What started as a book, “Shout! Sharing Our Truth: An Anthology of Writings by LGBT Veterans and Family Members of the U.S. Military Services,” became during the past year the play “Shout!" Both pieces are the work of Lora Beldon, a Richmond artist and arts educator.
Lora Beldon
Having grown up with a father who was a Marine, Beldon hopped off the frequent-move carousel in 1984 to study painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. While she was interning at the original Shockoe Bottom location of the 1708 Gallery, a controversy erupted about homoerotic art on the windows for an exhibition — “that whole Joe Morrissey thing,” Beldon says, summarizing the former commonwealth attorney’s efforts to censor the exhibition. (Beldon ultimately served for a time as the gallery's director.)
For the past 20 years, she’s examined the lives of youth brought up in military families. That interest rooted in her own background grew into the Military Kid Art Project. She’s also co-director of the Brat Art Institute.
"Shout!" includes true LGBTQ+ military family stories from multiple generations and service branches, spanning rank, race, gender and socioeconomic backgrounds.
“When I first started looking at the lives of military children, there really wasn’t anything out there,” Beldon explains, “and the part of that involving sexuality and identity was even less.” Many servicemen and -women weren’t raised in military families; thus the peculiarities of that childhood weren’t experienced firsthand. This recognition led to Beldon’s traveling "Unclassifed: The Military Kid Art Show," a joint production of the Military Kid Art Project and Brats Without Borders.
“We highlighted 75 years of military brat history and organized it so that museums and other institutions could lease it," Beldon says. The show got its travel papers in 2012 through a $15,000 grant from Newman’s Own, the company founded by late actor Paul Newman, in an annual competition sponsored by Newman’s Own, Fisher House Foundation and Military Times.
Beldon's artist-in-residence fellowship at the Museum of the American Military Family in New Mexico generated the written anthology of "Shout!" A grant for adapting the text to stage came from the Arcus Foundation, and Beldon teamed with Richmond director and writer Melissa Rayford and Deejay Gray of TheatreLab.
A script-in-hand presentation of "Shout!" from last year; Sunday's performance will be a stage play.
The play’s setting alludes to a self-help or therapy meeting, though the type is not specified. The ensemble cast of six assumes the individual personas of the storytellers.
The cast members are Lucretia Anderson, Raja, Avery Johnson, Stevie Rice, Caitlin St. Clair, and, the only nonprofessional performer in the ensemble, artist Petie-Bogen Garrett. The Sunday, Sept. 22, production of "Shout!" at TheatreLab is a stage debut.
“We’re testing the waters with Richmond,” Beldon says. “The long-term goal is to share this show with community centers across the nation and in Europe, with an educational package, and that can accompany a film and different materials.”
"Shout!" premieres at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 22, at TheatreLab, 300 E. Broad St. $20.
