Val Gray Ward

When I heard Val Gray Ward was performing in a small exhibit room in the Chico State Campus, I immediately was a little shocked at the potentially intimate atmosphere that such a location would provoke. The event was last Thursday in Trinity 100, a white room used to display student artwork. There were lines of folding chairs set out, probably about 40 to 50 of them, with a podium set in front of them. When I got there the place was already filling up and I caught a seat next to a classmate I was meeting up with; I overheard a teacher talking to a woman sitting in the front row, sitting next to a professor I recognized while roaming the halls of the English department building. The whispering teacher presented himself as one of the theater teachers at the school and how honored he was that she had come to perform. Obviously this was Val and she wasn’t what I had expected. I was expecting someone very professional, set aside from everyone else, and not the calm, and overtly relaxing personality that radiated soothing vibes and that was sitting alongside everyone else. The English professor sitting next to her started the night off with a brief introduction, pointing out her appearance in movies, a playwright, and director who has won 21 Emmys and a multitude of other awards. This seemed to embarrass her a little but it was refreshing to such modesty in a publicly accomplished individual. Her performance was described to me as dramatic interpretations of Langston Hughes and Harriet Tubman but that doesn’t even touch on the reality of her pieces. The performances were mixed up songs with poetry, characters that came alive in the shell of one woman that molded their physical/psychological states. With a firm support of a deep foundation that reverberated through the room and up to a whisper that would float in the air above your head, her voice told the stories her lips would form. At one point, during a piece her husband had written for her, tears welled in the creases of her eyes. You wouldn’t believe that anyone who could control the dynamics of the aura of a room with such energy and passion for her creating tangible characters could be 75 years old, a fact that, when she told us, the whole room couldn’t believe it. In closing Val took questions and was casual about how she would joke about her experiences and she treated everyone as if they were more intimate than complete strangers. But this was the truth. What she created in that room was an entire existence within itself that excluded everything past those walls. Bravo, to Val. Bravo.