DC Metro Spotlight: August 2006

DC’s first Capital Fringe Festival may now just barely be history, but if you’re still looking for something brand new onstage, or just something a bit offbeat, the usually low key month of August will not disappoint.

Theater Alliance presents the world premiere production of 3/4 of a Mass for St. Vivian (H Street Theater, August 10-September 3). The play was first seen at the Kennedy Center’s Playwright Discovery Evening one year ago, when the then-16-year old playwright Phoebe Rusch of Highland Park, Illinois was honored with a staging of her drama by The Playwright Discovery Award Program, which offers middle and high school students an opportunity to examine how disability affects a person’s life. Set in the 1970s, this is the story of an improbable friendship between two extremely resolute young women who are exploring the concepts of life, love, death, and belief.

Another highlight occurs late in the month when Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company kicks off the national tour of the recent off-Broadway hit In the Continuum (August 28-September 24). Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira wrote and play numerous roles in this drama focusing on how AIDS affects women of color the world over.

Trey Parker, one half of the team responsible for television’s profanely hilarious South Park cartoon series, is the co-author of Cannibal! The Musical (Landless Theatre, August 25-September 16), which takes on the saga of Alfred Packer, the only person in American history to be convicted of cannibalism. If your taste — in music, not eating — runs more to Gilbert & Sullivan, Capitol Hill Arts Workshop presents The Gondoliers (August 3-August 12). The comic operetta involves an elaborate tale of switched identities when one of a pair of Venetian gondoliers is actually a King, but no one is sure which one.

Natural Theatricals, the theater company performing at the ornate indoor amphitheatre of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, has much more serious fare to offer: Euripidies’ The Phoenician Women (August 10-August 27), which tells the story of the epic battle between Oedipus’ sons.

Longacre Lea Productions, performing at the Callan Theatre at Catholic University, serves up Tom Stoppard’s dark comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (August 17-September 10) Celebrated actor/director Kathleen Ackerly directs this offbeat account of what happens to two companions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Apparently, Company III.ii had much the same idea, as they’ve scheduled Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound along with Christopher Durang’s hysterically funny parody For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls in a production they’re calling, in a spasm of creativity, Two One Acts (August 18- August 27).

Finally, The Shakespeare Theatre Company downtown ends the month by starting its run of Henrik Ibsen’s very serious An Enemy of the People (August 29-October 22). It’s a timely account of the risks of whistle blowing, as Ibsen portrays a society cruelly ostracizing a truth-teller who tries to warn his fellow citizens their city’s tourist-attracting baths are contaminated. Adding resonance is the fact that director Kjetil Bang-Hansen, in his Shakespeare Theatre Company debut, used to be artistic director of Den Nationale Scene, the Norweigan theatre where Ibsen served as writer-in-residence in the 1850s.