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My father died peacefully in his sleep late Thursday night. In lieu of flowers or cards, please consider donating to your local library, education organization, or arts organization.

Winston White Leonard

Asheville – Winston White Leonard, 83, died in Asheville on September 12, 2019. He was born on December 14, 1936, the son of Elizabeth Preston Leonard and E. M. Leonard, Jr.

Winston was an alumnus of Mars Hill University and Mercer University, where he studied law. He founded the Crayon/Leonard advertising agency in New Orleans, where his clients included Lady Bronze cosmetics, Halter Marine, and the Bombay Company. After moving to Asheville with his family in 1981, Winston handled advertising, marketing, and communications for a number of regional businesses including Mother Earth News and Volvo Construction Equipment.

An exceptional athlete, Winston was scouted by the Cincinnati Reds baseball team and was a scratch golfer. He was an avid sailor and participated in several races, including Volvo Ocean Race in-harbor racing. He also enjoyed North Carolina basketball, gardening, and reading. A singer in his youth, Winston and his wife Karen were supporters of the Asheville Symphony and other performing arts organizations in the area, and he did pro bono work for various music organizations and ensembles for young people.

His work often included travel, which Winston loved. His first major international trip, with the Bombay Company to visit its artisans, was a six-week journey around the world, stopping in Egypt, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Other trips included those to China, South Korea, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium. With his late wife, Karen, Winston traveled extensively in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, as well as in the United States.

Winston is survived by his sons Keith Leonard (Robin Rice) and Mitch Leonard (Ann Leonard); his daughter Kendra Preston Leonard (Karl Rufener); three granddaughters, Sarah Hannah Lundgren (Lance Lundgren); Lindsay Hayes, and Ashley Hayes; and a great-grandson, Nash William Lundgren; his sister Beth Allen and her family; and his brother Grenfell Leonard and his family.

Moon-Crossed was originally written as an entry for the American Shakespeare Center’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries” competition. Each year, the ASC selects five of Shakespeare’s plays; playwrights then choose one to use as an inspiration or basis for their new work, responding to, parodying, or otherwise engaging with the work. For the 2019 competition, one of the plays was the “problem play” All’s Well That Ends Well. Ostensibly a comedy, All’s Well has long been considered problematic: it includes nonsensical, “fairy-tale” logic; a forced marriage; a bed-trick, in which Bertram is fooled into sleeping with Helena without his consent; and a strangely abrupt ending in which Bertram’s loathing of Helena suddenly becomes love.

As I thought about ideas for addressing the play, it occurred to me that I could employ several tropes from both the early modern period and the present. Why does Bertram hate Helena so? Clearly, she’s a monster. In making her a real monster, I was able to take into consideration early modern beliefs about women’s monstrosity and men’s fears of women as unnatural, enigmatic, and devious. It also allowed me to consider the ways in which women’s power and influence is used in early modern drama: Helena, Madame Capilet, and Diana must all resort to some levels of cunning to survive, as were many women during the period, and are frank about the roles their wealth, bodies, and minds play in that use of power. Finally, by making Helena a real monster, I could bring humor into an otherwise mostly humorless play. The recent popularity of works like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter made it clear to me that there was plenty of room for werewolves in Shakespeare, and noble werewolves at that.

Moon-Crossed also let me play with lines and ideas from All’s Well That Ends Well, other Shakespeare plays, and medieval and early modern writings. Many lines come directly from All’s Well That Ends Well; other text comes from or is in reference to Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Much Ado About Nothing; the Malleus Maleficarum; the King James Bible; and Marie de France’s “Bisclavret.” Other influences and references come from Charles Perrault’s fairy tales; the concept of “ghost characters,” who appear in lists of roles but have no spoken lines; the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly; Billie Holiday; Warren Zevon; Shakira; and Charles Addams.

In keeping with the ASC’s practices of universal lighting and minimal staging, Moon-Crossed needs no costumes or lighting equipment and only a few props.

Moon-Crossed is offered for use under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International license. Anyone can perform the work for free without my permission; if you want to stage a commercial performance, please contact me for a standard contract at kendraleonard at pm dot me. If you or your class decide to put it on, in whole or in part, please let me know! Enjoy!

Want to hear me speak about my research, read my poetry, or attend an opera for which I’m the librettist? Here’s my schedule–so far–for late 2019.

21 August: “Medievalism, Myth, and Music for The Lion in Winter,” Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen conference, Birmingham City University. I’ll be participating via Skype, and my session begins at 8 am Central. I’ll also share it to Humanities Commons CORE afterwards.

25 September: “Shakespeare, Madness, and Music” public lecture at Sun Prairie Public Library, Sun Prairie, WI. 6:30 pm in the Community Room.

26 September: “Shakespeare, Madness, and Music” public lecture at Black Earth Public Library, Black Earth, WI. 6:30 pm, location TBD.

11-13 October: Houston Poetry Fest. Open to all. I’ll be reading 2-3 poems, probably on Saturday, 12 October. More details as they emerge.

18 and 19 October: Texas Music Library Association meeting at Rice University in Houston. I’ll be there regardless of whether I present; feel free to ask about my recent work on Melody magazine, undertaken with the assistance of a Music Library Association Dena Epstein award.

31 October: Premiere of The Harbingers, an a capella opera a libretto by me and music by composer Rosśa Crean. 7:30 pm, Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago.