Photo by Jason Collins courtesy Eva DeVirgilis
Eva DeVirgilis didn’t expect anything from Richmond when she moved in 2009 from New York City.
She couldn’t have anticipated that on the Theatre Gym stage, she’d open a one-woman show. Her “In My Chair,” a co-production of Virginia Repertory Theatre and Cadence Theatre Co., runs March 2-31 under the direction of New York-based Lisa Rothe. The production synthesizes, through direct monologue and character interpretation, DeVirgilis’s experience as a woman, actress and makeup stylist. The show evolved out of a 2014 TEDxRVAWomen talk with a message about women’s relationship to a cultural sense of beauty and self-identity.
After the TEDx talk, the letters and emails started coming in: Women the world over wanted to meet her. Others pushed back through the comments section, and the vehemence unnerved her. Both types of responses gave her the idea to meet the women who sought her in person.
“I toured eight countries in 44 days,” she says. “I circumnavigated the globe.” She spoke in community rooms and people’s houses for small groups and large audiences. No matter where she was or who sat in her stylist’s chair, she heard: “I’m sorry I look like this.” And that just didn’t sit well with DeVirgilis.
“I’m not a guru,” she explains. “I’m struggling with these issues myself. I wanted to get at why is it that women everywhere, no matter what country or culture, always seem to think that something is wrong with them? Or, they were engaged in a personal struggle, even if not measuring themselves by the mirror. I wanted to find out if there’s any culture doing it right by the way women stand in their society,” DeVirgilis reflects. “And I think we’re all struggling.”
Since she returned from the tour, the #metoo movement blossomed, the country was embroiled in the controversial confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and masses of women went on the march. DeVirgilis remarks, “Every day I could update and edit and completely change my script.”
The show needed a director who’d connect with the material, which meant contacting New York agents and theater professionals to put the project before them. Through Virginia Rep, a field narrowed, and DeVirgilis came to a telephone interview with director Lisa Rothe. Eight years ago, Rothe directed Jeanne Sakata’s “Hold These Truths,” and took it throughout the country. The piece is about the U.S. World War II internment of Japanese-American citizens and Gordon Hirabayashi, who fought the measure all the way to the U.S Supreme Court.
“And, sadly, today, that play is more relevant than when it was written,” Rothe says.
Rothe recognized a similar resonance and began working with DeVirgilis in shaping a script. She soon decided that the actor/writer needed to get away from meeting here or in New York. They went to the Tofte Lake Center for the Arts in Minnesota, where they received assistance from Liz Engelman, founder and director of Tofte Lake Center at Norm's Fish Camp.
Rothe says, “It was good to get away from our homes, to work with Liz, and it was helpful spending time with Eva, hearing her stories and getting to the root of what her story is as well and why it’s not only important for her to tell it, but also the stories of these women.”
DeVirgilis’ approach isn’t customary for the one-person show program, long dominated by monologists and performers from Spalding Gray to John Leguizamo. Women taking on the form have played multiple characters, whether Anna Deavere Smith or Sarah Jones, in often documentary fashion and usually dealing with social justice. “Even Lily Tomlin is mostly in character,” DeVirgilis says. “Speaking in our own voices can be difficult. We’re conditioned to thinking that we’re talking too much — that it’s a vanity piece, we shouldn’t be complaining. Who the heck do I think that I am that people want to hear what I have to say?”
She grants that the task is daunting and, frankly, at times scares her, which is right where an artist should be who wants to get any better.
In the cases of one-person shows — and she’s done several since being in Richmond, including Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” — her favorite scene partner is the audience. During the course of the 90-minute, no intermission show, she’ll directly address the audience, but also assume the characters of women, and men, whom she met on this personal odyssey.
Eva DeVirgilis will perform "In My Chair" from March 2-31 at Theatre Gym as part of the Acts of Faith Festival. $37. va-rep.org
