Apparition Sightings in St. George
In this essay, Brian Buchanan examines Staten Island’s interconnected arts scene through the lens of his own uneasy relationship with participation. What begins as guilt over leaving shows early becomes an exploration of community, connection, and how local art and culture can teach us that showing up for others just might be the most radical art form of all.
part I
This past summer, while working on a self-imposed Sisyphean task to scroll to the end of the internet, I came across this quote: “Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.” Like a pointy, persistent pebble stuck in my shoe, this inconvenient and bothersome phrase lodged itself into the back of my mind. The quote—which was apparently circulating on mom blogs—is a modern twist on the old adage, “It takes a village…” and it found me at a time I was feeling a particularly potent bout of shame. Namely: I wanted all the benefits of Staten Island’s music scene, but I wasn’t always holding up my end of the bargain. I was all reap, no sow. See, no one likes the dude who plays a set with their band and then bounces immediately after… and that’s exactly who I had become.
No one conjures up an excuse better than me, especially under the guise of self-care. I’m an olympic level mental contortionist the way I can justify anything, and I don’t even have to try all that hard. I’m an educator; I wake up at an ungodly hour to beat the traffic to my job at an inner-city school in Newark; I’m usually in bed before 10 PM. Local shows—as much as I love them—run on what we all disaffectionately call punk time, which is to say that band “set” times are anything but. Couple all that with knowing I have to schlep from the North Shore to Tottenville after each show, and I found myself planning my escape before playing my final note. On the car ride home, I’d tell myself, “But I am tired. And I don’t need to stay for the other bands. And I’m not responsible for being both a performer and a crowdmember. And no one will even notice that I left. And I’ll stay late the next show.”
Reader: I never did stay late at the “next show.” And you know what? It was fine. Nobody ever gave me a hard time. As I gave my apology-laced goodbyes, everyone always told me they understood. The thing is, though… I don’t want to be that guy. Like, I love my job and it requires real recuperation, but part of why I became a teacher in the first place is the time off. Summers are supposed to be for donning my creative hat and living in it for a few weeks. But what was the point if I didn’t make an effort—a full effort—to show up for others? I mean, I’m not so self-centered to think that my personal presence (or absence) at a show has any bearing on Staten Island’s music scene, but I recognized that if everyone so easily rationalized G-ingTFO as I did, there would not be an art scene to blog about.
This isn’t complicated. When it comes down to it, I want to be respected by the people I respect the most. That means I must follow a modified version of the golden rule: if I want those people to show up for my art, I ought to show up for theirs, plain and simple. If I want to be a part of a thriving art community on Staten Island, I need to consume a multiple more than I produce. Or: if I want a better village, I need to be a better villager. And so I vowed to make a change, or—at the very least—try. I ended up attending more amazing shows—including the first She Shreds Fest in July—and made a conscious effort to stay longer at these shows. I wasn’t always perfect, and even now, I still sometimes have to cut out early from a show. But I’m working on it. I’m being the change I want to see in the world and whatnot, blah blah blah. I’m overcoming the inertia to stay home and then, once I’m out, the urge to go home. All the evidence so far suggests that I’ve honestly never regretted going out and staying out, and that helps. Step by step. Bird by bird.
As I endeavored to modify my behavior, right my wrongs, and make amends, I couldn’t help but think more broadly and consider the whole of Staten Island’s art scene. If anyone is under the assumption that the music scene is some kind of self-contained bubble… well, it isn’t. We musicians are constantly intersecting with artists of all pursuits. Show posters and merchandise are created by our graphic designer friends. Many of our venues serve specialized food and drinks. The mini-golf course constructed each year at MarkerPark Radio’s Punk Rock Mini-Golf shows is the work of MakerSpace’s wizard engineers. At the aforementioned She Shreds event, a number of vendors sold crafts of all sorts, from pottery to prints to knitwear. Staten Island’s art scene is a symbiotic ecosystem in which everything is connected to everything else. In fact, for many Staten Islanders, musician is just one hyphen in their ever-expanding multi-hyphenate self-description. If all of those examples I just listed appear to be just a tad music-first, though, then maybe you have an inkling as to where this essay is heading. It became clear that—in an effort to truly be a better villager—I had to go to events that were not music showcases of some kind, too. I needed to leave my corner of the street and venture out to the larger artistic horizon. The less music, the better, actually. I was looking for art outside my wheelhouse, art I didn’t know how to make or perform. I wanted art that I didn’t understand and that challenged what I hold to be true. I was in search of some soul-enriching experiences, made by and for members of my larger Staten Island community.
That is how, on August 9th, I found myself somewhere I’d never been before: at the New Worlds Festival, a night of plays presented by the Women’s Playwright Collective and the Staten Island Shakespearean Theatre Company at the Staten Island Playhouse theater.
part II
It Was Hers, written by Ariana Nicoletta and directed by Justine Giachetti.
Finding the Staten Island Playhouse theater after navigating the cold, corporate labyrinth of St. George’s Empire Outlets feels like stumbling upon a quaint oasis in the desert. A deceptively quaint oasis might be a more accurate description, actually, because it’s clear that this black box theater punches well above its small-community-theater weight class. One cannot walk in without noticing, for example, that despite the admittedly cramped square footage, the Playhouse maintains a thorough lighting system and an impressive sound operation. Arrive early enough and you might overhear the cozy chatter of a connected, tight-knit theater group saying their helloes and catching up. What’s plainly obvious is that the Women’s Playwright Collective and the Staten Island Shakespearean Theatre Company save their knockout blows where it matters most—their programming. The weekend of the New Worlds festival presented two one-act plays: How I Learned to Steal Horses and Finally Play the Piano, written by Kseniya Ignatova-Yates and directed by Courtney Emerson, and It Was Hers, written by Ariana Nicoletta and directed by Justine Giachetti. While any two plays staged back-to-back might naturally lead to thematic echoes, these two plays bordered on being conspicuously resonant.
Take the role of music in reclaiming an identity. The theme bubbles up more explicitly, as one might expect, in Piano. Abby (Dani Favaloro), sits at a hotel piano with the kooky psychic Glendora (Jenny Kelly), reminiscing about the piano lessons imposed on them by their family growing up. In Hers, Nonna (Roseann Marcus) plays a vinyl record and speaks to the importance of listening to music; in the modern age, the record she spins sounds scratchy and low fidelity, but the song remains the same—a throughline between the past, present, and (hopefully) the future. In both plays, music serves as familial glue, a preservation mechanism. Where Piano posits that identity is always in flux and childhood piano lessons come to an end, Hers responds by acknowledging that truth, and suggests that it is better to be proactive about it and ride the wave of change.
Clothing as a transformational device is also present in both plays. This time, Hers is more straightforward. The plot largely hinges on what will happen to Nonna’s shop, where for decades she worked as a bridalwear designer. Bridal gowns are—on their own—steeped cultural symbolism, but Nicoletta deftly elevates these conventions by making it personal. There is a running mystery as to where the dress Nonna made for Franny (Sami Blake) ended up, but more important than the mystery in and of itself are the rich narrative colors it provokes. There is a sense of responsibility or expectation to honor the sacrifices of your grandmother, made all the more potent when she’s the one that makes your wedding dress. What if that responsibility is too much to bear for a teenager, one that could not possibly know or understand the extent of those sacrifices? When the gown is “lost” and ultimately unworn—and that subsequent marriage falls apart—one is left to wonder if the missing gown is the cause or an effect. The last remaining question to ask is: what would it mean if, ultimately, that dress is eventually found again?
How I Learned to Steal Horses and Finally Play the Piano, written by Kseniya Ignatova-Yates and directed by Courtney Emerson
Soon after meeting Glendora in Piano, Abby abruptly changes out of her work clothes and into a leather jacket. What follows is a refreshing take on a classic narrative journey that is one part Greek myth—travelling down to the underworld by way of the river Styx—and the other part Dante’s Inferno. Glendora inadvertently serves the Charon/Virgil figure, using humor and ultimately grace to help Abby navigate her understanding of self as she confronts a crucial night in her past. With a touch of cosmic magic and a pinch of suspended disbelief, the suggestion is that this jacket and other occurrences are what Abby encountered that night. To put it on again can feel at once like armor and what Abby hoped to achieve that night… or like a straightjacket, restricted by what actually happened.
The strongest similarity between Piano and Hers is in how they both deployed the use of apparitions. The more striking image is the Shrouded Woman (Mélisande Echanique) in Piano, recalling Maya Deren’s haunting specter from Meshes of the Afternoon. Ignatova-Yates coyly plays with what death is, or rather, what it means to die. Abby oscillates between wondering in one moment early in the play if it is possible to hold one’s breath to death to—soon after being grazed by the Shrouded Women in a restaurant—needing her, “space to breathe.” Near the end of the play, in the evening’s most visually compelling moment, Abby and the specter—her specter???—mirror each other’s movements one for one, but as a means to move past and beyond each other. Or in a word: forward.
The other ghostly phantom is Bella (Laura Casertano), or Nonna as a young woman, when she’s navigating a new life in a new environment. She appears in what seem to be conventional flashbacks meant to provide context to Nonna’s history. But as Bella keeps manifesting on the stage, and as Nonna’s fading memory loosens her grip on reality, Bella’s presence serves as a stark, haunting measure of how much Nonna has diminished. While initially disheartening, it sets up a moment of pure catharsis. Without spoiling too much, consider this: everyone has, at one point in their life, wondered what they might say to their younger selves if only given the chance; every young person has a wish for whom they’d like to become in time. Hers delivers on such an impossible meeting—one filled with complex, emotional recgonition—with adept, narrative efficiency, and in a way that only a play truly can.
There are more connections between How I Learned to Steal Horses and Finally Play the Piano and It Was Hers, but it’s worth mentioning that each stands strong on their own, too. There’s more humor to be found in Piano, both on the page and discovered by Emerson and the strong cast. It’s also the more harrowing of the two; Piano builds and builds towards what it is ultimately about, and when the moment finally arrives, the matter is handled with due respect. Conversely, Hers has a non-linear—and therefore more densely packed—plot. Don’t be mistaken: this is a strength. The considerable effort put in to set up the story’s narrative dominoes make for a thrilling release as the play races scene for scene—and then beat for beat—to the end. All told, both plays on their own were all one could hope for: they were engaging and thought provoking. It is this writer’s recommendation that—if and when these plays are staged again—you run, not walk, to secure tickets for you and everyone you know. One wonders, though, if you’ll have the same fortune to see them one after another, just to see how well they compliment, magnify, and support each other.
Hats off to all involved.
part III
It Was Hers, written by Ariana Nicoletta and directed by Justine Giachetti.
“‘You want to write a play?’”
That’s how Ariel Marcus-Hollenbeck—a founding member and Producing Festival Director for the Women’s Playwright Collective—described the origins of the WPC. “Back in 2016, I was looking around our local [Staten Island] community, and while we have a vast array of theaters and opportunities, I wasn’t seeing a lot of female directors or female identifying playwrights that we were producing. So I literally said, ‘Let’s start something.’ I started it in my basement with four other people. … I’d never done [something like that] before.” The initial process, as she describes it, was informal: members would meet once a month, read their work out loud, and receive feedback. Before long, the collective gained steam. In 2018, they teamed up with The Staten Island Shakespeare Theatre Company to produce their first festival at The Little Victory Theater. Ariel credits the SIST with, “allowing us to grow,” though, nearly a decade later, the grounding goal of the WPC remains as tenacious as ever: to create more opportunities for female identifying playwrights.
The Women’s Playwright Collective, in conjunction with the Staten Island Shakespeare Theatre Company, hold two festivals each season. Those initial basement sessions turned into the Not Forgotten Festival, and held its eighth iteration this August (I wanted to go, but I was, uh, a little busy preparing for something that weekend). “We do what we did in the basement: we reach each other’s plays, they get feedback.” A few Collective members workshop 10-minute plays over Zoom for about half a year, culminating with the festival weekend. Ariel explains: “Then, two of those plays get picked, either by jury selection (which is a combination of SIST Board Members, playwrights, and community members), and then the other one will get picked by audience selection.” The writers of the two plays selected then have a choice to make: they can either expand that ten minute play into a one-act (Ariana Nicoletta choose this path), or they can start fresh and create a whole new one-act piece (this is what Kseniya Ignatova-Yates opted for). The culmination of these works is what I saw on August 9th, at the New Worlds Festival.
While some might imagine two festivals a season to be an already daunting undertaking, the Women’s Playwright Collective keep their sails set for the horizon. “I’m always looking for opportunities to expand,” Ariel said, “My goal is to connect with a small organization—I’d say a mid-sized theater organization in Manhattan—who [could] co-produce with us, and maybe co-produce a full-length piece.” There’s good reason to believe this will one-day-soon come to fruition. “[The WPC] started off as [ten minute plays] because I feel like that’s really tangible, especially for new playwrights. My next goal was to create a one-act, which has happened. The next goal would be creating a full length. … Oh my gosh, a musical would be my dream!”
That was Ariel’s response when I asked if a musical might be in the Women’s Playwright Collective’s future plans, too, because of course I turned our conversation to the music version of a play. I’d like to point out (just for the record): both Piano and Hers had loose music themes despite my explicit attempt to evade anything music-adjacent by heading to the Playhouse Theatre that night. Perhaps music is just an unavoidably ubiquitous cornerstone of human culture. I suppose now—only twenty-seven hundred words into this essay—is as good a time as any to disclose the meager thread I have connecting me to the world of theater. In my life, I’ve played in the pit for about two dozen local shows, ranging from high school, college, and independent theater productions. That said, I haven’t played in a pit in almost a decade, and outside of four episodes of an audio drama I created five years ago, I don’t know jack about acting, directing, producing—not any of it. Sure, I might see a handful of shows on and off Broadway each year, but that’s it. I know I love a team, and you need a team—the pit, the actors, and the crew—to put on the monumental task of a musical, but that’s where my knowledge begins and ends. By what right do I have to write this article? I don’t know! I’ll say this: as always, we’re circling towards a larger Point to All of This™ I promise… we just haven’t arrived there quite yet.
ANYWAY in one sense, the Women’s Playwright Collective is already well on their way to seeing a full length play get produced. Courtney Emerson—who directed Piano and is a member of the WPC—premiered a show in January called Lights Over Kansas. “She went from a ten [minute play] to a one-act, and then she—on her own—expanded that one-act to an hour and a half piece,” Ariel explained. While not strictly under the WPC umbrella, this show—staged at the Staten Island Playhouse theater and produced by the Staten Island Shakespearean Theatre Company—was a downstream result of the WPC’s efforts. Still, the path forward is clear. And it’s a path that—perhaps you!—could follow for yourself. I asked Ariel if there was anything people show know if they want to get involved with the WPC, and she gave me a list of three things:
1st: visit the website.
2nd: “I’d love for people to know that if they are a female identifying playwright, or just interested, we open up submissions for new voices in November.” If you’re reading this essay the day it comes out—Halloween, 2025—then November starts tomorrow!
3rd: don’t be scared to apply.
“Even if people are quote-unquote, ‘green,’ they can do it,” Ariel stressed, “so we really would love to have new voices. … I—as an artist—I love seeing other artists and I love seeing their work in progress. The fact that I get to sit in on nine playwrights and see their work and see their struggles, and then talk to them at the end of our festivals and see how excited they are, or they’re questioning things, or they want to go back and change this because their actors did something… like, what a fucking gift I get! I feel like it’s what motivates me to keep doing this. [I want to] continue this, continue this organization we’re building together.”
So why not?
What do you have to lose?
What are you waiting for?
Go submit!!!
part IV
How I Learned to Steal Horses and Finally Play the Piano, written by Kseniya Ignatova-Yates and directed by Courtney Emerson
I had to ask Ariel Marcus-Hollenbeck if all of the thematic crossover I noticed and felt between How I Learned to Steal Horses and Finally Play the Piano and It Was Hers was on purpose. Sadly—predictably?—it was not… maybe?
“It’s a happy, happy accident, I think,” she said, “And it could be: even with the forty-five one-act plays, the two playwrights are listening to each other’s plays each month. So they could be influenced in some way, shape, or form.” Ariel mentioned that, in the past, she would review the plays for past festivals and theme them based on common threads. “And it was never, like, ‘Oh, this year’s theme is X, Y, and Z.’ It was always, ‘Let’s see what the playwrights create, and let’s see what theme comes out of it.’ I’ve strayed away from that … but that’s interesting, to maybe pull back at some other point.” That’s not the only way the Women’s Playwright Collective might shake things up. “I’m also looking at maybe changing up the festival format, because I recognize that with our current climate and economics, people don’t have the money to go do local things. They want to go to Broadway.
“But I find putting your money back into “local” really does benefit our arts culture.” I don’t think Ariel knew how much it meant to me for her to say this. She wasn’t saying this to me specifically, but, well, that’s part of what I was hoping to accomplish by going to the New Worlds Festival in the first place, wasn’t it? Later on in our conversation, I mentioned that—after having such a great experience—I’d been kicking myself for having never gotten out to the Staten Island Playhouse theater sooner. Ariel replied, “Hey, you’re here now. We appreciate it.” I certainly plan on going to see more local plays and definitely catch both the New Worlds and Not Forgotten festivals next season. I hope people check out the WPC and as a result of seeing and reading this article, someone who might not have otherwise submitted to join the Collective will. And if that had been the end of the story—and the end of this essay—that would be enough…
…but going to this festival and seeing these plays seriously impacted me, and I’ve been trying to unravel why for weeks. Part of me wondered if it was the novelty of the experience, in that sense that I went into the night truly not knowing a damn thing. OK, I knew the names of the plays, but that was it. I didn’t know these playwrights, I’d never been to this theater. When was the last time I truly consumed a piece of art that I didn’t at least know something about? Like, I can’t even pick what I’m going to fall asleep to on Netflix tonight without seeing a poster, a brief description, the genre… but these plays could’ve been anything. Anything! That anticipation made what I saw all the more fresh. On top of that, while there are a million plays out there I’ve never seen, written by complete and utter strangers, these plays—Piano and Hers—were made by people in my local community.
More than just being local stuff by local people, these plays were extremely ambitious—they both took huge swings in both their scope and depth. I made the point to Ariel that, while the actors were often reading from books, within a few minutes the books were gone for me. I was enveloped. And the illusion was upheld because the sets, the crew, the sound, the lights—everything—was on point. I’m aware of how challenging that is to do professionally, and I’d imagine doubly so for small theater companies with limited resources. What it all amounts to is: there was no distinction between these stories and me. I’ve written a million thematic essays in a hundred English classes throughout my life, analyzing over and over again Gatsby’s green light, but rarely have I ever felt like what I was experiencing was speaking directly to my soul. And this happened with two plays! In a row! That’s 100% more life-affecting plays than just one! There’s no other way to describe the odds of this occurring other than as a miracle.
Not to get all uber-meta, but I know my Shaolin Art Party blog posts tend to end on some Barney-esque moral for five-year-olds. And yes, I also recognize that making an article about a women’s writing collective all about me at the beginning and the end is a supremely guy move on my part. I promise I’m aiming for something more universal, though, and all I’m asking for—in just a few more hundred words—is that you hear me out. And so… here—finally!—is the Point to All of This™.
After the plays ended, I took out a pen and notebook I carry around (I don’t like writing meaningful notes on my phone, yuck 🤮). I wanted to jot down my initial gut reaction, and all these weeks later, I’m glad I did. I wrote that it was curious that both plays dealt with the idea of being able to revisit a memory, to be stuck in it, and then to lose it. I wrote that being free means to be vulnerable, and that vulnerability can be taken advantage of. I asked myself: What happens when you return back to an identity that is not quite right anymore? I tried to answer my own rhetorical question, saying that when you do that, it feels like a sort of death. Just as I finished writing all that down, a waffle-fueled talkback began. I’m familiar with talkbacks insofar as my actor friends have grumbled about them, usually because they’re mostly filled with questions from precious grandmas such as, “How do you remember all of those lines???” But the playwrights helmed this talkback, and it was moderated by Ariel, and let me tell you: that night, Kseniya Ignatova-Yates and Ariana Nicoletta dropped certified bangers only.
Nicoletta talked about how it was “really scary” to see her writing come to life, and that you only really know what your story is once it's in the hands of some dynamic actors. Ignatova-Yates said of the writing process: “Sometimes it does work, you just don’t understand,” (I’m feeling a strong dose of that myself right now, actually). There was talk of imposter syndrome and the need to be told, explicitly, that, “you’re meant to be here,” and how, through the Women’s Playwright Collective, they were inspired to continue bringing their ideas and thoughts into reality.
And at one point, while talking about the central dramatic question she was trying to answer in her play, Ignatova-Yates wondered if a person is a sort of Ship of Theseus. If they could be all new, as it were, after carrying around bits of their old selves and replacing them—updating them—over time. If you remember—about four thousand words ago—I had not exactly held the right self-esteem for a particular configuration of myself, and so it was this question, this idea, that pierced my heart that night, and like all the best art, it spurned a thousand more: When do we become the better selves we wish to be? When we make the choice to be better? When we actually act better? Or maybe only once we’re able to—as our new selves—forgive our former selves of our trespasses.
I was somewhat flip in part I of this article, making light of trying to better myself by doing the right thing. Making an attempt to change myself, replace my bad bits with something better… but that is how it goes, how we grow. Perhaps this was all an overlong exercise in remembering that the reason I or anyone consumes art by going to local shows or plays is to feel something—to feel joy and fear and everything else—because when we do that, we forge a real connection to our village. I try to bring things into reality, too, by making music mostly, but also here, by writing. Maybe writing more often is a new set of oars on my own Ship of Theseus. Who knows? Anyway, that’s my Big Takeaway™: community building—ironically, as I understand it anyhow—requires constant self-revision. When you read this, if you feel anything at all, know that I felt it, too, as I write out these closing remarks. You may be far away, in a different time or a different place—and my words may find you long after I’m gone… and yet here I am, the most verbose ghost—but that doesn’t make this connection any less real or valid. Even in this virtual blogspace, you’ve shown up for me.
And because of it, we are—together—a village.
♭rian♭uchanan57 ✌️
Brian Buchanan is a physics teacher by day and, by night, a masked vigilante versatile artist. His passions span the realms of football, guitar pedals, & the law of large numbers. Brian finds beauty in the patterns of the universe, and his artistic soul is reflected in both his music and writing, where he weaves melodies and stories that touch the heart. At home, he finds inspiration and comfort in the company of two pups: Boo & Jem. Brian's gentle spirit and insights leave an enduring mark on everyone he meets (hopefully!!), making Shaolin a more beautiful place through his diverse talents.