Slow Down Sweet Chariot
Special Report
The September Schoolhouse Players’ production of Slow Down, Sweet Chariot by Jack Sharkey and Dave Reiser brings stage entertainment with music and comedy. Audiences laugh through their tears during this heartwarming show.
As the play begins, Kitty Shannon and her daughter Joan are busy with a million details planning Joan’s wedding, and time is of the essence. Suddenly Kitty dies. Her guardian angel gladly tells Kitty that she is joining the ranks of the blessed in heaven. Kitty frantically petitions her angel for a delay, a slow down. Then, as a spirit, Kitty learns her daughter’s fiancé is a scheming swindler in love with another woman. Can Kitty interfere in the lives of mortals and save her daughter from this devious groom-to-be?
The plot twists and turns with the antics of the characters. The songs range from the wildly funny one, wherein Kitty and Joan lament they can’t stand half of the invited wedding guests, to a lilting romantic number wherein Joan and the man she should be marrying pretend they really don’t love one another, to a poignant one when Kitty finally must bid goodbye to her daughter.
Mary Mancin of Bartow and Chuck Lawson of Louisville are the directors for this stage production. The cast come from several local communities, quite a broad geographical representation.
From Louisville are Connie Burt as Kitty, the moderately merry widow; Chuck Lawson as Father Francis Finnigan, parish pastor; and Bill Kitterman as Opharel, a Heavenly Messenger. Beth Thompson from Swainsboro plays Joan, the uncertain bride-to-be.
Making the play a family affair are the Wallers. Chad Waller from Harrison plays Norman, the despicable groom-to-be, and his daughter Victoria Waller plays Mrs. Kovitch, a friend of Kitty’s. Daughter Miriam (Waller) Holtzclaw from Wrightsville is Eileen, Joan’s maid of honor.
Another father-daughter acting duo from Matthews are Rusty Arrington as Larry, Joan’s childhood beau, and Megan Arrington as Mrs. O’Boyle, a friend of Kitty’s. Completing the cast of characters are Ofelia Bobo from Gibson as Melody, Norman’s cast-off love, and Lindsey Chatfield from Martinez who plays Mrs. Petrucci, another friend of Kitty’s.
Citizens Bank of Washington County is the sponsor for this production. Sponsorship allows this regional performing arts group to stage entertainment that few small town theaters can achieve. The support of local businesses helps make it possible for the Schoolhouse Players to bring quality plays to this area.
The seven performances of “Slow Down, Sweet Chariot” will show at the Bartow Community Center at 8 p.m. on Sept. 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20 and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 21. For reservations, call (478) 364-3340.
Individual tickets are $10 for each adult and $5 for children 12 and under. Prepaid groups of 12 or more are discounted $1 per ticket.
Transcendent Ground
By Helen Aikman
Guest columnist
It is no surprise that a young man raised in rural Georgia towns such as Carrolton, Americus, and Statesboro – schooled in tiny Rootville “in the middle of nowhere” – would be drawn to landscapes. “I grew up sort of out in the woods and it’s always been a part of my life,” says artist Nick Nelson, now in Columbus.
Still, Mr. Nelson wandered before finding his artistic path. As an art student, he studied painting and drawing, mostly figurative. In time, he felt these works were too personal and too individual to reflect the more universal experience he wanted to capture. Then Mr. Nelson read Karl Jung, who wrote that landscapes have the power to express emotions or feelings best sought indirectly. Intrigued, Mr. Nelson left figurative work for landscape painting, focusing his attention on farmland and the rural setting.
“One of the things that fascinates me is the way people interact with the world around them,” Mr. Nelson says, “and landscape is something everybody has to interact with.” Exploring this notion, Mr. Nelson moved during graduate studies from painting to sculpture and installations. He felt he was making forward progress with this more experimental work, venturing into new territory, leaving behind a more conventional medium. In time, though, he missed the time-honored craft and structure of painting, the order and history of it, and he returned to that medium.
Mr. Nelson’s newest works are abstract – dealing with the elemental, often “nothing more than the horizontal planes or lines within a composition that create a sense of space.”
“I’m not really trying to copy nature,” he adds. “They’re much more expressionistic, less naturalistic.”
Mr. Nelson’s art combines acrylic paint, oil paint, and encaustic (a wax medium). He has developed a body of work for this show titled “Transcendent Ground: Mixed Media Landscapes.” These pieces “express awe in nature, they’re much more emotional,” reflecting what the artist calls “a sense of the sublime in the natural world.”
“If I go outside and I’m hiking around and see a scene that’s very inspiring, it’s more like taking that feeling back than trying to depict the scene itself.”
What brings this show together, Mr. Nelson suggests, “is the idea of searching for the transcendental within the cycles of nature” – farm fields undergoing endless seasonal transformations, plowing and burning, which the artists “latches onto to become part of something bigger.”
Transcendent Ground includes mostly larger works, as big as 4 inches by 7 inches, along with a few smaller studies. Mr. Nelson enjoys exploring surfaces, beginning with flat acrylics and working in rich oils and opaque, dimensional encaustics. Using panels, Mr. Nelson layers these materials on and then carves and shapes them, which the wax allows him to do.
The artist begins with an almost mathematical composition, a strong emphasis on proportion, and lays out arcs to create skeletons for his landscapes. These invariably highlight a natural tension between the orderly elements in Mr. Nelson’s work and those that are more chaotic or intuitive.
“It’s kind of a metaphor for the natural world,” he says. “Personally I believe there is some sort of order in it that may not be obvious to us.”
Transcendent Ground ushers in a remarkable series of fall and winter shows at The Fire House Gallery. “It’s a great way to come back from the summer break,” said the Gallery’s Intern Manager Dan Rekshan,. “Such vibrant, big work, and another way of looking at familiar scenes.”
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