Quick hits: 'West By God' play a love letter to West Virginia; banking challenges for cannabis farmers, and more

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email us at heather.chapman@uky.edu.

The new play "West By God" is a love letter to West Virginia, writes Thomas Floyd of The Washington Post. Read more here.

Hemp and marijuana growers face challenges in banking, Sophie Quinton and April Simpson report for Stateline. Read more here.

The trade war with China crushed a growing Chinese market for American cranberries, Adrian Ma reports for NPR. Read more here.

In a recent episode of the About South podcast, co-producer Kelly Vines talks to Dwight Billings, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Kentucky, about what drew the coal mining industry to central Appalachia and the future of the region. Listen to it here.

In the most recent episode of the American Farm Bureau Federation's Farmside Chat podcast, AFBF president and podcast host Zippy Duvall talks to Tennessee first-generation farmer and family nurse practitioner Matt Niswander about his work to address the opioid crisis in rural America. Listen to it here.

USA Today lists best festivals in the U.S.; many promote tourism in rural areas

Now that the weather is heating up throughout most of the U.S., festival season is on the horizon. USA Today "teamed up with a panel of festival experts to find the best music, food, culture, art and film festivals in the U.S," Lydia Schrandt reports for USA Today. Readers were then allowed to vote for their favorites, and some of the winners include festivals in rural areas or with rural resonance.

Among the best music festivals, No. 2 was the Electric Forest Festival, a four-day music fest in Rothbury, Mich., a village with a population of 424. An estimated 50,000 people attend the festival every year. No. 7 on the list is Bonnaroo, a four-day festival held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tenn. The festival had more than 90,000 attendees last year.

For poetry enthusiasts, the Best Cultural Festival list includes the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nev. The six-day event is "an annual celebration of the ranching and rural West," says the organization's website. Also on the list are the Texas Renaissance Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Frozen Dead Guy Days, Cheyenne Frontier Days, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and Festivals Acadiens et Créoles.

No. 2 on the list of Best General Food Festival is the Bounty of Yamhill County, located in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The Bounty of Yamhill County "is a three-day annual event that celebrates this vibrant community of famous wineries, celebrated chefs and sustainable family farms. No other locally sourced food and wine event can boast such nationally recognized participants," says the organization's website. No. 9 on the list is the Beaver Creek Food & Wine Weekend, a four-day event in Beaver Creek, Colo.

For a complete list of best festivals, click here.

Rural town using crowdfunding to raise money to replace old, unreliable ambulance

In another example of a rural town turning to the ever-growing world of crowdfunding when local and state funds won't cover costs, the Alexander Volunteer Fire Department in northwestern New York is using a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to replace an unreliable 15-year-old ambulance that serves 200 households, Emma Sapong reports for The Buffalo News.

The ambulance recently spent one and a half days in the shop, leaving the town without an ambulance, Sapong writes. Kelly O’Neil, a basic EMT with the department’s ambulance service, told her, “Our fear is if we don’t replace the ambulance soon, we won’t be able to meet all the needs of the community." (Best Places map)

The Fire Department receives funding from fire protection taxes, but the ambulance service relies solely on donations and fundraisers, Sapong writes. Ambulances are supposed to be replaced every 10 years, but a lack of funding delayed the purchase of a new vehicle. The department also failed to qualify for a FEMA grant. Officials can respond to calls in fire trucks if the ambulance is unavailable or ask for assistance from Mercy EMS in Batavia, but Mercy is a paid service, O’Neil said. (Read more)

Rural towns in Kansas and Kentucky are using crowdfunding to raise money for a grocery store and to re-open a theatre.

Rural town turns to crowdfunding site to raise money to re-open local theatre

Crowdfunding websites are becoming an increasingly popular form of raising money for projects and can be a valuable tool for rural towns to get the message out to a national audience. In the small southcentral Kentucky town of Horse Cave, organizers are trying to raise money to re-open Horse Cave Theatre, which closed in 2013 because of financial difficulties. (Copius Notes photo: Horse Cave Theatre)

Organizers are using a site called Indiegogo, where they hope to raise $75,000 to be used as the theatre's production budget, Alyssa Harvey reports for the Bowling Green Daily News.

"Mayor Randall Curry said bringing the theater back would have a positive impact on the community," Harvey writes. Curry told her, “Our young people would get to see plays, and sometimes it would be the only way they would be exposed [to the arts]. If we could bring the theater back, the theater’s identity to the local community would come back. When it was renamed [Kentucky Repertory Theatre], there were a lot of people who weren’t happy about losing our local identity." (Read more)

Appalachian author's play focuses on discrimination against LGBT residents in rural communities

Kentucky author Silas House intended to write his first play about mountaintop-removal coal mining, but he changed his mind because of several incidents linked to a failed attempt to establish a fairness ordinance in the town of Berea protecting rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. House is director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College, and says his play, "This Is My Heart For You," is "loosely based on an incident in Hazard," Ky., in which two gay men were kicked out of a public pool for public displays of affection, reports Crystal Wylie of The Richmond Register.

The town where the play is set is divided on whether the pool manager is a bigot or a hero. House told Wylie his play "shines a light on the bigger issues of equality, hypocrisy, and compassion in America today." He got a lot of material from discussion threads about the Berea fairness ordinance and the Hazard pool incident on Topix.com. One whole scene is taken almost verbatim from a discussion on the site. "If you’re looking into the heart of a community in modern America," House said, "you must go to Topix.com." (The head of Topix has said it gets more traffic from Kentucky than any other state.)

The play is fair to both sides of the debate, House said. It's not a critique or "taking fundamentalists and tearing them apart," he said; it's a look "into the heart of a town and all their complexities." He says faith is a continuing theme in the play, with characters just trying to "stick to their beliefs." He made a point to portray gay and straight people in the play as strong believers. House also says he wanted to show Appalachia as a contemporary place. "This Is My Heart For You" will be performed Feb. 22-25 at 8p.m. and on Feb. 26 at 2 p.m. in Berea College's Jelkyl Drama Center. For reservations, call 859-985-3300. Tickets are $10 for general admission and $8 for students. (Read more)

Theaters give anchor to life in Great Plains towns

In an age of streaming online video and massive multiplexes, one-screen movie theaters might seem to be a thing of the past, but across the Great Plains they are making a comeback, Patricia Leigh Brown of The New York Times reports. "The small-town, Main Street movie theater is thriving in North Dakota, the result of a grass-roots movement to keep storefront movie houses, with their jewel-like marquees and facades of careworn utility, at the center of community life. The revival is not confined to North Dakota; Main Street movie houses like the Alamo in Bucksport, Me., the Luna in Clayton, N.M., and the Strand in Old Forge, N.Y., are flourishing as well." (NYT photo of theater in Langdon, N.D., by Fred R. Conrad)

"If we were in Los Angeles or Phoenix, the only reason to go to a movie would be to see it," Cecile Wehrman, a newspaper editor who, with members of the nonprofit Meadowlark Arts Council resuscitated the Dakota in Crosby, N.D., told Brown. "But in a small town, the theater is like a neighborhood. It’s the see-and-be-seen, bring everyone and sit together kind of place." Brown writes, "In the Great Plains, where stop signs can be 50 miles apart and the nearest multiplex is 200 miles round trip, the town theater — one screen, one show a night, weekends only — is an anchoring force, especially for families."

Tim Kennedy, landscape-architecture professor who has traveled to small theaters across North Dakota for a book, says "The communal will of rural towns that keep theaters going represents 'buildings as social capital,' forged 'outside the franchise cinemas and their ubiquitous presence at the malls,'" Brown writes. Some point to baby boomers as the source of the revitalization. "They are the last picture-show generation on the plains," Tom Isern, a professor of history at North Dakota State University Fargo, told Brown, "who can remember that movie theater experience and want to transmit that to their kids." (Read more)

Musical showing aftermath of 1960s W.Va. mine disaster opens in New York to mixed reviews

As the Appalachian coalfield continues to deal with the aftermath of the April mine explosion that killed 29 West Virginia miners, the aftermath of a similar but fictional disaster is playing out in a musical that debuted in New York in May. The disaster "recalled an era half a century ago when such catastrophes were more common – the era depicted in 'The Burnt Part Boys,' set in the coal country of West Virginia in 1962," Jonathan Mandell writes for The Faster Times. "But that was also the era of boys’ adventure stories and movie Westerns, family and fantasy TV series. All are part of 'The Burnt Part Boys,' now opened at Playwrights Horizons, an odd mash-up of a musical – somewhere between 'Floyd Collins' and Harry Potter — that might have worked better had it stuck to one genre."

The musical follows two boys 10 years after a mine explosion and fire that killed their father and a dozen other miners. The central drama arises from the older brother's decision to work in the same mine and the younger brother's attempts to stop him. Early reviews have been mixed at best. "There are unquestionably moving moments in 'The Burnt Part Boys,' helped along by good acting and singing as well as several memorable dramatic tableaux, most of them involving a chorus of dead miners," Mandell writes. "There is just too much else there that feels like filler." (Read more)

A slow-moving plot through much of the production, just over 90 minutes, seems to be the most consistent criticism of the play, though little mention has been given to its portrayal of mining culture. Charles Isherwood, reviewer for The New York Times, took issue with the play's seemingly bland title, but writes "This small flaw is not, unfortunately, the only one made by the creators of this warm-spirited and family-friendly but dramatically static new show." (Read more) The play is directed by Joe Calarco with book by Mariana Elder, music by Chris Miller and lyrics by Nathan Tysen.

Outdoor theatre competes with outdoor denizens

"As the summer performance season enters full swing, nature is invading outdoor stages around the country," Ellen Gamerman reports in The Wall Street Journal. (Art by Ross McDonald) "A group of wild turkeys started gobbling from stage right during a recent performance of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, Calif. A bear ran across the lawn at the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in Becket, Mass. Workers nervously kept an eye out for alligators that lurk around a venue used by the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C."

There's more: "Some actors struggle to coexist with their natural surroundings. Theatre of the Big Bend, in Alpine, Texas, stages its outdoor shows near a natural spring on a hill dotted with cottonwood trees, scrub oak and prickly pear cactus. During a recent rehearsal, an actor spotted a scorpion just as the group was about to run through a dream sequence in a Spanish-English comedy. Amid screams, a cast member who’s from the area stomped over in his cowboy boots and squashed it."

And the Journal, of course, has a business angle: "Though attendance is down at some outdoor venues—crowds at the first summer performance at Tablerock Festival of Salado, in Texas, were down 17 percent compared with last year’s opening night—other events are seeing a spike in interest." (Read more)

Nation's first fine-arts extension agent helps start community theater in mountains of Eastern Ky.

Eastern Kentucky is known for its rich artistic heritage, and a new theatre in the state's easternmost municipality gives local performing artists a place of their own. (Encarta map)

The Black Box Theatre has its grand opening tomorrow in Elkhorn City, population 1,000 or so. The 5,000-square-foot space seats 120, and the stage can be arranged six different ways to meet a variety of performance needs. "Not only will aspiring and professional actors and artists be able to use the facility to showcase their creativity, but it will generate income for Elkhorn City and Pike County," said Stephanie Richards, the University of Kentucky fine arts extension agent for Pike County and the first fine arts extension agent in the U.S.

The facility will also be used for art education. Katie Pratt writes for the university's College of Agriculture, "In addition to hosting various plays and performances, Richards said the theatre will provide opportunities for local young people to explore various art forms, in which they can develop critical thinking skills and build self-esteem. They are already holding classes for an afterschool theatre program." The facility already has this year's theatre season fully booked. Richards says, "Our goal is to have something going on in the facility every day of the year." (Read more)