Washington, D.C. Spotlight: January 2005

Presidential inaugural festivities will dominate Washington evenings later in the month, but before the political partying gets underway, an unusually high number of world premieres will have the opportunity to claim the spotlight at local theaters.

The most ambitious production is Fairfax, Virginia-based Theater of the First Amendment’s original musical, Open the Door, Virginia! It’s based on the struggle of African-American high school students for a quality education in Virginia’s Prince Edward County, an effort that helped lead to the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision “Brown v. Board of Education” that outlawed segregated schools. Playwright, director, and choreographer Diane McIntyre is collaborating with underground bluesman Olu Dara on this blend of theater, dance and “roots” music. The story begins with the events leading up to a strike by 117 African-American high school students attending all-black Moton High in Farmville, a facility greatly in need of physical repair. Eventually the NAACP filed a lawsuit that ended up at the high court. The story, which uses actual words of the participants taken from interviews conducted by McIntyre, ends in the present time. The dialogue is blended with Dara’s original music, a mixture of jazz and funk styles, both urban and rural rhythms, and McIntyre’s dance movement, for what she hopes will be an emotional experience.

“I don’t do this with a hammer over people’s heads,” McIntyre told Theatermania.com, “but, hopefully, it will have people looking not just at the past but also at today, at the treasure that is education for all, and ask if we value it as much as those people who fought for it so long ago.” McIntyre is riding high on the success of her choreography for last season’s Crowns, a musical look at the traditional love affair between African-American women in the south and their hats. The show sold well over 60,000 tickets at Arena Stage, the company’s biggest hit of the season, and was brought back for a rare summer reprise. McIntyre said she is not concerned about staging the new play in the Old Dominion, where Prince Edward County (and others) closed public schools for five years rather than desegregate, and where some of the people who lived through and participated in the events she describes still live.

“I’m aware that in some quarters, sentiments may still be delicate and even raw over this issue, but I’ve tried not to name specific individuals,” McIntyre said. “We end with students in Farmville today, who do have a sense of optimism.” Open the Door, Virginia! will run January 12 through February 6 in the Harris Theatre, George Mason University Center for the Arts.

Also in the Virginia suburbs, Arlington’s Signature Theatre premieres local playwright Norman Allen’s “roundelay of sexual shenanigans,” Fallen from Proust, a look at a group of San Francisco-area “30-somethings” dealing with friendship and love. “It’s a light, romantic comedy of manners,” Allen told us, “although there are some twists and turns that have serious aspects to it. But for the most part it’s a fun look at contemporary mores and morality.” Allen laughingly notes that Republicans in town for the inauguration will find one of their own, sort of. “There’s some fun with politics. One of the main characters is a gay Republican, so we have fun with this red-state guy who’s in a blue-state state,” he said. Fallen from Proust runs January 11 through February 20th.

In a more serious vein, Theater J is premiering Joyce Carol Oates’ adaptation of her critically acclaimed 2003 novel, The Tattooed Girl, in which the Nobel Prize nominee examines her Jewish roots with a story about the prickly relationship between a disease-ravaged writer and his personal assistant. Theater J says Oates has substantially reshaped the plot and “narrative strategies” of the book for the stage. It runs January 11 to February 20.

Studio Theatre continues its “Russian Winter” season with Black Milk, an unsentimental look at life in post-communist Russian society by Vassily Sigarev. The tale of two young Moscow con artists who travel to a rural community to fleece the locals, it is set in the waiting room of a small train station. Director Serge Seiden likens Sigarev to Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonough, who wrote last season’s hit The Cripple of Inishmaan, which Seiden also directed. “Like McDonough, he’s sort of a wild man of Russian theater,” he mused. “He’s known for drinking and, like McDonough, claims he never saw a play before writing one.”

Local favorite Holly Twyford teams with Matthew Montelongo to portray the “shuttle traders” who travel the backcountry by train selling their wares. Both conflict and humor arise when their characters, Shura and Lyovchik, deal with the locals and the eight-months pregnant Shura suddenly goes into labor. Seiden and his cast have been working with a new translation Seiden requested, rather than using the available British version, “to bring back a lot more of the Russian feel,” as he put it.

The play made waves in Moscow two seasons ago when two theater companies mounted competing productions simultaneously, with differing interpretations of the material. With Sigarev’s hard-edged look at life in their homeland, Seiden is unsure what the reaction of the Russian community in the capital, which has welcomed and supported Studio’s Russian plays so far this season, even holding an Embassy reception, will be. “In Russia today, people have to make amazing compromises to survive, but I think the play is ultimately about hope,” he said. Seiden also promises a “big, secret special effect” at the end of the play, which runs January 5 through February 13.

There’s a unique combination of old and new at Arena Stage with Imitations for Saxophone, a newly discovered and never produced play by Sophie Treadwell, one of America’s first celebrated female playwrights. Set in the Jazz Age, this is the story of a woman who finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage while a sexual revolution explodes around her. Ann Bogart directs the play, which runs January 21 to February 27 in the Fichhandler (while the re-worked musical Hallelujah, Baby! continues in the Kreeger to February 13).

Opening January 5, and running through the 30th at Charter Theatre, is Sacred Cows, written by and starring Mario Baldessari & Jim Helein. It’s described as an “irreverent new comedy that skewers the comic state of religion in America” as Baldessari and Helein portray more than 50 characters.

In celebration of its fourth anniversary, the Winter Carnival of New Works, is now co-presented by Madcap and the Theater Alliance; this special community project showcases eight ten-minute plays written, performed and directed by members of the community. It runs January 13 through the 23rd at The H Street Playhouse.

Even the venerable Shakespeare Theatre has fresh material, the world premiere of a new translation and adaptation of Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio. Written by local playwright John Strand and directed by Artistic Director Michael Kahn, the play is a standard in France but rarely performed in the U.S. A drama meshing political intrigue, moral dilemmas, and individual heroism, Lorenzaccio will run January 18 to March 6.

At Catalyst Theater Company, it’s back to a favorite play of the 1970s as Halo Wines directs Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, a wild, gender-bending farce that compares human relations in British colonial Africa in the 1870s, with London a century later. The play runs January 12 to February 13.

The Disney machine rolls into town January 18th and stays through the 30th at the National Theatre, around the corner from the White House, with the GOP-friendly On the Record, a new musical featuring 64 Disney songs spanning 70 years, from some of the most popular films ever made. Featured are hit songs from The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella and Snow White.

Elsewhere, Washington Stage Guild promises “a rollicking romp through medieval Europe” with Michael Hollinger’s Incorruptible. Subtitled “A Dark Comedy About the Dark Ages,” it runs January 6 to February 6. Arlington’s American Century Theater mounts Robert Anderson’s moving 1953 play, Tea and Sympathy, an intimate study of a sensitive teenage boy and a mature woman who rescues him from despair, January 7 to February 5. Folger Theater stages Romeo and Juliet January 12 through February 20 and at the end of the month, Rep Stage, in suburban Columbia, Maryland, opens the dark comedy about a dysfunctional family, Kimberly Akimbo January 28.