A&E

THE SHOW MUST GO ON THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Haywood Arts Regional Theatre Executive Director Steven Lloyd sitting in the seats of the Performing Arts Center building in Waynesville. Garret K. Woodward

Haywood Arts Regional Theatre finds footing amid pandemic

BY GARRET K. WOODWARD S TAFF WRITER I t’s late morning and situated behind his desk in the back office of the Haywood Arts

Regional Theatre in Waynesville is Steven Lloyd. Leaning back in his chair, Lloyd sighed at the question posed to him: what’s the current status of HART?

“Well, our entire staff has been laid off and all of the new hires we were looking forward to bringing on this spring have been put on the backburner until further notice,” said Lloyd, the executive director of HART. “Every performance we had on the calendar has been postponed, but we don’t even know when those shows may take place, if they even do — everything is up in the air right now.”

This coming weekend would have been the 2020 opening for the mainstage series in the Performing Arts Center building. But, due to the current Coronavirus Pandemic and nationwide mandates prohibiting large gatherings and stage productions, HART remains in a holding pattern until normalcy might return.

“The best-case scenarios say society may reopen in a couple months, and with treatments that may work. Worst-case scenario is that nothing changes and we’re closed for the rest of the year,” Lloyd said. “But, even if things do open up, how much longer after that would people feel comfortable coming to a packed theater to see a show? It’s one thing to be seated far apart at a restaurant, it’s another thing to go into a theater and be seated next to somebody.”

Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, HART has evolved organically from humble beginnings into one of the finest theater organizations in Southern Appalachia and beyond, winning numerous accolades along the way for its programming and development.

“This theater has made Waynesville a way more cosmopolitan community than almost any other mountain town,” Lloyd said. “There are so many incredible people who have moved here because of HART, and so many people from the community that have supported us and helped us grown from the start.”

With tens of thousands attending performances throughout the year, the economic impact of HART on Haywood County is around $3 million. That monetary force is something not lost on local and regional art organizations and art enthusiasts who look at the theater as a beacon of cultural and economic significance.

“We play a huge role in the community. When people come to buy a ticket and see a show, they eat at the nearby restaurants and stay at the hotels,” Lloyd noted.

When HART is fully operational, its monthly costs are covered by ticket sales. But, without people coming through the doors, the property maintenance and insurance bills have been drying up whatever savings the organization had in its rainy-day fund.

“It would be a devastating loss to the community if HART disappeared because of financial struggles due to the pandemic,” Lloyd said. “Though we’re in a better spot than most arts organizations, we’re still having trouble paying the bills and keeping the property running.”

Want to help?

If you would like to make a donation to the Haywood Arts Regional Theatre, visit www.harttheatre.org and click on the “Donate Today” button.

For more information, call 828.456.6322 or email boxoffice@harttheatre.org.

Lloyd is grateful for the recent generous donations of several local residents and loyal theatergoers, but he stresses the importance of a longtime endowment and sustained larger donations that have remained elusive for HART.

“I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life building this theater, and suddenly it has the potential of disappearing. And without the support of these donations, this organization would just go away,” Lloyd said solemnly. “We’re trying to make ends meet, and also have enough money be able to put a show on whenever ‘this’ ends and we’re able to reopen.”

And even though, at 66, Lloyd has no plans to retire in the near future, the pandemic has shifted the trajectory of his life and career.

“I just signed up for Social Security, though I had planned on waiting until I was 70,” Lloyd said. “My hope is that when HART comes back, I can return on half-salary and use the other half of my salary to hire somebody else.”

Stepping out of his office in the Fangmeyer Theater, Lloyd walked across the brick patio to the neighboring Performing Arts Center building. Turning on the lights in front of the mainstage, the massive space is eerily quiet, with stage props still in place from rehearsals for upcoming productions yet to be rescheduled.

“Though I have been enjoying some of this down time to take longer walks and slow down a little bit, I really miss that invigorating feeling I get when all of the stuff is going in here and everything’s in rehearsal,” Lloyd said.

Finding a seat in the auditorium, Lloyd is surrounded by hundreds of empty chairs, each normally filled with somebody that values HART, who believes in the sheer awe and splendor that is singular to theatrical productions. Taking an inventory of the silent rows, Lloyd grinned for a moment and pondered the future.

“I think when [the shelter-in-place and mandates] are lifted, and our audiences are once again ready to come back, there will be this pent-up hunger to get away from it all and see a production — it’s going to be magical,” Lloyd said.

It’s a good life that comes upon you now and then

While waiting for my coffee to be brewed in the back of the newsroom this past Tuesday, I stared blankly into the abyss.

Looking around the small nook, there were memos on the wall, sink filled with cups and dishes, small fridge in the corner and stacks of office supplies on the shelves. The coffeepot burped and shook me out of the trance.

I turned my attention to the contraption itself and realized that I’ve had that same coffeepot since college. Originally, it was the extra coffeemaker in my parents’ house in Upstate New York. But, it also found its way into my truck when I left for school in Connecticut and took off for newspaper gigs in Idaho and North Carolina.

Wandering down that rabbit hole of thought, I soon thought of when I packed the coffeepot into my old truck and left for

Idaho, a decision that was made with my heart of my sleeve, my eyes aimed forward in search of adventure. And to think, I almost didn’t chase that horizon in those early days.

After I graduated college in 2007, I applied to any and all journalism gigs. Every corner of America. I was ready for whatever was next. In October 2007, at age 22, I had one bite on my resume from a newspaper in Vermont, just across Lake Champlain from my New York hometown.

I went to the interview in a nice button up shirt and dress pants. The back-and-forth questioning went well. Then, out of nowhere, they sat me down at a desk in the newsroom and gave me a story assignment. It was to call up this World War II veteran and chat with him about financial challenges facing the local American Legion.

I felt like I had just been thrown in the deep end. But, I winged it, did the interview, wrote the article and submitted it before I left the building. A couple of days later, the editor called back. They liked the article and offered me the staff writer position.

But, for some reason, my intuition signaled this wasn’t the place for me. I wanted to leave my familiarity that is the North Country. The job was great, but it just didn’t sit right. Somewhere inside my soul, I felt there was something else around the corner.

To the dismay of my parents, I turned the gig down. Not much longer after that, I was offered a reporter position at the Teton Valley News in Driggs, Idaho, on the backside of my most favorite place on the planet: the Grand Teton Mountains. That opportunity and time out there forever changed my existence.

Skip ahead to 2012. The economy tanked in 2008 and I had left the Teton Valley News, ready for the next step. Turns out the exact day I left the newspaper, Wall Street began to crumble. That night of Sept. 15, 2008, I was day one in my return trek from Idaho to New York. Staying at a cheap motel in Miles City, Montana, I turned on the TV to see the news: Lehman Brothers had collapsed.

So, for the next few years, I was back in Upstate New York, this time struggling as a freelance writer, to which I was substitute teaching in my old high school to make ends meet. But, it never once crossed my mind to leave journalism: this industry is my passion and lifeblood.

Well, there I was, now 27 years old, sending out my resume to publications across America. One newspaper on the coast of Maine got hold of me. It was in a town I ran around every summer as a kid and young adult. Beautiful seaside community.

So, I drove up to Maine and went to the interview. The newsroom was right above the in-house printer, with the place smelling of ink and chemicals. It was nauseating. Then, in the interview, the editor said I would have to wear a shirt, tie and dress pants at all times, even in the depths of summer. Yikes.

Oh, and the editor also informed me that I’d mostly be covering school board meetings and cops and courts. Sure, these are important and interesting subjects. But, I’d already been in those trenches and wanted my next gig to be writing about what I absolutely love: the arts and people.

Before I crossed back over the Maine state line, they offered me the position. I had the entire drive back to New York to think about accepting it. By the time I got home, I realized once again this wasn’t the place for me.

I remember several close friends and family members saying I was downright crazy to turn down the offer: “The economy is shit and you’re telling them ‘no’? What’s wrong with you?” It didn’t matter, I knew deep down there was something else coming down the pike.

Not even a week later, Scott McLeod, the publisher at The Smoky Mountain News, called me and asked that I come down to North Carolina and interview for the gig. Well, some eight years later, I still reside in that dream job, a position I continue to harbor sincere and overflowing gratitude for.

Folks, the moral of the story is this, and only this: follow your heart. Your intuition is there for a reason, whether it be a job or relationship, or any decision for that matter. Follow the energy of the beating muscle in your chest and it’ll never lead you astray.

Life is beautiful, grasp for it, y’all.

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Back to the future

If it’s true that timing is everything, then Ben Okri’s new novel The Freedom Artist is right on time.

As we, here, in Western North Carolina are going through an unparalleled time of trauma and uncertainty, Okri’s most recent novel opens up like a mirror for how at the present moment our country is organized for inequality and ineffectiveness in terms of proper governance and freedom of the individual. In a country that claims to be “the land of the free,” the United States of America is rapidly moving in the direction of “the land of the prisoner.” And Okri uses the word “prison” in his new novel to emphasize how his fictional system of governance is set up to keep people in line and asleep when it comes to self-realization and equanimity.

In the tradition of distopian novels such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, Okri’s The Freedom Artist could have easily been titled “2020.” So similar is Okri’s novel to these earlier apocalyptic classics and our current situation in the U.S. in terms of politics and the Corona virus epidemic that at times I thought that I was reading a book of non-fiction. In this sense this book is prophetic. In The Freedom Artist the predominant issue is how, over time, the government (referred to as “The Heirarchy”) has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes with lies and false myths and is in complete control of everyone’s lives as well as their thinking. Or as it is in this case, their not thinking.

Sound familiar? “Everyone is asleep” Okri writes and reiterates over and over again for 350 pages. People are living in what Okri calls “The Prison” — meaning that the society, the country, the world, and in fact their own bodies are nothing more than a prison in terms of what an enlightened life of freedom would look and feel like. In fact, The Freedom Artist reads like a myth written by a scientist and is brilliantly composed in short chapters and sections with a weaving of easily followed characters and subplots.

Okri, a former Booker Prize winner of Writer Thomas Crowe

Nigerian origins and now living in London, begins the book with the epilogue “Everything sacred, that intends to remain so, must cover

itself in mystery.” And the storyline, or the “plot” if you prefer, is all about the book’s central characters uncovering the great mystery, which is their society and their personal lives. Early on in the book Okri writes:

“People were not meant to fill their heads with facts, but only to re-learn what they already knew. And what they already knew was that the state was good and everything they did was leading them back to the garden of origins.”

Sounds a bit familiar, yes? And it gets worse: “But what really killed literacy and books was the great campaign against orginality. The Age of Equality. Then we arrived at the point where it’s an insult to be better informed than your neighbor.” It is at this point in the narrative that oneword graffiti starts appearing in public places with the slogan “Upwake!” As this word keeps appearing again and again throughout the book, I couldn’t help but wonder if Okri wasn’t using this as a not-so-subtle message meant for his readers and their lives today.

On page 132, all of a sudden a plague, a kind of national pandemic, began popping up.

“This new plague crept up on the world, from one continent to another, til it became a universal contagion. No one knew its cause. No one could propose its cure. The newspapers were silent about it.”

Sound familiar? (Remember, Okri’s book was published in early 2019.) Things escalate and keep getting worse — until one of the main characters (a young pre-teen boy) — through a series of initiations — becomes something of an Avatar. And, for the rest of the book there are various vague and not so vague comparisons with the biblical life of Jesus and the later-written Christian canon. Our young savior goes to the mountaintop; he gives teaching lectures to large crowds; he has his “40 days and 40 nights” in the wilderness; he heals the sick; he starts a revolution against the power structures; he is arrested and taken prisoner by the state. All of this as the masses are beginning to “upwake” and start to question their lives and the authority figures that control them.

After a quasi 9/11 attack on the Heirarchy’s headquarters and by the end of the book, an underground movement has formed and people are marching in the streets and ignoring the “stay at home” proclamations and “6 foot” restrictions by the government. Sound familiar? “For there to be a new beginning there must first be an end,” proclaims one of the main female characters reminiscent of the lines by Bob Dylan “it’s always darkest just before the dawn.” When asked why she is weeping, she replies, “This world could be so beautiful.” Without providing a “spoiler” as to how The Freedom Artist ends, let me instead end here, with Okri’s “Coda” on the last page of the book: “In the oldest legends of the land, it is known that all are born in prison. In the new reality, all are born into a story. It is a story which everyone creates and which everyone lives, with darkness or with light, in freedom.” Even with the graphic apocalyptic aspects of his novel, we emerge with a glimmer of light, of hope, and a wakeup call just when we need it most.

Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News. He is the author of the historical fiction novel The Watcher (Like Sweet

Bells Jangled) and lives in Jackson County. He can be reached at newnativepress@hotmail.com.