Firehouse News
Readers’ Theatre May 25: Last Wagon West
posted on March 31, 2010
Last Wagon West
Tuesday, May 25, 7:30 p.m.
Directed by Keith Fitzgerald
$5 suggested donation; students and RAPT members free with ID.
A man builds a conestoga wagon, packs up his wife and children, and travels west from his home in Providence Forge, Va. Only this story takes place in 1961, and the man is Leon Gillis, a modern pioneer and maverick adventurer who leads his family through a life-changing odyssey. Based on a real-life family, the Gillises were, for a time, the most photographed family in America after the Kennedys. The world, in the grip of the Cold War, was charmed by their “new pioneer” spirit. The play is narrated by Leon and his wife in turn, the time alternating between present day 1990 and flashbacks to the early sixties. An ensemble cast portrays the characters they meet all over the country and the world. This play is a portrait of a strong family, a headstrong father and a snapshot of an era that is at once more innocent and more ominous than today.
About the Playwright
Margie Langston lives and works in Richmond where she is a member of the Richmond Playwrights’ Forum. Several of her plays have had staged readings and productions in recent years, including her most successful one-act to date, Luau at Acorn Acres, which was produced last year in Syracuse, N.Y., in July and at Skipwith United Methodist Church in October, after being given a staged reading at the Firehouse Theatre in February 2009.
Another one-act, Out to Dry was a winner in the St. Tammany National One-Act Play Competition of Covington, La., and was chosen to be performed in Chicago at the World’s Largest Laundromat as a piece of guerilla theatre to make a statement about clotheslines for the Right to Dry political movement (www.laundrylist.org) based in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, the performance was scuttled at the last minute.
In 2004, her one-act play, Painting the Truth won first place in the Barksdale Theatre’s Footlights Series for new playwrights and was given a staged reading. A shorter piece, Signs, has been produced several times for the Reflections Repertory Theatre and once for the West End Assembly of God.
Margie also enjoys radio theatre, and wrote an hour-long mystery drama that was selected to be produced by San Francisco-based Shoestring Radio Theatre and broadcast in September 2006 on public radio stations in 34 states as well as on the Internet. Margie has contributes scripts and “frames” for the Richmond-based On the Air Radio Players, of which she is a board member.
When not acting or writing, she works as a manager of condos and townhouses, which provides an unending source of characters and stories for inspiration.