“Do you know that I’m dead?” Those words, inscrutable as they are, mark the very beginning of The One Good Thing, a new play by Joe Bravaco that is now in rehearsals for its U.S. premiere at Washington Stage Guild.

The question, addressed by one brother to the other as they stand outside a cottage on the coast of Ireland, is left hanging, though it provides the hook for all that comes after.

The twists and turns that follow that revelation were described by the British Theatre Guide as “unexpected, compelling and dramatically satisfying.” The review appeared after the play’s official opening, in April, in a part of Yorkshire where sheep, statistically, outnumber people, though people, happily, prefer plays.

“But why is it set in Ireland?” I asked the director, Steven Carpenter, as we sat down for a lively video interview last week during a break in rehearsals.

The answer, Carpenter replied, is that the playwright, Joe Bravaco, conceived it as Irish.

“According to Joe,” he explained, “the genesis of the play was the song ‘I’ll Be Singing,’ which was written for the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar. The song, echoed in this production, gave rise to the story.”

Bravaco, who lives in New Jersey, is both a playwright and a librettist. He started out as a high school English teacher who taught journalism and drama.

“The play,” Carpenter continued, “is full of magical ideas, endemic to the Irish. The way the brothers speak, for example, is similar to the work of Conor MacPherson or Brian Friel.”

Carpenter, who admits to “a little bit of Irish blood, far back in the family,” described the relationship between the brothers as one without great animosity.

“They do a fair amount of verbal sparring — what the Irish might call ‘takin’ the piss’ — but it’s mostly in fun, and is just one way they express their love for each other.”

There are many surprises in the play, which — as Carpenter warned me — cannot be revealed in this article. Audiences will have to watch the story unfold and wait till the end for answers. (One such mystery, a tantalizing clue, is the meaning of the play’s subtitle, which is or “Are Ya’ Patrick Swayze?”)

When he first read the play, Carpenter — who wears many hats at WSG, including that of associate artistic director — knew immediately that it was a winner.

“I was halfway through the first act when I knew that this was a Stage Guild play,” he said. “Our niche, as it were, is plays about ideas, plays in which the argument is the action.

“In fact, we like to say that words are the ‘special effects’ of our plays,” he laughed.

Carpenter is both an actor and director, though he thinks of himself primarily as a director-style actor. “When I’m acting, I think about the totality of the parts, as well as the effect on the audience, both of which are directorial traits.

“As a director,” he continued, “I find that the biggest challenge is communication. In a cast of six actors, I might need to find five or six different ways to speak to the actors and see which approach works best for each of them. With two actors, the job is easier.”

The two actors in The One Good Thing — Ryan Neely and Chris Stinson — are familiar faces in the theater world, with lengthy résumés listing stage and screen credits.

“Both are smart, intuitive actors who bring a lot of their own ideas to the table,” Carpenter wrote in one of our many follow-up emails. “They’ve made rehearsals stimulating and fun.”

Turning to his early life, Carpenter fell in love with theater as a student at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus. “They had a great theater department at the time,” he said, and that steered him to graduate school at the University of South Carolina.

Grad school included an internship at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, here in DC, where he worked as an extra in a season’s worth of plays.

“In nine months, I had about four lines,” he quipped.

“But the real education was being able to work with company members, such as Ted van Griethuysen, Floyd King, Ed Gero, and others. That was invaluable.”

He decided to remain in Washington, where, for several years, he worked as a freelance actor — performing many roles at WSG along with other DC theaters — before joining the company as one of its full-time managing directors when executive director Ann Norton stepped down.

Today, Carpenter is one of the four actor-directors who manage the company. The others, all co-founders, are Laura Giannarelli, Bill Largess, and Lynn Steinmetz.

“We’re like a family, and we all wear lots of hats,” Carpenter said, pointing out that, apart from his official title, he is also the casting director, the production manager, and — in one of his most memorable (and Helen Hayes–nominated) performances — a sound effects creator in It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play.

The company, which was formed in 1986 by a group of theater professionals — most of them classmates at Catholic University — still embraces an air of collegiate idealism that is hard to find in today’s largely commercial world.

The One Good Thing marks the beginning of Washington Stage Guild’s 40th-anniversary season, which combines the classics with a few contemporary plays. Highlights include Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and Patricia Milton’s Accused.

“Our motto is that we’re one of the oldest theaters in America that most people don’t know about,” Carpenter said, adding that the company has flown under the radar for years.

“We try to stay relevant, and we’re even occasionally edgy. But the bottom line is that we’re a theater that’s based on words.”

On a personal note, Carpenter met his wife, Lauren Hyland, when both were working on a play in which he was the director and she was the assistant director. They have one son, a teenager who’s into athletics and who is currently not the least bit interested in theater.

One of the attractions of DC, when Carpenter first arrived in the mid-’90s, was that it had already developed a strong theater community.

That sense of community survives, though it’s open to visitors. “We welcome actors from outside, we embrace them as part of our DC family, and we enjoy seeing them again when they return,” he explained.

“But DC theater is special. To begin with, it has the smartest audience you’ll ever come upon. It’s an audience that’s highly intelligent, savvy, discerning, and loyal. It’s metropolitan in feel, but local in size.

“I don’t think you get audiences like that in New York,” he concluded. “New York audiences include a lot of tourists. We don’t. In fact, we know many of our audience members personally. We often hang out in the lobby and talk to them after the shows.”

Like most of us, Carpenter is worried about the decline in government funding. However, he’s hopeful about private support.

“We’ve seen an increase in individual donations ever since the pandemic. And that,” he grinned, “is very encouraging!”

Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes, including one 10-minute intermission. 

The One Good Thing – or “Are Ya’ Patrick Swayze?” opens in previews on September 25 and runs through October 19, 2025, presented by Washington Stage Guild, performing at The Undercroft Theatre at Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, 900 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC. All tickets are general admission and $60. Students and groups of 10 or more pay $30 each, and seniors pay $50. To purchase tickets, click online.

Post-show discussions: September 27 and October 18, both following the Saturday matinee performance.

COVID Safety: Masks are recommended (not required). Washington Stage Guild’s complete Health and Safety Policy is here.

The One Good Thing – or “Are Ya’ Patrick Swayze?”
By Joe Bravaco

CAST
Jamie: Ryan Michael Neely
Tommy: Chris Stinson 

CREATIVE TEAM
Director: Steven Carpenter
Scenic Design: Brandon Roak 
Resident Lighting Design: Marianne Meadows 
Costume Design: Lily Komorow 
Sound Design: David Bryan Jackson 
Dramaturg: Bill Largess
Production Stage Manager: David Elias
Assistant Stage Manage: Luca Maggs 

SEE ALSO:
Washington Stage Guild announces 2025/26 season (news story, April 22, 2025)

The post Steven Carpenter on rehearsing the U.S. premiere of ‘The One Good Thing’ at Washington Stage Guild appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Call it a fictionalized autobiography — or a memory play, if you will — The Berlin Diaries, extended through June 29 in its regional premiere at Theater J, is the story of the author’s search for a secret that lay hidden for more than 80 years.

It’s a Holocaust tale — told in its original form by the playwright’s great-grandfather, who buried the truth in order to spare his children and grandchildren from the knowledge of a terrible loss. In the play, facts that were deliberately omitted have been resurrected.

Curious to know why and how the play came about, I talked to Andrea Stolowitz, the multi-award-winning playwright, over a video link from her home in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her husband, an East German–born physics professor at Reed College. Our interview was sandwiched between her older son’s college graduation and a trip to Ireland, where she is now working on a new play commissioned by the Abbey Theatre.

Berlin Diaries begins in Durham, North Carolina, in 2006. A letter has arrived from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, announcing that the playwright’s great-grandfather’s diary, which she has long refused to read, has been donated to the museum.

The letter informs Stolowitz that — in return for this donation — she will be getting glossy copies of the diary, which was written in 1939 and addressed to her mother’s generation. The diary describes his life in Germany, how he left the country, and his subsequent life in the United States.

Stolowitz, played by Dina Thomas, looks at the diary and finds it impossible to read. It is written in the tiniest script you’ve ever seen.

“Who reads script anymore?” she asks. She puts it on a shelf and — though she takes it wherever she moves — she never opens it again until she is about to go to Berlin for one of her husband’s sabbaticals. At that point, she thinks, “Maybe this diary will have the makings of a good play.” In the past, she had never wanted to read it because she didn’t want to deal with the Holocaust.

“It’s like enough already,” she told me. “But then I realized that this is not a diary about the Holocaust. There is nothing about the Holocaust in it. It’s about family history and a lot of other things. So I decided that I would make it the basis for a new play. I managed to read seven pages of the document, wrote a proposal, got funding, and then moved to Berlin with my husband. (He’s not in the play, it’s just me, since there’s only so much room on the stage.)”

But then — in both real life and the play — she gets to Berlin and sits down and actually reads the diary, and realizes it is extremely complicated and there’s nothing in it that would lend itself to a play. She is horrified.

“I practically lose my mind because I have promised this arts organization that I would write a new play, and they have given me money to do it. So I have to do something. And so I begin to think about the time that he was writing this diary, from 1939 to 1948. And I realize that what he’s written is a children’s book. A nice book for nice children. There’s nothing about the Holocaust because, when he starts writing, it hasn’t happened yet.

“He arrives in the U.S. in 1936. By 1939, his daughters are here too. They’re having babies. He begins writing this on the first of January 1939, to give his grandchildren details of his life in Germany. He’s telling them where he is from, his family background, and who he is, because they’ll never know anything about that other world. They will grow up here, in the United States.

“When he starts the diary, Germany has not yet invaded Poland. So yes, there is antisemitism. And yes, Hitler’s in power. But nothing else has happened. And as he’s writing this book, he’s trying to figure out how to report both past and present. But a lot is hidden. He’s not saying things because he’s writing to children.

“So I use the diary to try to uncover what he would have known, what he could have known, about what did happen to his family. And so I become the first person in my entire family to know that we had 21 first cousins who were killed or rounded up in Berlin and sent to death camps. We didn’t know this. His myth was that everyone made it out alive. In our immediate family, they did. In the rest of the family, they did not.

“So the play is about my discovery of the past, my reconciliation with it, and my reconciliation with my own family. In doing so,” she concluded, “I set out to change some of the things that needed to be changed.”

Her great-grandfather left Germany in 1936. His first daughter left two years earlier, in 1934. She had been studying medicine in Freiberg and was no longer allowed to continue her studies because she was Jewish. It was the beginning of a series of repressive laws, preventing Jews from entering the professions or from studying at “Aryan-only” schools.

At the time, he was a doctor in Berlin, but under Nazi law, he could no longer earn a living. Luckily, he left early enough to get out, and to be able to work as a doctor in the U.S.

He was a writer as well, though not professional. He wrote poems, stories, and songs. “I think writing is a Jewish trait, part of keeping memory alive,” Stolowitz said, adding, “that’s just my theory” and acknowledging that many other faiths share the same proclivity.

“The play is a memoir,” she explained. “And the way I report it is how I experienced it when I searched for the truth in Berlin. Is it the truth? No, because everything that happens in the play is filtered through my personal lens.”

However, in writing the play, she did set some rules for herself. “I never changed the diary itself. However, I did move portions. For example, sometimes, in the diary, he has an idea, and then he spends five pages explaining it. But all I really needed was the idea. I didn’t need the interstitial stuff. So what I allowed myself to do in the diary was to use certain sections but remove others. Some of it is written in German, which an American audience might not understand. So I translated some things, or just omitted the German.”

“But the diary itself is intact,” she averred. “I didn’t add anything, but I did remove sections and words for clarity.”

In fact, she explained, she couldn’t fictionalize any of the diary, since that would amount to Holocaust denial. “This diary is an actual book that sits in the Holocaust Museum. So if I were to start making up stuff about the Holocaust, that would open the door to people who say, ‘Well, look, if this isn’t true, then that isn’t true. And so I’ve been very careful in this play to remember that the tool of Holocaust deniers is any misrepresentation of the Holocaust.”

Stolowitz never knew her great-grandfather, since he died in 1949. She was born in 1972.

“I’m 53,” she laughed, describing it as a liberating age. “You don’t care anymore what people think,” she explained, counting the ways in which turning 50 is a freeing experience. “Nobody looks at you as a sex object. Your children still need you, but not in the same way. And you’ve been alive for so long that you can’t really get excited about things. And if you’re still healthy, as I am, it’s perfect.”

Another liberating aspect of her current life is the freedom from teaching, which leaves a lot more time for playwriting. She just quit this year, after teaching full-time since 2003. She began her teaching career at Duke University in North Carolina — where the play begins — then moved west to UC-San Diego, where she got her MFA. Her final stop was at Willamette University in Oregon, where she taught playwriting and screenwriting for film and TV.

“I left Willamette this year because I received a fellowship from a foundation that gave me $25,000 — the same amount that I had made as an adjunct professor — and they said they couldn’t hold my position if I left for a year. So I said, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll leave.’ And so now I no longer teach. My husband is still on the faculty at Reed, which is good, since somebody in the family has to have a regular salary.”

The play itself, according to Stolowitz, is a little different from most because of the way it’s designed. There are just two performers, portraying 14 characters. The two are Lawrence Redmond and Dina Thomas, both well-known and admired for their work on the DC stage. Directing the play is Elizabeth Dinkova, artistic director of DC’s Spooky Action Theater.

The Berlin Diaries has had several lives, beginning with a two-act version that was produced in Berlin and Oregon before going on tour in Canada. At the time, Stolowitz was working on a shortened version, aiming for its opening in New York in 2019.

“The two-act productions were like out-of-town tryouts,” Stolowitz said. “I realized the play was too long, so I wrote the current version, which is one act. But then the pandemic came, shutting down the theaters. When we finally opened in New York, it was 2023.” The theater was 59E59, a small, nonprofit venue adored by serious New York theatergoers.

Following that run, the play was picked up by the National New Play Network for a Rolling World Premiere. Due to Equity rules, the 59E59 premiere was not included, nor were other productions, including one in Chicago and the other here at Theater J.

While many of her plays have Jewish characters, she did not realize until recently that the plays themselves were Jewish. For example, her first play, Knowing Cairo, which was produced in 2003, was about old age and how we, as a society, care for the aged. “It was not until I wrote Berlin Diaries that I understood that the fact that the character was a Holocaust survivor — like my great-grandfather — had a lot to do with what happened in the play.

“I now recognize that Cairo is a very Jewish story, as is Berlin Diaries and the new play that I’m working on in Ireland. In fact, the Irish play owes its existence to this one,” she said.

What happened was that the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theater in Dublin, liked The Berlin Diaries but didn’t want to produce it. Instead, they proposed a play about the remnants of what was once a thriving Jewish community in County Cork, detailing its recent history, what it’s like now — with just two thousand Jews left — and its hopes for the future.

“It raises questions that face worldwide Judaism today,” she said, adding that the project began before October 7 and is now quite different from what she envisioned at that time.

In addition to the Irish play, she has several other productions in the works. One is an opera libretto, called The Limit of the Sun. “We’ve had the workshops, and now we’re waiting for an opera company to take it over,” she sighed. “It’s about a U.S. journalist who’s been kidnapped and is being held hostage. The other characters include the handler, the journalist’s mother, and an FBI agent. It’s based on a true story, and it’s about international justice and who is tasked with upholding it. It’s also,” she added, “about mothers and children.”

Berlin Diaries is her eighth play to be produced, though she has dozens more in development or commissioned.

Stolowitz grew up in Riverdale, a leafy oasis located improbably in New York City, just north of Manhattan, and went to the Horace Mann School and then Barnard College. After Barnard, she moved to Berlin, then returned for graduate school in California, followed by marriage, family, and teaching at Duke in North Carolina.

Asked why theatergoers should rush to see the play before it closes next week, Stolowitz agreed that the rise in antisemitism — along with the return of autocratic rule — makes the Holocaust more relevant than ever. “The question, “ she asked rhetorically, “is how do we, as third- or fourth-generation survivors, move on, while making sure that the Holocaust itself is not forgotten.”

The first generation of survivors is nearly all gone, though their descendants live on, still trying to piece together the puzzle of how it happened and whether it could, given the circumstances arising today, happen again.

EXTENDED: The Berlin Diaries plays through June 29, 2025, presented by Theater J at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater in the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($70–$80, with member, student and military discounts available) online, by calling the ticket office at 202-777-3210, or by email (theaterj@theaterj.org).

Running Time: 90 minutes with no intermission

The program for The Berlin Diaries is online here.

SEE ALSO:
In ‘Berlin Diaries’ at Theater J, an absorbing remembrance of lost family (review by Amy Kotkin, June 11, 2025)

The post Andrea Stolowitz on why and how she wrote ‘Berlin Diaries,’ now at Theater J appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

“Making money is art.” That’s the credo of the money-making pop artist — known for his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup cans — whose imagined plight at the hands of a timid revolutionary is the core of Andy Warhol in Iran, the new comic drama making its DC debut at Mosaic Theater Company.

The show, now extended through July 6, begins with Warhol — played by a radiantly comic Alex Mills — musing about his detachment.

Speaking directly to the audience — his face obscured by the signature wig and large dark glasses — he describes himself as an observer. He identifies with his camera, an ancient Polaroid and a relic, even in 1976. (The role is reminiscent of I Am a Camera, the 1951 play by John Van Druten and Christopher Isherwood, in which the latter describes himself as a passive observer, but then is drawn, reluctantly, into the world he observes.)

Warhol is in his room at the Tehran Hilton, waiting to hear from the Shah’s wife about a commission to paint her portrait. But, in the words of Brent Askari, the playwright pulling the strings, Warhol admits that he is really waiting “for something that could have happened … or would happen … or will happen.”

I was curious about the evolution of the play, and tracked Askari down for a video interview at his home in South Portland, Maine.

“Originally, the play I had in mind was about Warhol going to Iran,” he said, adding that the artist really did go there, in 1976, in order to do a portrait, using Polaroid and paint, of the Shah’s wife.

“But there was no conflict, and without conflict, there’s no drama,” he concluded. However, he was hooked on the idea of a play about Warhol’s trip. “Once I realized that I didn’t have to stick to the historical facts, I knew there was a lot to write about.”

While reluctant to give away any of the details of the plot — audiences will have to see the play in order to find out exactly what happens — he did provide me with this summary.

“Warhol goes to take Polaroids of the Empress,” Askari said, “and he’s stuck in his hotel room, waiting to get summoned. So he’s hanging out in the hotel for a few days and doing some touristy things and ordering caviar, which is only $12 for a large serving.

“And then, one day, he has this encounter with a young revolutionary who comes to his hotel room and challenges his notions of art and politics. This young man has a very critical view of the Shah” —  restored to power through the intervention of the West — “because of the regime’s secret police and widespread use of torture.

“So Andy and the passionate young Iranian end up in the hotel room together and have a lot of debates about politics and art and the roles of each in the other, and they both end up changing each other’s views — a little, and only for a moment. We see that there are similarities between the two men as well as differences. In a sense, they’re both ‘revolutionaries’ of a sort.”

One of the most astonishing things about the play, which I saw at its opening, is that the would-be terrorist — played by Nathan Mohebbi, with a wonderful blend of idealism and anxiety — manages, in between the threats and the jokes, to deliver a history lesson, at whirlwind speed, that touches on every act of perfidy for over two centuries.

“The would-be kidnapper doesn’t want to erase history,” Askari said. Instead, he forces Warhol — and by extension the audience — to relearn it.

Much of the speed of the play — both in the history lessons and in the sparring between the two men — is the work of Mosaic’s managing director, Serge Seiden, who is back on the creative side after serving on the business end of the theater.

Although Askari and Seiden had never met, they have a lot in common. Seiden grew up in Maine, then settled in Washington, DC. Askari, just the opposite, grew up in the DC area and now lives in Maine. Both began their careers as actors.

And both are graduates of Swarthmore College. (As a result of this shared background, Mosaic is offering a special Swarthmore Alumni performance on June 29 at 3 pm.)

Other coincidences abound: Andy Warhol in Iran was originally commissioned by the Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires, where Mosaic’s artistic director, Reginald L. Douglas, directed the workshop. Prior to that, Askari worked with Douglas on a play called White Party.

“So we connected twice,” Askari said. “And when he asked me to think about Mosaic for the play’s DC premiere, of course I said ‘yes!’”

Like many playwrights I’ve interviewed, Askari has worked both on and off the stage. He began his career as an actor, and though he continues to move back and forth — he currently performs with the Mad Horse Theater Company in Maine — he is today focused primarily on writing. More than a dozen of his plays have been produced. His latest play, Advice, opens next week in Sacramento.

“As a playwright, I find it very helpful to have been an actor, since you understand the craft of acting,” he explained. “You know what an actor needs and doesn’t need in order to bring a character to life.”

Of course, Iran is very much in the news today, so this play — with its artful look at some of the forces leading up to the revolution in 1979 — is very relevant. It’s a painful reminder of what went wrong, both before the revolution and after it. Far from saving the country, the number of deaths from torture, tyranny, and execution far exceeds that of the past.

For Askari, the play is a way of talking about issues like justice, art, and politics, but it’s also about cultural differences.

“The differences are especially important,” he said, pointing out that he is a product of a biracial marriage. His father is from Iran, and his mother is a New England WASP. “Those are two very different cultures. I’m interested in the interaction between the two, and the relationship between East and West.”

As for the comic bits: “Yes, a play always needs humor. And Warhol was such a character. He was a trickster in fact.” In a play, he reminded our readers, having something to say and offering entertainment are not mutually exclusive.

My favorite line in the play, spoken by Warhol, but probably echoed by many of those who read DCTA, is this: “It’s hard for people who studied literature to find work.”

Andy Warhol in Iran plays through July 6, 2025, presented by Mosaic Theater Company performing in the Sprenger Theatre at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC. Tickets are $42-$78 and available by contacting the box office at (202) 399-7993 or boxoffice@atlasarts.org from 12 pm–6 pm Tuesday through Sunday, or one hour prior to a performance. Tickets may also be purchased online or through TodayTix.

Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes, with no intermission.

The digital program is downloadable here.

Senior discount of 10% when using the discount code SENIOR. Student tickets $20 with discount code STUDENT. Educator: $20 with discount code EDUCATOR. Limited number of rush tickets are available via walk-up one hour before the start of each performance. Military and First Responder rate: 10% with discount code HERO. Under 30: $25 with code UNDER30 (not available on weekend matinees).

Andy Warhol in Iran
By Brent Askari
Directed by Serge Seiden
Andrew Cohen (Scenic Designer), Alberta Segarra (Lighting Designer), Jeannette Christensen (Costume Designer), Larry Peterson (Wig and Make-Up Designer), David Lamont Wilson (Sound Designer), Deb Thomas (Properties Designer), and Mona Kasra (Projections Designer)

SEE ALSO:
A far-out artist meets a real rebel in ‘Andy Warhol in Iran’ at Mosaic (review by Charles Green, June 2, 2025)
Mosaic Theater Company to present DC premiere of ‘Andy Warhol in Iran’ (news story, April 22, 2025)

The post How Brent Askari came up with ‘Andy Warhol in Iran,’ now at Mosaic Theater appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Shakespeare would love it. And audiences will too, once they cotton to the fact that gender, in Mei Ann Teo’s new take on Twelfth Night, is rarely static. In fact, male and female roles — as revealed in the Folger’s new production, directed by Teo — are as interchangeable as a costume or hat.

Call it cross-dressing or mistaken identity, gender confusion has long been a source of comedy. It’s a plot device dating back to the Romans, then stretched to extravagant heights by the Bard nearly two millennia later. Under Teo’s direction, the plot device yields a darker, funnier tale.

“How is Twelfth Night different from Shakespeare’s other plays about mistaken identity?” I asked, as we settled in for a chat on Zoom, prior to the play’s opening here in DC.

“While it’s true that Shakespeare wrote about gender fluidity in other plays,” Teo replied, “it’s especially beautiful in Twelfth Night. And that’s because the play itself is all about the slips and slides of desire.”

In Shakespeare’s time, Teo pointed out, all the roles were played by male actors. As a result, the jokes — and the innuendo — came straight out of the performance.

“However, the subversive nature of desire lies deep within the play itself,” Teo said, adding that the word queer, as applied to the play, is not just a sexual orientation. It’s a way of living with resilience and acting in direct opposition to oppressive structures, such as patriarchy. And it’s about challenging the norms in a celebratory way.

“Twelfth Night is actually the last day of Christmas,” Teo explained. “In many cultures, it’s celebrated as a type of carnival or revelry. It’s an accepted practice, on Twelfth Night, to revel in feelings or actions that might not be acceptable in normal society, but that make us human.

“And what a beautiful thing that we can do that in the theater!” Teo rejoiced, describing the act of performing or even seeing a play as a form of permission to do, or pretend to do, all the things that we might not be brave enough to do in real life, either because we don’t know how to do them, or because of the way in which we have been conditioned. “It’s a chance to go wild and let the conditioning go.”

“To go wild is actually the most beautiful thing the theater can do. Theater is, in its own way, a carnival,” Teo added. “A chance to wear masks, and then take them off. But the question of who is under the mask is much more complex.”

Teo described a revelation that came after rehearsals one day. “I realized that the word that’s most often used in this play is mad. Characters are constantly asking, ‘What is this madness?’ And what is this madness most related to? It’s the feeling of falling in love.

“As we fall in love,” Teo continued, “we feel like we’re losing our grip on rational thinking. I hope that every human being on earth gets to experience falling in love, no matter what form it takes. It can be eros, or the love of a parent. In fact, parents talk about the way that they love a newborn child as beyond anything they’ve experienced. So I’m not limiting this to erotic love, although the play does have a lot to say about that. But the play also includes platonic love. And it’s love that shakes us out of our masks.”

Certainly, the casting of this love-oriented Twelfth Night is reflective of Teo’s directorial spin. There is no particular rule about gender. Some of the male roles
are played by women, and some are not. Either way, gender doesn’t always matter.

“I wanted every combination of falling in love,” Teo said. The director also wanted to expose the flip side of love — the hurt and jealousy and betrayals. For example, one of the least talked-about betrayals in the play is that of Sir Toby toward Sir Andrew. “The audience loves these clowns. But in the end, one betrays the other, and they go their separate ways.”

So the play is about all the layers of love, and about all the ways in which love goes beyond gender. It’s about the complexity of love. And Teo, as director, is committed to looking at all the different combinations.

Interestingly, the Folger production is quite a turnabout from the last time Teo directed Twelfth Night, which was about 20 years ago, right after Teo had graduated from Pacific Union College in Angwin, California. It was an outdoor, site-specific event, and Teo’s interpretation was completely different.

At the time of that earlier production, Teo had just graduated from college. Although Teo’s degree was in finance, Teo had already excelled in undergraduate theater productions. The college wanted Teo to stay on, but didn’t know what to call Teo, who was neither an intern nor an assistant professor. Teo suggested “resident artist,” and that stuck. Teo signed on to direct two shows a year, teach a class, and go on to summer training stints with major organizations, including the SITI Company in New York (Anne Bogart, who headed the group, subsequently became Teo’s mentor at Columbia). Teo also studied with Dijana Milosevic at the Dah Teater in Belgrade.

But why the finance degree, I asked, finding it an odd juxtaposition.

“Yes,” Teo laughed, “it is odd. But my parents were Singaporean Chinese, and I wanted to be a good Chinese child. My sister went into finance, so I thought I should too. So I got my finance degree, but never used it until years later, when I applied for a position in artistic leadership at the Musical Theatre Factory in New York. The board, in the middle of the hiring process, got very excited about my knowing finance. I called my mom when I left the interview, and when I told her how much they loved that fact, she said, ‘You have me to thank!’ ”

Of course, understanding finance was a great help in knowing how to budget a theatrical production. But it also helped Teo to understand what Teo couldn’t do, in terms of a career.

“There was a watershed moment when I was a senior looking for accounting internships. I suddenly had this visceral feeling that accounting was not for me. That was 24 years ago. And since then, I’ve done nothing but theater. I’ve done it as a professor, as a director, and as an artistic leader, currently at Ping Chong and Company in New York. But I’m living out my wildest dream, right now.”

Surprisingly, Teo has not done any other Shakespearean plays. Teo comes from a devised theater and new work background, specifically working with people who tell their own stories.

Last year, Tep directed the Folger’s production of Where We Belong by Madeline Sayet. Teo has also directed a lot of classics, including Sam Shepard’s True West, which Teo reinvented with an all-Asian cast. But Teo identifies essentially as a “new work” director.

“My approach to Twelfth Night is to treat it as a new play, and really think about the people in the room. I like inviting incredible artists to be a part of what I’m doing,” Teo said.

“At auditions, I ask the actors to choose any text in the play that they really care about. I tell them, ‘It doesn’t matter if you want to be cast in that role, or if you think you might be cast in it. Just any text you care about. And then pick a scene that can’t be done by one person.’ It’s amazing to see how many actors bring their artistry to bear. I get to see who they are, not just as actors playing a role, but as artists who are thinking about how performance can communicate more than the text.”

For example, “There’s a moment when Olivia has been grieving for her brother for seven years, and everyone’s tired of it, including Sir Toby. He says, ‘What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus?’ And then things begin to change.

“We see it during Olivia’s first meeting with Cesario, when she starts to feel her body again. She’s like a statue at first, but then her blood starts pumping through her veins, and what is usually a monologue is activated by the group, embodying what it feels like to feel alive again.”

Teo quoted Candy Darling — the superstar of Andy Warhol’s realm — who famously said, “I’m a thousand different people. Everyone is real.”

“We’re not just one thought; we’re many thoughts,” Teo said. “All the complexity of each moment is present. So the question is, how do we bring that complexity to performing this play, which already has so much complexity written into it? And how do we physicalize that?”

With choreography, I guessed, suspecting that Tony Thomas, last seen at the Folger in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, had once again cast his spell!

“Of course,” Teo agreed, pointing out that Thomas has added layers of meaning to the world of Twelfth Night. “For example, there’s an opening moment in which Viola has washed up on the seashore, and there is movement that feels like waves lapping over the bodies, and it’s so delicate that it suggests the possibility of both death and survival.”

Thomas is not the only DC artist in this production of Twelfth Night, Teo continued. “Alyssa Keegan, who plays Orsino, was one of those who helped me to understand how to do the play. Todd Scofield is amazing as Antonio; he could fall in love with a rock, and I would believe it. Alina Collins Maldonado is an incredible Olivia. And Lilli Hokama, as Viola/Cesario, has been a tremendous soul, joining me on this journey. I know people will come away thinking, ‘Wow, those actors are Olympians of the mind, heart and spirit.’”

Bottom line, What should audiences expect?

 “I think they can look forward to a really hilarious and sexy time, remembering what it’s like to fall in love and maybe feeling brave enough to do it again.”

Running Time: Two hours and 15 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.

Twelfth Night plays through June 22, 2025, at the Folger Theatre, 201 E Capitol Street SE, Washington, DC. To purchase tickets ($20–$84, with many discounts available), go online, call the Box Office at (202) 544-7077, or visit TodayTix.

To see credits for the cast and creative team, click here.

COVID Safety: While Folger audiences and employees are no longer required to wear masks at most events, masks are welcome and remain an important preventive measure against COVID-19. Anyone needing or choosing to wear one is encouraged to do so. Folger’s current safety protocols are here.

SEE ALSO:
Folger Theatre announces cast and creative team for ‘Twelfth Night’ (news story, April 17, 2025)

The post Director Mei Ann Teo on ‘Twelfth Night’ as a subversive celebration of love appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Is it a satirical farce? Or a farcical satire?

“Either way, it’s a ridiculously funny, fast-moving play set in the nonprofit world, where I spend a lot of my time,” said Larissa FastHorse, the highly acclaimed Native American playwright whose latest opus, Fake It Until You Make It, is now enjoying its regional premiere at Arena Stage. (Click here for DCTA’s review of the play.) 

FastHorse, whose “day job” is raising money for her own theater projects, is all too familiar with the nonprofit scene. In fact, as she pointed out during a lively interview at the Arena Café just before the opening, Fake It depicts a corner of that world, a small office building in which four organizations, similar to her own, serve Indigenous people. The clinker, in this case, is that two of the groups are competing for the same very large grant. And while both are being billed as “Indigenous-serving,” only one is actually Indigenous. The other is white.

According to FastHorse, the idea for Fake It came from Michael John Garcés, the director of Fake It and many of her other plays. The two have worked together for 13 years. “Michael suggested that I write a satirical farce. ‘Your work is so close to farce,’ he said, ‘because of its ridiculous action and the speed at which it’s performed. So why not just go ahead and do it?'”

“So I did,” she laughed.

“The finished play is a lot like French farce — Feydeau’s work, for example — in that there’s a combination of broadness and metaphor. It also allows for a kind of shorthand. For example, you know that if a door slams here, another door will open there. It’s a very free way to write. It’s a bit of a sex farce, too. It’s full of romping naughtiness. It was fun to write, fun to perform, and a lot of fun to watch!

“But beyond the comedy,” she mused, “it asks some serious questions, such as how do we define ourselves? And how do we categorize different groups?”

Like her previous plays, Fake It is about identity, but the emphasis, she averred, is greater than before. “I think I’ve gotten more specific in terms of the forms of identity that I’m exploring,” she told me. “ Right now, there’s a lot of ‘righteous confusion’ about why we identify in different ways. As an author, my job is not to say what I think, but to make you wonder what you think. I want to make you aware of the questions. I want you to go home wondering about the play, and then wake up the next morning looking for the answers! If we disagree, that’s fine. But I want you to know why you disagree.

“Bottom line,” she continued, “is that this is an idea play with a lot of jokes.” Put another way, it’s a silly play with a serious theme, which is a rare, but entertaining, combination, and one that is especially relevant today.

“This is going to sound Pollyanna-ish,” she said, “but we need comedy and laughter, and we need a space in which to come together to face difficult truths. Theater brings you face-to-face with people with whom you both agree and disagree. It forces you to hear people saying out loud the words and ideas that you don’t want to say or think. There is nothing like laughter to bring people together. Comedy forces us to engage, it forces us to see each other as human beings, because we laugh at the same things. And we have to go through this — the question of racial identity, or who we are — together.”

The play also deals with a Native American concept called two spirit identity, which is the idea that some people possess more than one gender. “It’s not a stigma,” she explained, “since people who have two genders are considered more sacred than others because they know more.” In the play, there are two characters — out of six in all — who have this kind of dual identity.

Four of the six actors in the cast are Native American, though from different tribal nations.

FastHorse herself is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation. Although she was born on the reservation, her family moved to Pierre, the capital city of South Dakota, when she was an infant. Her father was a leading educator who parlayed a degree in sociology into a role in the state corrections system. Later, he was one of the founders of two tribal colleges and created the sociology department at a community college in Pierre. “He was always interested in why people behave the way they do,” she said, adding that this play owes a lot to his work. “Fake It studies how people relate to each other.”

Although she began her career in classical ballet, she was forced to switch gears, after 10 years of dancing and choreographing her way across some of the top dance stages in America, due to an injury.

Now 53 — and looking twenty years younger (“the effect,” she laughed, “of doing ballet for so many years”) — FastHorse did not begin writing for the stage until she was 35.

At first, she tried writing for TV, but while she was good at it, she didn’t enjoy it. “Live theater is much more like ballet,” she said. “And farce, with its emphasis on movement, involves a lot of choreography.”

However, she did ultimately return to TV, beginning in 2019, with a series of projects for the Disney channel, NBC, and Apple TV. Along with Ty Defoe, she founded a new company, called Indigenous Direction, which boasts theaters, universities, and even the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade among its consulting clients.

Though she is best-known for The Thanksgiving Play — a big hit in New York in 2023, when it became the first work by a female Native American playwright to make it to Broadway — that was by no means her first play. Nor was Fake It Until You Make It; both plays date back quite a few years.

Her first play, directed by Michael and mounted nine years ago in LA, was called Urban Rez. (That play is now part of a trilogy, scheduled for publication later this year.)

She and her husband, the sculptor Edd Hogan, live in Santa Monica, not far from the Mark Taper Forum, which celebrated its re-opening, after a long hiatus, with the world premiere of Fake It Until You Make It.

Asked why people should see it, she laughed out loud and pointed out the obvious. “Because everyone needs to laugh! Laughter is important for mental and physical health. Laughter adds years to life. It’s incredibly beneficial,” she said. “I love comedies. When I go to the theater, I want to be rewarded as well as challenged by new ideas.” She and Michael laugh all the time while developing new plays or concocting new ways to rectify old ones.

Why Arena? “I’ve known Artistic Director Hana Sharif for many years,” she said. “We worked together in Baltimore, back in 2015, and both served on the Theater Community Board. And we spent some really wonderful time together at a women’s retreat.”

Is there anything else that DCTA readers should know? I asked.

“Yes,” the playwright fairly shouted, her words echoing in the otherwise empty Arena café. “Everything, from the murals and music in the lobby to the art in the set and the actors’ costumes, has been created with the input of Native American artists and craftspeople.

“It costs more to commission everything, but Arena was committed to doing the right thing — and to making sure everything was paid for, rather than taken, as many theaters do, as ‘courtesy’ donations.

“The production,” she concluded, “is incredible.”

Fake It Until You Make It is a co-production with Centre Theatre Group, which unveiled it at the Mark Taper Forum last month. With just two more weeks to run, audiences will need to run to catch it before it leaves.

Fake It Until You Make It plays through May 4, 2025, in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, 1101 6th St SW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($45–$149) are available online, by phone at 202-488-3300, or in person at the Sales Office (Tuesday-Sunday, 12-8 p.m.); tickets are also available at TodayTix. Arena Stage offers savings programs including “pay your age” tickets for those aged 35 and under; military, first responder, and educator discounts; student discounts; and “Southwest Nights” for those living and working in the District’s Southwest neighborhood. To learn more, visit arenastage.org/savings-programs.

Running Time: 90 minutes with no intermission.

The program for Fake It Until You Make It is downloadable here.

COVID Safety: Arena Stage recommends but does not require that patrons wear facial masks in theaters except in designated mask-required performance (Tuesday, April 29, at 7:30 p.m). For up-to-date information, visit arenastage.org/safety.

Fake It Until You Make It
By Larissa FastHorse

SEE ALSO:
Clever farce ‘Fake It Until You Make It’ at Arena sends up the absurdity of identity (review by Eileen Miller, April 12, 2025)
Arena Stage announces cast and creative team for ‘Fake It Until You Make It’ (news story, March 23, 2025)

The post Larissa FastHorse on her ‘idea play with lots of jokes’ at Arena Stage appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Censorship and parental rights are not normally the stuff of comedy. But when the play is by Sharyn Rothstein, a writer known for her comic touch, the shouts of protest are easily turned into gusts of laughter when their absurdity is exposed.

That’s just what happened when Bad Books, Rothstein’s latest opus, was unveiled in a free reading as part of the Bonnie Hammerschlag National Capital New Play Festival two years ago at Round House Theatre. The workshop went on to win a rolling world premiere, starting this month, with full-scale productions at theaters across the U.S.

Of course, it helped to have two of DC’s most talented actors — Kate Eastwood Norris and Holly Twyford — reading the scripts. Happily, the two will reprise their roles in the world premiere, opening this week at Round House. Kimberly Gilbert, a third star in the DC firmament, will be understudying both roles.

Bad Books is the highlight of this year’s Festival, which includes workshop readings of four new plays, whose authors hope to emulate Rothstein’s success.

Having interviewed the playwright before — when her musical adaptation of Hester Street was produced at Theater J last year (click here for my feature in DCTA) — I was eager to catch up with her now. We connected over Zoom.

“This play is literally snatched from today’s headlines,” I said, pointing to the proliferation of book banning, now spreading as fast as the California fires, and the increased parental and state control of what’s taught in the nation’s schools.

Yet the headlines are not new. In fact, as Rothstein pointed out, she actually began writing Bad Books a few years ago, when the issue of parental control first arose.

“There were all these meetings,” she explained. “The town library, the school board, the town council. And I was struck by how these meetings — which you might call protests — were happening all over the country.

“As a writer, I am very wary of censorship. So I wanted to write about it, as seen through the eyes of a badass librarian, one who defies the image of that role.

“And I thought, well, if I’m going to write about a badass librarian, I need to give her a worthy opponent. And this character — a mother who wants a book taken off the shelf at a local library — just came into my head.

“So now I have two women who come into a play with all of their preconceived notions about each other. And over the course of the play, a lot of these notions fall away. The play is meant to be a glimpse of where we are as a country, in terms of books and censorship and parents’ rights, which, by the way, is a term that I find endlessly fascinating.”

“Because you’re a parent?” I asked.

“Yes,” she laughed, “because I am a parent, and I always feel like I don’t know what I’m doing!

“Censorship,” she continued, “has become an increasingly pressing issue. We need to have an honest conversation about what freedom of expression means in this country. But we’re not having that conversation. We’re talking around it. Part of it is because the people who believe in censorship think they’re hearing the word of God.

“It’s the same as it was in the McCarthy era,” she said ruefully, “in that the people railing the most about freedom of speech are also the ones who are trying to curtail it. Those are some of the issues that arise in the play.”

Censorship is not the only topic that is skewered in Bad Books. “But it’s not a political play per se. It’s about a mother and a librarian, people who have to deal with these issues in their community, and they’re doing it for the sake of the kids in their community.”

“What about the comedy in the play?” I asked.

“Comedy is something else that gets lost in all these hyper-political debates,” she explained. “Comedy is what makes people pay attention. Comedy makes us listen to each other, hear each other, and process difficult things with each other. It doesn’t need to be a form of cooperation, but it helps.

“So yes, there’s a lot of humor in the play. And the heart of the play is that it’s not just parents but members of the community who are all trying to do the best they can for the kids.

“The play asks if we’ve overlooked what’s best for our kids. We have all these hyper-charged debates about how we’re protecting them by taking the books off the shelves. To me, it feels like we’re forgetting the kids. We forget that the kids themselves have a voice.”

Knowing that Rothstein and her husband have two children, a 13-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, I wondered if the play had grown, at least in part, out of an experience they had had with a school librarian.

“No, it didn’t,” she assured me. “But it did grow out of my experience as a parent. When I was watching the parental rights movement at the beginning, I kept thinking to myself , sometimes jealously, ‘Oh, look at all these parents who know the best thing to do for their kids.’ And I wondered, ‘How can they be so sure?’

“It also comes from wanting our kids to be safe. We all want our kids to be healthy and happy. And I can understand people going to extremes, just trying to safeguard their children.”

She then told me about an incident that took place in Tennessee, when she was there working on a play. One of the actresses was upset because the school her children attended, in Nashville, was being roiled by huge parental protests over mask mandates.

“She was saying that she and her family loved this school, they felt like this was their community, but now they felt like they might need to remove their kids because of the parental outrage. Hearing her anguish over this had a huge impact on me.

“And I was thinking, Oh, it must be so destabilizing to think ‘I live in this town. I love this community, and then all of a sudden, these parents, who I thought I knew, have very different ideas on how to protect our children. And I’m sure that experience went straight into the play.”

Rothstein considers herself fortunate to have landed at Round House. “They gave me a killer workshop,” she said, still awed by the idea that Norris and Twyford had embraced the project. The two actors — both Helen Hayes Award winners — love playing against each other. (In fact, this is their tenth joint project.)

She also feels lucky to have landed Ryan Rilette, who is the artistic director of Round House, as director of Bad Books. “He’s been a stalwart supporter of this play from the very beginning,” she pointed out. But the bottom line is that the Washington audience is receptive.

“DC audiences demand good theater, and they support it too,” she observed.

Although she and her family are normally based in Brooklyn, they moved to LA last August so that Rothstein could work on Suits LA, a prime-time TV series on NBC. The show is a spinoff of the original Suits, for which she was a writer for five years. This time around, she’s both a writer and the co-executive producer.

Like a lot of other playwrights nowadays, she writes for both television and the stage. “They feed each other,” she said. “The more I write for TV, the more I’m hungry for the stage.”

Back to Bad Books: “Should parents bring their kids to this play?” I asked.

“Definitely,” she responded, “but only if they’re high school-age.” The play, she added, deals with adult themes. But teenagers — and their parents — will find it very funny.

Bad Books plays from April 2 to 27, 2025, at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, MD (one block from Bethesda Metro station). Tickets ($50–$108) can be purchased by calling 240-644-1100, visiting the box office, or online. (Learn more about special discounts here, accessibility here, and the Free Play program for students here.)

Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

Cast and creative team credits for Bad Books are here (scroll down).

COVID Safety: Round House Theatre no longer requires that audience members wear masks for most performances. However, masks are required for the performances April 22 and 26 (matinee). Round House’s complete Health and Safety policy is here.

Bad Books
By Sharyn Rothstein
Directed by Ryan Rilette
Featuring Kate Eastwood Norris and Holly Twyford
A National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere

SEE ALSO:
Round House Theatre announces lineup for fourth annual festival of new work (news story, March 5, 2025)

The post Sharyn Rothstein looks at censorship ‘through the eyes of a badass librarian’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Is he Arab? Israeli? American? Jewish?
Is he a product of the Middle East? A native Californian?
An actor with 10 years of credits? Author of an autobiographical play?
The answer is all of the above.

Ari’el Stachel is a Tony Award-winning actor who happens to be American-born, of Arab descent, and profoundly Jewish. He is also the star of his own autobiographical play, Out of Character — a funny and poignant account of his struggles with anxiety and his subsequent attempt to adopt different roles — now in its East Coast debut at Theater J. The solo performance, originally staged by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2023, is a joint production of Mosaic Theater and the J.

I talked to Stachel — or Ari, as he prefers to be called — during a lull in rehearsals last month. “Two Jews hanging out on Christmas Eve,” he quipped, describing what turned out to be a long and relaxed conversation on Zoom.

Our discussion ebbed and flowed, veering from his boyhood in Berkeley — where he was the only dark-skinned kid at his Jewish elementary school — through 9/11 and beyond. Having a father who looked like Osama bin Laden was a terrifying experience, he told me, giving rise to years of denial, guilt, and anxiety.

In Out of Character, that journey — from the trauma of school to the triumph of a Tony for his role as a Middle Eastern trumpet player in The Band’s Visit on Broadway — is enacted with Ari, now a boyish-looking 33, playing all the roles.

What follows are some of his remarks, edited for length and clarity.

The play

Out of Character begins on the night when I won the Tony Award. We’re at the afterparty, and I’m surrounded by colleagues and friends who are congratulating me. But I’m sick with anxiety, holed up in a bathroom. Anxiety is eating me up. So I decide to personify the anxiety, using a device I’d learned in childhood, which was to give the disorder a name.

The name I chose was based on a really evil character who appeared in a movie called The Parent Trap. In the film, the wicked stepmother is called Meredith. So I named my disorder after her and made Meredith the antagonist of the play.

In the Berkeley Rep production, we used a voiceover to portray the villain. But as we prepared for the East Coast premiere here at Theater J, we realized that it would be more interesting if the character were physically embodied.

So the DC audience is going to get a whole new experience when this Meredith appears. (There are other changes that we’ve made, but I’m not going to give them away. Readers who want to see what we’ve done will have to come see the show!)

I think the idea of a wicked stepmother being an aspect of the hero’s mind is really hilarious. It’s intended to be funny, but of course, we’re talking about anxiety, which is not so funny.

Out of Character is really a dramatic comedy — meaning that it’s funny on the surface but not below. And that’s a good description of anxiety, which is often described as a Jewish disease. It’s one thread of this play.

The theme

The other thread of the play is what it means to be a Middle Eastern Jew.

A lot of the struggle that I had growing up was that — unlike most Jews in the U.S. — I was not a Jew of East European descent, known as an Ashkenazi. I’m a Mizrachi Jew, meaning that I’m Jewish but of Middle Eastern descent. I have a lot of Mizrachi features and traits. And like many of my Mizrachi friends, I don’t feel really accepted in the American Jewish community.

But we’re not accepted in the Arab community either. Why?

Because we’re Jews.

When we talk about Jews in America, we have a very specific image in mind. We think of Jerry Seinfeld or Woody Allen, Jews of European descent. And I always felt excluded from that part of the Jewish community. Yet I’m an American and Jewish.

So in the play, I describe an incident at my Jewish Day School where the kids called me “dark-skinned.” My response was to put on an Israeli accent, but it wasn’t successful.

Then I tried to pass for white. But by that time, I had switched to a public school in a very white suburb, and that didn’t work either. And so I gravitated toward one of the few kids who was Black. We became best friends, and that got me accepted into the Black community.

Looking back, what I was doing was trying on and manipulating different identities.

That’s why the play is called Out of Character. It’s about stepping out of one identity and into another and figuring out who you are. I realized that I had been surviving for years simply by hiding in other roles.

The writing

When I began writing Out of Character, I was in a very different place from the one I’m in now.

I was beginning to appear on TV. My dream of doing solo theater began when I saw Tony Taccone — who is now my director — directing Sarah Jones in her one-woman Bridge & Tunnel. I was transfixed by the play.

Years later, I found myself on stage in a Broadway musical called The Band’s Visit, and the part I was playing was Middle Eastern, which is how I saw myself at the time.

So I started writing this play, Out of Character, which is about race and identity. It was about a kid like me, who passed for Black in order to get through the 9/11 years without being seen as a kid from the terrorist-filled Middle East.

Once I had cobbled together a first draft, I gave it to Tony, who read it, gave me three hours’ worth of notes, and said, “Come back when you’re ready.”

Two and a half years later, we were in a workshop, and I was banging my head against the wall. Tony said, “I just don’t understand what your character wants.” I said, “He wants to be less anxious.” And Tony said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Go write about that.”

I came back the next day. I hadn’t slept, but I had 25 new pages. And that became the driving force of the show.

At one point — during the show’s run at Berkeley Rep — Tony resisted calling this a Jewish play. He thought it might limit the show’s appeal.

But the Jews in the audience were laughing out loud. They said, If it’s about anxiety, then it’s a Jewish play.

On ethnic identity

Until recently, I had identified completely with being Middle Eastern. I didn’t understand that I was Jewish on both sides.

The reason is that I was seen as Brown, not white. In this country, in the school cafeteria for example, kids tend to sit together based on how they look. Since I didn’t look like the other Jewish kids, I identified with those who were Black.

I’m grateful that I had that experience. I’m glad that I wrote the play, and grateful that I’m here in DC, at Theater J, and able to say that someone who looks like me is Jewish. Not half-Arab or half-Jewish, just Jewish.

Working with Tony, I learned that writing an autobiographical play is really hard to do. It sounds easy, because it’s my life. But turning it into a piece of art is another matter.

Somebody once said, Never perform from an open wound. Perform from a scar that’s healed. When I started writing this play, it was still an open wound. And so it was hard to be funny about it. Now that I’m removed from the experience, it’s easier.

On being a Middle Eastern Jew

If you go to a Jewish day school in the United States, you’re not going to see a lot of Middle Eastern Jews. The reason is simple: most of us, a generation or two ago, did not have the resources to emigrate to the United States. When we — or our parents or grandparents — were forced to leave their Arab countries, they settled in Israel, often in the parts of the country that most needed manual workers.

As a result, in Israel, there are as many Middle Eastern Jews as European. But in this country, the Jewish population is mostly of European descent.

My parents, who divorced when I was very young, came from completely different backgrounds. My father, who was born in Israel, grew up in a family that had emigrated from Yemen. He’s the only person in his family who left Israel. Not one of his siblings has a college education.

Here in the U.S., my father is what’s called an Israeli hustler. He’s very entrepreneurial, like most immigrants. When he first moved to this country, he did odd jobs. He was a taxi driver. He sold hotdogs. And eventually he started his own flooring company, which ultimately turned into a real estate enterprise.

My mother’s side of the family is the opposite. My grandfather, whose family emigrated from Europe, is a professor of physics. Everyone on the Ashkenazi side is intensely intellectual.

On 9/11 and his father

The attack on the World Trade Center plays a big role in the play because it shifted the way Middle Easterners were — and still are — seen in this country.

My dad, who has a big beard, was often compared to Osama bin Laden. And that made me want to shed any resemblance to him. I wanted to jump out of my skin and become someone else. To literally step out of character.

And so in the play, I try to pass as white. I cut off my hair and put a ton of gel on it. But then the kids see my dad and that’s the end of that. I move on to middle school and start pretending to be Black.

I start making up a terrible story, which is that I don’t have a dad. And I start fantasizing that I’m not my father’s son.

That fabrication lasted all the way until college, when I went east to the Tisch School at NYU to study acting and singing. That’s when I realized that I was almost an adult and that I couldn’t lie any more about who I was.

I realized that I was denying my father’s very existence, just to legitimize my story.

So yes, this play is really about my father and about the guilt I feel. I loved him, but there was a terrible social cost to being his son.

October 7

Flashing forward, I thought 9/11 would be the last thing that could affect my sense of who I was. But October 7 (the day the Hamas attack on Israel started the current war) had an even greater effect, bringing me even closer to my identity as a Jew. So now I’ve integrated October 7 into Out of Character as well.

October 7 is also one of the reasons for my choice of Theater J. Out of Character is a Jewish story. But it’s also about the diversity of the Jewish American experience. And that’s what I’m really getting at.

I feel more connected to the Jewish community — and more accepted by it — since October 7 than I have ever been.

Certainly I experienced a revelation. And that was that despite all the confusion about my Arab versus Jewish identities in America, the reality is that Jews and Arabs are one, and I’m living proof of that.

But of course the world is not ready to be united at this moment.

Closing words

Growing up in northern California was an isolating experience for a person of color. The Bay Area, as liberal as it is, doesn’t have a robust Jewish community and certainly has never had the diversity that cities like New York or Los Angeles do.

New York has many Middle Eastern synagogues. Los Angeles has its large Persian-Iraqi Jewish community.

I wonder: If I had grown up in either of those cities, with kids who looked like me, would my story ever have existed?

I think not.

In New York, people sometimes thought I was Dominican because of my dark curly hair. But people in California don’t even know what a Dominican looks like.

After The Band’s Visit and the Tony Award, I had plenty of opportunities. But I didn’t want to be a part of a small story. I wanted to build something of my own. And so I set out to write this show, my first solo piece.

It’s not a thing that people do after they’ve won a Tony Award for a Broadway musical. It’s not sexy. And it wasn’t what my agents and managers expected. But I survived. I did a lot of TV shows and movies, and had a fabulous time.

But now I want to start my own theater company.

I want something that I can feel really passionate about, something that focuses on stories of multiculturalism and on those, like me, who feel like outsiders growing up. That’s what I feel really passionate about. And I think that it will be accomplished in the next five years.

I had an epiphany a few weeks ago. I was in rehearsal at Theater J, in a small studio on the first floor of the JCC. I was having the time of my life, and I thought to myself: I’d rather produce plays I care about, in a small theater with 150 seats, than continue breaking my head.

Out of Character plays through January 26, 2025, presented by Theater J and Mosaic Theater Company of DC at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater in the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($69–$80, with member, student, and military discounts available) online or by calling the ticket office at 202-777-3210 or by email (theaterj@theaterj.org).

Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission.

The program for Out of Character is online here.

Out of Character
Written and Performed by Ari’el Stachel
Directed by Tony Taccone
A Berkeley Rep production co-presented by Theater J and Mosaic Theater Company

The post Ari’el Stachel on seeking a self ‘Out of Character,’ at Theater J appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

“To act — or not to act.” That is the question posed by the central character in Data, Matthew Libby’s astonishing new play, now in its world premiere at Arena Stage.

That character, named Maneesh, is a somewhat naïve 22-year-old, just out of college and eager to secure the approval of his colleagues at a large, but highly secretive, organization. His dilemma, when faced with the potential consequences of the company’s work, is whether to expose or accept its secrets.

Blown away by the play — and its ability to weave together the classic with the not-yet-happening modern — I cornered the 29-year-old author for a video interview, conducted from the Arena lobby a few weeks before I saw the production.

“It’s a fast-paced thriller set in the sleek, sunny world of Silicon Valley,” Libby began. “And it’s all about the dark underbelly of this world, a bit of a black box, controlling much of our lives and institutions.

“I wanted to get across the excitement of this world, to help people see why it’s so enticing, so full of idealism and wit before you get to the dark core underneath,” he added.

In fact, Libby thinks parts of the play are funny. “I think there’s an inherent absurdity that the play gets into. There’s a lot of F-bombs and a lot of technical jargon, but it’s less about the audience understanding every word than it is about giving a picture of a world in which jargon dominates, revealing or hiding intention.

“In the end,” he added, “I think it’s meant to be an entertaining thrill ride with a lot of highfalutin’ themes baked in.”

The play focuses on four employees at a fictitious corporation called Athena Technologies, a software company for data analytics. (According to Libby, it’s loosely modeled on a real-life company that operates in a highly secretive manner, creating software that allows its clients to identify people or trends that may affect their business or industry — or even, perhaps, society as a whole.)

The central character, Maneesh (played by Karan Brar with a deft combination of shyness and humor), is a brilliant entry-level programmer who is promoted to a secret division at the company. When Maneesh discovers the true nature of the project, he is faced with a crisis of conscience.

The question Maneesh confronts is whether to expose the project — joining another whistle-blower who needs his help — or go on working on it, regardless of the consequences.

“The project itself is a mystery,” Libby explained. Since it’s not revealed until the second half of the play, I’ll leave that for audiences to discover.

Asked whether Maneesh is the playwright’s alter ego, Libby laughed and admitted that there were certainly some ways in which the two were similar.

“I’ve been told by my parents that his speech patterns replicate mine,” he added with a wry grin.

More significantly, both the author and his creation are graduates of Stanford University, with degrees in cognitive science — which is the basis for what is known today as artificial intelligence, or AI — and both are concerned about the potential danger of the data-mining industry.

“It’s a billion-dollar industry, and it’s been a big concern to me even before the AI boom began,” he said, adding that the introduction of ChatGPT — which really set off the boom — has not only magnified his concern but radically increased the relevancy of the play.

On the other hand, the character is superficially quite different from the author. For one thing, Maneesh is Indian American, the son of immigrant parents who risked their lives to escape persecution and see their sons established in a safe new world.

Libby, on the other hand, is from a well-established family, originally from Europe, and many generations removed from the refugees now arriving.

In creating the character, the playwright also chose to turn the role upside down. “So many stories about Silicon Valley are told from the point of view of the CEO, who is typically a white man who holds all the power,” he said.

“Maneesh, on the other hand, is an entry-level employee. Instead of being charismatic and confident, he’s an anxious 22-year-old, just out of college and dealing with the real world for the first time.”

And instead of being white, he’s a person of color, a child of immigrants whose identity is central to the story.

Everyone bullies Maneesh, yet he handles it with laid-back aplomb. Jonah, his entry-level buddy — and constant ping-pong partner — is a belligerent, ambitious, but none-too-bright employee who hopes that company loyalty will offset his lack of talent. Played to great comic effect by Stephen Cefalu Jr., he wears a company T-shirt and an air of aggressive stupidity.

While Jonah bullies with ping pong — creating a syncopated beat for his arguments — Alex, a senior executive who is Asian American, is more sinuous. Instead of smashing a ball back and forth with a paddle, Alex slithers around on the floor, tempting Maneesh with reminders of the hopes of their families.

Alex and Maneesh are both first-generation Americans; they are eager to please their parents, who have suffered harrowing conditions in order to get their sons into the right schools and then into the right jobs at the right companies. Alex, played with wily but credible charm by Rob Yang, is brilliant and sensitive, but an apologist in the end. (His is the voice of the ultimate corporate or government excuse: “If we don’t do it, someone else will.”)

The most sympathetic of the co-workers — and thus the most persuasive — is Riley, the lone female in the group, who knew Maneesh at Stanford. It is Riley who knows about the new algorithm that Maneesh has discovered, and who uses that knowledge to try to propel him into acting on her side. Isabel Van Natta brings a combination of idealism and affinity to the role that is highly seductive.

The story is told in a series of rapid-fire scenes, separated by screeching sounds and light effects bordering the stage. The shadows cast upon the walls are stark and threatening, stemming from the lighting design (by Amith Chandrashaker) and the extraordinary set (by Marsha Ginsberg), which looks like the inside of a corrugated metal box.

Much of the credit for the taut pacing of the show is due to its director, Margot Bordelon. Called in at the last minute, to replace someone who had a scheduling conflict, she turned out to be the perfect choice.

“Margot and I have known each other for years,” Libby said. “She knew the play, she knew me, and she’d worked at Arena. We even have the same agent!” He shook his head in amazement.

“It was a perfect solution. She agreed to do it in just 72 hours.”

Turning back to the subject of data mining and AI, Libby mused over the question of whether the brain is in fact a computer.

“Even before the AI boom, we were asking what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world,” he explained. “Ask yourself, What does social media mean? What is smart about a smartphone?”

“Those questions are inherently dramatic,” he added.

“What’s interesting is that this play predates the AI boom. I started writing it six years ago, in 2018, at a time when the play had a kind of five-minutes-into-the-future bent. But now that AI is here, it’s five minutes after the event.

“That’s because the technology described in the play actually exists. The use to which it’s put — which becomes the mystery at the center of the play — doesn’t exist yet, but it probably could!”

In fact, every time he went back to the play, often after a break of only a few months, he found that what he thought was the future was in fact the present or the past.

“The question was, How do you write something that feels like it’s current but is probably going to be out of date by the time the play actually opens?” he asked.

The solution, for Libby, was to look at the philosophical and moral questions that underlie the story. In other words, “To act, or not to act…”

The main reason that the play is relevant today, he added, is that it looks at the issue of AI from both a human perspective and a political one.

The political question is paramount. For Libby, the biggest concern about AI is how the legacy institutions — such as the U.S. government and its law enforcement agencies — will use AI as a tool.

“There are many ways in which the proliferation of data can be used to predict or streamline human behavior, and that’s a good thing. The problem, for me, is when these things are done in secret.

“The technologies themselves have no inherent value, good or bad. But there’s an incredible amount of data out there, about every single one of us, regardless of whether we’ve opted in or out. And once the information is out there, as the saying goes, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.”

Stunned, I asked, “Is there anything that cannot be touched by an algorithm?”

“That’s a very relevant question right now,” he responded, “both for us personally, as individuals, and politically, as a country.

“There’s some scary stuff that a president could do, using this technology,” he warned.

“Are you saying that these tools can either illuminate or destroy?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “Yes, I think the data created by AI can be tools of abundance and illumination, but they can also be tools of oppression. They can be used to make people’s lives better. And they can be used to make people’s lives worse. It really has everything to do with the intention behind them.”

What should audiences expect when they see Data?

“Bottom line, it’s a thriller. And it’s got a lot of fast dialogue, which young people like. Young people, more than others, have a real sense of the power they have — the power to look behind the curtain and see a world that really does not want people peering in.

“There’s a lot of Gen Z anxiety in the play,” he added.

At 29, Libby is not much older than the leading characters. And although he’s won dozens of awards for plays presented at college readings and workshops, Data is one of his first plays to be professionally produced. (Another, Sisters — written later than Data but mounted a few weeks earlier, at Northern Stage in Vermont — is also about AI and its consequences.

“Data was originally supposed to have had its world premiere three years ago, but it was canceled due to the pandemic. So it’s been a long time coming,” he said ruefully. But he’s thrilled now to have it at Arena, with a longer run than most new plays are given.

We’re thrilled, too, since that’s a little over three weeks more in which to see it.

Data plays through December 15, 2024, in the Kogod Cradle at Arena Stage, 1101 6th Street SW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($75–$149) may be obtained online, by phone at 202-488-3300, or in person at the Sales Office (Tuesday-Sunday, 12-8 p.m.). Arena Stage offers savings programs including “pay your age” tickets for those aged 35 and under, student discounts, and “Southwest Nights” for those living and working in the District’s Southwest neighborhood. To learn more, visit arenastage.org/savings-programs.

Running Time: Approximately one hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission.

The program for Data is online here.

COVID Safety: Arena Stage recommends but does not require that patrons wear facial masks in theaters except in designated mask-required performances (December 1 at 7:30 p.m.). For up-to-date information, visit arenastage.org/safety.

SEE ALSO:
Driving new drama ‘Data’ at Arena Stage digs into ethics of big tech (review by Bob Ashby, November 10, 2024)

The post Matthew Libby on the dark underbelly of AI and his new play ‘Data’ at Arena Stage appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

The Greeks got it right. They understood the link between art and healing.

And in fact, if Sophocles (or any of his buddies) were around today, they would be greatly cheered by The Art of Care, the extraordinary theater presentation that’s now in the final weeks of its world premiere at Mosaic Theater.

This multifaceted presentation, which incorporates music and movement, celebrates the role of drama as a catalyst for cure.

Depicting the “intimate relation of art to caring and of theater to healing”— in the words of DCTA’s review by editor John Stoltenberg — the production was conceived and directed by Derek Goldman, an internationally renowned playwright, producer, and director.

Goldman is best known for the recent and highly acclaimed production of Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, which debuted at Shakespeare Theatre Company and was subsequently transformed into a PBS television drama.

I wanted to know how the The Art of Care came together, and I managed to corner Goldman one day recently for this lively digital interview. His responses have  been edited for brevity and clarity.

Derek Goldman: The play is made up of the actors’ own stories, and their relationships to care in their own lives. Care is one of those topics that we struggle with and keep private. So the idea is that we use the power of theater to build community and bear witness.

A lot of the content for this piece has been built from conversations the actors have had with me and with each other. We used a method I’ve developed over the years called “In Your Shoes”: Two people in a pair will have a conversation about their relationship to care, and they’ll be recording it. They’ll go away and choose a portion to transcribe precisely, then bring it back to the group and perform each other’s words.

This captures something much more textured and intimate than if people are writing their own stories. It catches us in the immediacy and intimacy of how we actually choose to share this material in the moment with someone who has earned our trust.

Ravelle Brickman: When you were choosing the cast, did you choose them for their stories or their acting ability?

That’s a great question. I think both. All of them are deeply committed to the ancient idea of the artist as storyteller and witness.

Some of them are people I’ve known and worked with extensively over many years and others I’ve just gotten to know. But I felt all of them would bring deep generosity and empathy and life experience to the process of going into what would be very vulnerable and intimate places, and they would hold these stories of their selves and each other in a beautiful light. Acting talent in and of itself wasn’t the primary consideration.

I was also interested in the kind of grace and beauty of their humanity as performers because they’re handling material that is so moving and so personal. They needed to be the kind of artists who take care of themselves and one another.

Had you heard the stories before?

For the most part, no. The process has been about inviting people to share stories, but because of the history of my relationship with them, there are things that I knew about each of them when we began.

Like, this person is a refugee from Syria who is navigating staying together in a spousal relationship with someone far away. And this person I know is a cancer survivor who’s been caring for her terminally ill mother. And this person I know went through a very scary illness themselves.

I knew this much, but it took gathering people to actually get the full story. Even among the actors, some of whom have known each other for 20 years said, “I had no idea, I didn’t know that about you at all.” Even though we’re close, we don’t necessarily share the full story of the things that are at the real core of who we are.

Had you worked with all of them before?

No. Four of them — Billie Krishawn, Tom Story, Susan Rome, and Tuyết Thị Phạm — I’d worked with on other meaningful projects, and that had led to trust and rapport. The other three — Jabari Exum, Raghad Makhlouf, and William T. Newman — are people I’ve gotten to know through the project. So it’s a spectrum.

The goal of this piece is not to expose people in any way. It’s the opposite: to empower them and their sense that their story is worth telling. It was very important that people could feel that they might trust sharing a story in a room with just us — maybe not even a whole story but just a thought. A reminder I get all the time from “In Your Shoes” work is that anytime we’re in a room with other people, we barely scratch the surface of all of the connections and deep things that might be there between us. So it was a process where people really could go in and talk about grief, illness, childbirth, the humanitarian role of care — very beautiful personal stories that are very close to the bone

Wouldn’t you say that a lot of what they’re talking about is normally hidden?

Yes. Our society tends to cordon off a whole set of things, and that produces stigma and shame and a sense that the things that we are going through in our mortal bodies and in our lives and struggles are to be borne alone. There are so many things that contribute to this — our cult of individualism in America, our need to be winners, to beat the thing, to be victorious over the thing.

These are the kinds of stories that people might share with the people closest to them but wouldn’t think to share more broadly. To me, they’re exactly what we need in the theater because they are at the core of what’s going to bring us together as human beings. The oldest thing theater does is have us be able to see ourselves in another and go, “Oh, that person looks different from me, their life experience is different, but we’re connected in this way.” These stories offer a way into that.

People have asked me, “Will it be depressing?” And I think it’s the opposite because it’s profoundly uplifting to see that the things that you hold dearest, you’re not alone with.

There’s going to be people who are like, “Oh, I’ve seen Tom Story or I’ve seen Susan Rome in like 20 plays, and I think I know them through those roles, but I’ve never actually known anything about them, I’ve never heard anything about their stories.”

One of my hopes for the piece is that it may allow audiences to widen their lens on how they think about the lives behind the work. They see what is actually going on in the lives of artists. That is very much what’s in all of our lives — we all have stuff that we’re dealing with every day — why should actors only pretend and play a role that’s fictional?

Why shouldn’t there be a form for them to share their own beautiful, hard-won experience as storytellers? That’s what this piece invites them to do.

It’s about storytelling.

It’s very much about storytelling, very deeply. I’m just discovering the degree to which it’s about the power of story.

What do you want audiences to take away?

We have a crisis of care in our world that I think most audience members have some personal connection to. What this piece provides first and foremost is a sense that those experiences are seen, are communal, are connected, and that people can be moved by saying, “I’m less alone in this than I thought.”

The resilient stories of the ensemble will provide insight, strength, inspiration, and emotion, and that is what theater does well, which is connection. I see the piece as kind of a celebration, not in a let’s-have-a-party kind of way, but as a celebration of our human capacity to care.

It wasn’t my choice to open it the week of the election. But the timing has turned out to be serendipitous, as the piece is offering something deeply resonant with this moment that is also not about electoral politics or opinions or who is right but is offering a balm of human connection at a time when people are starved for it.

It’s been so gratifying to see how audiences of vastly different ages, cultural backgrounds, and experiences are all finding something deep and profound to connect with. Often long after the performance, the lobby is still filled with people responding to the piece, sharing their own stories about care, making deep connections, opening up to one another. That outcome feels like such an unexpected gift right now.

What should audiences expect when they walk in? What are they going to see?

They should expect to be deeply welcomed and to be made to feel at home and to find people and stories that they relate to.

This isn’t like some high-on-a-pedestal artistic idea about care. People are going to be wowed by the honest beauty of these artists, by just their whole personhood — not pretending to play a character or channeling themselves into someone they’re not, but offering who they actually are in a very richly performative, honest way.

The Art of Care plays through November 24, 2024, presented by Mosaic Theatre Company in partnership with The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, performing in the Sprenger Theatre at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC. Tickets ($53, Thursday and Friday; $70, Saturday and Sunday) are available online.

Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

Ticket Discounts
Rush Tickets: Limited amount available via walk-up cash purchase one hour before start of performance.
Senior Discount (65+): Save 10% with discount code: SENIOR
Student Rate: $20 tickets with discount code: STUDENT
Educator Rate: $20 tickets with discount code: EDUCATOR
Military and First Responder Rate: Save 10% with discount code: HERO
Patrons 30 and younger can access $25 tickets to Mosaic mainstage performances: code UNDER30

The program for The Art of Care is online here.

COVID Safety: Masking is recommended, however it is no longer mandatory — masks in theaters and public spaces at the Atlas Performing Arts Center are now optional. For the latest information, visit mosaictheater.org/health-and-safety.

SEE ALSO:
Theater as healer in ‘The Art of Care’ at Mosaic (review by John Stoltenberg, November 5, 2024)

The post ‘At the real core of who we are’: Derek Goldman on ‘The Art of Care’ at Mosaic appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Theatergoers who missed Theater J’s sold-out production of How to Be a Korean Woman in January will have a second chance to see it when the playwright, Sun Mee Chomet, returns to Washington next week to perform in her own story.

The play — originally staged as part of a trio of solo performances — is about a Korean American Jewish woman who embarks on a search for her birth parents. Finding them leads her to question who she is.

It’s a fascinating story, and a timely one, since people with multicultural identities are increasingly visible today.

“Look at Kamala Harris — a woman who is both South Asian and Black — even though some politicians can’t grasp that!” Chomet exclaimed.

“Every person’s story is compelling and complicated,” she added, as we settled down for a lively Zoom conversation about the play and how it came about.

How to Be a Korean Woman, she explained, is the story of how she — a well-known actor, playwright, and feminist — was able to track down her birth family, only to find that they, like most of their compatriots, were still bound by the rules of a highly patriarchal society.

She was stunned. Korean women, she learned, have few legal rights.

“Single mothers are stigmatized,” she said, still amazed that this could be true in the 21st century. “Women who get divorced are ostracized and often denied the custody of their own children.”

The discovery — movingly portrayed in the play — was more than a shock. It forced her to question her own identity.

“I’m the product of two mothers,” she said. “My American mother is a feminist. She’s brilliant and strong, and a wonderful role model for me.”

Her Korean mother is also brilliant and strong, but she is the product of a patriarchal society that has created many barriers for women, and especially for those who have children out of wedlock.

At the time that she found all this out, she was playing Antigone at the Guthrie Theater in Seamus Heaney’s Burial at Thebes. She began to question who she was.

“As an actor, you draw from your own experience, from who you are. But suddenly, I didn’t know who I was. I was completely discombobulated.

“Writing this play was a way out, a way to navigate my way back to who I am.”

How to Be a Korean Woman was first staged in Minneapolis in 2013. For this production, Theater J asked the playwright to elaborate on the role of Judaism in her adoptive family. As a result, two scenes have been added.

Theater J has also commissioned a new play from Chomet, scheduled for the 2025/26 season. That play will delve into her relationship with her adoptive grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who emigrated from Nazi-controlled Vienna in 1938.

Chomet, who lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, describes the city as a mecca for actors.

“I do more acting in Minneapolis/St Paul than I would living anywhere else,” she laughed, adding that there is plenty of work on stage. And the cost of living is low.

Before the pandemic, there were more theaters per capita in the Twin Cities than in either New York or Washington. Today, there are many Asian American theaters located there.

“That means there are more roles for Asian American actors,” she said.

St. Paul is also home to a lot of Korean adoptees, drawn, in part, because of the many social-service organizations based there serving multicultural families.

Although Chomet moved there originally to attend the University of Minnesota, she dropped out during graduate school, then continued at New York University, where she graduated with a master’s degree in acting.

She returned to St Paul and settled there for good in 2005, finding a community in which she felt completely at home.

Although she started out as an actor — credits include the New York Public Theater (Suzan-Lori Parks’ premiere of Sally & Tom), Lincoln Center (brownsville song: b-side for tray), and the Broadway Tour of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses — Chomet has gradually shifted to playwrighting.

The reason? “There are too few roles for Asian Americans,” she said ruefully.

Hopefully, that will change. Her first play, Asiamnesia, was voted “Best New Script of 2008” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and is included in the anthology Asian American Plays for a New Generation (Temple University Press, 2011).

Looking back, Chomet reflected on the fact that both feminism and Judaism were important in her upbringing. Although her mother was — and still is — Protestant, her father and grandparents were Jewish, and the family was part of the Jewish community in Detroit.

“This play, among other things, focuses on a dichotomy that exists throughout the U.S. and Europe,” she said.

“The dichotomy is that we, as Korean adoptees, are being asked to expand our Jewish identity, while within the Jewish community we’re seen as outsiders.

“For example, when I was in Vienna doing research on my father’s family, I was introduced by a dinner host as someone who was ‘not really Jewish.’

“Can you believe that?” she asked. “People actually question whether I am really Jewish!” She shook her head in disbelief. “We forget that many Asian babies were adopted into Jewish families, and then brought up within the community.

“I want to challenge the Jewish community worldwide to accept the fact that adoptees are as Jewish as those born within its realm, not only as cute children under the protective wings of their parents, but as adults who navigate the world on their own, facing discrimination and challenges to their own identities.

“This is an opportunity for Jewish communities to look at who we, the adoptees, are, now and in the future,” she concluded. “It’s a chance to expand and embrace our complex identities as a vital part of Judaism!”

Running Time: 85 minutes with no intermission.

How to Be a Korean Woman plays from September 12 through September 22, 2024, presented by Theater J at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater in the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($50–$70, with member and military discounts available) online, by calling the ticket office at 202-777-3210, or by email (theaterj@theaterj.org).

To read the program online, click here.

To read the Audience Guide, click here.

SEE ALSO:
A daughter aches to connect with her birth mother, in ‘How to Be a Korean Woman’ at Theater J (review by Lisa Traiger, January 8, 2024)

The post ‘Suddenly, I didn’t know who I was,’ says Sun Mee Chomet as her hit ‘How to Be a Korean Woman’ returns to Theater J appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

She’s been compared to Charlie Chaplin, called a comedian and a trickster, and is occasionally mistaken for a character who’s fallen out of Waiting for Godot.

She’s also been described as magical, mysterious, and funny.

Her name is Julia Masli, and it’s little wonder that her newest show — a solo performance called ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (that’s seven times ha) — was accorded top honors at the Edinburgh Festival last year.

Since then, the show has had sold-out runs in New York, LA, Sydney, and London. It arrives in Washington on July 17 for a brief engagement at Woolly Mammoth before returning to London, where Masli, who grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, now lives.

I caught up with Masli in New York, where she was taking a break from her U.S. tour and checking out other shows and museums.

“New York’s energy is inspiring,” she said, as we settled in for a lively chat over Zoom. She had just returned from seeing the new Jenny Holzer exhibition at the Guggenheim, which she described as “getting out of my own bubble.”

“Whenever you’re described as an ‘Estonian clown,’ people laugh,” I said. “Why is that?”

She laughed in response. “It’s because when you say ‘Estonian clown,’ people think it’s a joke! I think it’s because most people have never heard of Estonia.”

Also, the idea that someone would choose to make a career out of clowning sounds silly, she added. Truth be told, if she had her way, she’d call herself an architect.

“An architect of joy!” she repeated, gleefully. Because that, in a way, is what she sets out to do whenever she’s in front of an audience. She’s building connections, using laughter as mortar.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is her fourth play to be produced. It’s about problems. Personal, public, and global problems. Literally.

She opens the show by asking members of the audience to tell her about their problems. She then tries, comically and ingeniously, to solve them, often to ludicrous and hilarious effect.

Since the show is billed as “interactive” — meaning that each skit is built on a problem proffered by an audience member — every performance is different. It’s not improv, but the solutions and comedy engendered depend on who is in the audience, and which problems they choose to share.

Is it lost love? The climate? Eating or sleeping? Dating? Or fixing a chair? Those are some of the topics the came up last month at Soho Playhouse in New York.

“Every show is different,” she explained, “because every person is different. Everyone is human, with heart, brains, and guts, but every human is unique.”

Prior to ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, she created Choosh, about an East European immigrant’s struggles in America, in 2022, and Legs, which is about the limbs we walk on, in 2019. Both won comedy awards at the Edinburgh Festival.

A fourth show, Anna Karenina Na Na, performed with the Pushkinettes, was produced in London in 2020 and was a finalist in the Off-West End Awards.

The success of Legs at the Edinburgh Festival was a major turning point in her career. It was an hour-long show, literally about legs, which sprouted improbably from different parts of her body. The audience roared with laughter.

The artificial limbs became a talisman and an important part of her on-stage persona. As a result, when she steps out front at Woolly this month, she will be sporting a gold mannequin leg in place of an arm.

“Is it a sight joke?” I asked. “Or a message?”

“Both,” she said. “But most of all, it’s a private symbol of hope for me.

“Before that show,” she explained, “I had gone through a difficult period where I couldn’t do anything. It ended when I realized that it’s okay to fail. I began with a five-minute skit, called Legs, which eventually grew into a full-hour show. That saved me. I literally got up and started walking again.”

The solution, she added, was accepting the possibility of failure. “I gave up on seeing success as a goal. I started performing because I loved it. It freed me.”

The great thing about the new show, according to Masli, is that it keeps evolving.

“It’s never finished,” Masli continued. “Each show is created in the moment with the audience. That’s my joy and frustration. How simple it would be to know every beat. But it wouldn’t be as exhilarating to perform.”

She and her co-director, Kim Noble, often joke that in 20 years they will still be working on it.

Masli met Noble — a well-known (some say “notorious”) British performance artist and comic — after seeing his show, Lullabye for Scavengers, last year in London.

“I was blown away,” she said. “The show had so much depth and tenderness, yet it was deeply funny.”

She invited him to a work in progress of ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and they teamed up soon after.

“He helped me to go deeper into the material, and not always take the easy route of laughter,” she said, adding that it’s been the best creative collaboration of her life.

Although Masli’s shows often begin at comedy clubs, theaters — and especially Woolly Mammoth, which is dedicated to the production of courageous and invigorating new work — represent a more interesting venue.

“I feel like the show can breathe a bit more in that setting,” she said.

“There’s a big difference between performing at a comedy club and onstage inside a professional theater,” she added. “At comedy clubs, people expect to laugh. Theater is more difficult. It’s more disciplined, but more satisfying.”

On another level, performing on stage is a dream come true. Her parents, who are lawyers in Estonia, sent her off to school in the UK when she was 12 years old, hoping that she would learn English. She did, but she never lost her accent.

That meant that despite her girlhood dreams of becoming an actress and starring in great tragedies, she could not, at age 17, get into a single British drama school.

Unwilling to give up, she moved to France, where she studied mime and other aspects of high comedy under the maestro of clowning, Philippe Gaulier, the now 81-year-old guru whose students have included Sacha Baron Cohen.

Clowning led to the Pushkinettes (described by Masli as three idiots in love with their Russian heritage), then Legs, Choosh, and now ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

What can audiences in DC expect? I asked.

“To laugh. To feel. To be together, to feel connected in a community of strangers. To feel a sense of hope,” she replied.

And while the clowning around is clearly adult, teenagers are likely to enjoy it too.

“People often see the show, then come back with their kids,” she concluded.

Running Time: 65 minutes with no intermission.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha plays from July 17 through August 4, 2024, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St NW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($60–$80, with discounts available) can be purchased online, by phone at 202-393-3939 (Wednesday–Sunday, 12:00–6:00 p.m.), by email (tickets@woollymammoth.net), or in person at the Sales Office at 641 D Street NW, Washington, DC (Wednesday–Sunday, 12:00–6:00 p.m.).

COVID Safety: Masks are required for the performance on Tuesday, July 23, at 8pm. Masks are optional for all other performances. Woolly’s full safety policy is available here.

Special Access:

• Thursday, July 25 at 8pm – Open Caption
• Tuesday, July 30 at 8pm – Audio Described
• Thursday, August 1 at 8pm – ASL

Assistive listening devices are available for all performances. Transmitters and accompanying headsets and ear speakers are available at the Box Office.

SEE ALSO:
A captivating clown whose schtick is trust, in ‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’ at Woolly (review by John Stoltenberg, July 21, 2024)

The post An Estonian clown walks into Woolly Mammoth and … ‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

They’re back!

The five wacky clowns who make up the cast of Happenstance Theater—a company that takes comedy seriously and sees drama as farce—returns to the DC area on Saturday, June 22, with Preposterous!, a deliciously funny show that’s a delight for all ages.

Billed as a “theatrical clown circus,” Preposterous!, which had its debut in 2017, has all the trappings of the big tent, minus the tent.

I saw the show April 27 at Glen Echo Park, where the quintet of clowns—armed with some of the silliest props ever seen on stage—performed in honor of the reopening of the century-old carousel.

The theater—nearly as old as the carousel—was packed, and the show itself was laugh-out-loud funny for everyone in the audience.

Toddlers sitting on the floor laughed as gleefully as their parents, sitting beside them, while the old folks, like this reporter, perched on the edge of their seats and guffawed.

Some of the funniest skits featured Sabrina Mandell and Mark Jaster, the founders of the company, performing comic duets. One involved a violin bow and a saw, while another, equally hilarious, had the two reflecting each other in a magic mirror.

The couple, who met and married in 2005, have made a career of comedy, merging their artistic styles and picking up Helen Hayes Awards and critical raves for their work.

She’s a professional clown, as well as a painter and poet, while he’s a master of mime. (He studied under both the legendary Marcel Marceau and his mentor, Etienne Décroux, and credits Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx for inspiration.)

Company members for Preposterous! are Sarah Olmsted Thomas, Alex Vernon, and Gwen Grastorf, each with his or her particular, or preposterous, style of goofiness.

Thomas, for example, evoked shouts of awe and high-pitched giggles in a skit where she pulled a black tutu over her harlequin tights and then walked—bravely, teetering and tottering with each step—across an invisible tightrope.

Vernon was the musical maestro, playing the xylophone, horns, cymbal, and drums. And Grastorf was ferociously funny as an animal trainer, coaxing Jaster—in the guise of a somewhat petulant lion—who wore a tutu instead of a mane.

A human calliope, powered and performed by the entire ensemble, was a sight joke so funny that words were unneeded.

The costumes, designed by Mandell—who has won two Helen Hayes Awards for the work—were blissfully absurd, ranging from the ringmaster’s jacket (which resembles the one often associated with Napoleon) to classic Harlequin attire.

Mandell also designed the set, which was built by Jaster and Vernon. It’s ingeniously simple, consisting mainly of two folding screens, painted to look like Greek columns, and just large enough for the characters to duck inside and change their costumes.

Other highlights of the show include acrobatics, reminiscent of Commedia dell’arte, synchronicity so perfect it could easily have won the performers a role with the Radio City Rockettes, and facial expressions so droll that even a simple grimace drew loud bursts of laughter.

It’s summer fun, based on the classics—some going back to the 16th century—but performed by a team of first-rate actors and dancers, many well-known on the Washington stage.

Running Time: 50 minutes, with no intermission.

Preposterous! A Theatrical Clown Circus plays Saturday, June 22, 2024, at 10 am, presented by Happenstance Theater performing at Cabin John Regional Park, 7400 Tuckerman Lane in Bethesda. Admission is free. Click here for full summer tour schedule.

SEE ALSO:
How Sabrina Mandell met Mark Jaster and Happenstance Theater began
(feature by Lisa Traiger in DCTA’s The Companies We Keep series, May 22, 2023)

The post ​Happenstance Theater’s wacky ‘Preposterous!’ pops back into DC appeared first on DC Theater Arts.