Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg (Photo by Jay Paul)
Actor Cole Escola grabbed headlines at the 78th annual Tony Awards last June as the first openly nonbinary performer to win Best Actor in a Play for their role in “Oh, Mary!”
But Escola wasn’t the only award winner for “Oh, Mary!” that night. Hopewell native Sam Pinkleton took the award for Best Director for the same production, and he says that kind of success may not have found him if it weren’t for the time he spent as a teenager at Appomattox Regional Governor’s School, aka ARGS, in Petersburg.
Sam Pinkleton (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
“I cannot overstate the degree to which ARGS genuinely saved my life. I was an opinionated and chatty gay kid in Hopewell who walked funny and listened to show tunes,” Pinkleton says via email. “I wasn’t built for traditional classrooms. I learned sideways. I questioned everything. I wanted to make up new models, poke holes in old ones and make the room laugh in the process. ARGS didn’t just tolerate that — it celebrated it.”
Pinkleton says ARGS nurtured his potential, helping him learn to trust his instincts and to embrace silliness, absurdity and play. “Those aren’t cute extracurriculars; they’re the raw materials of invention,” he says. “Anything I’ve made in my life — any show, any collaboration, any piece of art I’ve been lucky enough to help build — traces directly back to those years when adults trusted me enough to be myself and fail spectacularly until I found my way.”
Founded in 1999, ARGS is one of 18 Virginia Governor’s Schools; it serves 14 school divisions from Amelia to Southampton counties including Chesterfield, Richmond, Hopewell and Petersburg. In addition to their academic curriculum, students at ARGS can choose to focus on dance, literary arts, theater arts, musical arts, visual arts or technology.
ARGS Executive Director Meagan Tenia (Photo by Jay Paul)
Meagan Tenia has served as executive director at the school since 2021. The unique relationship between educators and students at ARGS, she says, is built on trust. Take lunch, for example. A full hour long and scheduled concurrently for everyone in the building, lunch is more than time to refuel and move on; it’s an opportunity to connect and create.
“You might think, well, it’s lunch, but no,” Tenia says. “During lunch, they are choreographing. They’re working together. They’re studying together. They’re working on art projects or installations. They’re performing for each other. It’s such a climate and culture of lifting everybody up. It’s the mutual trust between staff and students that allows that creative freedom to happen every day.”
Tenia says ARGS helps teens recall the sense of curiosity and discovery they knew when they were toddlers, giving them the freedom to explore. “If you think about a toddler or an elementary school student, they are always thinking so creatively,” she says. “And then, as we go through traditional schools, it has the ability to kind of stifle that. What is so beautiful here is that there is a lot of room in our day that allows our kids to work on those creative juices.”
ARGS Visual Arts Department Chair and instructor Susann Whittier (Photo by Jay Paul)
That explorative creativity is actively helping students learn, says Visual Arts Department Chair and instructor Susann Whittier. “Creating is how our brain works. Students build, draw, sculpt and paint to understand the world around them,” she explains. “We teach them to think critically and problem-solve using the best way possible to get the results they need. Making art has its major successes and failures, and I do believe it is in the failures without judgement where a young artist can grow and rise to their full potential.”
Roary McAdams is a senior at ARGS with a focus in visual arts. He spends his days studying art history, photography and sculpture, as well as the requisite calculus, government and English. McAdams says the work he’s done at ARGS has helped him tap into his sense of identity. “The conversations I’ve had during instruction time, with my teachers or with my classmates, have opened my eyes to so many parts of myself,” he says. “I think art education is important because it teaches young artists to open new doors and explore what they find without fear.”
The arts are where you learn the things that actually make a person functional in the world: confidence, empathy, imagination, the ability to communicate.
—Sam Pinkleton, Tony Award-winning director and Appomattox Regional Governor’s School graduate
The importance of taking chances and, yes, sometimes failing is a through line among the leadership at ARGS. Theatre Arts Department Chair and instructor Cindy Warren echoes Whittier, noting, “Theater students learn that failing isn’t bad, but a way to help you see that you can do things differently. They learn how to overcome obstacles and rejection. We try to help them see the bigger picture, that their viewpoint is only a small part of the overall concept.”
“Theater can inspire empathy, and I believe that it is vital, especially in today’s world,” Warren adds. “Being able to put yourself into someone else’s shoes and try to see from a different perspective is so valuable. It allows us to understand we are not all the same and that so many variables can affect a thought or a reaction to a situation, and through empathy, we might react differently and hopefully in a more positive way.”
For Pinkleton, schools like ARGS are more than a place to get an education; they’re an essential lifeline. “Arts education is not some adorable extracurricular hobby that can be the first item slashed in a budget — it is life-giving, oxygen-level stuff. I’ve built a much bigger, richer life than I ever thought possible because I had access to arts education. That’s the headline,” Pinkleton says. “But the truth runs deeper. Even for the students who don’t go on to work on Broadway or on film sets or in museums, the arts are where you learn the things that actually make a person functional in the world: confidence, empathy, imagination, the ability to communicate. I do think that if our world is going to be saved, which feels like a real question at the moment, these will be the tools required to do so.”
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