By Isadora Swann

March 3, 2025

Robert Bailey’s solo performance In Some Dark Valley follows Reverend James Brand on a moonlit night. This character, loosely based on Ibsen’s verse tragedy Brand, is a fiery post Civil War circuit preacher who emerges from the shadowy mountains of Appalachia to weave a tale of religious fervor set against a landscape scarred by war, poverty, and disease.

Bailey has been performing his play in festivals up and down California. It plays through March 9 at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice

STAGE RAW I get the sense that Reverend Brand’s world is filled with trauma?

ROBERT BAILEY Well, this is the post-Civil War period in the South. It’s a defeated place, a defeated land, destroyed really. There’s sickness, there’s poverty, I think about 1/3 of the male population of the South died in the war. So it’s massive. And this is a person whose only literature was the Bible. And so he goes about his preaching … and his domestic life … in a very severe way. There’s one narrow way to get to eternity, and everything else is wrong. It’s only in the very final moments of the piece (it’s 65 minutes long) where there’s some sort of revelation to him about a different way he could have gone about it.

SR: It seems to me that there are parallels between his struggle to see outside of his own perspective and the struggles that America is facing in trying to cross divides of all kinds. Is that part of the reason why you decided to do this piece now?

RB: The simple answer is yes. What started me on this path was a fascination many, many years ago with the original field recordings made by Alan Lomax and others. White and Black Southerners singing. These are people who, for generations, have depended on their faith and expressed it through song. The hard times they went through are real, they’re very, very real, and they’ve continued throughout the 20th century and into this century, right? I had read a headline from USA Today, way back in 2015, “U.S.Torn on Confederate Flag.” And as a Southerner, I’m looking at that, I’m thinking, ‘Torn in what way? . . . What are you talking about? . . . ‘What’s the problem?’ The Confederate flag is what it represents; the South trying to divorce itself from the North to keep its slave population. Everything that started happening around 2020 [re-ennobling the Confederacy] was puzzling to me, disturbing, and as a Southerner, embarrassing.

So I wanted to confront it in some way. And when I settled on the narrative of a preacher, I found an archetype that represents a certain way of thinking. ‘We’re right, you’re wrong’. ‘This is the right way’. And yes, I think that’s one of the roots that’s bugging us right now. I don’t pretend that anything I’m doing captures all of it. It’s just one of the roots, right? And I wanted to embody that and confront it in some way.

SR: You include folk music in your performance. What role do you feel music has in creating culture and in perpetuating it?

RB: Oh, gosh, I mean, the more I study it, it is the culture. It is what makes people unique. If you hear Bulgarian women’s choirs, you don’t hear that music anywhere else in the world. It’s their culture. It’s an expression of their cultural identity. Because of mass culture, and the homogeneity of what gets played, this stuff is going to disappear.

It’s kind of like when you read about languages, you know, primitive languages that just disappear because nobody speaks them anymore. Scientists have noticed that, you know, millions of species are disappearing, right? They’re never going to come back.

These songs, we don’t even know how old some of them are, they passed through so many peoples. They transform themselves over time into variations and then by the time they cross the Atlantic they change again. So, it’s just huge. It is what culture is.

SR: Why is Reverend Brand an important character to embody right now?

RB: Let me step back for a moment. One of my big influences as a young person in college was the Polish Laboratory Theater and its leader, Jerzy Grotowski, who pointed out that it’s very difficult to create pieces that involve myth, or a collective belief system because we don’t have a collective belief system in modern secular society. But what he thought was possible was confrontation with myth. So I was proceeding along the lines of, this character, [this fervent preacher],should be confronted, but in order to confront him, I have to embody him.

That meant dialect, that meant costume. That meant lots and lots of research, lots of books, looking into where this comes from, what the experience of the war in particular was. Both sides prayed to the same Christian God, and both sides evoked that God and the rightness of their cause. The North, after suffering huge losses . . . everybody suffered huge, huge losses on both sides . . . the North was able to say, ‘Well, we were right, God was on our side’. The South had to twist that pretzel in some other way, right? ‘What is God doing to us? . . . Is God testing us?’ It’s a pretzel, isn’t it? It’s a moral pretzel.

I have to tell you that, growing up in Richmond, Virginia, I was not an enlightened person. Very few people around me were enlightened. The attitudes were baked in and we didn’t even think about them. They just were what they were. I was fortunate in that my father, for whatever reasons, when I would come home with certain attitudes and certain phrases or certain jokes or whatever it was, would say, ‘I don’t like that’. ‘I don’t want to hear it . . . You’re talking about people’ And I, I have to, I have to confess to you, at the time, as a child, I was thinking, ‘What’s his problem? . . . Everybody’s like this.’ It’s hard when you’re a product of a certain soil, when you’re grown in a certain soil, it’s hard to see it. So I knew that I had to play this character in such a way that I am inside of him.

SR: There’s something so poetic about what you said about needing to embody something to confront it. What do you think we as citizens can learn from the performing arts? Why should I watch it? Why should I care? Why is this relevant?

RB: I think live theater is a way of experience. It’s a mode of experience unlike any other. And again, Grotowski was very clear . . . he just pared it down to a live human being in front of a live audience. There is an immediacy. There’s an immediate encounter between living organisms and if this is borne out in my piece. It is one of the things I’m proudest of.

SR: The world that you describe this preacher’s world seems really similar to the world today. You know, you talk about young people dying, you talk about wars, you talk about poverty, you talk about inequality. It seems like everything has changed so much, but has the world really changed?

RB: I don’t think so. I just think the clothes are different, the styles are different, the machinery gets different, the technology gets different, you know, and the basic human experience remains the same. And obviously, we’re not up against the same reality. We’re not even up against the same realities that Midwesterners and Southerners went through in the 1930s, with the Dust Bowl and the great migration. I mean, we’re removed from those realities right now. Supposedly we have protections in place that would make those things not relevant to us. Supposedly we would not have a civil war in this country, but that’s a big supposedly, lately, right?

SR: What do you think this character would have to say to a young person like me entering into a world in which great migrations, like what you’re describing from the Dust Bowl, may have to happen again in the next 20 to 50 years because of climate change?

RB: I guess I would put it this way, all of us are on earth for a certain amount of time, yes? None of us really knows, individually, how long that is. Is our experience just, you know, follow the rules, get an education, get a good job, get a good salary, raise a family, make sure you have material comforts, and then that you still have material comforts when you’re really old, and you go to the old person’s home, and hope that you have enough money left over. Is that it? Is that it? Or like the great Peggy Lee once sang, “Is that all there is?” Are we on some sort of spiritual journey?

Whether we know it or not, I believe it’s the second. Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m preaching to anybody. It’s bad enough having to play a preacher. But following a creed, following a prophet, real or false, or somewhere in between, looking for answers, coming up against really harsh realities . . . for example, in this piece, there’s the war, there’s poverty, there’s illness, there’s a plague going around. There’s a lot going on to confront. Young people like you today are entering a world where the battle lines are being drawn. You guys have a whole lot to confront right now in the world. You’re tempted by the tendency to follow, to follow some pathway that might be the way, right? . . . And that I think is eternal. So I would say, if I’m doing my job correctly with this piece, no matter what age you are, if you follow the storyline you should be swept up in this one person’s coming to terms with that. I didn’t feel in a position to judge my character, or anybody, for choices made. But that doesn’t mean the choices are good. In the Scripture somewhere, it says, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’ I’m as tempted as anybody to judge right now.

In Some Dark Valley is being performed at Pacific Resident Theatre, 7051/2 Venice Blvd., Venice; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 pm; thru March 9. [2025]

[view the interview]

One moonlit night, Reverend Brand, a fiery 19th century circuit preacher, emerges from the shadowy mountains of Appalachia, and our collective history, to weave a tale of religious fervor set against a landscape scarred by war, poverty and disease – a story that also shines a light on rare moments of tender and resilient redemption, according to a news release.

Robert Bailey’s solo performance grapples with the inevitable clash between an unyielding vision of moral rectitude and the tragic personal destruction it leaves in its wake, the news release states.

Embodying multiple characters while also singing gorgeous traditional songs handed down through generations of southerners, Bailey transports the audience to a land and era that is haunting and illuminating in its relevance to today.

In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of Reverend Brand will run March 17 at 7:30 p.m. and March 18 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. [2025] North Coast Repertory Theatre is located at 987 Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach. Tickets are $40 with discounts for students, military, and educators. Season Subscribers receive $10 off. Call 858-481-1055, or visit www.northcoastrep.org to purchase tickets.

By Mathew Chipman

November 20, 2024

merging from the Appalachian mist for three moonlit performances, In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of Reverend Brand is coming to the Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre this month with a haunting solo performance by Robert Bailey.

Most recently performed at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in Los Angeles, where it was awarded “Best of the Fringe,” the play, directed by Billy Siegenfeld, explores the life of a religious fanatic in the aftermath of the American Civil War as he discovers within himself “the key to softness.”

Inspired by 1940s recordings of Southerners from all walks of life, singing traditional songs, Bailey wanted to explore the roots of the real people who have lived and died in the South.

“I was fascinated by field recordings of white and black Southerners, of regular people singing songs that had been passed down, ballads, hymns, stories of hard lives. It sort of resonated with me. I grew up in Virginia so I am from the South, and I wanted to put this music into a theater piece, and somehow during Covid when I was by myself I realized I could make a solo piece,” Bailey says.

During the pandemic, while he was adapting Henrik Ibsen’s verse tragedy Brand into Some Dark Valley, Bailey kept finding himself exploring how this country’s deep roots have been twisted to a point where we cannot understand each other.

“What I kept coming back to was that we were going through this period in our country that I didn’t understand. I didn’t know how we got here, how we got to people not even born in the South marching the Confederate flag through the Capitol—I have a lot of respect for this class of people in the area of the country I grew up in who come from very hard backgrounds and realities and rely on each other and religion to get by. It’s been a part of the American story since the beginning. People shipped over from England and expected to do the work, and if they lived they lived. If they died they died.”

Bailey explains that the character of Brand, a moral hero and a monster at the same time, “comes from that place—it makes me upset that these very deep roots are twisted in the fabric of our society that we can’t understand what’s going on.”

Siegenfeld and Bailey, who went to Brown University together, are a true actor/director dynamic duo. Siegenfeld’s work involves building performances out of primal human behavior, and Bailey’s training with legendary Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, who empowered actors to explore their relationship with the space itself, makes for a team that brings not only Reverend Brand to life but also each character he embodies throughout the play.

“We’re seeing a person who has a twisted mentality about religion, which we’ve seen a lot throughout history, where they believe they are right. He is a fanatic, and as a fanatic, he uses that belief, that dogma, to not treat people well. Throughout the play he meets people who are not like him … people with good hearts, softness and compassion, including his wife, including an older black woman. His journey thrashing around like number 47 [the 47th president] is suspenseful. Is Reverend Brand going to stop being an asshole fanatic? We don’t know,” Siegenfeld says.

Performances are Nov. 22–23 at 8pm and Nov. 24 at 2pm [2024] at Center Stage, 1001 Center St., Santa Cruz. The Nov. 23 show is a benefit for the Hurricane Helene relief fund. santacruzactorstheatre.org

[view the interview]

We caught up with Bob and show director Billy Siegenfeld to learn more about how the show came to be, the questions it wrestles with, and the message it carries.

AT: What was the inspiration for the show?

Bob: Many years ago, I became fascinated with the field recordings of Southerners singing traditional songs on porches, in fields, in prisons. Through the Alan Lomax archives (original recordings and research materials assembled by Alan Lomax over the course of six decades, which can be found at http://culturalequity.org/the-archive/loc), I started listening to this music that the people sing. The folk revival of the 60s wouldn’t have happened without this music. I grew up in Virginia, and while I didn’t hear it where we lived in the suburbs, probably people were singing this across town. 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. It also captured some ideas that had been part of my theatrical soul for many years, ever since I had gone to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski. He introduced the idea of “poor theater,” which eliminates all the parts that could be considered extraneous and relies on the actors’ bodies and voices to tell the story, and also emphasizes real contact between human beings. 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: Bob asked me to look at the piece. When I read it, it hit me on the level Bob was talking about. We are in a time of fanaticism, and finding an image or metaphor for confronting that was great. 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.

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. It also captured some ideas that had been part of my theatrical soul for many years, ever since I had gone to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski. He introduced the idea of “poor theater,” which eliminates all the parts that could be considered extraneous and relies on the actors’ bodies and voices to tell the story, and also emphasizes real contact between human beings. 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: Bob asked me to look at the piece. When I read it, it hit me on the level Bob was talking about. We are in a time of fanaticism, and finding an image or metaphor for confronting that was great. 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. This play has the Reverend get hooked back into past episodes in his life through other characters, which makes it 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: The one conception that I decided would make this work as a solo performance was the idea of a visitation. This guy in 19th century garb comes out of the past to address the audience. I realized he could retell the basic story points from Ibsen’s Brand in a way that becomes a testimony—why I did what I did, and why I made the choices I made. Working over Zoom—Billy was in Evanston, and I was in L.A--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: You play many different characters in a short span of time--what is your approach to creating them?

Billy: Try to find action. 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 to 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.

Billy: The setting is stripped down—it’s not a church, just a black box space with simple black cubes—which puts the burden on the actor to create the scenery through his actions, sounds, etc. Bob would slow down to let each new character happen, then come back to talking to the audience. When playing or dealing with an obsessive person, it’s easy to stay obsessive. The additional characters took him away from his obsessiveness—they were part of him—they pull him out of the fanaticism.

Bob: The more I worked on it, the more things I would read that fed into it. For example, reading the book White Trash: The Untold History of Class in America reminded me that we’re talking about real people here. I remembered how in the summer between college semesters I was working construction in Virgina, working with guys who’d drive in from West Virginia. These guys taught me how to do construction, and they were people with great dignity who came from hardship and dealt with hardship. People are all coming from their own needs, backgrounds, hardships—I know these people and have gotten to know them even better by working on the play. Billy didn’t grow up in the South, so he needed to find his own way into that point of view.

AT: Talk a little about your collaboration as actor and director--what roles did you play in developing the show? Have you worked together before, and what do you enjoy about working together to create theater?

Bob: For me, it’s like being guided by your best friend or brother. He has expectations and pushes me, but not beyond what I can do. On our Zoom calls he’d be articulating in this beautiful way, and even demonstrate—"Can you see me?”—showing me something that’s obvious to him, but maybe more difficult for me. And eventually I’d realize, oh, that’s what he’s been saying about movement and directing energy. There was one moment of choreography that took me forever! He’s also very well read and has been a great dramaturg, helping me recognize when I’ve said enough and when I need to say more so the audience can understand. All these things together were joyful for me. He makes it a joyful process. We laughed a lot. We’ve never as adults since college collaborated so closely.

Billy: I’ve wanted to work with Bob for forever. Getting to work with him as an actor was great—Bob 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: Say a little about your performance company Jump Rhythm.

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, versus how our brain thinks we should move. Bob is a naturally musical actor.

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.”

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: What else would you like to share about Reverend Brand 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.

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 Bob.

Bob: 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.

"In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of the Reverend Brand," a joint production of Jump Rhythm and Actors' Theatre, plays Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23, at 8 pm, and Sunday, November 24, at 2 pm. [2024].

[view interview here]

by Dan Ruth

We tend to think that the darkness of the American Civil War took place hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and that it exists in a place far, far away in a corner of our history that cannot be touched. In reality, it ended only 159 years ago and the consequences and repercussions from the war are still felt today. There is a genre of theatre and I suppose storytelling, which relies on these spans of time to weave and spin haunting tales of a time before our time, when stories were handed down through generations.

Robert Bailey has created such a story, a story that contains no trace of today’s modern built world, where the only water around was in the river or creek that runs by the village, when messages were sent by horseback and protection for your village and the people that surrounded you was in the hands of God and the elements. In the tradition of theatre such as “The Diviners” by Jim Leonard Jr. and Romulus Linney’s “Holy Ghosts,” Robert Bailey steps out of that tradition with his finely crafted In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of Reverend Brand, which is playing at The Madnani Theatre, as part of The Hollywood Fringe.

Bailey’s creation of Reverend Brand is a fiery post-Civil War roaming circuit preacher, who has visitations and sees signs in nature; a man who is much more human than holy. As a young boy and a product of backwoods Appalachian life, he sees people as they are. He befriends Ludie, an African American woman and her two small boys, only to return one day to find their entire house burnt to the ground and the three of them gone forever. Life in the holler challenges young Reverend Brand on every level, both spiritual and physical.

Later in his life, he is the only man in his village to go down river to save the life of a dying man. This act of bravery causes the villagers to want to keep him as their preacher, but when Reverend Brand uses money from his wealthy deceased mother to rebuild the village church, he is rebuked when he allows black folk into the congregation. Darkness and specters follow the preacher throughout his life. As he loses both his wife and his child to disease, he relies on the humanity of circumstances to make sense of this cruel, confusing world, buried deep in the holler. Ultimately, it’s the Reverend who must question what is right. He sees that the church is hollow, and that man, God, and death, are all part of the much larger, natural world, and that no one, not even a man of God can save themselves.

In Some Dark Valley truly is delightfully dark but there is also humor and outstanding storytelling through finely etched characters. Using not only spoken word, but songs and the haunting sounds of a French harp as well, Robert Bailey’s In Some Dark Valley: The Testimony of Reverend Brand is a powerful and highly entertaining show that takes full advantage of the lights and a full sound design to draw you into its musty, backwoods world. Directed by Billy Siegenfeld.

See Review

By Ernest Kearney

June 11, 2024 | Los Angeles

The dark wooden canopy of the Appalachia Valley, known as The Great Valley, shrouds a deep and massive scar that cuts across the eastern landscape of America. As the titular character In Some Dark Valley: The Testament of Reverend Brand, Writer/Performer Robert Bailey succeeds from his first moment on stage in capturing that unknown terror which the vastness of wilderness has held for humanity from Oedipus and Dante to Dorothy and The Evil Dead.

Man’s ability to have unwavering faith in what is beyond his senses to affirm is one of life’s great mysteries. Another is his capacity to lose that faith. There are echoes of this in the story Robert Bailey shares with his audience; that of a man confident of the divinity within himself who is then destroyed by that deception.

Bailey commands the elongated stage of the Madnani masterfully, with a robust physical presence while he envelopes the theatai in the essence of postbellum America through his sincere singing of hymns from the period.

What most impressed me about In Some Dark Valley was how Bailey, through the enfolding of his language, succeeded in conveying the preeminence of the spoken word held in the nineteenth century.

It is hard for our modern sensibilities to perceive the power that words once possessed. Language has been weakened today by our visualization of it. There are few places in the twenty-first century where one can walk without being awashed in the representations of words; digital billboards, towering print advertisements, flashing neon signs, and typographical logos converting words into art.

In the nineteenth century, words had power through their purity and their potency was undiluted. The demarcation point for this change can be found in the comparison of two short turns of phrases; Today, we go “to see a play.” But, from the time of the ancient Greek stage until only the last century, theatergoers went to “hear a play.”

Bailey captures the period’s respect for language through his characters’ usage. They choose their words carefully to communicate their thoughts with clarity; as when Agnes, the Reverend’s young wife, seeks to warn her husband of his faltering faith, “You bruise where you oughta caress.”

Or when Brand realizes what his failure to live his belief has brought him to, “a loneliness so deep it didn’t have no depth.”

As directed by Billy Siegenfeld and produced by Cori Allison, Robert Bailey’s In Some Dark Valley: The Testament of Reverend Brand has but one flaw that I could see; it was limited to only three performances thus denying more Fringe audiences the opportunity of experiencing this exceptional and exquisite work.

See Review