New film features Richmond, VCU alumni in mind-bending, gritty fashion
“Welcome to the Show,” directed by VCU professor Dorie Barton, features over 30 VCU student actors. The film premiered at the Cinejoy Virtual Fest on March 20. Photo courtesy of Dorie Barton
Claire Darcy, Contributing Writer
As four students wander the city in the hopes of finding their way home in the new feature-length film “Welcome to the Show,” many familiar Richmond sights are pictured, from street murals to Belle Isle.
Dorie Barton, the film’s producer, writer, director and co-editor, said that ever since moving to Richmond, she wanted to make a movie about the city.
“I think the city is so beautiful,” Barton said. “It’s so cinematic in all of the contradictions that are here.”
The film stars more than 30 VCU student actors and follows four individuals — played by Dillon Douglasson, Richard Follin, Keegan Garant and Christopher Martin — as they participate in a mysterious interactive theatre experience known as “The Show.”
“Welcome to the Show” made its world premiere on March 20 as part of the Cinejoy virtual film fest. Cinejoy is an online iteration of the annual Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival, an international independent film festival held in California.
This year, the festival ran on the Cinejoy website for 10 days and ended Tuesday. Barton said the film was invited to be part of the festival after she submitted it to Cinequest.
“I wanted to challenge what the responsibility of theater actually is to its audience; how people that make theatre relate to their audience, take care of their audience,” Barton said.
Each of the four main characters take the same name as their actor counterparts but are fictional versions of the men. Douglasson said that the four were best friends before the film, and that retaining their own names made it easier to relate to the characters.
“Every actor takes from their own life,” Douglasson said. “There’s different aspects of the character that I could relate to — which is how I went about it, just trying to relate to every situation and how I as a person would react and how I thought the Dillon in the movie would react.”
The main four cast members were students in Barton’s course on acting for the camera during the fall 2019 semester. The film was shot across 10 days in November 2019, and the editing process began in January of last year, Barton said.
“It was the longest 10 days of my life that went by at a blink of an eye,” Douglasson said.
The movie begins when the four friends decide to stay on campus for their last Thanksgiving together before they graduate and go their separate ways. Then, Rich finds an unexplained red envelope in his jacket pocket. Inside the envelope is an invitation to “The Show,” which is described as “an interactive theatre adventure in three acts.”
The next morning, the friends head out to VCU’s Shafer Street Playhouse, where they encounter the Ticket Taker, played by Maya Forrester, and Lady Day, a character who explains the rules of “The Show” to the men, played by Chyanne Leeland. Forrester and Leeland both graduated from VCU last year.
As one of the film’s co-producers, Forrester said playing the role of the Ticket Taker was unexpected. When a hired actress didn’t show, she had to step in to fill the role.
“I was one of the few females that was there that day,” Forrester said. “I put on a dress that was four sizes too small, undid my hair from that morning. I was like ‘Oh no, I wasn’t ready for this,’ but it was really fun and ended up being a really good experience.”
The friends are led out to a car where they meet the Driver, played by Barton, who blindfolds the crew and drops them off in an unfamiliar neighborhood. As the Driver speeds off, they decide to search for clues and soon realize they are missing all their valuable personal possessions — phones, wallets and keys.
The rules of “The Show” forbid the characters from giving or receiving help from anyone, so they must work their way through Richmond and back home on their own. Along the way, they encounter several groups of students, whom they suspect as being actors in the interactive play.
Alongside friend and fellow VCU student Andrew Bonieskie, Douglasson wrote original music for the film. He said much of the score was composed on his bass guitar, which he would play while rewatching the scenes.
Barton was a graduate student at the time of the film’s production, and “Welcome to the Show” served as her thesis project.
“From the time that I asked them if they wanted to be in a film to when we were shooting was only about six weeks,” Barton said. “I wrote the screenplay during that time and did all of the prep for production during that time, so that was a very intense six weeks of my life.”
Forrester was unable to present her thesis since the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person classes midway through the spring 2020 semester. She was glad to have the film as something to show for her last year as an undergraduate student, she said.
“‘Welcome to the Show’ was such an unexpected gift,” Forrester said. “It kind of ended up being my last project at VCU and that ended up being a really awesome memory for me.”
“Welcome to the Show” will be available to stream online in the future, though the dates and platforms have yet to be announced.
