This play, In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of Reverend Brand, grapples with the inevitable clash between an unyielding vision of moral rectitude and the personal destruction left in its path.

The initial genesis emerged from Robert’s fascination for field recordings of white and black Southerners singing hymns, ballads, blues and children’s songs: music that had been passed down orally through generations and was in danger of disappearing entirely.

Robert grew up in the suburbs of Richmond Virginia and Washington D.C. with grandparents from rural areas. Discovering this music in its unadulterated form well into adulthood opened his mind and soul. Whether religious or secular, the singing moved him in a way he couldn’t shake – that something lost in the rush of progress retained a unique power to speak.

The folk music revival of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s (what Dave Van Ronk amusingly dubbed “The Great Folk Scare”) had hit American culture like an earthquake when he and many others were exposed to records assembled from the very field recordings Robert held in fascination.

As a practicing theatre artist, he played with the notion of incorporating this music into a piece of live performance.

And so began a protracted period of research into multiple strands of the larger story about the South. Robert’s earliest investigations ranged far and wide, diving into whatever came to hand.

Surprisingly, there were few plays; Romulus Linney’s HEATHEN VALLEY and HOLY GHOSTS were obvious choices, but there was nothing by Tennessee Williams, for example, which felt germane to this particular quest. Flannery O’Connor’s novel THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, with its religion-haunted backwoods protagonist, stayed by his side and taunted him with its preposterous yet inevitable plot. He spent hours with a dog-eared paperback on his shelf entitled The South As It Is: 1865-1866 by John Richard Dennett, who, as a Northern journalist undertook a horseback journey through the defeated land and reported what he saw and heard.

Baileys noted, “Dennett’s accounts showed me the bitter roots of so much that turned oppressive and violent in the decades to come.”

Robert found inspiration and references in Woody Guthrie’s autobiography BOUND FOR GLORY; Tony Horwitz’ CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War; Dennis Covington’s SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia; the archive of Alan Lomax and all his field recordings coming online; John Cohen’s black-and-white documentary from the ‘60’s, HIGH LONESOME SOUND (featuring unemployed miner and songster Roscoe Holcomb); the poetry of James Dickey; a TREASURY OF SOUTHERN FOLKLORE; historian Nancy Isenberg’s WHITE TRASH: The 440-Year Untold History of Class in America; Drew Gilpin Faust’s THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War.

What eluded Robert amidst the research and resources was a narrative. In the news, a headline in USA Today on July 1, 2015, proclaimed “U.S. Torn on Confederate Flag.” And that same divisive symbol was marched through the halls of Congress on January 6, 2021, by men and women who weren’t even from the South. Robert recalls, “The cognitive dissonance was deafening and my sense of urgency grew.”

The film director Federico Fellini once described how he arrived at stories to tell:

“I start back down a road to identify where certain bruises were inflicted, where certain illnesses were born, where, psychologically, certain cancers formed.”

Jerzy Grotowski, the avant-garde theatre director, with whom Robert briefly worked in Poland, suggested that, while our culture may no longer possess a “common sky” of belief allowing for group identification with myth, a confrontation is still possible:

“We can attempt to incarnate myth, putting on its ill-fitting skin to perceive the relativity of our problems, their connection to the roots, and the relativity of the roots in the light of today’s experience.”

The text that finally pushed beyond Robert’s rejected ideas was Henrik Ibsen’s verse play, BRAND. Although set in the frozen fjords of Norway and immersed in its own religious tradition, the play gradually revealed to him, through experimentation with voice and characterization, a structure upon which to create a circuit preacher, c. 1870, navigating the mountains and dark valleys both of Appalachia, and his own psyche. Over a period of months, Robert wove additional story elements into the narrative to reflect certain realities of the post-Civil War south.

Robert had completed a rough draft of the text and begun to experiment with a performance style, when he shared his experience with one of his closest friends since their college days together at Brown University, Billy Siegenfeld.

It was not just their friendship and creative alignment, but Billy’s background – Professor of Theatre at Northwestern, Artistic Director and principal performer with Jump Rhythm Jazz Project – that led them to realize Billy would be the ideal collaborator and director for this project.

Robert says, “Billy offered me the gift of his uncompromising directorial eye, dramaturgical insight and unconditional love. He launched into a process of encouraging, prodding, probing, and contributing over the next two years, as if the idea had been born in his soul as well as mine.”

In the 65-minute play that evolved, the visitor – a Matthew Brady portrait come to life – emerges from shadowy regions of our collective history and embodies a tale of religious fervor set against a harsh landscape transfigured by war, poverty and disease, only occasionally redeemed by tenderness and resilience. His struggle may seem alien to our contemporary reality, but, like an old artwork rediscovered after layers of paint are scraped away from a modern canvas, what was always waiting there is revealed.