On Thursday, May 21, area residents are invited to learn about the local past, in dramatic fashion, thanks to a group of Washington and Lee University theater students who will perform a series of archivally researched, originally scripted historical monologues.
Their performances will be staged, starting at 5:30 p.m., across different gravesites that have been chronicled in Oak Grove Cemetery.
Partnering with the Rockbridge Historical Society, their spring term capstone projects have been supervised by Suzanne Delle, visiting assistant professor in the W&L Department of Theater, Dance, and Film Studies, who describes them as “embodied performances … that transform Oak Grove Cemetery into a living space of memory and storytelling, through an immersive sitespecific performance.”
Over the course of a four-week theater intensive, the students narrowed their focus to spotlight three residents from 18th, 19th and 20th century Lexington.
The Rev. Daniel Blain was born five years before the creation of Rockbridge County, an early professor of languages at Washington College, who would minister to Timber Ridge and Oxford Presbyterian churches in the first decades of the 19th century.
Professor William MacFarland Patton graduated from VMI in the notable class of 1865, hired just two years later to teach civil engineering until 1889. Evocatively, Patton kept a series of “dream journals” now housed in the VMI archives.
Capt. Greenlee Davidson Letcher, VMI class of 1886, W&L Law class of 1888, was the 11th and last child of Virginia’s Civil War governor and Lexington native John Letcher. Serving in France in his early 50s, he became Lexington’s most celebrated World War I veteran, commander of the Rockbridge Battery, and a leading figure in local and state politics, elected as delegate to the General Assembly, before his death in 1954.
To research and refine their individual scripts, they’ve drawn on a range of methods and resources: a tour of the RHS Museum by Executive Director Eric Wilson to ground general chronological and cultural background; more specific documentary and digital research guided by W&L Special Collections public services manager Seth McCormick-Goodhart; interactive, collectively critiqued rehearsals, complemented by the graphic design of one-page biographical flyers.
After providing students with primary and secondary sources for their own selections and simulations, Wilson noted: “It’s been exciting to watch the process through which students – some of them theatrical veterans and some new to the craft entirely – bring fresh understandings of both notable and less familiar figures in Rockbridge history. They also advance RHS’ core mission by using more singular points of view to illuminate the habits and habitats of everyday life that shaped their own life experiences and those of their neighbors, more broadly. As Professor Delle adds, their formal structure and design also aim to lens contemporary patterns and issues today, emphasized in the program’s subtitle: ‘Stories from the Past. Voices for Today.”’ With Delle’s guidance, students were both introduced to and instructed in a range of theatrical techniques: practicing different strategies for narrative focus and development, rehearsing variations in performative styles, and experimenting with both more concentrated and elaborated formats.
In their first week, they quickly sketched monologues that narrowed to specifically, emotionally charged moments marking the lives of three memorable residents memorialized in RHS’ series of “Story Stones,” installed in the sidewalks of downtown Lexington: Charles Figgatt (Confederate veteran and cashier at the Bank of Lexington, who notoriously embezzled $145,000 in 1895, but was never caught before his death in Colorado, four years later); Brownsburg’s William Wilcher (conjured in a moving jailhouse confession explaining the love triangle and coon-hunting dispute that led to the murder of a friend, and his infamy as the last man sentenced to hang at the Lexington gallows in 1906); Jonathan Daniels (VMI valedictorian of the class of 1961, Episcopal seminarian, and Civil Rights activist and martyr, shot to death during a voter registration drive in Alabama).
The project was shaped over the past year with vital guidance from W&L’s Office of Community-Based Learning, which connects the university with over 70 area nonprofits to advance their varied missions, and to foster authentic engagement opportunities for undergraduates.
Associate Director Alessandra Del Conte Dickovick emphasized, “In this and all our partnerships, we work to ensure a patient, purposeful process that reciprocally serves both educational and civic goals, on campus and across the community.”
For background and teasers on Thursday’s performance, and relevant biographies, see RHS’ Instagram and Facebook pages, or contact Director@ RocbkridgeHistory.org.
