BLUR theater students improvise during the 2012 camp.

Sweet Briar College’s third annual Blue Ridge Summer Institute for Young Artists, known as BLUR, will be held June 16 through July 7 on its campus. This year, the camp has added music and technical theater to its repertoire of theater, creative writing and visual arts.

BLUR founder and director David Griffith, who teaches creative writing at Sweet Briar, is expecting the largest and most geographically diverse group yet — between 35 and 40 students from 16 states.

“We have students coming from every corner of the country,” he said. “That’s our goal at BLUR: bring as many distinct voices and visions to the artistic conversation as possible so that our sense of what is possible is enlarged.”

Launched in 2011, BLUR is a collaborative, three-week residential camp for high school students interested in the arts. It’s built on the founding principle of blurring the boundaries between art forms to imagine new ways of seeing, thinking and creating. While participants concentrate in one area, spending two-thirds of their day deeply immersed in their disciplines, the rest of the time they work collaboratively on projects in other mediums.

BLUR partners with Sweet Briar’s theater troupe-in-residence, Endstation Theatre Company, and the adjacent Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). In addition to having the opportunity to learn from the crew and cast, BLUR students will attend performances of all three plays in Endstation’s Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival, including Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Cymbeline” and the musical “Violet.” They will also visit the VCCA to meet with artists from around the world.

More information about this year’s camp is here and at sbc.edu/blur. You can follow BLUR on Facebook at BLURatSBC, Twitter at blur_institute and on Tumblr at bluratsbc.

— Janika Carey

Molly Harper during her “Diversity Monologues” performance last fall.

Sweet Briar College senior Molly Harper literally stumbled into acting in high school. After failing to make the volleyball team, the Maryland native spotted a theater flyer on her way out of the gym.

“I went home and told my mother that I was going to audition,” she says. “Once I got into that show, I never left the theater.”

This month, Harper will present her final directing project, “Lies,” at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, in Babcock Studio Theatre at Sweet Briar College.

Written and directed by Harper, who also composed all of the music, the play is a collection of monologues documenting lies by various characters and the reasoning behind them.

“As the audience watches the pieces move together, the … entanglement of lies develops into other issues of self-consciousness, self-perception, doubt, loneliness, depression and a strive to work for something honest and hopeful,” Harper says. “I hope that this play shows the universality of human emotions and how everyone feels the same way at one point or another.”

Molly Harper in a promotional photo for “Lies.” Photo by Margret Wood ’13.

The characters’ struggle and fragmented self-image are also reflected in the set, which Harper designed.

“Set design is one of my favorite hobbies, and it just so happens that our set is based on broken mirrors,” she says. “[It’s] a physical manifestation of the misinterpreted image … these characters have developed about themselves and the lies they have told over time.”

Harper, who will graduate in May with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater and music and an Arts Management Certificate, started developing the play when she wrote her first monologue for the College’s “Diversity Monologues.” That text later became part of “Lies.”

Started in 2011 to promote dialogue on campus, “Diversity Monologues” features performances by several Sweet Briar students who talk about their personal experiences to spark conversations about diversity and civility. Staged during first-year orientation, the monologues are among a number of commitments on Harper’s calendar. She’s also a member of Paint and Patches, Earphones, Taps and Toes, GLOW, Silhouettes, and served as InterClub Council president for the SGA board this year.

Inducted into Alpha Lambda Delta and Alpha Psi Omega, Harper has been a Dean’s List honor student since her first year at Sweet Briar and in 2012 made the Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities list. In addition, Harper, who is a Work Study assistant for the theater department and a theater tutor, received the theater department’s award for Excellence in Academics two years in a row.

“I love my department, because they’re always extremely helpful and willing to work with you on anything,” she says, remembering what it was like when Bill Kershner, director of the performing arts department, gave her a large role during her first year at Sweet Briar.

“I was so intimated,” she admits. “But as we worked together, he showed me what real acting was, and I knew that acting was what I was good at.”

Molly Harper in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.”

This summer, Harper is taking her experience one step further. Along with other Sweet Briar theater students and faculty, she will travel to Scotland for the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival to perform in “Chops,” a play by Kirin McCrory.

“I play the lead, Marg, who has been accused of killing off all the men in town, but as most comedies go, nothing is as it seems. It’s quite a funny piece.”

Harper’s previous theater credits include “The Bacchae” (Second Messenger), “Under Milkwood” (Second Voice), “Dsvelada: Senior Show” (master carpenter), “The Secret Garden” (Mrs. Medlock), “Glass Menagerie” (master carpenter), “Crimes of the Heart” (stage manager), “Aladdin Jr.” (set designer/master carpenter), “As You Like It” (Touchstone), “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (Mag), “Doubt” (Sister Aloysius), “The King and I” (master carpenter) and “Waiting for Godot” (Pozzo).

“Lies” stars fellow seniors Noelle Ames and Catherine Ramos, as well as Taneal Williams ’16, Patricia Morgan ’15 and Mariah Skalka ’14. Behind the stage, Harper is getting help from stage manager Madeline Skiba ’16, props master Julia Green ’13, master carpenter Sarah Capen ’15, sound designer Charlotte Hopkins ’15 and video projection operator Latoya Letmon ’14.

Tickets are free, but seating is limited. Email boxoffice@sbc.edu for ticket reservations starting Monday, April 15. For more information, contact Shelbie Filson at (434) 381-6228 or sfilson@sbc.edu.

— Janika Carey

Tearrance A. Chisholm visits the slave cemetery during his stay at Sweet Briar.

Endstation Theatre Company and Sweet Briar College will host a reading of “In Sweet Remembrance” by playwright Tearrance A. Chisholm at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 27, in Pannell Gallery. A reception follows the event, which is free and open to the public.

Commissioned by Endstation, Sweet Briar and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, “In Sweet Remembrance” is a tribute to the significant role of the black community throughout the College’s history. Chisholm, who lives in Washington, D.C., has spent the past four summers researching Sweet Briar’s cultural and historical importance, resulting in an original play that, according to Endstation, “explores the landscape of its past, discovers the contours of its present and realizes its future.”

A cast of actors, including Sweet Briar students and hired professionals, will perform the manuscript in its entirety for the first time on March 27. Michael Stablein Jr., who heads the company’s Playwrights Initiative, will direct the reading and also play a small role. Beginning March 10 until the end of the month, Chisholm will be in residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to revise and complete the play. His visit will also include on-campus workshops for students at Sweet Briar.

In his writing, Chisholm explores the many faces of the African-American experience. The theme of race as a double-edged sword of advantages and shortcomings permeates all of his works, including “Burning Books” (MU New Play Series), “Liddy’s Sammiches, Potions & Baths” (Arkansas Rep; Voices on the River), “Vulpicide” (MU New Play Series) and “A Month of Sundays” (Midwinter Madness Short Play Festival; NYC). Chisholm has also been published in interJACtions: 75 Monologues by some of America’s Finest Playwrights and Arcadia Magazine.

You can learn more about the Playwrights Initiative and “In Sweet Remembrance” on Tumblr.

— Janika Carey

The ensemble cast of “Waiting for Godot” with director J.T. Marlowe (seated).

Samuel Beckett’s famously spare language and staging in “Waiting for Godot” leaves much to the viewer’s own interpretation. And that’s how J.T. Marlowe, who is guest-directing Sweet Briar Theatre’s production of the play, wants to keep it.

“Waiting for Godot” will open at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, in Murchison Lane Auditorium at Babcock Fine Arts Center. The show follows a pre-show dinner and lecture at 6 p.m. in Johnson Dining Room at Prothro. Additional performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, March 1-2, and at 2:30 p.m. March 3. The Sunday matinee will be sign-interpreted. Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students, and free for children younger than 12 and for members of the Sweet Briar community. Area teachers and students will be admitted free on opening night, Feb. 28.

Molly Harper ’13 and Sarah Muth ’14 as Pozzo and Lucky in “Waiting for Godot.”

Tickets go on sale Monday, Feb 18. Call (434) 381-6120 or email boxoffice@sbc.edu for reservations. To order by credit card, visit www.lynchburgtickets.com.

Marlowe, who previously directed and taught theater at Sweet Briar, is leading an ensemble cast in the play, which follows Beckett’s own notes from a production he directed in 1975.

“I hope to honor Beckett and the students here, using some of Beckett’s own direction ideas and his revisions to the text,” Marlowe said.

The cast members are Annabel Metson Wallace ’15, Charlotte Gibson Hopkins ’15, Molly Harper ’15, Sarah Muth ’14 and Caden John Campbell ’13, and local actors Omar Ott and Alex Miller.

The first staging of “Waiting for Godot” in 1953 was in French. Reaction to the radically original “tragicomedy in two acts,” as Beckett subtitled it, was slow to take shape. It has to sink in.

Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2003 about the experience of directing the first production in English in 1955, said he didn’t immediately recognize it as a turning point in 20th-century drama — but he and many others would come to see it as a watershed.

“And it certainly took a month of intensive rehearsal for me to realise that the play was a masterpiece,” he wrote. “But from the very beginning, I thought it was blindingly original, turning the undramatic (waiting, doubt, perpetual uncertainty) into tense action. It was exquisitely constructed, with an almost musical command of form and thematic material. And it was very funny. It took the cross-talk tradition of music hall and made it into poetry.”

Those qualities made Marlowe, who teaches performing arts at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., want to return to Sweet Briar to direct the spring production.

“Like so many directors, actors, playwrights, we have been startled and influenced by Beckett’s mastery of crafting language into pure dramatic action — fully realized in this play,” Marlowe said.

The story revolves around Estragon and Vladimir, or Gogo and Didi as they call one another, two friends who are waiting for Godot. They fill the time with conversation, the tone of the dialogue ranging from slapstick comedy to bleak despair as they interact with a confusing world of nonsense and absurdities.

“The audience will experience this play and Beckett from their own perspective of what they think or feel is happening on the stage,” Marlowe says. “For me, the exploration of awakening to one’s purpose and the choices we make along the way; how we negotiate it all — who will help us along our path, what friendships, what connections, what love here and now — are ideas that engage and excite me.”

— Jennifer McManamay

Students in theater, music and dance will present performances inspired by the Asian theme.

Molly Harper ’13 in “As You Like It” (2011)

The dance department has prepared two dances choreographed to Taiwanese composer Lu Yun’s music. Professors Mark and Ella Magruder met Yun in Taiwan this summer while teaching and presenting at the Dance and the Child International conference (daCi) in Taipei. Ella’s choreography to Yun’s “Puo Suo” will be brought to life by senior Jessica Murphy, sophomores Lily Hoblik, Chelsea Modeste and Katherine Hoyt, and first-years Katie Craig, Calee Whitten, Abby Smith, Jasmine Taylor and Comora Littlejohn.

Mark Magruder’s contribution is a solo to “Monologue for an Old Tattooed Man” from the composer’s “Music from the Mountain” suite.

“I call my solo “Bamboo Memories,” [using] some Sweet Briar bamboo as part of the set,” he said.

The evening will also feature Sweet Briar voice students singing selections from the comic opera “The Mikado” (1885) by William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Led by vocal instructor Marcia Thom, the ensemble includes seniors Ally Booth, Noelle Ames and Kate Macklin, junior Caroline Lacy, sophomores Haley Foraker and Sarah Capen, and first-year Shannon McCarthy.

Flute player Caitlyn Playle ’13 will perform two pieces of folk music arranged by Han Guoliang — “Jasmine” from Jiangsu Province and “Kangding Love Song” from Sichuan Province.

The theater department will be represented by Molly Harper ’13, who will stage excerpts from Brenda Wong Aoki’s “Mermaid Meat and Other Japanese Folk Stories.”

Catherine Ramos ’13 (Anna) stars alongside Karl Lindevaldsen (the king). Photo by Kylene Hayslett.

Sweet Briar College’s Division of Performing Arts will present its second musical, “The King and I,” at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 18-20, and at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 21 in Babcock’s Murchison Lane Auditorium.

The production is directed by William Kershner and features music by Richard Rodgers. Written by Oscar Hammerstein II, the book and lyrics were based on “Anna and the King” by Margaret Landon. Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students and free for children younger than 12 and for members of the Sweet Briar community. To reserve tickets, contact the box office at boxoffice@sbc.edu or (434) 381-6120, beginning Oct. 8. To order by credit card, visit lynchburgtickets.com.

The musical coincides with Kershner’s ‘Silver Soiree,’ an event to celebrate his “first 25 years at Sweet Briar,” said box office manager Shelbie Filson. The celebration will take place after the Saturday, Oct. 20 performance at the Elston Inn Conference Center. A free pre-show dinner lecture by Kershner at 6 p.m. in Prothro Dining Hall will precede the performance. Regular dinner rates apply. Reservations for the lecture can be made through the box office beginning Monday, Oct. 8.

All area teachers and students will receive free admission for the premiere on Thursday, Oct. 18. The Sunday, Oct. 21 matinee will be sign-interpreted.

In a true community effort, the cast of 50 features Sweet Briar students, staff and friends, including Catherine Ramos ’13 as Anna Leonowens; Emma Kieley ’16 as Tuptim; Shannon McCarthy ’16 as Lady Thiang; and the vice president for finance and administration, Scott Shank, who plays Sir Edward Ramsay. Performing arts faculty involved are music director Rebecca McCord, choreographer Loretta Wittman, vocal coach Marcia Thom, designer/technical director Cheryl Warnock and costumer Ursula Kuhar. Mary Rora ’12 serves as the master electrician and assistant lighting designer, and M.A.T. candidate Ebet Davey ’12 is the assistant director. Even family members are involved in the production.

“Assistant soccer coach Amy Dahlin’s daughter is one of the dancers, and the royal children include one of Dean Amy Jessen-Marshall’s daughters, as well as the daughters of alumna Laura Price ’99 and professor Rebecca McCord,” Filson said.

For the first time, the University of Virginia will hold its renowned Young Writers Workshop on Sweet Briar’s campus — alongside the College’s Blue Ridge Summer Institute for Young Artists and Endstation’s Playwrights Initiative.

“It really is a marvelously inspiring coming together of so many people who are invested in the arts,” said Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence Carrie Brown, who helped bring UVa’s program to Sweet Briar.

After renovations at UVa put the 30-year-old workshop on hold last year, organizers decided to look for a new home, and Sweet Briar seemed like a good fit.

Margo Figgins, founder and director of the Young Writers Workshop, named a number of reasons: “the strong interest from Sweet Briar in our program, the warm invitation to pursue the mutual possibilities, the sustained friendliness of everyone each step of the way, the arresting Sweet Briar landscape, and the ability to become a 100 percent in-residence program — which has been a long-held goal of the program.”

Brown is hoping that it will indeed become a permanent one. After all, she said, Sweet Briar’s campus offers an “inspiring landscape for young artists,” and she’s not just talking about its natural environment. Over the years, Sweet Briar has established a growing, interconnected community of artists.

There is the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) across U.S. 29, which continues to attract creative minds from around the world and serves as a vital resource for Sweet Briar students and faculty.

There is the theater company Endstation, whose summer festival has been growing consistently since 2008. In addition to staging innovative indoor and outdoor performances on Sweet Briar’s campus, the company attracts an eclectic mix of young writers each summer. Its Playwrights Initiative, founded four years ago by associate artistic director Michael Stablein, is an artist residency program for emerging and professional playwrights from all over the country.

This year, resident playwright Joshua Mikel will be joined by visiting playwrights Kate McManus (Los Angeles), Elford Alley (Dallas, Texas) and Kirin McCrory (New York City), as well as Regional History Commission Playwright Tearrance Chisholm from Washington, D.C. Chisholm, who participated in the Initiative last year, will be completing his new play, a fictional account of the first African-American tenure-track professor at Sweet Briar College. The Playwrights Initiative also features special guest playwright Rory Ledbetter — writer, actor, director and professor at the University of Mississippi — and a public reading series highlighting 10 original works of theater (July 9-13, 16-20).

And then there is BLUR (June 17-July 8), a three-week workshop for high school students interested in writing, acting or visual arts, which took place for the first time last year.

Dave Griffith, director of BLUR and assistant professor of creative writing at Sweet Briar, said workshop participants will once again be taking advantage of the College’s artistic landscape.

“I’m particularly excited about the fact that the students are going to get to see three Endstation Theatre productions — Big River, Comedy of Errors and Macbeth,” he said. “The site-specific nature of what Endstation does is a perfect fit for BLUR, and the ridiculous talent of the actors is hugely inspiring to our young artists.”

Staged in a different location each year, Endstation’s outdoor plays make deliberate use of the College’s natural and built landscape. The idea of drawing inspiration from nature is a big part of what BLUR is all about — the other is incorporating different art forms into one’s own. This summer, Griffith decided to add an elective class period in which students have the opportunity to leave their home studio and create art in one of the other studios.

“This will complement the interdisciplinary and collaborative emphasis of the program, as it will encourage students to see how the skills and concepts native to the medium they usually work in apply to another media,” he explained. “So, for example, in what ways might writers bring what they know about the basics of storytelling … to theater? How might a visual artist’s sense of color and form help her when she sits down to write a poem? What unique insights do actors bring to [the] writing of stories?”

Participants will also visit the VCCA, something that has been part of the program from the start.

“Last year students were treated to a tour of several artists’ studios and got to talk with the artists about their process of composition,” Griffith said. “The VCCA is one of the premier artist colonies in the world, and we are unbelievably lucky to have them as a partner.”

Thirty high school students are expected to participate in BLUR this year — four more than last year.

UVa’s Young Writers Workshop promises to bring another 170 students to campus. Session I takes place June 24-July 6, session II runs from July 8-27, each offering studio workshops in five different genres: fiction, poetry, songwriting, screen and play writing and creative nonfiction. Taught by a staff of published, professional writers, participants develop a portfolio, publish in the workshop’s literary magazine and perform their work at the end of the camp.

Proximity to BLUR and the Playwrights Initiative add a new dimension to the well-established workshop. The latter will serve as a valuable resource for both student camps, Stablein says:

“There will definitely be some cross-pollination with BLUR and [the] UVa Young Writers Workshop. Both groups of students will be attending our Public Reading Series and select students from both … will attend closed-door roundtables with the visiting playwrights as they develop new work on campus.”

Griffith, Brown and Figgins say they look forward to even more collaboration between the different art camps, the VCCA and the theater festival in the future.

“How can we come together so we can do more things and reach more people?” Griffith said. “How can we create spaces for art to thrive?”

Sweet Briar, it seems, is a great place for art to do just that.

Contact: Janika Carey

Ross, who has been seen in the national tour of “Wicked” and on Broadway in “9 to 5,” will perform in a benefit concert to raise money to support Endstation’s fifth annual Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival. The “Broadway in the Blue Ridge” fundraiser will be held at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 19 in Murchison Lane Auditorium at Sweet Briar’s Babcock Fine Arts Center.

The night will feature Broadway hits from “Once,” “Sunday in the Park with George,” and the current best-selling musical “Wicked.” Ross will also be joined by Endstation performers on selected songs from “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a featured production of the 2012 Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival.

Ross is a seasoned Broadway veteran, having worked alongside celebrated stage actors Lorna Luft, Allison Janney and Matthew Broderick. Most recently, Ross played Rosemary Clooney in the world premiere of “Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical” for the Human Race Theatre Company. She has appeared on Broadway in “Cry-Baby,” across America in the national tours of “The Producers” and “White Christmas,” in London as Agent Clarice Starling in “Silence! The Musical” and at Carnegie Hall in “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”  She has also appeared on the big screen in “Sex and the City 2” and “The Producers.” Her next project will be Cyndi Lauper’s new Broadway musical, “Kinky Boots.”

The Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival is produced annually by Endstation Theatre Company and is hosted by Sweet Briar College. The festival includes original plays about and for Virginia, family-friendly productions, and location-specific outdoor classics that take place on Sweet Briar’s beautiful campus. Endstation Theatre Company was founded in 2006 by Amherst native Geoffrey Kershner and his fellow Florida State University alumni, Krista Franco.

Tickets for “Broadway in the Blue Ridge” are $20, $10 with a student ID. For more information on the concert, the Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival, or on Endstation Theatre Company, contact the box office at (434) 826-0391 or visit endstationtheatre.org.

Wright first discovered acting the summer after eighth grade, when she auditioned for a community play. She was cast for two roles — a boy and Grandma Tzeitel — in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“I didn’t really realize what I was getting into because I’d never done theater before, and a lot of the kids there had done so much,” she remembers. “But once I got into it, I really enjoyed it. I realized that this is something fun that I could do.”

But it wasn’t until her senior year in the magnet program at Woodside High School in Newport News, where she studied vocal music, that she set foot on the stage again. This time, she was in the ensemble of “Grease.” Again, Wright loved it, but the idea that theater could be more than just a hobby never fully formed — until she took a theater class at UVa.

“This was like a turning point for me. It was the most fun I had ever had … I had never taken a theater class before. We learned about technique, and that was really exciting for me,” she says, adding, “I never got any pleasure like that from my engineering classes.”

Wright dropped out of the engineering program and moved back home for the next year. After several months of working and thinking about her future, she applied to Sweet Briar.

“I said, theater is what I’m going to do,” she says. “It was kind of scary because up until that point, I had never made major decisions for myself. But by that point, my mother was like ‘Well, you’ve got to figure out what makes you happy, because I don’t want you to be in college for six years trying to figure out what I want you to do.’ ”

Today, Wright knows that it was the right decision. At Sweet Briar, she says, she was able to gain more practical theater experience than she would have at a larger college or university.

“If you know nothing about theater, you can come in and work on sets or be a stage manager … you can do things that you wouldn’t expect to be able to do right off the bat. When you audition for a show at UVa, a lot of times the graduate students get the lead roles, and the upperclass students get the supporting roles, whereas you come here to Sweet Briar, and your first year you could get a lead role. Gaining a lot of experience during your undergraduate years will benefit you.”

Wright performed in a number of plays each year and also had the opportunity to work with professional artists, such as Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, who taught a workshop for Sweet Briar students in February. For her senior project last semester, Wright directed “Doubt,” putting the entire performance together in just one month.

“It was a little stressful, but I’m pleased with the results,” she says. “I ended up being the set designer, too, and I’m not a designer, but I had some really great people working with me that helped bring my vision to fruition.”

When she was awarded Sweet Briar’s Jessica Steinbrenner Molloy theater arts award in April, it was icing on the cake.

“I was really excited. I even started crying,” she says. “It’s one of those things that you hope will happen, but you don’t expect it.”

After all, Wright adds: “I’m not your typical ‘loud’ theater student. When people meet me, they don’t think I’m involved in theater at all … I guess you could say I have a quiet passion for theater.”

The only real giveaway is the “Hello, Dolly” T-shirt she’s wearing — it’s for the spring musical at Lynchburg’s Academy of Fine Arts. The show runs until Saturday. Wright is in the ensemble, so much of her performance relies on singing and dancing. Luckily, the senior took a jazz dance class at Sweet Briar, and she’s good at learning all the technical aspects of dancing, she says.

“But I wish I’d taken more dance classes,” she says. Loretta Wittman, who choreographed “Hello, Dolly!” and teaches theater at Sweet Briar, is offering a tap dance class next semester. “I’m a little disappointed that I’m missing out on that,” Wright admits.

In the end, she’s glad she didn’t spend all of her time in the theater department. Instead, she got involved in tap clubs, worked as a resident advisor for three years and in the Phonathon, a student-run portion of Sweet Briar’s Annual Fund. She also explored a number of classes unrelated to theater and enjoyed making connections between different subjects, and with her professors.

The liberal arts environment, Wright adds, helped her to think for herself and to draw her own conclusions. It also encouraged her to pursue her goals with determination. To get her acting job this summer, she drove to an audition in North Carolina in the middle of the night because it was during the week and she didn’t want to miss any classes.

It was worth it. Snow Camp Outdoor Theatre, one of more than 75 companies scouting for actors at the Institute of Outdoor Drama, liked her immediately and offered her the lead role of Esse in “Pathway to Freedom.”

“It was exciting for me because I’ve never had a job offer for a role before,” she says.

For the first time, Wright is signing a contract and getting paid for doing what she loves. Through July and August, she’ll be performing almost every day.

And then? Wright says she doesn’t know yet what will happen after the summer, but is confident something will pan out. She’s applied to an acting apprenticeship in Philadelphia and has an audition there at the end of May, and to a couple of theater-related jobs, as well as a residence life position.

“I’m just trying to not put all my eggs in one basket,” she says. “You never know what’s gonna happen. If worst comes to worst, I’ll stay in Northern Virginia and probably rent out my mother’s basement!”

Wright is practical, but she also has dreams. One of them is working in New York. A Sweet Briar arts management trip during Spring Break made her fall in love with the city.

“One of the girls and I took a train to Brooklyn Heights, and we were looking at Manhattan from over there, and I was like, ‘I could live here,’” she says.

“There was a nice park there, and you could see where they were building the new World Trade Center … it was just a nice spot.”

For now, Wright is focusing on short-term goals. With more than a month to spare before she moves to North Carolina, she’s thinking about returning to her job at the Holiday Inn restaurant in Dumfries to save money for the summer. But even there, theater isn’t far from her mind.

“It’s funny, but last time I worked there I kept thinking of the restaurant as a theater, and anytime I had to go in the kitchen, I’d accidentally say, ‘I’m just gonna go backstage. … ’ People thought, ‘What is wrong with her?’ ”

It’s that quiet passion coming through.

Contact: Janika Carey

The 26th annual Arts Day will be held at Sweet Briar College on the morning of Friday, April 20.

Shelbie Filson, who is organizing this year’s event, says the College is expecting 314 Amherst County fifth-grade students. Before attending workshops across campus, the students will eat breakfast in Prothro Dining Hall beginning at 9:15 a.m.

Sweet Briar student and staff volunteers will assist at breakfast, accompany groups to each activity throughout the morning and lead a variety of classes, such as square dancing, music appreciation, the art of chemistry, theater games, drawing sharks, natural art, creative writing, film music and more.

For more information, email sfilson@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6228.