DC Metro Spotlight: February 2007

We’re in the thick of the six-month Washington Shakespeare Festival, but February has turned out to be an unplanned celebration of female playwrights.

Still, the month’s main event is the Kennedy Center’s production of the 45-year-old Broadway hit musical Carnival! (February 17-March 11). The story focuses on Lili, a sheltered orphan who joins a traveling circus, falls for a scheming magician, enthralls a whimsical puppeteer, and eventually finds true love. Broadway’s Robert Longbottom directs and choreographs the piece, which yielded the mega-hit “Love Makes the World Go Round.” The talented cast features relative newcomer Ereni Sevasti as Lili and Broadway veterans Jim Stanek, Natascia Diaz, Michael Arnold, and Sebastian La Cause in the other leading roles.

With Signature Theatre’s new complex in Arlington now fully operational, the first production in the ARK, the 99-seat blackbox space, is Crave (through April 1) by British playwright Sarah Kane, who took her life at age 28. Deemed controversial at first, Crave has gradually won fans for its existential look at the effect of psychological stresses on the human mind, especially those of love, loss, and longing.

GALA Hispanic Theatre has the U.S. premiere of Las Peredes/The Walls (through February 25) by Argentinian playwright Griselda Gambaro. She uses both drama and dark humor to depict the powerlessness of individuals to fight abuse and psychological terror inflicted by a totalitarian state. Catalyst Theatre Company presents New York playwright Sheila Callaghan’s We Are Not These Hands (through March 3), an offbeat comedy that focuses on two teenage girls seeking a way out of their fictional third world country.

DC playwright and actor Callie Kimball is a popular local presence whose latest work is debuting at the Washington Shakespeare Company: her adaptation of Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece (February 13-March 11). The Bard borrowed the storyline from Ovid, who wrote of Lucrece, the beatific wife of an illustrious Roman general who is ravaged by the general’s friend.

Rachel Crothers, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Parker were considered bold playwriting pioneers in the Prohibition Era. See what the fuss was about as The American Century Theater stages Drama Under the Influence (February 23-March 24), an evening of their one-act plays. Solas Nua looks at how language binds two people together, perhaps the last two people in the world, in Irish playwright Edna Walsh’s The Small Things (Flashpoint, through February 25).

If you’re wondering where Signature stalwart Will Gartshore is these days, he’s in Bethesda to portray British drama critic Kenneth Tynan in the Round House Theatre production of Orson’s Shadow (through February 25), Austin Pendleton’s Off-Broadway comedy hit which imagines what went on behind the scenes with such luminaries as Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh at a real 1960 production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros directed by Orson Welles.

Arena Stage has a different take on relationships in the Kreeger with a revival of Terrence McNally’s two-hander Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (February 23-April 8), in which a one-night stand between a waitress and a short-order cook highlights issues of intimacy.

Elsewhere around town, it’s witty drawing-room comedy at Olney Theatre Center, which is staging Somerset Maugham’s 1926 satire of marriage and mores, The Constant Wife (February 14-March 11). Actor’s Theatre of Washington has a drastically re-imagined version of The Owl and the Pussycat (February 23-March 25), Bill Manhoff’s 1960s tale of a wannabe author (owl) and a wannabe actress (pussycat) who pays her bills by entertaining gentleman callers. Studio Theatre’s The Passion of the Crawford (February 7-25) offers John Epperson as his alter ego Lypsinka, who brings screen icon and wooden-hanger maven Joan Crawford back to life.

Finally, it’s back to the Kennedy Center, which has a world premiere for the kids: Blues Journey (February 9-18), based on the book by Walter Dean Myers.