The Breeze Bends the Grass
Arbutus Cunningham and Krista Detor. photos by Jim Krause
~ by Lee Edgren
They were women who felt a fierce need to create, unwilling to sacrifice their lives as artists, stepping out of conventional female roles to become artists in a world dominated by men.
Award-winning writers Krista Detor and Arbutus Cunningham invite us to consider the life of the woman artist with its hardships and its glories in their powerful collaboration, The Breeze Bends the Grass. The Breeze will return to the Brown County Playhouse for six performances this October 13 – 15, and 20 – 22 at 7:30 p. m. All original cast members— Krista Detor, Arbutus Cunningham, Lara Lynn Weaver, and Amanda Biggs— are returning, and a fifth artist, Kate Braun, will join them.
This will be the third time this play, with its beautiful music, is presented in Brown County. The original production arrived in 2012. Extensively reworked, the production returned in 2014 for one performance only. And now it will be shown again thanks to the support of the Bicentennial Indiana Masterpiece Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, as well as a grant from Duke Energy, and support from the Brown County Art Guild. What is now a musical theater piece began with Arbutus Cunningham’ s commission to write a spoken performance piece about Selma Steele, the wife of artist T. C. Steele. Selma, who was an active force in her husband’ s creative life, made it her mission to create glorious gardens“ interesting enough to be placed on the painter’ s canvas.”
30 Our Brown County Sept./ Oct. 2016
One of Steele’ s well-known paintings,“ Selma in the Garden,” depicts the red-haired Selma, a tiny figure in a large straw hat, nearly lost in a riot of colorful blooms.
The concept expanded to include other artists, and was initially titled Hammer, Garden, Canvas and Clay. It presented the lives of metal artist Janet Payne Bowles; landscaper Selma Steele; painter Marie Goth; and ceramicists the Overbeck Sisters. Then Detor talked Cunningham into expanding it into a musical play.
The passions and careers of these women arose during the shifting political and artistic values at the turn of the 20 th century. The Arts and Crafts movement stood for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms. Leading thinkers in the movement linked good design to the values of a good society. The movement was ardently anti-industrial and embraced a vision of life in which workers could take pride in craftsmanship.
Arbutus Cunningham recalls that her personal connection to the women of The Breeze came through her mother’ s mother, a farmer in a“ teeny tiny agricultural community in south Texas,“ and her fight to retain a life of the mind. Cunningham’ s grandmother had been a French scholar in college. After her farm work for the day was done, she spent late evenings translating the essays of Montaigne into Spanish. Cunningham quotes her:“ Always keep a corner of your mind free for yourself alone. The soul withers from constant toil.”
Janet Payne Bowles was a successful metal worker. She faced the hard truth that to have a life at all, she would have to divorce her alcoholic husband and, without knowing how she would do it, provide for herself and her children. She made gold spoons for financier J. Pierpont Morgan.
Selma Steele was a trained artist and teacher. She transformed acres and acres of thin and unforgiving Brown County soil into glorious gardens. She lived on at the House of the Singing Winds after Steele’ s death in1926 and, shortly before her own death, gave the property to the State of Indiana as a perpetual memorial to the life of the spirit. Her gardens are the focus of a major restoration project.
According to Cunningham, the Overbeck sisters’ mother was a force of nature. She insisted that art was the primary and main focus of any meaningful existence. The sisters lived through a period of great
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