New Ground Revival Roadside’s Newest Musical Hits the Road Last year, Roadside Theater premiered its newest musical, New Ground Revival, at home and in Choteau, Montana. Then the play toured North Carolina and was performed in New York to an enthusiastic audience of 700 at Lincoln Center’s festival, So Dear To My Heart: Irish Imagination Meets Appalachian Genius. The musical, written by Roadside’s Ron Short, is a collaboration with the Mullins Family Singers of Dickenson County, Virginia, who are Ron’s first cousins. For over 100 years, the Mullins family has provided a strong musical voice in the mountains by passing along a tradition of family harmony singing. Following is an excerpt of an interview by folklorist Blanton Owen with the Mullins Family Singers —Billy Gene, Myrtle, Scott, and Annabell

						Blanton: The main thing I’m interested in is how did you get involved with this play in the first place? Scott: Well, I guess it all happened back when we were singing at memorials with the family - the Duttons and the Mullinses and the Shorts would just get together and pick and sing after we’d had dinner. One thing led to another and Ron (Short) started bringing us these beautiful songs that he’d written. Myrtle: Ron had asked me, I guess, several years before we ever started working with Roadside Theater if I would like to be in a play. And I said, “What are you talking about? I can’t do that.” And he says, “Well, yes you can.” Later, after we had sung together for awhile I thought about it and I thought, “Well, maybe I can.” Annabell: Ron is our family. Scott: See, if he done us wrong, we’d tell his mommy. (laughter) Billy Gene: The material in the play was fascinating to me. You know, the material just hit down home, and it was meaningful. It was about our people - our family - not just the Mullinses, but everybody in our area. Blanton: Was there anything about putting together this play that’s been kind of awkward? Annabell: Just being physically on the stage. In church, we always just got up and got in our positions and sang. So the blocking that we had to learn for the play was rather difficult. Billy Gene: What happened first was we started learning our parts and really not looking at the big picture. We were dwelling on what we were fixing to say and not on the whole picture of what was taking place. That was a problem. But when it did come together, it was real exciting. Scott: We had to get used to the script and get used to being with an audience different from the church audience we were used to. Annabell: But if you can look out in the audience and pick a person out there and sing, or do your lines to that person, you’re o.k. Blanton: Now when Ron was writing these songs and said, “What do you think of this?” did you change the songs at all? Scott: Well, I think Ron wrote each song with a particular voice in mind. For example, “The Garden is Growing” is a song that he wrote with Dad and Mom and Annabell in mind because he wanted that old family sound — you know, the trio, the old type sound. Myrtle: He knew how we stood on the songs. He knows us so well. Scott: I think Ron made the play to where it just feels like we’re doing something natural. To me, it’s just like going to church somewhere and singing. We just go and sing and see what happens. Blanton: Would you want to put this work on video tape? Do you think that would be a good way to keep the tradition going? Scott: I don’t think anything that we would try to record would ever match what would be done live in front of an audience. I think it’s always been our best work - live. Annabell: A film can be stopped and started and stopped and started. Well, you don’t stop and start on stage. It has to be real. Virtual reality - I don’t even like that word. I like reality. I don’t like a virtual anything. I want the real thing.
		Virtual reality - I don’t even like that word. I like reality. I don’t like a virtual anything. I want the real thing. Annabell Mullins Puckett
							Blanton Owen 1945-1998 Blanton Owen, a folklorist with expertise in Appalachian and Western rural traditions, directed research and served as dramaturg for the creation of the Roadside and Choteau plays. Tragically, he was killed in a plane crash on June 6, 1998. Blanton was an accomplished old time banjo player who toured with The Fuzzy Mountain String Band for many years. He was the first Folk Arts Program Coordinator for the Nevada Arts Council, worked as a folklife fieldworker to the Western Folklife Center, the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the American Folklife Center, and wrote a book on vernacular ranch architecture. We dearly miss him.

Voices from the Battlefront:
A Project With HOPE House

Last year, Roadside Theater conducted a residency with HOPE House, a women’s shelter serving six counties in southwest Virginia. A play, Voices from the Battlefront, was created from stories collected during the residency. The play was performed at a domestic violence workshop in Duffield, Virginia and in Richmond at a state-wide training workshop held by the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice. After the performances, the cast, composed of HOPE House staff, survivors of abuse, and Roadside members, led the audiences through a story circle process designed to help them relate what they just saw to their own lives and to the lives of their neighbors.

Following are narratives from Joy Smith-Briggs, Executive Director of HOPE House, and from Nancy Brock, a member of the HOPE House support group for survivors of domestic violence.

Joy Smith-Briggs

I wanted to do this project with Roadside because I saw the potential for getting the message out about domestic violence through the stories of the women who have lived through it, or not survived it as is too often the case.

And I wanted to empower the women themselves by having them be able to tell their stories in a non-threatening atmosphere. When we say in the play, these are stories that are hard to tell and hard to listen to, that’s very true.

The staff was skeptical about this project in the beginning. They had genuine concerns that the women wouldn’t want to tell their stories — that they would be threatened by telling them, knowing they might be heard by their abuser.

But the women who didn’t want to tell their stories never did, and the women who did, who saw the value of it, relished the opportunity to get their story out.

When we read the first draft of the play, Voices from the Battlefront, it didn’t sound that significant to us. These stories were just things we hear every day. I think we didn’t realize what we had created until we saw the first production and heard the audience’s reactions in the story circles.

Working in our field, we don’t often get recognition for what we do. There are many, many days when we think, what’s

	Once I got started in the play I enjoyed it, even though I thought I was going to have a heart attack in the beginning. Nancy Brock

the point. We work so hard and see our work undone in a moment when a woman turns around and goes back to an abuser. We know why it happens, that it’s part of the cycle, that it takes a long time to change, but sometimes we can take it personally.

I think Voices helped us look at what we do in a new way. We read the evaluation forms from the workshops and saw that the audience began to look at domestic violence with greater understanding, greater empathy. They saw the complexity of the problem.

I think it changed the Roadside people too. Obviously Roadside could not go in and write this play, do this performance if they didn’t have an understanding of the situation. But the sincerity with which they approached the work was genuine. The emotion expressed in the performance was more than just acting.

I think this happened because the story circle process they used required them to tell their own stories as well as listen to ours. They had to lay it on the line. Story circles aren’t rocket science, you know. If people listen to each other, they learn. That’s the whole point.

		Comments from two audience members who saw Voices from the Battlefront and participated in the story circles: I‘ve often considered these women’s complaints trivial. I didn’t understand how it (domestic violence) starts, and how it escalates. I’ll have to be more careful weeding out the trivial from the substantial. --a judge My father was very violent, and beat my mother regularly. She left my father and me when I was four years old. I never understood how she could leave me there with him. Now I see that she knew he would kill her, and she was afraid I would see it. If she would have taken me, he would have hunted her down. Either way, I would have lost her. --a police officer

Nancy Brock

I was in the Hope House support group story circles, then Roadside encouraged me to write some stories from things I’d shared in the circles. I read two of my stories in the final play. Once I got started in the play I enjoyed it, even though I thought I was going to have a heart attack in the beginning. I was so nervous about performing.

I enjoyed the writing the most. It gave me more confidence in myself. It made me aware of my Appalachian culture. It helped me see that being from the mountains is not such a bad thing, like I used to think.

The whole project made a great impression on me. With domestic violence, everything’s mostly kept in the background. It was hard to believe that somebody would want to hear my story, to hear about something that happened to me. And it’s not just my story either, because there are so many people with the same story. It was like I could speak with one voice for many people. I am glad that God used me for this work.

Teatro Pregones, Junebug Productions, and Roadside Theater are making a new play about love stories with the help of co-commissioners — the Flynn Theatre, Vermont; the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and the Wagon Train Project; and the Columbia Festival of the Arts, Maryland.

As yet untitled, the musical about love in New Orleans, Appalachia, and the South Bronx will feature the compositions and playing of noted musicians Donald Harrison Jr. (New Orleans), Ricardo Pons (the Bronx), and Ron Short (Whitesburg).

The New Orleans premiere is scheduled for this fall, October 21-24, at the Contemporary Arts Center. Subsequent premieres will be scheduled in Burlington, Vermont; Lincoln, Nebraska; Columbia, Maryland; New York City; and Whitesburg, Kentucky. The bilingual play will greet the new millenium with a national tour in 2000-2001.