Winner of Best Solo Performance 2025 from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle: "In Some Dark Valley" Plays This Weekend as Part of the Ripple Effect Arts Festival

Don't miss this powerful solo performance! On a moonlit night in Appalachia, a fiery preacher travels through time to confront his own unyielding zealotry, in a work both haunting and illuminating in its relevance to today.

Robert Bailey wowed audiences here in Santa Cruz a year and a half ago with his one-man show. Since then, he's toured the country with it, and has just returned from a run at the at the White Bear Theatre in London, where journalists enthused about the unique blend of elements and the power of the performance. It's back again as the first of two shows that are our contributions to the Ripple Effect Arts Festival.

Here are some thoughts from Bob and director Billy Siegenfeld, who wrote and stars in "Fortitude & Gentleness," the second show of our Ripple Effect offerings.

AT: What was the inspiration for "In Some Dark Valley"?

Bob: Many years ago, I became fascinated with the field recordings of Southerners singing traditional songs on porches, in fields, in prisons. The folk revival of the 60s wouldn’t have happened without this music. Certainly my grandparents in rural Virginia and North Carolina would have sung this music.

During Covid, I started thinking about a one-person show that could get at the root of the disturbing things happening in the culture, the rigidity of thinking and the passion for the wrong things. And I was also wondering how I could find a narrative to hang some of these songs on. I kept coming back to a paperback copy of an Ibsen play called Brand, a verse tragedy about an uncompromisingly moral pastor in Norway trying to accept the consequences of his choices. I realized I could shape this story in a different way using an Appalachian preacher from the 19th century. I thought that, through theater, the audience could confront this mindset of rigidity represented by Reverend Brand. Billy came onto the scene early enough to help me shape this.

Billy: We are in a time of fanaticism, and finding an image or metaphor for confronting that was great. When Bob asked me to look at the piece I didn’t have to keep writing angry emails but could find a creative way to channel my frustration with those increasingly rigid forces in society.

What I saw in the piece was a character who had a very tormented mind and was searching for a way through it. It's not just a play about him, but about the people he affected. We get to see  the torments, loves, and sadnesses of the Reverend that led him to make these fanatical choices, and we get to witness him confront that and find a way to the other side.

Bob: Billy encouraged the idea of embodying many different characters as visitations the Reverend experiences. The whole piece escalated artistically once Billy encouraged incorporating the additional characters.

AT: Bob plays many different characters in a short span of time--what was your approach to creating them?

Billy: Bob was originally writing ABOUT these characters—I encouraged him to let the characters themselves say what Reverend was saying about them. This let us keep changing the dynamic of the piece, instead of the Reverend just talking. Every time he can step into the physicalization of another character, it makes the audience move in and out of time with him. Those characters he’s remembering are there in real time speaking for themselves. He’s in his own present time but also telling the story of his past. Bob’s ability to physicalize intensely made this possible.

Bob: Billy pushed me expressionistically, so we’d have the contrast between the Reverend just talking to us and him disappearing into these other characters with their own fanaticisms to vary the narrative. Billy came up with concept that the Reverend is pulled into these situations—he’s being visited upon just as the audience is being visited by him.

AT: What is the message of the show? What do you want audiences to come away with?

Bob: One of my former college classmates came to see a run-thru and said, “I’ve been struggling for a long time to come to grips with this rigid way of thinking, especially from the religious right, and you helped me see something.” I hope the show will help with coming to terms with our feelings and our own prejudices about a certain class of people—it can be a little window of light that can shine on that area.

AT: Talk a little about your collaboration as actor and director--what do you enjoy about working together to create theater? 

Bob: Billy has been on me from day one about energies--where do they come from? what part of the body? The most useful advice was him encouraging and permitting me to come back to zero or neutral over and over again. He’d say, “What you just did has manifested itself, now come back to rest for both you and the audience. Give your complete commitment to that energy, physically and vocally, then relax it so that something else can happen." In addition to everything he's brought to the show around movement and directing energy, Billy has also been a great dramaturg, helping me recognize when I’ve said enough and when I need to say more so the audience can understand. He makes it a joyful process. We laughed a lot. We’ve never as adults since college collaborated so closely.

Billy: Getting to work with Bob as an actor was great—he works so hard at his craft. He’s always been a physical actor, and that was the key for me. I knew he was willing to splash his body in different directions. He also has a tremendous ability with the way he uses his voice. He can impersonate anybody. He can bring so many different textures into his voice, and we worked on matching those textures with physicality. Even just standing there speaking he’s going to be compelling, but I pushed him to find a physicality that matched his voice for each character.

AT: The second show at Actors' Theatre for Ripple Effect is Billy's show "Fortitude & Gentleness." How would you describe it?

Billy: A rehearsal between two actors turns into explosions of angst, politics, literature, motherhood, forgiveness, and love — with snatches of song, a handful of dances, rants about life, and impassioned appeals to both the moon and Jane Austen.

AT: Can you say a little about your performance company Jump Rhythm, and the workshops you'll be teaching on Wednesday, April 22nd?

Billy: I started life as a percussionist and I love social things. Jump Rhythm is teaching people to simultaneously vocalize and move. Children do this all the time. It’s part of the biological make-up of what it means to be human. We have rhythmic movements in us—our heartbeat, breath, etc.—and I try to put that impulse into what I teach, getting my students to just be kids. It’s a pedagogy based on trying to give articulation to the energies in yourself rather than trying to look or move like somebody else or adopt a posture. How does the body want to move?

Standing Down Straight® (SDS) is a method of voice-and-movement training that helps us do the tasks of everyday living without causing strain or injury to the body.  How? By guiding us to use life’s most effective and cost-free aid to healing and strengthening the body: gravity-directed relaxation.

SDS explains how gravity works with the human skeleton, in fact, how it is designed to use gravity to ground our bodies, so we use less muscular effort when working or playing, whether at home, on the job, on the athletic field, or onstage. It's a movement system made for truly every body. I'm also doing a second workshop on using these principles to make swing dancing feel more sustainable, connected, and joyful. Read more and sign up for Billy's workshops HERE.

AT: What else would you like to share about the shows or making theater in general?

Bob: Film and TV do many things better. When theater tries to incorporate the things film and TV do so well, it loses its identity. Today we have no problem finding stories being told in all different kinds of media. But theater involves a live performer and live spectators—that’s something that theater does differently. With a theater performance, anything can happen, and you have to be open to it. There may be something that goes the same way every time, but in terms of what I feel when doing it, there are micro-moments that change depending on the audience. The show is still flexible and breathing, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to bring it to Santa Cruz again.

Billy: Playwright Tony Kushner once said that theater audiences get 25% smarter when the lights go out. That’s also something theater does. That statement helped me understand why theater has been so powerful. People have an anonymity that’s conferred when the lights go out—they feel more relaxed and can let more things come in—often things they probably only let in in private. Theater is unique in that way—as an audience you do a different kind of work than you’re used to, which is to imagine something. For 65 minutes people can imagine along with us.

"In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of the Reverend Brand," a joint production of Jump Rhythm and Actors' Theatre, plays Friday and Saturday, April 17 and 18, at 7 pm, and Sunday, April 19, at 2 pm. Buy tickets HERE.

"Fortitude & Gentleness," plays Friday and Saturday, April 24 and 25, at 7 pm, and Sunday, April 26, at 2 pm. Buy tickets HERE.

See both Jump Rhythm shows for a discount HERE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMWKQ6xsGlQ