The lights come up on a giant stack of boxes. Piled high and wide, the stage is filled with dozens of manila crates used for filing old tax returns. Projected onto those boxes is the New York City skyline, which pulls the audience into an office at the Met as two commissioners debate the best way to get their hands on a newly discovered set of Walker Evans’ photographs for an upcoming display.
Moments later, a glowing, orange farmhouse appears on those same boxes, taking the audience deep into Kansas in the dustbowl years with Evans himself, who has taken a government job with the Farm Security Administration. His job: to document the lives of the rural poor during the depression – to “introduce America to Americans.”
As the play unfolds, “A Thousand Words” takes its audience back and forth between the 1930s and the present in order to uncover the true story between the mysterious set of photographs and the various people who claim to have a connection to them.
Just as Evans’ gut-wrenching photography tells the sad yet honest tale of those living in extreme poverty in the 1930s, so does playwright Gwendolyn Rice’s own work reflect on the times. As many Americans are beginning to dust themselves off after the only economic recession in decades to be likened to the Great Depression, Rice presents a play that challenges its audience to critique the capitalist system once again.
History cycles. And good art can predict.
“Good art is art with a point of view,” Rice claimed. “It’s original and it’s emotionally or intellectually intriguing. Most important, it needs to mean something – to communicate to me, to make me feel something profound. And hopefully it inspires me to think new things, feel new things, respond with my own art.”
Unlike most artists, Rice is not afraid to point to the connection between art and commerce. By exploring the disconnect between authenticity and profitability, Rice’s play shows that art is always a business, even for large “non-profit” organizations like the Met.
“It’s important to me to ‘expose’ museums and other arts organizations as businesses with very real financial and programming challenges,” Rice argued. “It’s important to ask: Who owns art? Why and how is art created? And who profits from it”?
Rice, who is also communications director for Madison’s own Forward Theater Company, began writing “A Thousand Words” after reading a newspaper article about the surprising discovery of some of Evans’ photographs in Ernest Hemingway’s belongings.
Five years later, the play is still evolving. In fact, Rice admits that she and her crew were adjusting the script all the way up to the show’s preview on Jan. 19. Regarding the rewrites, Rice says with a smile, “I’ve cut three of my favorite lines in the play. That’s hard. William Faulkner said, ‘In writing, kill your darlings,’ which means that just because you like a particular scene or turn of phrase, it doesn’t mean it’s what the story needs.”
What the story does need, Forward decided, is to present a mixed media exhibit in conjunction with “A Thousand Words” that features local artists inspired by the work of Walker Evans. The exhibit, which showcases work from the Center for Photography at Madison as well as the Madison Contemporary Fiber Artists Guild, will be on display in the Playhouse Gallery and in Gallery II at the Overture from now until early March.
So what’s a picture worth, anyway?
“That depends on the context,” Rice says with a grin. “If it’s a Photoshopped picture of a supermodel in an ad for wrinkle cream, probably not much. If it’s a picture that captures a moment in time you would love to have back, it’s priceless.”
A Thousand Words is running at the Overture Center for the Arts through Feb. 5. Tickets range from $20-37 and can be purchased online at overturecenter.com.
