D.C. Metro Spotlight: April 2005

With baseball-starved D.C. finally getting to see a hometown team in action for the first time in three decades, Arena Stage is hoping for a hit and no errors with the very first play to open in April, The Piano Lesson, August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, on April 1. No fooling.

Set in a Pittsburgh row house during the Great Depression, a brother and sister explore family ties, secrets, and sibling rivalry as they argue over the future of the intricately carved piano left them by their father, a slave who had been a plantation carpenter. Among a cast of familiar Washington actors, Harriett D. Foy and David Emerson Toney, who starred as Big Sweet and Lonnie in Arena’s successful Polk County several seasons back, are reunited. The Piano Lesson is part of Wilson’s illustrious ten-play cycle set in each decade of the 20th century and chronicling the African-American experience. The Piano Lesson runs on the Fichandler stage April 1 through May 15, even as Arena’s critically-acclaimed The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? continues in the Kreeger through April 17.

Round House Theater officially opens Life x 3, the follow-up to the mega-hit Art by French playwright Yasmina Reza, on April 4 after several weekend previews. This is the Washington area debut for the play described as “hilarious and thought-provoking.” This time, Reza gives us an evening with two difficult couples. Actually, it’s one evening, played three different ways and with a trio of outcomes. Life x 3 will run through May 1 at Round House’s primary stage in Bethesda.

Area audiences finally have the chance to see Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy, the witty, slightly sarcastic play that wowed the West End, and then made merry at Manhattan Theatre Club two seasons back, courtesy of Washington Stage Guild. Humble Boy intentionally brings to mind Shakespeare’s Hamlet as 35-year-old scientist Felix Humble returns home to a contemporary English village for his beekeeper father’s funeral, only to find his domineering mother is playing hive with another man.

Because of the numerous structural and rhetorical allusions to the Prince of Denmark’s tale, audiences may be expecting this to merely be a re-telling of that story, but it’s most definitely not, according to director Alan Wade. “I think we’re supposed to say it’s a hilarious farce, but it’s not just that,” Wade said. “It’s certainly intended to be, finally, a comedy. There is funny stuff in it and it ends happily, but that isn’t to say there isn’t a dose of drama in it, as well, with dysfunctional families, and love and death all explored.”

Felix, played by Bruce Nelson, recently onstage in Studio Theatre’s extended run of Black Milk, comes to terms with his father’s death, unnerved that his mother, played by popular Jewel Robinson, has apparently decided it’s better not to “bee” and gotten rid of the little buzzers. Jones ladles on the “B” business, with Felix sometimes stuttering on the sound, and Wade is planning a buzz to sometimes fill the air. But Wade doesn’t want to overdo the Hamlet connection, noting, “A person who knows Hamlet will enjoy all the allusions, but if one assumes that a beehive is a community structured around a queen bee, then that’s what’s going on in this play, that the mother can be thought of as the queen bee, toward whom the men of the play all gravitate.” Oh, and there’s fun to be had with the urn containing the father’s ashes. Humble Boy runs April 22 to at least May 22.

MetroStage has a classic bit of theater opening the same night as Humble Boy, but it’s the original material as Jennifer Mendenhall takes the title role in Sophocles’ tragedy Electra. Director Michael Russotto promises “relentless intensity” for the 2,400-year-old study of betrayal, murder, adultery and family politics that audiences are not to confuse with television’s The Sopranos. To make certain of that, MetroStage has firmly affixed the author’s name to the title. Sophocles’ Electra is onstage April 21 to at least May 29.

Folger Theatre is also reaching back in time, but only to the 18th century, for David Garrick and George Colman’s farce, The Clandestine Marriage. Here’s how the theater explains it: “Mr. Sterling is determined that his two daughters, Fanny and Betsey, marry men of wealth. However, both Betsey’s fiancé and his foppish uncle have fallen for Fanny. Egads! The pursuit of love or money takes many twists in this playful romp through the English countryside.” If that doesn’t excite you, you might be enticed over to East Capitol Street, where Folger performs almost under the shadow of the Capitol dome, to see an all-star local cast, including Catherine Flye, Susan Lynskey, Shannon Parks, Ian Merrill Peakes, Lawrence Redmond, Michael Tolaydo, and the Shakespeare Theatre’s formidable Ted Van Griethuysen, among others. Or maybe you’ll just decide you need comic relief on Tax Day, as The Clandestine Marriage opens April 15 and runs to May 22.

It’ll be a little quieter in Bethesda on Tax Day as The Quotidian Theatre Company opens The Roads to Home, Horton Foote’s gentle, poignant look at how a group of small-town Texas friends handle a crisis in the 1920s. Quotidian has a special relationship with playwright Foote and specializes in his plays, so this is probably a good chance to see the play pretty much as the author intends. The Roads to Home will run through May 15.

Journeymen Theater Ensemble, true to its name, is traveling from downtown out to the Clark Street Playhouse in Arlington for The Colorado Catechism, Vincent J. Cardinal’s comedy about a mismatched couple who meet in rehab. He is a denizen of the New York arts scene, and she is a Midwestern divorced mom involved in a custody battle. Journeymen is a Christian-centered theater company, but Founder and Artistic Director Deborah Kirby, who plays Donna, the female lead, promises a play full of laughs and no preaching as the couple try to support each other with sometimes disastrous results. The Colorado Catechism runs April 20 to May 21.

Also on stage in April:

• Theater J. continues though April 17 with There Are No Strangers, the world premiere of Theater J associate producer Jeanette L. Buck’s play, featuring multiple Helen Hayes Award-winner Holly Twyford as a young woman targeted in a seemingly random act of violence and left to wonder why.
• Hidden: A Gender, Kate Bornstein’s comic look at gender formation, attitudes, and roles, offers a new view of two historical figures, brought to Theater on the Run by Trumpet Vine Theatre Company through April 30.
• Olney Theatre Center stages the area premiere of Omnium Gatherum, Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’ biting, slightly surreal play about New Yorkers and their response to 9/11, through April 24.
• The Shakespeare Theatre continues with their visually stunning The Tempest, through May 22.
• Ford’s Theatre continues through May 1 with their vibrant, thoroughly enjoyable production of the musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as Deaf West Theatre tells Mark Twain’s classic tale with a combination of American Sign Language, spoken English, dance, and song.
• Landless Theatre runs Nine, the musical incorporating Fellini-esque cinema into the story of a film director’s search for truth through April 17.
• And Signature Theatre has Ten Unknowns, its disappointing, dramatically inert production of Jon Robin Baitz’s look at an aging painter attempting a comeback, through April 24.