Washington, D.C. Spotlight: September 2004

With its first production already underway, Arlington’s Signature Theatre is getting a jump on the fall theater season, and a battered metal cup and a three decades old pack of cigarettes are playing a small but poignant part. Eric Schaeffer is directing One Red Flower, the latest incarnation of the musical that author Paris Barclay has been honing since 1986 (and called Letters from ‘Nam when it starred Maureen McGovern in a number of cities several seasons ago). Set to a pop-rock beat, the show is based on actual letters sent between American soldiers in combat and their families back home during the Vietnam War.

Barclay, best known for his Emmy Award-winning directing and producing duties for such TV shows as The West Wing and NYPD Blue, uses the words of about 100 soldiers, combined here into a composite of six and one of their mothers, set in 1969 and 1970. For actor Kurt Boehm, playing the role of POW Private First Class “Alan Chisolm” has been “a humbling experience” because of an unusually intimate dose of reality the young actor has experienced.

The words of the “Chisolm” character are taken from a number of sources until he is captured. After that, his song lyrics are based on the letters Air Force Captain E. Alan Brudno sent to his wife, Debby, during his seven and a half years in a North Vietnamese cell. Debby Brudno, who lives in Virginia, visited Boehm during rehearsals to tell him about the man he portrays. She also brought with her several artifacts: the cup and spoon that was one of her husband’s few possessions during his ordeal, and a pack of cigarettes and matches he brought with him from Vietnam. (Brudno committed suicide shortly after returning home 1973 and his name was etched onto the Vietnam Memorial just this year.) Mrs. Brudno gave Boehm her husband’s cup, with the “A” scratched into its side, for use during the performances and it sits at his feet in the “cage.” “It gets to me sometimes, during the show, to be looking at it and know that it was in his hands,” Boehm said.

Keegan Theatre, also in Arlington, has a show about to open, but you’ll have to cross the Atlantic to see it. Keegan, which likes to spotlight Irish playwrights and themes in its season here, begins a tour of Ireland September 7 in Dublin, ending up October 13 in Monaghan, NI. The play they have chosen for Irish audiences? Sam Shepard’s very American True West. The tour reunites the team of director Susan Marie Rhea and actors Eric Lucas, Mark Rhea (her husband), and Brian Hemmingsen. Lucas starred in An Island Of No Land At All — The Story of O’Malley of Shanganagh by Peter Coy, part of the group’s summer repertory offering, which also featured Lucas’ own work, Tattoo Sky. If you’re planning to hop the pond and would like to catch True West, visit www.keegantheatre.com for the nine-city schedule.

Fresh from their successful appearance at New York’s International Fringe Festival, where their production of Roland Reed’s play, Host and Guest was warmly received by critics and audiences, Synetic Theatre is currently reprising the show for a seven-week run (opening September 3) at the Rosslyn Spectrum, just across the Potomac River from DC.

First produced by the company last fall, the play is based on an epic poem from the Republic of Georgia about a Muslim and a Christian who befriend each other despite the animosity between their cultures. In New York, the audience at the fifth and final performance numbered close to 400, while the Fringe average for large performance venues is 150. Reaction from New Yorkers was so positive, says the company, that they have been invited back to Gotham later this fall where, over four weeks, they will present two of the critically acclaimed works in their burgeoning repertoire of movement-inspired productions, Hamlet — The Rest Is Silence and Master and Margarita. (They’re not ready to announce the venue or dates just yet.)

As the name implies, their innovative version of Hamlet, a triple Helen Hayes Award-winning production (Outstanding Play, Direction and Choreography), is performed without dialogue in a production this writer described in a review as “an astonishingly beautiful presentation that combines elements of expressionistic theater with dance and mime into a captivating swirl of emotionally laden, rich imagery.”