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O c t o b e r 1 7 , 2 0 1 2 • V o l . 5 • N o . 4 2 • w w w.T h e W e e k l y S u n . c o m
Woman in Black, a Good Ghost Story
Karen Jacobsen
BY KAREN BOSSICK
T
he stage is set for a good ghost story at the Liberty Theater. Company of Fools’ set designer Joe Lavigne has draped white sheets over the theater’s 200 seats, giving them a ghostly look. And he’s set 48 seats on stage within a spook’s reach of the actors. He’ll top it all off with a dirty dusty look, thanks to a machine that can make the theater look dirty and dusty, even though it’s not. And Steven Koehler will endow the theater with some spooky lighting. It’s up to Scott Creighton and Neil Brookshire to take it from there as they tell Susan Hill’s 1983 horror fiction novel about a menacing ghost known as “The Woman in Black” who haunts the bleak, isolated manor of Eel Marsh House. “The play takes place in an empty theater so we’ll have people coming through a dark musty lobby. And the seating will give the intimate feel of sitting around a campfire—there’s something about being really close for a good ghost story,” said Director John Glenn. The play, adapted by Stephen Malatratt, was first performed at the Theatre-By-The Sea in Scarborough, England, in 1987. Acclaimed to be one of the most exciting, gripping theatre events ever staged, it’s now celebrating 23 years in London’s West End with a run second only to Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap”—the longest running non-musical show of the modern era. Scott Creighton, who has been in numerous Company of Fools plays, plays a lawyer obsessed with a curse that he believes has been cast over he and his family by the ghost of a woman in black. He employs a young actor to help him tell the story and soon both are caught up in a world where the borders between make believe and reality begin to blur and the flesh begins to creep. “It’s the story of an old lawyer who comes to a young actor to tell the story of what happened to him. The young actor plays me and I play all the people he met—seven different people in all,” said Creighton, who is learning a Devonshire accent and other dialects to help distinguish his characters. Neil Brookshire appeared in the Fools’ production of “Uncle Vanya” years ago. He has since spent eight seasons with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and appeared with other theater companies, including Seattle Novyi Theatre, Opera Idaho, Idaho Dance Theatre and Boise Contemporary Theater. Glenn noted that the play takes place in 1937—right about the time the Liberty Theater was built—a touch that should only add to the spooky feel. “It’s not a modern, slasher-type horror story. But it does have some scary moments,” he said. “It’s a psychological piece that messes with your brain. You never know what’s going to be besides you.” “It’s a good ghost story, very mysterious,” said Brookshire. “It’s been produced all over so it’s obviously got something people like.”
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Karen Jacobsen is known around the Sun Valley area for her plein air paintings of Redfish Lake and other local landmarks that she paints on site outdoors. Underwater explorers know the Hailey woman for her plein eau (water) illustrations. STORY & PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
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he landscape Karen Jacobsen was painting looked just like the expansive rolling sea of sagebrush, cinder cones, lava fields, black glassy lava rock, lava tubes and sink holes that she drives past every time she heads south to Twin Falls or east past Craters of the Moon. But this landscape lay 5,000 meters underwater. “Rolling hills and mountains of mud,” said Jacobsen. “And something about the softness of these mountains reminded me of the familiar sage-covered mountains in our area.” The watercolor artist has toted her sketchbooks and paintbrushes to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico countless times in order to offer the world detailed likenesses of what may seem the stuff of science fiction. She paints what she sees from the cramped studio of a miniature research submarine. “She’s so talented. And she’s able to provide us with an opportunity to glimpse a world that 99 percent of us will never see since she gets to go down in a submersible,” said Courtney Gilbert, a curator at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. “We think we live in an age where we know everything. But you look at Karen’s work and you quickly learn there’s a lot we don’t know lying at the bottom of the ocean.” Jacobsen recently returned from another underwater expedition—on the tethered ROV Jason to explore the mud volcanoes of the Barbados Accretionary Prism. But this expedition was different—for the first time, she was accompanied by five other artists—a filmmaker, batik artist, acrylics artist and videographers tagged with capturing a “Moment of Discovery.” They hope to create a traveling multi-media exhibit if they can find the funding. “I feel it’s incredibly important to show aspects of the ocean floor, as it covers about 70 percent of our planet—our home— and the vast majority of it remains unexplored,” said Jacobsen, who has shown her work in exhibitions across the country, including one at the National Science Foundation headquarters in Arlington, Va. “I have been granted the privilege of seeing it and being present for the moments of discovery, and I have a responsibility to bring these images back to show people.”
Karen Jacobsen, standing next to an illustration of tubeworms, sometimes paints subjects under a microscope. At other times she paints looking out the window of Alvin.
It was Jacobsen’s artist mother Sue who taught her to draw from life, not photos. That talent found its match in a Scientific Illustration class Jacobsen took at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz where she studied art. “I felt as if I was born to be an expedition illustrator,” she said. “I’m not an abstract painter—someone who has to put my emotions on canvas. I want to paint what I see.” The trick, however, was to find work as a scientific illustrator in a world where demand peaked a couple of hundred years ago. To prove her worth, Jacobsen illustrated archaeological digs in Petra, Jordan, and other exotic locales. Then, in 1991, she was introduced to Cindy Van Dover, an oceanographer from the Duke University Marine Laboratory and a Navy-certified submarine pilot. To date, Jacobsen has gone on more than a dozen deep-sea trips and cruises, painting at the bottom of a six-foot sphere or bowl on the submersible as Van Dover and other scientists discover life in places that were once believed to be void of life. Like Captain Nemo and the crew of the Nautilus, they and their miniature submarine, named Alvin, dive 20,000 leagues under the sea where they explore hot springs on the ocean bottom that Jacobsen likens to Old Faithful erupting out of a chimneytop. They’ve found giant red-plumbed tubeworm pillars up to 30
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