STAGING OUR HIDDEN HISTORY
Two Hollins alumnae connect with Colonial-era Virginia and celebrate our history’s oft-overlooked voices.
by Joseph Staniunas
As Hollins tennis player Julie Westhafer Basic ’96 was looking for something to do one off-season, she decided to take a swing at fundraising, landing a paid position in the Hollins advancement office’s telephone fund drive.
And she found that she loved asking people for money.
“I was talking with alums, talking about the campus,” she said in a video chat in July. “At the end of the night, I was adding up how much I had raised through all of these conversations and all of the pledges and thought, ‘This is really important; I’m doing a lot of really important work.’ It was like thousands of dollars, and I just felt so really good about it.”
For some 20 years now, Basic has been involved in raising money for the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (JYF), the last 10 as senior director of development for the agency that oversees the sites of the Jamestown Settlement and the climactic victory over the British in 1781. “What we do here is tell stories of the cultures that converged in Virginia: the English, the Indigenous people, and the west central Africans,” she said. “And there are so many lessons and so much relevance that can be learned through those experiences.”
“People are interested in these stories and that’s what I think is so exciting. There’s a lot of conflict and polarization with it, but learning about these cultures is something that I see everyone enjoying, and for us to be able to tell those stories is so important.”
At nearby Colonial Williamsburg, the living history museum recreating life in Virginia in the era between Jamestown and Yorktown, Claire Wittman M.F.A. ’21 is one of nine members of the Jug Broke Theatre Company. The group creates and performs short musicals featuring 18th-century characters whose lives can reflect contemporary themes. “I’ve always loved research, and every play is an opportunity to learn new things about the period that I’m writing in, about a historical figure, about a book, about myself, about the world that we live in,” she said over coffee one morning just after the debut of The Peddler’s Opera, a piece she and two colleagues created. It’s based on an early American folktale about a seller of wooden bowls and spoons who convinces townsfolk that their porcelain pottery carries the plague. “At a single show we can have babies in strollers, elderly people, teenagers on their phones, teenagers reading books, teenagers enraptured, parents juggling two kids and a dog,” she said. “To put the needs of the audience first and foremost is one of the most valuable lessons, to have one eye on the audience — how are they feeling at every moment.” Even if a few of them walk out of a performance.
In different ways both women are using their talents to bring more diverse and inclusive experiences to visitors to America’s Historic Triangle.
Julie Basic ’96 (left) talks to an interpreter in the Colonial Garden Living History Exhibit at the American Revolution Museum.
Julie Basic entered Hollins expecting to be a teacher and developed a passion for history and the way it was taught by Professor of History Emerita Ruth A. Doan and other professors. “It wasn’t necessarily what to think about history but how to think,” she said, “to do your research and look at primary sources and come up with your thesis and justify that and be prepared to come to class and wrestle with it with your classmates.” An interest in history, love of education, and awareness of how fundraising can do so much to advance both means that “everything has come together for me here, and that’s why I’ve been here so long.”
Her previous work in advancement includes stints for the University of Virginia law school, Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, and for the University of North Carolina Cancer Center. Since coming to JYF, she’s been involved in the campaigns for the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the 2019 commemorations of the arrival of the first African slaves and the birth of the Virginia legislature, and the annual fund drives that help not only to operate the museums and living history exhibits but to broaden the visitor experience to include the stories of the Black Americans who fought with and against the Continental Army, and the intersection of women at Jamestown from three different cultures: English, Indigenous, and Black. “People are interested in these stories and that’s what I think is so exciting,” she said. “There’s a lot of conflict and polarization with it, but learning about these cultures is something that I see everyone enjoying, and for us to be able to tell those stories is so important.”
Wittman (right) backstage at the Colonial Williamsburg Play House before a performance of The Ladies of Llangollen.
A native of Bedford County, Virginia, Claire Wittman recalled visiting Colonial Williamsburg “dressed in my American Girl dress with my matching doll,” though she and other patrons would have never encountered a program like her short musical, The Ladies of Llangollen, about two 18th-century women who live as a couple in Wales.
She first heard about Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby on a podcast and thought that “it was always what we look for in our shows. It was sweeping, it was adventurous, it was romantic, it had the possibility for music.” And it was authentic, based on primary sources. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t write ‘My beloved wife’ in my personal private diary to anyone who is not my beloved wife. And I thought this was lovely and romantic, and we don’t really have a romance, so let’s write this one. And I didn’t realize this would be the first public program at Colonial Williamsburg to address queer themes.”
Wittman says the audience reaction has been approving and warm, though some people have left once they realized what they were seeing on the Play House open-air stage on the site of the first colonial theatre. Visitors should expect to see more programs like this throughout Colonial Williamsburg in coming years, Wittman says. “It’s worth mentioning that the reason we have these primary source documents is because these were wealthy white girls. We know this history because we have this history, and there are stories from even more marginalized communities that are lost to us.”
Communities whose hidden history is continuing to emerge thanks in part to two women of different generations, united by a love of the past and ties to Hollins University.