Last Friday, I took a drive up to Catskill’s Bridge Street Theatre to watch a rendition of The Laramie Project by R’Ville Stage Creations.

The play was originally created by Moises Kaufman and the Members of Tectonic Theater Project who visited Laramie, Wyoming in the wake of a vicious and fatal hate crime against 21-year-old Matthew Shepard on Oct. 7, 1998. The group proceeded to interview and gather data from the community over the following year and shaped their findings into the play that, almost 30 years later, is still being produced at theaters across the country.

For any of you who haven’t been to Bridge Street Theater (it was my first time too), it is a small, one-room theater with a large stage and tiered seating. The play, I learned after arriving, was three hours long with two intermissions. I settled in, with no context about The Laramie Project besides the fact that it was being shown during Pride Month and had some connection to the theme of pride.

What I experienced during those three hours was unlike anything I had experienced in theater before. The format of the play is almost entirely monologue-driven: there are eight actors playing the roles of over 60 characters; each character, in my opinion, held their own. Each actor played the roles they were given with honor and sincerity and the result was an emotional, jarring reflection on how hate can breed in small, rural communities and how, even more importantly, a community can band together in a collective sense of resilience and grief and become stronger for it.

The play does not pick sides. It doesn’t impose its own moral compass but rather, as any proper journalist would also do, it lets the members of the community in Laramie speak for themselves. It is a revelatory play to witness. The three hours flew by.

I wish all of this gushing was in promotion of the play itself, but unfortunately the last show was this past Sunday. Still, if you ever do encounter a showing of The Laramie Project somewhere down the line, I’d highly recommend seeing how the performance company puts it together. Even better, go check out Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill and attend one of their upcoming shows.

Go Upstate to Get Your Art Together

The big arts and culture news for this weekend is, of course, Upstate Art Weekend, which started on Wednesday, June 24 and runs until Saturday, June 28 and features 160 different art studios, spaces, centers, collectives and more. The initiative covers the entire Hudson Valley and beyond, from Putnam and Westchester counties to out in Sullivan and the Catskills to Columbia and Greene counties.

Of all these districts and municipalities with participating venues it’s notable that Kingston has the highest percentage of locations — a whopping 20! Not even ingrained art hubs like Hudson, Beacon and Catskill can compare to the overwhelming number of venues Kingston has slated for this weekend.

I will leave a lot of the Upstate Art Weekend hunt up to you all and encourage you to venture out of our city limits to visit a location up north, south, east and west that you may never have been to before and see what kind of art that community fosters.

There are, I admit, a good portion of these exhibition spaces and venues in Kingston that I’ve never heard of before, and I consider myself fairly tapped in. Of these places I don’t know about or have only heard of in passing, the ones I may check out this weekend are BCMT Gallery at 79 Hurley Ave., Suite 110a; Bosco’s Mercantile, 38 John St.; Front Room Gallery – Expanded Field, 446 Delaware Ave.; Marly Hammer + Jasper Richmus, 1300 Ulster Ave.; Station, 394 Hasbrouck Ave.; and UTOPIA, 35 North Front St.

I can’t speak to any of these yet, so stay tuned for next week’s column to see what I end up making it out to.

Popping Up at Dollar General

What I can speak to is a pop-up art event taking place Saturday night, from 6-9 p.m. at the vacant Dollar General in Esopus.

The event is the brainchild of local pop-up art show impresario extraordinaire Aleksandra Scepanovic and curatorial partner Jennifer Miller. We’ve written about Scepanovic’s one night-only exclusive openings in formerly abandoned spaces around the Kingston area a few times in the past. Of Frame and Fallow features 42 artists, mainly Kingston-based, displaying in a variety of mediums.

Scepanovic’s company, Site Seen Inc., is a nonprofit that focuses on curating liminal, fleeting art spaces, activating unused and abandoned locations and transforming them into exhibitions worthy of notoriety.

I am personally so into the idea pushed by Site Seen. I think we can all name, off the top of our heads, at least a handful of abandoned buildings in our neighborhood that have a certain artistic aura to them. Something a bit dingy and down-and-out but holds the history and remnants of its former life on its walls and windows and floors.

When you really take a step back and think of all the spaces in Kingston alone that fall into this category and think of how underutilized they are, just sitting there vacant and unaccounted for years if not decades simply taking up space, it’s baffling that there aren’t more initiatives like Site Seen that are doing what they can to utilize the underutilized in our communities.

At the Dollar General, people will be able to see art that ranges from sculpture, installation, painting, video, audio and something called “site-responsive practices,” which I imagine has an interactive element. The press release also stated that “a number of artists [are] developing work specifically in response to the scale and atmosphere of the vacant building itself.”

They also state that the building was completely cleared out for this project, leaving behind only the skeleton of the former retail store; the space feels like a daunting chasm of its former consumerist frenzy.

Some architectural nuances noted include “polished concrete floors, exposed industrial ceiling infrastructure, long commercial sightlines, and the suspended atmosphere of a space waiting to become something else.” That last note didn't describe a physical manifestation of architecture, but holds in its phrasing what I see as the true intention behind the project.

There will also be an outdoor aspect to the show, with art and installation pieces reaching their tendrils into the area that surrounds the building.

The opening is free to attend, and the location is 1162 Broadway in Esopus. Learn more about Site Seen at siteseenarts.org or @site_seen_arts.

Put It in the Books

Finally, the Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is hosting a party for the launch of their new book, which includes photography from the artists who were included in their recent biennial celebration on Saturday, June 27.

The 176-page book was designed by Will van Roden, published by CPW Press and printed by 1080PRESS, and includes all 39 artists who participated in the inaugural Biennial event.

The event, which includes a tour of the exhibition from 4:30-5:30 and a reception from 5:30-7:30, is free to attend. To register and learn more, follow the link here.