Arts

As for Theatre IV itself, after more than three decades and countless performances since Br’er Rabbit first took the stage in the Halifax High School gymnasium, there’s no sign the company is settling into comfortable, sedentary middle age. Bruce Miller and Phil Whiteway are no longer fresh-out-of college enthusiasts in a second-hand van—they have offices and families and a multi-million-dollar budget to oversee—but they seem still as passionate for their work as any one of their young actors, always looking forward to the next idea, the next innovative way to broaden Theatre IV’s reach in keeping with its fourfold mission.

In 2001, Theatre IV stepped in to save Richmond’s venerable Barksdale Theatre company from dissolution, and since then the two companies have shared a collaborative relationship and administrative and artistic staff. “Now we are exploring ways to make the existing collaboration permanent,” says Whiteway. Theatre IV has launched new community outreach efforts such as its “Curtains Up/Lights Out” overnight camp at the Empire for youth groups and the recent children’s auditions for an upcoming production The Sound of Music that drew a crowd of aspiring young actors to a Richmond-area shopping mall.

Yet even as the casting, the rehearsing, the set-building and costuming, the performing and scheduling and traveling carry on, new ideas are incubating. “I’ve become convinced the arts can play a major role going into at-risk communities and helping early childhood students be ready for reading instruction,” says Bruce Miller. “One of my pet projects now is to find ways that children’s theater can work with Head Start and other programs like that to get less advantaged children ready to begin to learn to read.”

Sooner or later, the curtain will rise on this idea brought to life. The music will start, a group of actors will take the stage, and a crowd of children will lean forward, wide-eyed with anticipation, ready to be carried away.