Hamner Theater
The Hamner Theater was founded in 2005 by theater professionals Peter Coy and Boomie Pedersen with the express intent of telling the stories of our community; producing professional quality performances in collaboration with the community and other area theaters; providing educational and training opportunities for any and all interested members of the community; and, through the Virginia Playwrights Initiative, working with local playwrights to develop new work. Initially we were a project of the Rockfish Valley Community Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization but were recognized as our own non-profit entity in 2012.
For eight seasons The Hamner Theater had an intimate black box theatrical home at the Rockfish Valley Community Center and produced plays to fulfill its mission of telling the stories of our community as well as producing professional quality performances for the residents of Nelson County, to offer a performing arts venue in Nelson County and to create a community theater open to and reaching out to all residents of Nelson and its surroundings.
In the years following our release of venue, we collaborated with PlayOn! Theatre, with Live Arts, with Four County Players and continued our free Improv sessions as well as our VPSI readings and workshops. We were the fiscal sponsors for several area performance groups, PEP (Performers Exchange Project) and CPC (Charlottesville Playwrights Collective) as well as BAC (Belmont Arts Collective) and have stayed active in the local theater world. As we redefine and hone our purpose now, with our studio at Crozet Arts, we want to continue telling the stories of our community; we want to bring to light what has been hidden away, to encourage and foster bold, sustainable community conversations. We want to make a difference in our community, one story at a time, one play at a time. Our future work includes Dementia Friendly Theater; work with the senior population, specifically with residents of care facilities; a summer Shakespeare for Crozet and surrounding environs. We want our projects to be able to travel to underserved or more remote communities where access to the performing arts may be limited. We believe that theater should be available and accessible to all because it is a necessary part of a healthy society.
All Hamner events have been on zoom since March 2020. The Hamner Theater continues to offer weekly Improv sessions, free and open to the public; monthly uncurated Community Conversations; monthly Second Saturday Community Zoomversations of plays written as part of the Newtown Project; regular play development workshops through the VPSI. We have been in rehearsal to develop an original adaptation of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard which will be a touring production, a continuation of Chekov UnBound and the collaboration with UVA playwright Doug Grissom (Three Sisters in 2019.) The play has become a monthly zoom act-by-act event and has been recorded to be an audio play as well.
The Newtown Project was begun in 2018 in response to the question “where is the diversity in Crozet?” posed by a board member of color. The question opened a Pandora's box of issues and more questions and we are continuing that conversation with our Newtown Project Expansion, a series of plays and monologues which look at the larger, historical context of the Greenwood Chemical Plant explosion and its place in the history of Environmental Justice issues. Expanding themes include the Middle Passage and slavery; exploration of the "playground of the wealthy" - the estates that front Newtown and were former plantations through the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard. We are exhuming the lost history of Newtown and environs.
Now more than ever the time is right for theater to focus on the issues reflected in our culture - systemic racism, environmental justice issues, silenced voices. The Hamner's stated mission to boldly serve and heal our communities through conversation-provoking story telling and theatre in creative spaces dovetails exactly with the Newtown Project, which aims to look at all of those issues through the creative lens of story telling.
Please visit the Hamner Theater’s Youtube channel for:
Royal Shiree's Lamentations – four iterations featuring actors from Texas, Maryland, Richmond, Lynchburg and Farmville as well as Charlottesville.
Our act-by-act Cherry Orchard, also on youtube.
All actors are paid for their participation in these events. It is time to recognize the value of the labor of the artist and compensate that. The artists have been present throughout the COVID Pandemic and have been continuing to create whereas the buildings have been empty and useless. It is time to shift the paradigm of where we put our arts money!