Category: Art & Theater

Class and consequences shape new Chris Bohjalian novel The Amateur

When Vermont author Chris Bohjalian began writing his new novel, The Amateur, he kept it a secret; the only person who knew about it was a lawyer. It wouldn’t be the last time attorney-client privilege would connect to the book, which, much to Bohjalian’s surprise, would turn into a courtroom thriller.

The Amateur follows Mira Winston, a teenage golf prodigy whose life is derailed when she smashes a golf ball through a practice net and accidentally kills a classmate, Kenny Foster, a caddy. In a first for Bohjalian, who’s written 24 novels, it has a table of contents, with section titles portending that she will ultimately stand trial.

Critically, the book explores Mira’s sexual exploitation by a middle-aged country club member that begins at age 15. Her experience leads to an irrational, magical thinking belief that the death was karmic punishment for being a homewrecker, when in fact she was a victim.

Bohjalian is an almost blank slate writer who starts with a premise and lets it lead him forward. The Amateur centers on the question of what a life-altering event does to someone who’s bound for greatness. As with previous novels, the future is often present, beginning with revealing that Mira will abandon golf and become a novelist.

“Dread is my jam, and that means I use a lot of foreshadowing in my work,” Bohjalian said in a recent Zoom interview. “So you know that at some point Mira is indeed going to be on trial, and that she’s not going to be an LPGA golfer. She’s going to be something else, and that will turn out to be a female version of me.”

It’s not Mira who best resembles Bohjalian, however, but the boy who dies at her hand. “I am Kenny Foster,” he said. Like Kenny, he moved frequently as a kid, attending six schools in five years across three states, the last particularly tough. “I parachuted in just before 11th grade,” he said. He also caddied at a country club that his family could never afford to join.

That class divide is deftly addressed in the book. Kenny’s parents spent most of their limited earnings to ensure that he had a good education and a brighter future. At the gilded country club, however, he met derision, getting the caddy equivalent of scut work, servicing meager tippers, and pathetic or inebriated duffers.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald said something along the lines of, ‘I grew up in the worst house on the best block’ … a lot of that was my childhood,” Bohjalian said, alluding to a The Great Gatsby character who described his house as “a small eyesore” in the “consoling proximity of millionaires.”

Confronting those inequities is one reason Bohjalian considers the novel his “most important” since 1997’s Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls, written in 2012, but it’s not the main one.

“We’re in the midst of enormous cultural transitions, a reckoning, so to speak,” he said. “I view The Amateur as important because it gets at all of those issues of how we look at young women, and the way we often give men of my generation a pass they do not deserve — Exhibit A, the man in the White House.”

This leaves the question of why Bohjalian kept The Amateur under wraps until he announced it with an email titled “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” The answer isn’t nefarious, but practical.

Writing on the sly was less subterfuge than a reflection of a desire to work without pressure. Legal counsel provided plot guidance for Bohjalian when it became clear that The Amateur would not be solely about becoming a writer, but also about beating a murder charge. Still, he completed it in 90 days in what he described as “a frenzy.”

Given his prolific output, none of the people he normally confers with were concerned by his seeming radio silence at the time. “If anyone at Penguin Random House was wondering about my eerie quiet here in Vermont, all they assumed was I was giving myself a break and riding my bike and hanging out with my wife and my dog and having a lovely summer.”

Bohjalian will celebrate the book’s publication on Aug. 1 at BNH Stage in Concord, where he’ll have an onstage chat with Gibson’s Bookstore founder Michael Herrmann.

“I’ve known Michael since 1997, when I did my first event for Midwives at his bookstore; we’ve been friends ever since,” he said. Herrmann, he continued, “knows me better than almost any bookseller I know, and I think we will have a blast on stage, given our experiences together dating back 30 years.”

Gibson’s Bookstore presents Chris Bohjalian
When: Monday, Aug. 3, 7 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $45 includes copy of The Amateur, $15 admission only

Featured photo: Chris Bohjalian. Photo by Victoria Blewer

Two distinct styles join at Outer Space exhibition

In mid-July, a small second-floor gallery in Concord opened a show called “Montages,” with two artists, Peter Cordova and Kyoko Idetsu, showing their work. It’s billed as an artistic conversation, and that’s the idea that led Roger Buttles to open Outer Space Arts in a well-lit space across the hall from his own studio in the former residence of a Civil War colonel.

Pairing artists has been a constant at Outer Space since it opened in 2023. Sometimes Buttles looks for resemblances in genre or style. Occasionally he’ll mix media, bringing together a two-dimensional painter or drawer with a sculptor or ceramicist. “I’m not repeating myself over and over, because that becomes stagnant to me,” he said by phone recently.

For Buttles, the connection between Cordova, an illustrator who also works in ceramic sculpture, and Idetsu, a Japanese painter, was that both disorient the picture plane in their work.

“That’s why I titled the show ‘Montages,’” he said. “There are multiple perspectives — not in a cubist sense, but a distorted perspective coming together into one unified image.”

Cordova’s ceramic works aren’t included in the exhibition. “There were a few I could have chosen, but logistically it made more sense to keep this show all two-dimensional,” Buttles said. “His works are all colored pencil on cardboard. Kyoko’s side has both paintings and works on paper — pen and ink.”

The inspiration for Outer Space, and the reason Buttles pairs artists rather than mounting solo shows, traces back to his time studying under Michelle Grabner at the Art Institute of Chicago. Grabner, an artist and curator, ran an exhibition space called The Suburban out of her garage and tool shed outside of the city.

Buttles, whose primary job is advising collectors in New York, Miami, San Francisco and other big cities, never planned to open a gallery. That changed when his wife, a radiologist, took a job in Manchester. The couple and their family, two twin daughters and a son, relocated from NYC.

Upon arrival he found a studio on Pleasant Street in Concord with enough space for small exhibitions.

“It’s affordable,” he said. “I don’t have the pressure or expectations of running a commercial gallery in an expensive city. That gives me a lot of creative freedom in what I show, because I’m not going to go bankrupt doing this.”

In other words, he’s not trying to build an empire.

“I’m basically breaking even … it’s not a money-making venture,” he said. Outer Space is closer to a calling, and a way of staying connected to the artist he still primarily believes himself to be. “I consider myself an artist first, who happens to run this artist-run exhibition space.”

Buttles grew up on Long Island with little exposure to art. His creative outlet was sports, and he played lacrosse through college. Photography found him almost by accident, sparked at 14 by an offhand comment from his older brother’s college friend about earning credit for a photo class.

That seed grew into a career in black-and-white photography. Finding William Eggleston’s color work at 22 was a key jolt of discovery. During his twenties, Buttles apprenticed in San Francisco galleries and frame shops, mounting Diane Arbus and Robert Frank photos one day, and Mission School painters the next.

His entrée into collecting came when he discovered Creativity Explored, a nonprofit studio in San Francisco, began buying their 20- and 30-dollar pieces and embraced the idea of affordable art. Coincidentally, Cordova worked there. He immigrated to San Francisco from the Philippines at 19 and joined the studio in 1996, having never made art before.

Buttles has already featured Creativity Explored artists in two prior Outer Space shows but held Cordova back, sensing he deserved one of his own. That show found its second half in Idetsu, an artist Buttles connected with separately. Her work centers on domesticity and child-rearing filtered through a Tokyo perspective.

Buttles insists that the upcoming show should feel unintimidating. He compares the experience with listening to classical music without needing expertise in music theory. “I don’t know anything about it technically, but I really enjoy it; I feel like that’s how art should be too,” he said. “There shouldn’t have to be a prerequisite of knowledge.”

“Montages”: Peter Cordova & Kyoko Idetsu
When: Saturdays, through Sept. 19, noon-3 p.m. (or call for appointment)
Where: Outer Space Gallery, 35 Pleasant St., 2nd floor, Concord
More: outerspacearts.xyz
A reception with both artists happens Wednesday, July 29, at 5 p.m.

Featured photo: “Two Indian Head Tail” by Peter Cordova. From outerspacearts.xyz.

Shakespeare al fresco returns to Saint Anselm College

For the past two summers, Theatre Kapow’s Shakespeare on the Green has leaned dark. A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2024 was filled with shadowy fairy magic. With last year’s Romeo & Juliet, the dusk forming over Saint Anselm College and the following sunset offered a celestial comment on the tragic love story.

With this year’s As You Like It, director Emma Cahoon is changing the weather, Shakespeare-wise.

“It’s a bit more contemplative,” she said by phone recently. “It’s a very considerate play … each of the characters, to me, feel less like caricatures and more like real people, which is something that I just love.”

As You Like It introduced Cahoon to Shakespeare, courtesy of an eighth-grade teacher with an innovative streak. Years later, living abroad in London, it was the first Shakespeare she saw performed live.

“It completely charmed me all over again,” she said. Making it this year’s Shakespeare on the Green production was an easy decision, partly due to its setting.

Much of the action unfolds in the Forest of Arden, where exiled characters shed their old identities and find clarity among the trees, making it perfect for an al fresco stage ringed by real ones.

“Shakespeare on the Green has some great elements for it,” Cahoon said. “It’s kind of ready-made for a play set in the forest.”

One thing is notably absent this time: the Manchester dance company that partnered with Kapow on both previous Green productions. Ballet Misha weaved choreography into Midsummer’s fairy realm and Romeo & Juliet’s doomed romance, but that collaboration isn’t part of this year’s show.

“This is really not a dance type production,” Cahoon explained.

Rather than treat the absence as a loss, she framed it as an opening. The language of As You Like It, uniquely dense with plot and character even by Shakespeare’s standards, rewards the kind of close attention that previous Green efforts didn’t demand. “We’re meeting the absence of Ballet Misha by really digging into the language, which is its own kind of fun.”

An expanded eight-actor cast is made up entirely of returning Kapow company members, many who appeared in the previous two Green shows — from Midsummer, Emma Weller, Molly Litt, Claire Soleil Gardner, Cecilia Lomanno and Samantha Griffin, with Courtney St. Gelais and Jay Doane carrying over from Romeo & Juliet as well.

St. Gelais, who played Oberon in Midsummer and Mercutio/Prince in R&J, takes on Oliver and Jacques this time; Doane, previously R&J’s Benvolio, plays Touchstone, Charles and Jacques de Boys. This continues the company’s gender-blind approach to casting classic texts with a fluid ensemble.

This allows performers to cross the gender lines Shakespeare wrote into characters like Rosalind, who spends most of the play disguised as a young man, Ganymede.

“I am super excited about the cast; it came together in what feels like kind of a miracle to me,” Cahoon said. “It’s a really, really strong group.”

Asked for an early favorite moment, Cahoon was quick to respond, even as rehearsals had just begun. At the play’s first read-through, St. Gelais took on Jacques’ famous “All the World’s a Stage” monologue, arguably the most recognizable speech in the play, and thrilled everyone in a way Cahoon had been hoping for.

“As soon as I picked As You Like It, I was like, I need to hear Court do [that] speech, and … it was the best reading of that monologue I’ve ever heard; it knocked us out of the water,” she said, already picturing how it will land outdoors, delivered beneath open sky with Alumni Hall as a backdrop. “I think it’s going to be beautiful to hear it in that space.”

The production serves as the opening of Theatre Kapow’s 19th season, built around the theme “Elemental.” Each show tied to a classical element, with As You Like It serving as the Earth effort. That’s apt for a play focused on characters getting back in touch with something more grounded than the court politics they’ve left behind — and it’s also being staged in the elements.

Shakespeare on the Green Series 2026: As You Like It
When: Thursday, Friday & Saturday, July 16 – 25, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Koonz Theatre, 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester
Admission: $25, anselm.edu (children free, no ticket needed)

Featured photo: Cast of As You Like it. Courtesy photo.

Puppeteers for Fears return with AI-themed Robopocalypse

The premise of Robopocalypse: The Musical! sounds, on paper, like a high-speed collision of several ideas.

A tech billionaire invents a self-driving car that accidentally kills his wife, a tragedy that estranges him from his teenage daughter. Unable to communicate, each begins work on AI projects. Neither finishes, but their creations merge accidentally and go rogue, threatening the world, and the only ones who can stop it are two people who can’t talk to each other.

Oh, and there are puppets — wonderfully weird, and futuristic in a zany, retro way.

“It’s a wholly irrational project by any reasonable measure … it shouldn’t exist,” Puppeteers for Fears founder Josh Gross said in a recent Zoom interview. Yet it does, and with sufficient momentum to carry the Portland, Oregon-based hand-and-rod troupe through a 30-city national tour that includes a stop at BNH Stage in Concord on July 14.

Gross first wrote and performed Robopocalypse in 2018, and the world caught up to him some time later. The musical addresses AI at a moment when it’s become, as he puts it, “not science fiction anymore — just science.” When tools like ChatGPT launched a couple years ago, he continued, the company decided it was time to take the show nationwide.

Gross’s production has evolved, but it remains grounded in a philosophical tension between two AI schools of thought.

“One is that it’s a tool; another is that people are actually trying to create life,” he said. “But the thing about all life and consciousness is that a key component is a sense of self-preservation. If something is created as a tool but then achieves consciousness, it’s going to understand that a tool is property. And property doesn’t have control over its own outcomes.”

What’s changed about the show is what it’s wrapped in — a story that’s ultimately about what a parent owes to the life he helped create, and what it owes him. A father is trying to invent his way back to happiness after a tragedy, as his daughter tries to earn his attention by matching him on his own terms.

That two people can’t heal until they’re forced to face something they can only stop together is “a human story that anyone can relate to,” Gross said. “And putting it in the context of what we’re all facing right now, where people have very strong opinions on AI. It’s happening whether we want it to or not; we’ve got to figure out what to do.”

Puppeteers for Fears’ fun characters, Gross believes, are ideal for conveying the hard messages in Robopocalypse. “Puppets exist somewhere between reality and simulation. You can see them doing things, but we also know it’s a performance … someone putting on a mask. We make the conscious decision to accept that this thing lives in between.”

That liminality mirrors the many questions being grappled with when it comes to AI itself, like is it real consciousness or simulated? Is virtual reality real because it’s experienced as such, or manufactured because it’s made of ones and zeros? Hearing it all from talking cars and other next-level creations softens the blow.

The entire score for Robopocalypse was written on analog synthesizer, which Gross learned for the first time from how-to VHS tapes uploaded to YouTube. The Arturia MiniBrute he purchased from Portland vintage store Control Voltage wasn’t easy to tame, he said. “It’s not exactly an instrument you play so much as a runaway train you’re trying to hold on to.”

Gross is quick to say that his puppet musical isn’t for children — but not because of the usual reasons.

“Kids don’t have the attention span for a feature-length show about the nature of grief and technology,” he said. “There are a few f-bombs and some mature content, but the biggest thing is it’s just a bit long.”

That said, BNH Stage lists the performance as 18+.

Puppeteers for Fears is self-contained on the road, traveling with its own screen, lighting trusses, and sound. A recent grant from the Oregon Community Foundation to upgrade what Gross called “technology we’d been holding together with duct tape and shoelaces for a while” really helped elevate Robopocalypse to national tour-worthiness.

It’s a long way from their debut in Ashland, Oregon, on Halloween 2015 in a Renaissance Faire-themed bar that held 30 people but drew over five times that and inspired them to continue. “It continues to astonish me,” Gross said. “I’ve played a lot of empty rooms in other projects.”

Puppeteers for Fears presents Robopocalypse: The Musical!
When: Tuesday, July 14, at 8 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Admission: $26, ccanh.com 18+

Featured photo: Robopocalypse. Courtesy photo.

Centuries of absurdity, just in time for the 250th

There’s a moment Lawrence Lesher keeps returning to when he talks about directing the latest Winnipesaukee Playhouse production, The Complete History of America (Abridged), running July 3 through July 11 in Meredith. It’s the Lewis and Clark section, a vaudeville-style bit in which two explorers debate their destination until someone gets hit with a rubber hammer.

“Absurdly stupid jokes,” Lesher said with a grin during a recent Zoom meeting. “But they captured exactly that energy with complete commitment right off the bat, and I was embarrassed by how much I enjoyed it.” That’s the sweet spot the show, written by Adam Long, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, is designed to occupy.

Three actors, 90 minutes with intermission, and 600 years of American history are distilled in the play, initially performed by Reduced Shakespeare Company, a troupe famous for what the New York Times dubbed “intellectual vaudeville.” That it’s playing during the nation’s big birthday celebration is almost too perfect.

Lesher, surprisingly, claimed the semiquincentennial had slipped his mind until reminded of it, thanking the interviewer as he considered how to include it on opening weekend.

“I’m so focused on the show I didn’t even think about it, but yes,” he said, “we’re going to open with some rousing acknowledgment.”

That’s one of the play’s biggest charms — it’s less a script than a jumping off point. In fact, it’s been revised as recently as late last year. For example, it now includes a lot more about Alexander Hamilton than when Lesher first saw it during the George W. Bush presidency.

Lesher was a tour guide in New York City some time ago, and one stop was at Hamiton’s grave. “I’d have to explain who he was; now they tell me. That’s the power of pop culture when it’s applied to history,” he said, and promised a Lin-Manuel Miranda callback in his production — no spoilers, though. “It’s a cameo … a really funny one, and it’s a musical reference.”

This is Lesher’s first Winnipesaukee Playhouse gig, and it came partly because of his track record. He’s also an actor and was part of RSC’s national tour of Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). He did have some concerns about this play’s politics-tinged jabs. “My first question when I was hired was, ‘Can we laugh at ourselves anymore?’”

The answer, after a week-plus in rehearsal with a three-person cast of Owen Minor, Travis Tingvall and Amanda Wagner, is a clear yes.

“They’re so funny and light that I think even with our very real rancorous differences in politics today, we can set it aside and enjoy the gentle ribbing,” he said. “We tar everybody.”

The show skates nimbly across the full sweep of American history, or at least a highly compressed, cheerfully distorted version of it. There’s pre-Revolutionary America, the founding era, westward expansion, two world wars, Watergate and Covid, along with figures ranging from George Washington to both Bushes and the current White House resident.

Real-time topicality is baked into the play’s DNA, and Lesher has leaned into it.

“If something happens in the political world the day before we open, we might throw that in,” he said, adding the script almost demands the reflexes of a stand-up comic. “Being able to play off each other and what the audience gives you … it will be different every night.”

There are audience Q&A sections, a game show sequence where an actor goes into the crowd with a fake microphone, and occasional snark aimed at latecomers. It all lives or dies by the cast’s deft read-and-respond skills. Though it’s information-packed, Lesher is emphatic the show is accessible even for audiences who slept through eighth-grade social studies.

“You don’t need to know American history … it’s enjoyable on the level of pure, sheer zany comedy,” he said. “But those who do know their history will find another level in the references.” Seriousness sometimes does elbow its way in, with moments touching on national tragedies like Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

Fortunately, it’s all handled with an irreverence that earns its right to the material.

“It does make you go home and think,” Lesher said, nodding in agreement when reminded that one of history’s funniest bits concerns Mrs. Lincoln’s night at the Ford Theatre. “It’s rooted in something very real, but still one of the funniest things.”

The Complete History of America (abridged)
When: Friday, July 3, at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, July 4, at 2 p.m.; Sunday, July 5, at 2 p.m.; Tuesday, July 7, at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Wednesday, July 8, at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, July 9, at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Friday, July 10, at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Winnipesaukee Playhouse, 33 Footlight Circle, Meredith
Admission: $40 and up, winnipesaukeeplayhouse.org

Featured photo: Owen Minor, Travis Tingvall and Amanda Wagner. Photo by Lawrence Lesher.

Snapshots and Harleys at Currier’s Summer of Photography

Instagram didn’t invent self-curation, a point brought home by a pair of commingling exhibits currently at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art. Long before “personal brand” was an everyday term, people arranged themselves for the lens, deciding which version got preserved. The platforms changed, but the impulse did not.

“Together, Apart, Away: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection” offers the sorts of family photos never intended for public viewing. “The Bikeriders,” conversely, is Danny Lyon’s celebrated collection of documentary photographs, taken in the 1960s while he was an actual member of the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club.

Initially the two were separate, until Currier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Anastasia Kinigopoulo decided to join the exhibits “in conversation.” With a history of showing his work in museums, Lyon’s photos are more artistic, but Kinigopoulo realized they had much in common with the snapshots in Cohen’s collection.

“One of the things that Danny Lyon pioneered was a style of photography that feels very personal; in some ways, he was taking cues from vernacular photographs,” she said by phone recently. Joining them made sense. “For a long time, they wouldn’t have been found in museums alongside each other, but that’s very much changing now.”

What sharpens the pairing is a constraint both bodies of work shared, but one nobody currently under 30 ever lived with — not knowing right away how a photo came out. Shoot 100 pictures, discard 99 and keep the perfect shot is today’s rule. With vernacular photos, however, the process was snap the shutter, then wait to see what developed.

For example, there’s a Lyon photo of a biker’s reflection caught in a rearview mirror. It’s a shot that couldn’t be restaged after the fact. This was the mid-1960s, and no biker in Hell would be expected to take direction from a photographer seeking the perfect pose. “Mr. Barger, could you move over just a skosh?” Not happening.

The snapshot collection’s timeline runs roughly from 1880 to 1980 — a century of ordinary people, none of them artists, working from the same instinct that fills social feeds today: photograph the picnic, the road trip, the friends piled into a human pyramid, or a dog stuck in the motorcycle sidecar as a joke.

The Cohen collection is grouped in thematic “frames” of photos, all arranged by Kinigopoulo. For one, she paired a wall of open-road imagery with vernacular motorcycle photos. The choice pushes back against the violence-filled mythology of motorcycle gangs by showing ordinary people on bikes.

“I love the juxtaposition of this cultural symbol that permeated families and people’s lives in very different ways besides just as a sort of focal point of this very intense subculture,” she said, describing a photo of a father giving his daughter a ride, women on motorcycles, and bikes as punchlines instead of threats.

For a glimpse of Instagram’s vanity roots, she grouped snapshots of people performing for the camera. “An entire wall of photos of individuals essentially strutting their stuff … posing and building an identity through photographs,” she said. “People have always done that … they’ve always put on a persona for the camera.”

Lyon was Hunter S. Thompson with a camera, defining the difference between a documentary photographer and a tourist with a press pass. Kinigopoulo pointed to a portrait of a biker’s wife, Kathy, caught directly and then twice more in a pair of mirrors, a triple-exposed glimpse few could have gotten that close to.

Something Kinigopoulo has enjoyed during the “Summer of Photography” exhibition, which opened in May and ends Aug. 16, is seeing visitors linger on an object’s relatability. A group visiting during Bike Week marveled at how Lyon’s work reminded them of rides they’d taken and bikers they knew.

To her delight, everyday people will often see themselves or a loved one in a century-old shot.

“One of the things I really love about vernacular photography is its amazing universality,” she said. “People … look at those images and say, ‘I keep expecting to see an image of my grandmother or my aunt, or, ‘my God, look at this person, it looks so much like someone that I’m related to.’ That’s one of the magical things about the show.”

Summer of Photography: “Danny Lyon: The Bikeriders” and “Together, Apart, Away: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection”
When: Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., ending Aug. 16
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
Admission: $5 – $20, currier.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.