VCU’s ‘Shadow Play’ melds forms

Silhouetted spies lurk and conspire. Giant Chinese tangrams mysteriously float and topple.

As if bewitched, flashlight beams detach from flashlights and hover like fist-sized halos.

This is the wryly eerie world of "Shadow Play," a nearly wordless 75-minute entertainment nurtured at VCU and destined, its creators hope, for a career in professional theaters beyond Richmond.

The show's inaugural production, featuring an all-student cast, runs at VCU's W.E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts through Sunday.

Co-written and co-directed by Leland Faulkner, David S. Leong and Gary C. Hopper, "Shadow Play" melds the antique art of shadowgraphy, once a staple of vaudeville and Victorian parlor games, with 3-D animation, sculpture, puppetry, a magic act, and a Keystone Kops-flavored espionage caper performed behind and in front of a translucent screen.

The three co-authors have been developing the piece for a good half-decade -- and that's not counting the years that project-pioneer Leong spent racking his brain, searching for an idea that might rival the Blue Man Group, "Stomp" and similar movementand concept-driven crowd-pleasers.

"I wanted to create something whose language was universal," Leong recalled in a recent interview, conducted in the office of the Virginia Commonwealth University Theatre Department, where he is chairman.

It was a chapter in Albert A. Hopkins's classic tome "Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography" that ultimately convinced Leong to base his dream production on shadowgraphy.

Recruiting Faulkner, whom he knew from a Maine performing-arts retreat, was an obvious next step: Faulkner, a Maine-based filmmaker, illusionist and shadow-theater expert, has been obsessed with light-and-dark wizardry ever since encountering the aesthetic on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the 1960s.

The two agreed that a revival of shadow theater was overdue.

"It fell into disuse mostly because of the way that we light the world," Faulkner said. "Back at the turn of the century, things were done with gas lights and candlelight -- and shadows were everywhere."

The advent of electricity, and electric-powered pastimes such as radio and television, diverted public attention. But more recently, non-text-based performing-arts sensations, like Cirque du Soleil and the Blue Man Group, may have paved the way for 21st-century shadow art.

As the postmodern work moved forward, Leong wanted to include the creative energies of his VCU colleague Hopper, the department's director of undergraduate studies, who was initially skeptical.

Leong assured him that a narrative would tie the scenes together: Indeed, the production features a frame tale about an artist who finds much-needed inspiration in a realm of chiaroscuro spirits.

Further fueling the narrative's emotional arc is composer Michael Keck's soundtrack, which ranges from jazz to spooky electronic cadences.

Another key contributor is Devon James Langston, an adjunct faculty member at VCU's Department of Kinetic Imaging, who created an animation sequence featuring a black figure sparring with his shadow in a menacing landscape.

Leong said New York theater producers have scheduled a trip to Richmond to assess whether "Shadow Play" might be an off-Broadway draw. In an era of digitally manipulated visual imagery, he and his colleagues believe shadow theater may have a retro appeal that's irresistible.

"It's so old now, it's new," Leong said.
Contact Celia Wren at .