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  • Raised by opera-loving parents in a rock ’n’ roll world, Rich Copley has parlayed his broad interests into his career writing about arts and entertainment. Since 1998, he has covered performing arts, film and faith-based popular culture for the Lexington Herald-Leader, the daily newspaper in Lexington, Ky. It’s a pretty broad beat, but Rich delights in finding influences of the past in the present and showing fine arts fans the value of pop culture, and vice versa. ~ Copious Notes is a blog covering that broad spectrum. If you want to read about specific areas of interest, such as theater or opera, click on one of the categories to the right and you will be whisked away to all posts in that category. Also, look around the blog for links; multimedia items such as photo albums, videos, and interviews with artists; and other nuggets. Have fun, and thanks for dropping in. The header for this blog was designed by Danny Kelly and the illustration was drawn by Camille Weber.

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May 22, 2008

Searching for theater in our history

Ain - Michelle Michelle Hurst (left) plays Daphney Oldham in In This Place . . . , a play about Lexington's Oldham House, written and directed by Ain Gordon. Copyrighted Herald-Leader/LexGo photo by David Perry.

LexArts president and CEO Jim Clark has been interested in presenting a play rooted in Lexington's history. Four years ago, he invited New York-based stage writer and director Ain Gordon to come tromp around the city and see what sort of stories captured his attention.

That story, as we discuss in a story in today's paper, is about the Samuel Oldham house and its history as the first house in Lexington built by a free black man on property he owned. In This Place . . . is the play that he came up with, a one-woman piece featuring New York-based actor Michelle Hurst as Oldham's wife, Daphney, and multimedia elements including video of historian Yvonne Giles.

Earlier this week, Gordon and Hurst sat down with us to discuss the project.

In this clip, Gordon discusses how he decided the Oldham story was the one to tell (click the play button, and it will play):


In this clip, Hurst talks about approaching the role of Daphney:

Posted at 12:01 AM |

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scott white

Amazing. Don't miss this performance by an extremely talented actress working from a moving, well-erittne script. We need more of this type of non-traditional theater.

Posted by: scott white | May 23, 2008 at 11:56 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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