I’m excited to head down to Richmond, VA where the film I wrote and directed, “The Save,” will screen in the Richmond International Film Festival on Saturday, Sept. 26 at 4:45 p.m. at Movieland 2. Tickets and more info about the screening can be found here. 

I spent a few of my formative years in Richmond and think of it as my first artistic home after college. Here is a random assortment of memories and lessons I had along the way…

I did eight Theatre IV tours for young audiences. Hundreds of early morning calls, thousands of miles in a van with strangers that quickly became family before mostly going back to being strangers and figuring out how to make a production suddenly appear and function in difficult conditions like bad acoustics, scrambled attention spans, and the smell of square pizza and corn being prepared. Through that, I learned that, if I had the will, I could bring my craft and integrity into situations some might find beneath them. 

My third tour was for the first cast of Bruce Miller’s version of “Lyle, Lyle Crocodile,” starring the touring legend Gordon Bass. I played a 10-year-old boy and Gordon played my dad. We had a scene set at night in Central Park in which we backed into each other with flashlights and gave each other a fright. It must have been effective because a boy at a theatre in Indiana said of that moment, “I went like this,” as he shook himself with his fists in the air, “then I farted.” That became our go-to phrase when something was amiss the rest of the tour. That tour took us to many beautiful state of the art theatres and majestic gems. One was said to have been Liberace’s favorite place to perform! 

I met Harry Kollatz Jr. at the Richmond Area Professional Theater auditions — which took place the second night I spent in Richmond!! — at the Woman’s Club at the Bolling Haxall House. I did a monologue from Howard Korder’s “Boys’ Life” and a guy with an interesting hat talked to me the rest of the night. That was Harry. A couple years later, I did his play, “The Persistence of Memory,” at the Firehouse Theatre. It detailed how Salvador Dali almost made a statue that would have stood in Richmond. Harry told me that he wanted it to have a combination of surreal events in everyday situations. It certainly did! It also had a cast that mainly had two age demographics – people in their 20s and those above retirement age. I loved those blends of style and age. 

Janet Wilson cast me in Firehouse’s production of Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s “My Thing of Love,” which she directed at the Little Theatre inside the Empire Theatre. Juan Conde, who was working as a morning DJ at the time, was also in the cast. This was just before he became a news anchor. A nicely dressed pair of his fans sat in the front row of the intimate theater space, just a few feet from the low stage. In one scene, my character is awoken and scrambles to put on his clothes. This required me to start the scene completely naked under a bedsheet on a bed that was positioned downstage, with me facing upstage to not draw attention. One night in the complete dark of the scene change the sheet did not cover me. So that nice couple had an unexpected half-moon on the rise directly in their line of eyesight. 

Jack Cummings III, who would later earn two Obie Awards, directed me in Horton Foote’s “The Young Man From Atlanta” at the Barksdale Theatre in the Willow Lawn Shopping Center. The floor on the set had an Expressionistic paint pattern that contrasted with the realistic mid-20^th century play. It would get flooded each night at the end of the play to symbolize the characters drowning because of their choices and sometimes leak into the restaurant below. That production was staffed with many people connected to the University of Virginia’s Drama Department and was a bridge to my going there for graduate school. Some of the students I shared the stage with at UVa included Emily Swallow (The Mandalorian), Ben McKenzie (The O.C. and Gotham), Sarah Drew (Grey’s Anatomy), and Lear DeBessonet (Artistic Director, Lincoln Center). 

I also created and performed my first solo show “Some Kind of Pink Breakfast” in Shockoe Bottom. On opening night there were only three people in the audience: Clay McLeod Chapman, who would go on to have a strong career as an author and playwright, someone I don’t know, and the theater journalist David Hintz Timberline. They were, of course, quiet through the whole thing. I dragged my feet home that night feeling like an absolute failure. Unexpectedly, David gave me a wonderful review and the Best Actor Award in StyleWeekly for 1999. Talk about a surreal event in everyday life! 

Richmond was a place where I learned that the ups, downs, and surprise twists are what make up a life on and off the stage. I can’t wait to go back to reconnect with old friends and hopefully make some new ones. Fingers crossed, we’ll have at least three people coming to our screening in the RIFF.