Music & Murder, Southern Style
Benefit at Appomattox Courthouse Theatre
At left: Dee Evans, Elizabeth Lankford and Miranda Lewis.
The South is famous for many things, including its deep-fried cuisine (chicken, okra, and squirrel) and deep tradition of song (gospel, love songs, and murder ballads). If you can’t deep fry it or sing along with it, the music/foods’ Southern origins might just be called into question. With these traditions still intact, nothing can be quite as patriotically Southern as to combine these two in one event.
This, in fact, is exactly what the folks at the Appomattox Courthouse Theatre are planning to do. On July 26th at 6:00 pm, Appomattox’s prime theater troupe will stage a benefit show-concert featuring a reprisal of Southern Fried Murder followed by one of the area’s best acoustic bands, Deja Moo.
“It [will] be a full evening of entertainment,” director Robin Wolfskill told me (pictured at right). “We’ll have…hors d’oeuvres and punch for everyone to enjoy during our pre-show entertainment; the play will be performed, and then we’ll have music by Deja Moo. And they’ll be playing out on the porch, so we encourage folks to bring chairs and blankets…”
Southern Fried Murder follows in a long line of murder mysteries performed by the Appomattox Theatre, but with a delightfully irreverent twist: it’s a Southern Gothic mystery that lampoons Southern Gothic mysteries. In its two-hour running time, the players manage to tip over enough Southern sacred cows (the mint julep, the magnolia, sharecroppers, and old mansions) to send literary alumni like William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams twirling ’round in their final resting places.
“It is very outrageous,” Wolfskill said, “and … all the actors just have so much fun with all their parts, [they] can be that person they always wanted to and be outrageous and no one [will] think that they’re being silly.”
To gain a better understanding of Southern Fried Murder, I recently visited the set to speak with the actors. The actors, however, being actors, were so deeply immersed in their roles that I was forced to interview one of the play’s characters, Maggie (Magnolia) St. Lawrence (a.k.a. Elizabeth Lankford).
“…Do you know you are very, very lucky, it is not everyone who has a chance to speak with the great Maggie St. Lawrence.”
An ex-Broadway star, Ms. St. Lawrence spoke of her upcoming trip to New Orleans to visit her Grandmother Magnolia Davis Capote, her four cousins (three of whom are also named Magnolia), and Uncle Lou.
“…I’m taking a little bit of time off from my busy career in New York to go and spend some time with my Grandmother in New Orleans…I have quite a few rather disreputable characters in my family, and they all seem to be coming to this little visit with my Grandmother.”
And they are an interesting lot. For starters, there’s the rather grumpy Nolie Frost and the slightly unbalanced, pill-popping Magnolia Woods; the flirtatious sharecropper’s daughter, Stump Slatterly, and her alligator wrestling brother, Will Slatterly. And this list doesn’t even include a local-yokel sheriff, a womanizing lawyer, an eccentric writer named Louisiana, or the cane-wielding Grandmother herself.
At left: Tif Rice as Truman Capote.
As if all of this Southern Fried tomfoolery wasn’t enough, this dramatic performance will be followed by a musical one featuring Deja Moo. The band - Ken and Bonnie Swanson, Chip Robinson, Mary Scanlon, and John Hagedorn - is a high-flying acoustic outfit that delves deeply into folk, bluegrass, and Americana. On any given night, one can hear folk standards like “Cluck Old Hen,” odes to tobacco consumption like “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette),” and late ’60’s hippy fare like “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” For fans of the group (”Moo-Heads”), however, the mingling of guitars, banjos, washboards, and bass can be summed up in one short phrase: “a whole lot of fun.”
At right: The eccentric cast of Southern Fried Murder.
“It can mean several things,” Ken Swanson told me of the band’s name, “Like you feel like you’ve seen this bull before, and also it represents our era, because of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young [who recorded Déjà Vu]…It’s really worked well for us.”
While the Appomattox acting troupe and Deja Moo members are a democratic lot, Swanson holds a key position on July 26th: besides playing guitar and singing in Deja Moo, he will also fill the role of the slick, womanizing lawyer in Southern Fried Murder. While one might suspect that these multiple roles would make for a long night, Swanson begs to differ.
“It’s not a long night for me,” Swanson said, “…because there’s two people involved: Ben Parker, [and] he’s only on for two hours, and then Ken Swanson … If you really get into your character, it is like two separate energies.”
The Appomattox Courthouse Theatre benefit promises to be a good time for anyone 1) who loves a murder mystery that tickles the funny bone, 2) who loves down-home music that makes you hoot and holler, and 3) who is thankful for an excuse to get out of the house on Saturday night. Last but hardly least, the evening is sure to please all good Southerners who are in the habit of saying “please,” “shucks,” and “you-all,” and who understand that Virginia victuals never taste better than when they’re dipped and fried in a deep vat of animal fat.
Any way that y’all can save a performance of this for when I get back? I am suddenly craving theater…that doesn’t make me gay, does it?
Thanks to Ronnie Lankford for keeping tabs on the Appomattox arts scene. And btw, I enjoyed your folk music book.