With this week marking the fall side of the equinox, it’s no wonder the cultural season in Charleston is already alive with, quite literally, The Sound of Music.
Wrapping up Sept. 26 at Charleston Stage, that production’s moral stakes involve the acceleration of the Nazi party as it advances into Austria, prompting a naval officer named Georg von Trapp and his celebrated singing brood to head for the hills to flee their beloved homeland.
The season opener followed on the heels of another Nazi-centric Broadway musical, which had owned the season around the corner at Queen Street Playhouse via Footlight Players. The 1966 Cabaret, which peers behind the louche curtain of the fictional Kit Kat Klub, is set in 1930s Weimar-era Germany as the Third Reich infiltrates the city.
Given word-of-mouth buzz alone, both shows made their mark locally. It was particularly heartening to hear a friend’s account of a niece so engaged with The Sound of Music that she started studying up on World War II.
This is how it’s supposed to work.
Since the dawn of time, we humans find ourselves in head-scratching predicaments that mainly concern the ever-present existential scrum for a slice of the pie. Some think to share it; others to hoard it. What hangs in that push-me-pull-you balance is the stuff of society — the religion, the politics, the philosphy, the arts.
And that brings us to the beat of covering culture in Charleston.
Over the weekend of September 12 and 13, Charleston’s PURE Theatre launched its inaugural playwrights’ festival, with an eye on making it an annual event moving forward.
The festival brought together playwrights and attendees for workshops and panels. They convened at Cannon Street Arts Center, huddling in animated discourse, eyes glistening as they shared insights and swapped notions.
Some of the participating playwrights have been featured in past seasons, including Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder, whose work Zelda in the Backyard was performed this summer, and PURE co-founder Rodney Lee Rogers, whose plays like Waffle Haus Christmas, have regularly appeared.
Other playwrights at the festival are featured in the company’s coming season, including York Walker, whose Convenant opens the season. Past PURE collaborators like Steven Dietz and Brad Erickson were on the docket, too.
There was also Dan Hoyle, a San Francisco-based theater artist who wrote and performed his 75-minute work Takes all Kinds. A production directed by Aldo Billingslea was part of the festival program.
For the play, Hoyle spent a good part of 2024 traversing the country in search of true stories of American democracy. He put those down on the page, then mounted them on stage, solely inhabiting multiple subjects from all stripes.
There were working-class, Trump-loving Latino men, a bubbly school board mom, former mercenaries with a chilling body counts and Atlanta canvers. There were portrayals of Charleston denizens, too: Margaret Seidler, whose book Payne-ful Business chronicles her ancestor’s involvement in the slave trade, and Polly Sheppard, a member of Emanuel AME Church who was present, and spared, during Dylann Roof’s murderous attack.
Throughout, Hoyle nimbly straddled the razor’s edge, managing to elude stereotyping and succeed instead by virtue of the authenticity and specificity of each portrayal. Through his attentive, respectful artist’s gaze, he mined the heart and humor of each American he interviewed, offering to those at PURE invaluable insight to our current national convergence in ways that have resonated with me since.
When The Sound of Music and Cabaret first found audiences in the late 1950s and 1960s, respectively, they were a mere generation from those chilling days when rollicking Austrian hills and raunchy Berlin nightclubs first met with menace. That foreboding was felt anew in the recent Charleston productions.
In dangerous times, we need the eyes of our own contemporary artists like Hoyle to guide us, scene by scene, angle by angle, to just how we landed in them. Hoyle’s work underscores that our current crisis was not sprung only from an oval office or billionaire’s board room but from all of those voices who may or may not have been heard.
They emerge in the school PTAs and dive bars, in the city streets and farm fields–the remote pockets and forgotten corners where artists often venture–to then bring them safely to our seats in a comfortable theater.
Now more than ever, those theaters should be standing-room only.
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