It is the site-specific soundscape that grabs you and absorbs you: First, as you enter, ambient air raid sirens and bombs bursting, resounding around the underground tunnel you’re in as though there’s a military siege overhead. Then, as you walk along the vast tunnel’s dark curvature lit but by lanterns, you come upon two humans holding on to life in this conflagration, having taken refuge in a basement, now telling their fragile story punctuated by their own vocal emulations of munition fire — volleys of Bang-bang-bang! Ta-ta-ta! Buh-buh-buh-buh-ba-ta-ta-ta!!! —an oral onomatopoetics of fury and resistance, underscored by brazen brass interpolations improvised by this play’s eponymous trumpeter.

Inspired by true events, Ukrainian playwright Inna Goncharova composed The Trumpeter to bear witness to Russia’s months-long bombardment of the city of Mariupol in 2022. The play is set beneath a steelworks warehouse while that war of invasion wages overhead. The play’s main character and first-person narrator is an unnamed aspiring composer who, before the war, made his livelihood as a trumpeter in a marine brigade’s brass band, the other members of which are now all dead. He addresses us as though we are sheltered with him and he’s entrusting us, strangers, with his telling — or perhaps he is deliriously uttering aloud his traumatized mind as though no one else is there. Either way, it is as if we are personally privy to a harrowing wartime experience that no news report can deliver.

The musician whom we meet is attuned as much to silence as to gunfire and detonation. “War is cacophony,” he says at one point,” thus summing up why the unique acoustics of this underground venue serve Goncharova’s stark and trenchant play so perfectly. “I think God forgot the way to our basement,” the musician says, “or never knew it at all.”

The persistent combat-zone cacophony is literal — each bomb blast could mean death — and against its loud lethality, the musician has an artistic aspiration:

I’ve been trying to write. I always have my notebook with me – compact, slips into a pocket. I’m sketching out musical notes by hand: Bang-bang, bang, ta-ta-ta, uh-uh, ta-ta-ta-ta. A Symphony of War. If I finish it and stay alive to arrange and play it, it will be … a bomb. In a positive sense. If this word can have a positive meaning. I’m not doing it for fame, but to understand. To gain insight. Into the nature of war. Its origins, its essence, the restrained low pain of defeat and the sweet high note of victory.

He is trying to find in the destruction all around him sufficient harmony with which to create. Could there be a more apt metaphor for each true artist’s quest? 

The ever-innovative Alliance for New Music-Theatre presented the DC premiere of The Trumpeter as a staged reading in Dupont Underground, which was once a trolley roundabout and is now a multipurpose arts space. The event was offered as audience participation in a development process that, in the fall, will result in a full production in this same super-echo-y space. On the basis of the preliminary reading, The Trumpeter promises to be a riveting theater event.

The part of the unnamed musician was imbued with enthralling emotionality by Michael Kevin Darnall, whose equal partner in authenticity was Lise Bruneau. She read several other characters in the script, including two shelter mates — a soldier named Kolya, a nurse nicknamed Nightingale — as well as the musician’s far-away beloved, Lubya, a beautiful soprano who has fled to the West and whom he knows he may never see again. Together, Darnall and Bruneau startled with their vocalizing sound effects of combat and simmered with resilience and a shared soulfulness as the trumpeter’s tale unfolded. For this reading, an actual trumpet player, Kevin McKee, enhanced their freestyle war sounds with riffs of improvised underscoring. They began reading by lantern light at a Ukraine-flag-draped table; later, they read from music stands on a Ukraine-flag-draped stage. The renowned Hungarian émigré director János Szász gave fascinating shape to the dramaturgy and brought to the whole experience an artful solemnity that held one entranced.

Within the musician’s winding monologue is a passage of surpassing theatricality: “Sometimes this whole basement feels like a theater set,” he says. Touchingly, he imagines his dead brass band mates are merely “offstage.”

Whether the composer finds the symphonic harmony and insight into war he seeks is left in suspension. His bunker mate Kolya isn’t optimistic: “War has no nature!” Kolya says. “Because it’s people who fight! War is in the nature of people. So it is better to write a song…”

The play’s raw depiction of death’s-door survival in a thus-far intractable war of aggression is deeply felt, and lucidly rendered by local acting eminences Darnall and  Bruneau. If the musician character’s abstractly imagistic narrative is not always as clear as it might be when the play is fully staged, The Trumpeter text heard aloud testifies powerfully to art’s singular capacity amid the horror of war to inspire hope.

Says the musician, holding on to such hope:

Survival! This is the main task of each of us, no matter where we are: in the basement of this cursed industrial monster, in the occupied territories or right in the middle of hostilities. We all have to survive, because this war was intended by the enemy to destroy us. If we simply survive, it’s already a big victory.

Running Time: Approximately 70 minutes, no intermission

The Trumpeter was performed as a staged reading on April 28 and 29, 2025, presented by Alliance for New Music-Theatre in Dupont Underground, 19 Dupont Circle NW, Washington, DC.  ANMT will present a full production there in November.

The Trumpeter
By Inna Goncharova
Poems by Peter Mironov
Translated by John Farndon
Directed by János Szász
With: Michael Kevin Darnall and Lise Bruneau
Trumpeter: Kevin McKee

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The idea was both brilliant and brazen: to juxtapose in a theater piece the public testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford about the sexual harassment and sexual assault perpetrated against them in private by two men who went on to lifetime appointments on the U.S. Supreme Court. Like two Cassandras speaking truth to Senate committees determined to disbelieve and disregard them, they each foretold the character of a man — Clarence Thomas in Hill’s case, Brett Kavanaugh in Ford’s — whose subsequent judicial decisions would fuck over women across the nation.

The inspired idea to revisit these job interviews side-by-side became The Ford/Hill Project — created by Lee Sunday Evans and Elizabeth Marvel and directed by Evans — a Waterwell theater production that played two nights at Woolly Mammoth Theatre prior to a brief run at The Public Theater in New York.

The gripping script, dramatically spliced together from transcripts of the hearings — was embodied by an able ensemble — Eric Berryman, Chris Henry Coffey, Amber Iman, Elizabeth Marvel — who all the while wore in-ear receivers through which they heard edited recordings of the words they then spoke aloud. The effect of listening to these actors’ matched inflections was unlike ordinary oral interpretation; more profoundly, it was an audio-vérité channeling of consequential authenticity, and it pulsed with the frisson of resistance to male power.

Said Ford of being sexually assaulted at a party in high school by a drunken Kavanaugh:

Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes.… I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming. This was what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.

Said Hill of being sexually harassed by Thomas when he was her boss:

Judge Thomas … would call me into his office.… After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes.

He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involving various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess….

I told him that I did not want to talk about this subject… My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful.

There’s more. Much more. And because the script intercuts quickly between snippets of speech from Ford and Hill, from their Senate interrogators, and from the two ignominious nominees, there is a momentum in the work that mounts with emotion and portent.

The black-curtained stage is set with simply a semicircle of wooden folding chairs (of which there are nine, foreshadowing the bench the two accused will ascend to). Generally, Amber Iman portrays Hill; Elizabeth Marvel, Ford; Eric Berryman, Thomas; and Chris Henry Coffey, Kavanaugh (all with compelling credibility). But there is a striking scene when the two male actors are seated as witnesses and speak the words of Ford and Hill while the two female actors grill them in the personas of male senators. Though this surprising gender reversal unsettles and somewhat softens the work’s otherwise uncompromising clarity about how structural male supremacy and misogyny are playing out before our eyes, the switch adds a nice nuance: It models visibly and viscerally — as theater can when it wants — empathic identification with another who is different from oneself rather than domination or derogation of another in order to seem a self.

Neither Kavanaugh nor Thomas listened to the testimony of the women whom they wronged, we learn. No walking in another’s shoes for these dudes. Instead, the played-back record shows Kavanaugh’s and Thomas’ apoplectic denials, their enraged sense of entitlement to zero accountability, their shameless refusal to own their actions and apologize — and The Ford/Hill Project puts that callousness in their characters center stage.

In this respect, The Ford/Hill Project performs one of theater’s most noble and necessary functions: to shine a light on character itself, to attune the populace to how a person’s acts betoken who they are, and to prompt the polis to pay attention. What The Ford/Hill Project now holds up to collective discernment is how a particularly gendering prototype of character — belligerent, bullying, deliberately heartless, unabashedly unrepentant — has become normalized and valorized on the national stage, such that now the prospect of another such presidency looms.

One of the most impactful moments in the show is wordless. Iman as Hill and Marvel as Ford, who up to this point have been speaking presentationally to the audience, across the 30 years that separate their testimonies, suddenly turn to face each other and look into each other’s eyes in real time. The moment reads as a silent symbolic bond of unheeded bravery that history has vindicated — and that The Ford/Hill Project has made presciently present.

Running Time: 70 minutes, no intermission.

The Ford/Hill Project (a Waterwell production, presented by Woolly Mammoth in association with the Public Theater) played October 7 and 8 (invited), 2024, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D St NW, Washington, DC.

The playbill for The Ford/Hill Project is online here.

There are resources for survivors here.

The Ford/Hill Project will be performed next from October 16 to 20, 2024, at the Public Theater in New York.

The Ford/Hill Project
A Waterwell Production
Presented by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and The Public Theater
Created by Lee Sunday Evans and Elizabeth Marvel
Directed by Lee Sunday Evans

FEATURING
Eric Berryman, Chris Henry Coffey, Amber Iman, Elizabeth Marvel

Sound Design: Jeffrey Salerno + Mikhail Fiskel
Stage Manager: Katie Young
Costume Coordinator: Amanda Roberge
Associate Director & Creative Line Producer: Maya Davis
Casting Consultants: Rori Bergman + Karlee Fomalont

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As if flying on a drone in pursuit of a flurry of pink petals, one is whorled from world to world, each a spectacularly illustrated field of vision and animated digital display — now an Edenic garden, now a futuristic cityscape, now a medieval village, now a kaleidoscopic tunnel to environs ever beyond. Propelled through portal after portal, one becomes weightless, placeless, subsumed in unfolding scenic wonders on crisscrossing currents of momentum and aurally absorbed in a sound zone of symphonic electronica.

Something like that (individual impressions may vary) is what’s now on offer in an exhibit called ISEKI: Blooming Parallel Worlds through June 2 at Artechouse, a showplace of technology-driven experiential art in Southwest DC. Inspired by the National Cherry Blossom Festival (peak bloom dates this year: March 23–26), the Artechouse Studio artistic team has created an exuberant visual narrative that borrows from the fantasy genres of anime and manga and makes maximum use of a ceiling full of jumbo projectors. As one stands on the balcony by the bar overlooking a vast two-story space, the floor and walls of which are flooded with a sensory overload of imagery in motion, it is as if one becomes the central character in one’s own storytelling — like a solo soul in migration.

There are nearly no words. The creators have trusted each visitor to picture their own story. Only briefly do cryptic signs blink on then off: “AWAKE,” “ANALYZING” — the meaning of which may only be that which each viewer makes of it.

And the hyperreal music is glorious. Calmingly meditative chord progressions like deep-tissue massage for the mind.

The where is all. The when is now. There is no why. Simply follow the flowers, the who is you.

Is this theater? I mentally asked that of ISEKAI before I went to Artechouse and while I was there, and now afterward I’m still mulling. ISEKAI (the word in Japanese means “other worlds”) is certainly theater-resonant, theater-adjacent. When one descends the stairs for a walk around in the vibrantly illuminated room, the vertiginous swirling upon the floor can discombobulate one’s sense of balance like a bemusement ride. Many’s the play that seeks to do that too — to engage us in theater of the self transported and transfigured.

But here there is no applause of appreciation. The exquisitely brilliant performers’ work has all been preprogrammed. They’re done and gone. There is no audience cohesion, no shared emotion, no connection to other humans. It’s a solitary trip through a metaverse, following a flow of flowers. It’s virtual reality without the visor.

Yet in an age when computer-generated graphics are so often deployed in cinema to simulate explosions and combat and terror, it is a refreshing respite to experience technology-infused visual art that is suffused with peace and beauty as ISEKAI is.

And at this juncture in the history of theatrical production when advances in AI and projection technology promise new dimensions of sensorial signfying in theatrical performance, the experience now available at Artechouse is a provocative pointer to what could happen next.

All of which is to say that the question is not “Is this theater?” The question to be asked is “Is it theater yet?”

ISEKAI: Blooming Parallel Worlds is open daily until June 2, 2024 (Monday to Thursday noon to 9 pm; Friday to Sunday 10 am to 10 pm), at Artechouse DC, 1238 Maryland Avenue SW, Washington, DC, walking distance from the National Mall, L’Enfant Plaza, and the District Wharf. Tickets ($17–$31 with special pricing for families Monday–Friday) can be booked in advance online.

(Besides the main projection room described above, Artechouse DC has interactive installations and related exhibits in auxiliary galleries off to the sides, and overlooking the main room is an extended reality bar powered by the Artechouse XR App.)

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Let it be acknowledged that Les Misérables is one of the world’s greatest musicals. I’ve seen it onstage in New York and London and on film, I’ve listened to the album on repeat, and every time the show is a revelation. With its stirring score, sweeping story, and peerless lyrics, Les Mis is unmissable. And happily, the production now encamped in the Opera House at Kennedy Center contains every centime of its magnificence.

Viewing this production, I marveled at how painterly the stage pictures are, and how cinematic the scene shifts, with chiaroscuro backgrounds in motion on scrims and ensembles costumed and lit like Rembrandt meets Bruegel. I thrilled to the sonorous voices and orchestra as they blended sublimely into rich choral sensations set off by sweet and soaring solos. I was touched by actors’ performances that felt found afresh in the moment. Even the extensive intimacy and fight choreography seemed dancerly.

There are so many things to praise about this work, not least the creatives behind it, beginning with the Victor Hugo novel, the Claude-Michel Schönberg book and music, the Herbert Kretzmer lyrics (see complete credits here — the touring company directed by Laurence Connor and James Powell has no weak links). There’s no end of salient things to say about the work’s resonance and execution. But the other night, one particular theme jumped out at me: Though the story is set in 19th-century France and intersects a historical revolution in the streets of Paris — Act Two begins spectacularly at the barricades — the heart of the musical, I realized, is an inner revolution: the epic arc of Jean Valjean’s redemption.

The Prologue establishes that Valjean is being released from 19 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. Never mind that it was an act of charity (the bread was to feed his sister’s child), Valjean reenters civilian life condemned by the law. And the disagreeable Inspector Javert, as agent of authoritarian justice, is not about to let Valjean forget it.

Then the story takes a stunning turn. Valjean, now a penniless ex-con, is caught stealing silver candle sticks from a church altar and is about to be sent back to prison. But the Bishop does a divine intervention: he assures the arresting officer that the silver was his gift to Valjean. By the grace of this Bishop (who would say it was the grace of God), Valjean is free to go. (“Rest from pain, and rest from wrong,” the Bishop sings to him.)

Thus is introduced dramatically the ancient tension between guilt and forgiveness, between punishment and mercy. And how Valjean now chooses to act knowing what’s at stake for him as a moral being is what propels much of the rest of the musical’s plot.

In time, Valjean assumes a new identity; he changes his name and becomes a factory owner and Mayor, and we see him do a series of good works. He rescues a destitute young woman named Fantine, promises to care for her daughter when she is dying (“Good m’sieur, you come from God in heaven,” Fantine sings to him). Then he saves a villager who was crushed beneath a cart (“Monsieur le Mayor, you come from God! You are a saint!” the villager sings to him).

But Valjean feels a sense of unworthiness that he can’t shake. “Men like you can never change,” Javert taunts him in a combative confrontation.

“Who am I?” is Valjean’s sung self-interrogation and is a recurring lyric, notably at a powerful point when Valjean learns that an innocent man who resembles him is going to be sent to prison for something Valjean did. The scene in which Valjean wrestles with what to do is riveting, and the conscience-stricken lyric is right up there with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”:

Who am I?
Can I condemn this man to slavery?
Pretend I do not feel his agony?
This innocent who bears my face,
Who goes to judgement in my place…
Who am I?

Can I conceal myself for ever more?
Pretend I’m not the man I was before?
And must my name until I die
Be no more than an alibi?

Must I lie?
How can I ever face my fellow men?
How can I ever face myself again?

My soul belongs to God, I know,
I made that bargain long ago.
He gave me hope when hope was gone!
He gave me strength to journey on!
Who am I?

At which point in the staging, Valjean bursts into the courtroom and declares himself:

Who am I?
I’m Jean Valjean!

There are many powerful scenes in Les Mis, but for me this one stands out because it most eloquently captures what the art form of theater can uniquely tell us about how who we are is in the ethics of our acts. And Jean Valjean’s inner revolution — his “Who am I?” character arc in search of moral selfhood — is a major reason this musical is so enduring and why it’s essential to see.

Running Time: Approximately two hours and 45 minutes, including one intermission.

Les Misérables plays to April 29, 2023, in the Opera House at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($69–$225) are available at the box office, online, or by calling (202) 467-4600 or (800) 444-1324.

The program for Les Misérables is online here.

COVID Safety: Masks are optional in all Kennedy Center spaces for visitors and staff. If you prefer to wear a mask, you are welcome to do so. See Kennedy Center’s complete COVID Safety Plan here.

The post The enduring magnificence of ‘Les Misérables,’ now at Kennedy Center appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

DC Theater Arts doesn’t often report on staged readings (and never reviews them), but the premise of this one was too delicious to pass up: “Four vengeful, narcissistic actors, with the assistance of a brutish stage manager and a cynical stagehand, abduct and hold captive a theater critic notorious for shutting down productions and ending careers through his malicious reviews.”

Craig Houk’s original comedy Brute Farce has a veddy British Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong vibe about it. Set in “a careworn, scarcely professional, Provincial Theatre in England,” the play sends up not only the venality of the theater critic in question but also the daft vanity of actors.

Houk’s description of the two-level set promises silliness in extremis: “A cramped and unkempt Trap Room which has been converted into a Dressing Room…. Above the Trap Room is the Stage upon which sits a posh 1920s Study, serving as the set for the play within…. A trap door on the Study floor opens into the Trap Room below.”

At rise, the much-unbeloved critic, Alistair McHugh, is manacled in the trap room. It will shortly be established that a cockamamie plan has been hatched to kill him during a play within the play. A disgruntled actor coincidentally named Killian has masterminded the murder, which involves swapping Alistair into the play as a character who normally has a bag put over his head and is fake-punctured with a retractable horseman’s pick — except this time, with Alistair in the role of corpse-to-be, the horseman’s pick will be lethal. It soon becomes apparent that as accomplices go, the other three actors — the lush Quinn, the egocentric Vivian, and the narcoleptic cokehead Fiona — are a hopelessly bumbling bunch. To Killian’s consternation, they’ve lost the plot. Killian urges them to focus on the threat that Alistair poses:

KILLIAN: He’s been relentless in his efforts to undermine and, at times, completely shut down any production that doesn’t suit his impossible standards. And he’s been particularly vicious as it relates to each of us, repeatedly castigating us in his reviews, with the concerted goal of putting an end to our stage careers.

Thus the setup is ripe for hilarious dialog:

ALISTAIR. What can I say? I’m a theatre critic who lives for bad theatre. It’s my one weakness. I exist because there are actors out there who are profoundly self-aware, and who are grateful to hear the truth. And I persist because there are actors out there — like you lot for example — who take me too seriously when you shouldn’t.

VIVIAN. Oh, is that a fact? Do you know, there are mental institutions full to the brim with actors who have taken critics seriously?

ALISTAIR. On behalf of reviewers all over the globe, I’m honored.

…

VIVIAN. Your reviews are unreasonably harsh. And I’ll accept that though it is the responsibility of the theatre critic to be critical, it doesn’t mean that the critic should take pleasure in being cruel.

ALISTAIR. I don’t take pleasure in being cruel. It’s simply a by-product of years and years of exposure to dreadful scripts, second-rate productions, and vomit-inducing performances.

For anyone who’s worked backstage or on-, there are inside jokes aplenty, especially prompted by the seen-it-all stage manager Deirdre and her overwhelmed assistant Reggie. In what has to be one of the funniest props in theater lore, Reggie has rigged an elaborate electrical cueing system involving four colored light bulbs, one for each actor, and four clear light bulbs, one for each scene. The actors all being themselves dim bulbs, the device results in complete confusion.

Judging from an exceptionally well-done staged reading I attended the other night at Anacostia Arts Center, the first act of Houk’s comedy is a near-perfect, laugh-out-loud farce, owing not only to the cockamamie plot but to the comic invective among the bungling actors, harried production crew, and acerbic critic. The show’s synopsis calls Brute Farce “a satirical commentary on the perpetually symbiotic, oftentimes dysfunctional, and occasionally turbulent relationship between actors and reviewers.” And it spares no one.

Throughout Act One that trap door between upper and lower levels keeps accidentally dropping open, a sight gag that presages the goings on in Act Two, when a melodramatic play within a play takes place above intercut with scenes involving the constrained critic in the room below. I felt the comedic momentum go out of the play during the second act, when the focus shifts to the more conventionally unconventional play-within-the-play while the brilliant throughline about offing the critic gets short shrift.

As someone who sometimes plays the part of theater reviewer myself — and as one who believes no critic is above criticism — I thoroughly enjoyed Act One, and I suspect a stronger Act Two could be devised that would turn Brute Farce into a future theater-laughs-at-itself classic alongside Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.

Brute Farce by DC-based playwright Craig Houk is receiving four staged readings (October 27, 28, and 29, 2022) at the Anacostia Arts Center, 1231 Good Hope Road SE, Washington, DC. For additional information on these readings and to purchase tickets ($10), go online.

Running Time: Two hours and 5 minutes, including one intermission.

Brute Farce
Written by Craig Houk
Directed by Lisa M. Hodsoll
Assistant Director: Craig Houk

CAST
Michael Replogle: Alistair McHugh
Matthew Pauli: Killian Black
Karina HiIIeard: Deirdre Shepherd
Dana Scott Galloway: Reggie Brimble
Claire Schoonover: Fiona Bainbridge
Lisa M. Hodsoll: Vivian Pruitt
Steve Lebens: Quinn Ponsonby
Colin Davies: Stage Directions

PRODUCTION TEAM
Production Stage Manager: Laura Schlachtmeyer
Light Designer: Christian Jones
Sound Designer: Craig Houk

The post Craig Houk’s near-perfect ‘Brute Farce’ skewers a theater critic appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Four years ago, three new plays featuring Frederick Douglass opened in DC: The Raid from Theater Alliance, The Frederick Douglass Project from Solas Nua, and The Agitators from Mosaic. They were each terrific; I wrote rave reviews of them all. But none of them featured Anna, the Negro freewoman who arranged for Frederick’s escape from slavery. During their 44-year marriage, Anna bore Frederick five children, managed their household, and — as the magnificent new musical American Prophet now at Arena affirms — was the lifelong helpmeet without whom Frederick could never have had the freedom to become the man we now renown.

In life, Anna was disparaged — for not being able to read, for being darker skinned than Frederick — and in death, she has been dismissed by white historians. But the insightful and inspired authors of American Prophet — Charles Randolph-Wright (book) and Marcus Hummon (book, music, and lyrics) — have rescued Anna from the shadows of history and created a role that Kristolyn Lloyd performs so movingly you will feel Anna’s presence in Frederick’s heart and probably your own.

I could not stop thinking about Kristolyn’s performance as Anna. It had warmth, gravitas, passion, inner strength. She seemed to be channeling a woman with extraordinary historical significance and contemporary resonance, and I wanted to know more. I wanted to know the Anna that Kristolyn had come to know. In a delightful and deep Zoom conversation, punctuated by Kristolyn’s lilting laugh, I found out.

(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.)

John: There’s a note in the program from Charles Randolph-Wright, the book writer and director, that says, “Because of poetry, lyricism, and music, we are able to go into Anna’s journey, which is key to Frederick’s journey… We were empowered to give Anna a voice.” How did you find Anna’s voice for yourself?

Kristolyn: I’m a big believer in ancestral recognition. I have a practice of allowing the ancestors to join in the process because they’re so vibrant, and their presence is so felt. Before every show, I invite Anna into the performance because it’s her story. There’s nothing else for me to do in this moment except be a vessel. And Marcus [Hummon] gave me a very helpful book by Anna’s daughter Rosetta: Anna Murray Douglass, My Mother As I Recall Her.

Once I read that book it was very clear to me why white historians had written about Anna the way that they have: She was the backbone for Frederick and she’s what kept his abolitionist ship afloat. What Black woman in that position had room for niceties? She was busy, and she was very protective of her family. Anna and Frederick had some of the most eclectic people pass through their home, and I can understand that she would want boundaries of some sort in order to keep a sense of home life and domesticity alive while they’re in the midst of trying to save the race.

Anna and Frederick met at a meeting of the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, and in American Prophet, that scene is played to a beautiful song they sing together, “Children of the Same River.” [See video below.] Their cautious waltz is choreographed in a very stylized way such that Anna and Frederick almost touch but don’t — until the song’s end. Would you talk about that breathtaking moment of musicality and physicality?

We found that through our intimacy coordinator, Kaja Dunn. Her work allowed us to have a safe exploration of what is their connection, how does their intimacy look? You use your hands to let your counterpart know what places are safe to touch and explore. We found that there was something very exciting about the spatial relationship between Frederick and Anna before they actually touch at the end of the waltz. It felt very apropos for that time period when where you place your hands on a woman is very indicative of your relationship to her.

It reads today like intimacy with respect — and we get a sense of Anna’s strength and presence.

Later, because of the outside threat to their lives and their love, they can’t even reveal to friends and family that they’re married, and American Prophet dramatizes how Anna helped Frederick escape from Baltimore to New York, a free state, wearing a sailor disguise she made for him. At one powerful point she says to him:

ANNA:
You will be free. My children will not have a
slave for a father.
You are not a slave. Carry that with you, Frederick.
You are not a slave.

Would you talk about Anna’s role at that critical juncture in Frederick’s life and how those words resonate today?

She was already doing abolitionist work before she met him, even before he began his abolitionist work. I’m always struck by that moment because a woman who’s able to emotionally regulate this man in a moment of high panic is a woman that is formidable. I imagine that in moments like that, Frederick fell more in love with her — just the ability to look at this woman and say, Man, I need her and she can show up when necessary. So it is hitting me very deeply when I’m telling him: Carry that with you as you’re making your way to New York and back to me. You are not a slave, regardless of what they call you, regardless of their perception of you, that is not who you are. That is not how I see you.

There comes another point in Anna’s journey when Frederick is living in the spotlight and she’s living in his shadow, and that’s dramatized in American Prophet in a song called “A Name,” when Anna sings:

ANNA:
A WOMAN LEAVES HER NAME BEHIND
TO CLEAVE TO A MAN
WITH WHOM SHE ABIDES
MY HUSBAND’S NAME WILL WELL BE REMEMBERED
BUT WILL MINE?

How did singing that feel to you?

It always feels like a really important secret between her and the audience. I don’t know how often she vocalized that to her husband or the people around her who were supporting her and Frederick in the movement. So it always feels to me like a really lovely secret that the audience gets to hear from Anna, that nobody else in the play is going to get to hear. And it has a lot of importance to me to be able to say those words as a 2022 woman playing this woman from the 1800s; it feels very exciting to be able to voice that desire of hers.

Her dedication to him, and her support for him, is so solid throughout the play. There’s that cliche “Behind every great man is a great woman,” but you rarely see how that works in everyday life. In American Prophet, we do. Anna handles their finances; she raises their children; she manages the household when he’s away. And at a point when he’s overcome with self-doubt, she sings, gorgeously:

ANNA:
IF YOU EVER LOSE YOUR WAY
I WILL BE YOUR STAR
YOU CAN LOOK UP INTO THE SKY AND FIND ME
THAT’S WHERE YOU ARE.

Anyone who’s ever had that kind of support from a woman in their life knows something very deep is happening there. Would you talk about that?

I love that song because Frederick is getting the opportunity to feel the love and support and strength of a woman that he probably hadn’t felt since he last saw his Grandma Bailey. It’s very exciting to get to sing that every night and serve the purpose of reigniting whatever fire needs to be reignited in him. It’s those private moments that you imagine happened between Martin and Coretta; and you imagine that these women, these wives, these partners in the struggle are how we have our Malcolms and our Medgar Evers —people that have made a mark in the civil rights struggle.

You mentioned Anna’s activist involvement in abolition and there’s a moment when her work with the underground railroad is made explicit.

SALLY: How do you manage it all?
ANNA: I manage it all by managing it all. My husband is battling with the minions of oppression, why not I endure hardship that my race may be free

It is moments like that when the sense comes through that Anna and Frederick are not only of the same river; they are in the same cause.

And they both endure hardships. Frederick is beaten up by a mob of men. Black men lose their lives for less, and here he is, an escaped slave, preaching against slave ownership. So “why not I endure hardship that my race may be free” feels like a foreshadowing for what’s about to come: Shortly after, they lose Annie, their youngest. She was only ten when she died. So I really allow Anna to enjoy her time on stage where she’s singing about her love for Frederick because what comes after is just so unimaginable.

You have that song on stage alone, and your performance gives chills:

ANNA:
I LOVE A MAN
WHO COULD NOT STAND WITHOUT MY STRENGTH
I LOVE A MAN
DETERMINED TO CHANGE HISTORY
BUT PLEASE UNDERSTAND…
HE COULD NOT DO IT WITHOUT ME!

Who has Anna Murray Douglas become to you in the process of rehearsing and performing the role, and what do you hope audiences will see in her and hear from her?

Anna feels like a confidant in a lot of ways. Because I’ve gotten to know so many secrets about her, I have a feeling people are going to see the value in telling her story. I have a feeling there are going to be more renditions of it. I feel very honored to have gotten to trail-blaze this ancestor story.

I don’t know quite how to say this, but it’s like there’s a message to women of color in what you’re doing, in your character and your performance. And there’s also a message to men about who women can be in their lives.

That’s how I feel we’re going to be able to get progress in terms of racial reconciliation. We’re also going to have to ask ourselves really hard questions about gender reconciliation and how men and women exist together and are still allowed to live in their power, sensitivity, and vulnerability. bell hooks’ book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love has been helpful in my feminist journey because it’s not about railing or raging in a way where it’s one against the other; it’s truly about coexistence. And so I love that you said it also feels like a message for men, because I do have a deep desire to reach that audience in a way that is encompassed with love.

American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words plays through August 28, 2022, in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage, 1101 6th Street SW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($66–$115, depending on performance) may be purchased online, by calling 202-488-3300, or at the Arena Stage sales office Tuesday through Saturday from noon until 8 p.m. For information on programs such as pay-your-age tickets, student discounts, Southwest Nights, and hero’s discounts, visit arenastage.org/tickets/savings-programs.

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

The American Prophet program is online here.

GalaPro closed captioning is available.

COVID Safety: Photo identification and proof of vaccination against COVID-19 must be shown to enter the building and masks must be worn in the building. Arena’s complete safety protocols are here.

Kristolyn Lloyd is a Grammy and Emmy Award-winning actress. Her acting credits include Broadway: Dear Evan Hansen; Off-Broadway: Confederates, Paradise Blue, The Liquid Plain (Signature Theatre), Fairycakes (Greenwich House Theater), Little Women (Primary Stages), Blue Ridge (Atlantic), Hamlet (The Public Theater), Invisible Thread, Dear Evan Hansen (Second Stage Theater), Heathers The Musical (New World Stages), Cabin in the Sky (Encores! City Center); Selected Regional: Paradise Blue (Williamstown), Witness Uganda (A.R.T.), Hairspray, Rent (Hollywood Bowl); TV: Random Acts of Flyness (HBO), Elementary, Madam Secretary, Kevin Can Wait (CBS), ER (NBC), Lie to Me. Instagram and Twitter: @kristolynlloyd

American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words
Book by Charles Randolph-Wright and Marcus Hummon
Music and Lyrics by Marcus Hummon
Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright
Choreographed by Lorna Ventura
Music Direction, Orchestrations, and Additional Arrangements by Joseph Joubert

SEE ALSO:
Unforgettably powerful ‘American Prophet’ is on fire at Arena (review by Bob Ashby)
Arena Stage announces 2022/23 season, Molly Smith’s 25th as artistic director

The post The woman who freed Frederick Douglass: a Q&A with Kristolyn Lloyd appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

When Boys Exhale is a gripping and touching story of three young Black gay men and their interconnecting friendships. Written and directed by Anthony Green, the play premiered in DC in January 2020 with a sold-out run, had another sold-out run last April in Atlanta, and returns to DC at the Anacostia Arts Center July 22 to 24, 2022.

I’ve not yet seen the play but I’ve read it, and I found it beautiful and moving. The dialog is sharp, smart, emotionally authentic. The characters are well-rounded and believable. They don’t hold back; very little goes unsaid. The ending really got me. 

The play takes its title from a 1995 film that two of the young men are longtime fans of, Waiting to Exhale, adapted from Terry McMillan’s novel about four Black women friends. When Boys Exhale is a presentation of Cagedbirds Productions, which Anthony Green founded to create socially conscious projects that affirm African American LGBTQ storytelling. I was fortunate to have a chance to interview him.

John: What was the genesis for When Boys Exhale? What about these characters and this story called to you?

Anthony: A friend of mine was passing away from HIV, and in one of our final conversations at the hospital, he made me promise to tell his life story in a play. His favorite film was Waiting to Exhale. We watched it over and over. Quoting the film and talking about our lives in relation to the film was like our love language. So I thought it would be beautiful to tell his story through the lens of his favorite movie — with Easter eggs and references to it — because that film was essentially the love of his life.

Three of the play’s four characters are gay Black men in their twenties — Jonathan, Andre, and Khalil — and the fourth is Jonathan’s mother. So much about the play reflects the lives of, and speaks to, young gay Black men. How would you describe the play to gay Black men who haven’t seen it yet?

It depends on which generation they’re coming from. If they’re a little bit older, I just say it’s a male version of Waiting to Exhale and they’re sold off the bat. But if it’s someone in Gen Z, I describe it as a celebration of Black gay friendship. There’s a romantic love in there, but the real true love in this story is between Andre and Jonathan. That’s the love that’s gotten me through in my life and saved a lot of people because everyone is not meant to be in a romantic relationship. We all need friendship.

The play feels very personal and specific, full of truths about friendship and intimate relationships that a theater lover who is not a young gay Black man would readily recognize.

I believe so. There are a lot of deep truths in the play about life in general, about friendship, about trauma, about pain and loss. That goes through all lines of intersectionality.

What has been the production history of the play and what has been the reaction?

The first production was in DC in 2020. I just moved here from Memphis, so I was really surprised how quickly the show sold out. And from the reaction, I knew I wanted to do it again. But then COVID hit. About a year ago, a new theater owner in Atlanta reached out to me and asked me to bring When Boys Exhale to Atlanta. People were really excited to see it. We had people from the local HBCUs bringing their students from their gay-straight alliance. People from the local CBOs were bringing some of their clients from the HIV programs or the LGBT-related programs that they had. It was such a community experience. I felt like Atlanta was embracing us.

The play is very centered on the commonality between the Black female experience and the Black gay male experience. Two of the three male characters, Jonathan and Andre, are fans of the film Waiting to Exhale, and at one point, Jonathan’s mother says to the two of them:

SHEILA: I don’t know why you two love that movie about those old women.

ANDRE: Don’t you relate to it? I just mean, we do. Black gay men see ourselves in those women’s struggles; dealing with no good men, communal processing of trauma, having kiki sessions to destress, and struggling with intersectionality in an oppressive patriarchal society.

JONATHAN: Plus, at the heart of it, the movie is about friendship. Female friendships have always been more affectionate and expressive than male friendships. The gays love to emulate that bond.

That passage is extraordinary.

I’ve always loved in gay culture in general how oftentimes our friendships emulate the female friendship bond, because male friendships have always been so distant to me. And when I’ve looked at female friendships in media and in my life, they’ve just always been so intimate, not afraid to be physically affectionate with each other, not afraid to talk about emotions, not afraid to be there for each other. I haven’t seen that unique aspect of gay culture really explored a lot in media, but I wanted to celebrate it.

For someone who hasn’t seen the movie or your play, what does it mean to exhale?

In the context of the original film, a lot of people construed that once you get your life together and you find a man, that means you exhale. For me, having a more modern look at exhaling, I wanted it to be focused on stepping into your own healing, letting go of past trauma, and just being present in the moment of your own joy.

There’s a passage near the end where Khalil is talking to Jonathan:

KHALIL: Every time I physically get close to you, you hold your breath in anticipation of what I’m going to do next. All I have to do is move close to you and you don’t breathe out until the moment I kiss you or touch you or say something affectionate.

JONATHAN: Wow, I didn’t realize I did that. It must be a subconscious thing. Guess I’m just waiting to exhale…

I read that as relaxing into a relationship with ease, with trust.

I definitely agree. That was my own way of trying to remix or reinterpret the exhale theme.

I really wanted that aspect because so many on-screen gay relationships are sexually or attraction driven. And I wanted Jonathan and Khalil to have that calmness when they’re together, an understanding of each other. That is what drives them together. Not just because, Oh my God, you’re hot. I’m hot. Let’s be hot together. No: There’s something about you that makes me feel safe. There’s something about you that makes me wanna be the best version of myself, that makes me feel I can let go of tensions I’ve had, that I can exhale.

The play is so smart about emotional intimacy and emotional literacy. Your characters just speak out truth that is in the moment about these issues in their lives.

I’ve been moved and surprised by the emotional reaction people have had to the play. Like When Jonathan and his mom are having that exchange and she tells him how much she’ll always love him, I’ve seen a theater full of gay men sobbing. So many adult gay men have never heard that from their mom. The same when Andre and Jonathan have their reconciliation, I’ve seen people crying.

The play is also painfully honest and open about coming out to parents. In Jonathan’s story especially, we see the continuing tension with his mother and we hear of a shocking and traumatizing experience with his now-absent father. It occurred to me that the play might be saying something about how one’s past with one’s parents impacts one’s capacity for emotional intimacy and trust with a peer.

Absolutely. And that was very intentional on my part. The scene we learn the most about Jonathan is the one where he’s not present, Andre and Sheila are talking. We see her not as a mother but as a woman, and we get Jonathan’s parents’ love story. Our parents’ love story has a huge impact on who we are.

Another important theme in the play centers on HIV.

I’m always afraid anytime I do something with Black gay characters putting in HIV because I don’t wanna stigmatize. But if I’m telling my friend’s story, I have to tell his story as he wanted it and as it happened, and doing that, I wanted to make sure I told a full well-rounded person living with HIV’s experience. There’s so many other things going on in Jonathan’s life than his status. I love that. And I love that he’s still having relationships and living life.

Alan Sharpe has pointed out that the three most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama have dealt with Black, queer themes [A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson in 2020, The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall in 2021, Fat Ham by James Ijames in 2022]. Do you think these plays’ recent prominence could mean a wider audience for When Boys Exhale?

I do. I think now there is an interest in Black queer stories because there are now examples of what it looks like when it’s done well — when the stories are so well-written and impactful that they go beyond labels of identities. They get to the truth of life, they have depth, they’re entertaining and have colorful characters.

As a writer, what do you want your work to do to people?

I want it to spark conversations. There are things that these characters in this play go through and I went through in my life that I’ve never seen depicted or validated in a theater production or a film. I want people from my community to see my work and feel seen.

_________

ANTHONY GREEN is a writer, director, and LGBT advocate from Memphis, TN. He moved to DC to continue a career in sexual health. His debut book, #BlackGayStoriesMatter, is available on Amazon. He has fellowships with Lambda Literary, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 202Creates, and NASTAD’s Minority Leadership Program. He’s also the founder of Cagedbirds Productions, LLC.

When Boys Exhale plays July 22, 23, and 24, 2022, at Anacostia Arts Center, 1231 Good Hope Road SE, Washington, DC. Tickets ($30) are available online.

COVID Safety: Anacostia Arts Center follows the DC Mayor’s guidelines, which currently make mask-wearing indoors optional.

The post What it means ‘When Boys Exhale’: A Q&A with Anthony Green appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

The theatrical conceit of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, now playing in a thrilling production at Studio, is so damn dazzling I hardly know where to begin. A class of eleventh-graders in a tiny town in Georgia has been assigned to read Arthur Miller’s famous play The Crucible, the backstory of which turns on the married farmer John Proctor’s adulterous intercourse with a teenage orphan, Abigail. Because this sin of the flesh happens in pious Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, there’s the devil to pay. According to SparkNotes (which gets amusingly quoted in Belflower’s play), Abigail “is clearly the villain,” a seductress and liar and deranged avenger. Not so fast, foreshadows Belflower’s post-#MeToo title: John Proctor is the villain.

As it happens in Belflower’s brilliant devising, the high schoolers’ study of The Crucible coincides with some scandalously analogous goings-on in their own 2018 world: namely,  grown-man age-inappropriate sexual behavior, which the play dramatically divulges. (To say more would be a spoiler. When you see the play, you’ll know why.) Just as these teens (two boys, five girls) are navigating their budding sexual desires, including with one another, they have to reckon with the reality that fine and upstanding adult men they know and trust can be capable of Proctor-like predation. So they look at the sexual politics in The Crucible through the lens of their own lives and they look at the sexual politics of grownups they know through the lens of The Crucible. And they do so in teen-speak with reference to pop idols Lorde, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé.

Has lit crit ever been more lit?

I saw Belflower’s play more than two weeks ago, and it has stayed with me, not least because Belflower’s characters and dialog are so endearingly generation specific. (The students speak in tentativeness; they are constantly saying “yeah no” or “no yeah” — with, like, you know, questioning?) And Director Marti Lyons demonstrates again (as she did in The Wolves) that she gets deeply what’s going on within and among teen girls today, so much so that she may know better than anyone how to keep real all their feels.

The quality of the writing and the caliber of the performances are enthralling, but it is Belflower’s theme that most impressed me — for she has brought to light the emotional and cultural turmoil that is now finding expression in Gen Z feminism.

Gen Z is a generation for whom music is girls’ gateway to self-understanding, and that’s represented vividly throughout John Proctor Is the Villain, culminating in an indescribably beautiful and exultant ending set to “Green Light” by Lorde. (See below for a Spotify playlist Studio Theatre compiled to promote the production.) Early in the play the girls start an extracurricular feminism club, and at one point Nell (Deidre Staples) quotes Beyoncé’s song “Flawless,” which samples a TED Talk by the Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her words hit a nerve. It is as though she speaks directly to these teens’ experience of having to “make themselves smaller” and not be “too successful” so as to protect the egos of men.

This is a generation of girls that cares keenly about sexism. According to one study, 33 percent of Gen Z women consider reducing sexism one of the most important issues today, compared with just 10 percent of Millennial women, 7 percent of Gen X women, and 3 percent of Boomer women. And this is a generation keenly aware of the connection between sexism and men’s aggression.

In an exchange in John Proctor Is the Villain, for instance, Raelynn (Jordan Slattery) reflects on the relationship she’s been in with her boyfriend Lee (Zachary Keller). She tells him her identity has been subsumed by being his girlfriend and she’s realized that’s not what she really wants. Whereupon Lee erupts. In an abrupt act of violence, he casually picks up and tosses a chair. Raelynn recoils — and we might well infer that his outbursts have happened before.

This is a generation whose vocabulary can name such behavior — what Beth (Miranda Rizzolo) calls “textbook toxic masculinity.” She says this with reference to the character of John Proctor in The Crucible, but it is clear in performance that all the girls know from life what it means.

Even as this generation is keenly aware of sexism, they can imagine and recognize interpersonal relating liberated from it. For instance, in the sweetest scene in the play, Mason (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), an adorable underachiever, and brainy Nell, new to the school, are studying together in preparation for their joint class project. At a point in their easygoing collaboration, Mason surprises Nell and us.

MASON
…do you wanna like
hang out?
like
outside of class and feminist club?
I just
I’m really into how smart you are?
which is like a new thing for me and it really
I don’t know if that sounds like a line?
but it’s not?
I mean
I can’t make you believe me that it’s not
but my lines are not usually about brains…

Nell says yes, he beams, she gently reminds him to get back to work, and he does so, still beaming.

Such telling teen moments would seem to be peripheral to the events that drive the play’s plot — the Crucible-adjacent offstage scandals whose shocking revelations rock the students’ world. But as I’ve thought back on what Belflower is up to, I’ve come to wonder if the subtext of these young people’s awkward yet urgent emergence into Gen Z feminism might really be the play’s central storyline. Certainly, that would explain Raelynn’s astounding and apocalyptic monologue near the end, in which she begins by envisioning:

RAELYNN
…
one day
maybe
the new world we were promised
will be actually new
one day
maybe
the men in charge
won’t be in charge anymore…

Running Time: Two hours 20 minutes including one intermission.

EXTENDED: John Proctor Is the Villain plays through June 12, 2022, at Studio Theatre’s Mead Theatre, 1501 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($45–$95, with low-cost options and discounts available) can be purchased online or by calling (202) 332-3300.

The program for John Proctor Is the Villain is online here.

COVID Safety: Proof of vaccination (or a negative COVID test) and facemask are required. Studio Theatre’s complete Health and Safety protocols are here.

SEE ALSO:
‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ at Studio is provocative and gripping (review by Bob Ashby)

The post Gen Z feminism is the hero in ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

In A.D. 16 — a magnificently entertaining new musical now playing at Olney Theatre Center — 16-year-old Mary of Magdala crushes on 16-year-old Jesus of Nazareth. So it’s a passion play of the lovestruck sort.

Among the show’s many charms is its depiction of Jesus. As imagined by Bekah Brunstetter (book) and Cinco Paul (music, lyrics, and story) in their Bible-alluding tuner, the future reputed Savior is a nerdy dude with long hair and a man bun, and what would be a surfer vibe if Nazareth had nearby waves. Not only is he an inadvertent heartthrob — the neighbor girl Mary seriously thirsts for him — but he is also nonchalantly in prep for his adult gig in earthly ministry. In both dimensions of his character, we see him on a learning curve of love.

There’s a point in Act One, for instance, when Jesus is slapped across the face by an officer of the Sanhedrin, the local patriarchal law enforcement squad. “Again,” says Jesus, turning his other cheek. Whereupon the officer decks him.

Mary rushes to comfort her fallen flame.

MARY: Are you okay?
JESUS: I’m good. Not the first time that’s happened.
MARY: Why’d you turn your other cheek to him?
JESUS: It’s a new concept I’m working on…. Still kinda figuring it out.
MARY: You’re amazing. That’s amazing. I can’t stop saying amazing.
JESUS: Thank you for your kindness.

The joke, which runs throughout the show, is that teen Jesus doesn’t yet have the messiah thing down. He’s still trial-and-erroring the basic skill set, like parable telling and healing. But what this turn-the-other-cheek fail makes cleverly explicit is that Jesus doesn’t do mano-a-mano manhood and isn’t about to. Given today’s white evangelical idolization of reckless and rugged masculinity (See Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez), that fleeting funny scene is also a reminder of a life lesson lost on the world at great cost.

At another point in the story, Mary learns that Jesus spends time visiting folks in the local leper colony outside the city walls, and to find him she goes there too. The ensemble of lepers — who function in the show as a metaphor for the marginalized — have an extraordinary song called “The Skin We’re In” that calls out the culture’s curse on them.

Some people like to look at your exterior
and think that they are better than you
If they convince themselves that you’re inferior
they’ll feel better ‘bout the things that they do

Seeking to impress Jesus with her do-gooder “charity, mercy, compassion, the yooj,” Mary undertakes to lead the band of lepers back into the city from which they were banished, to be with the families who cast them out. It does not go well. The lepers are imprisoned and further oppressed.

There follows a scene between Jesus and Mary that is one of the most dramatic moral pivots I have ever seen in a musical. In a song called “You Did It for Yourself,” Jesus calls Mary on the self-interest in her “doing good just to be seen”:

All that you did that night
served you and you alone…
It’s not only what we do
but what lies within our hearts
that demonstrates love is true

In that moment and in that scene, Mary sees (and so do we) that Jesus has now begun to speak of a love that transcends what she felt when she fell for him. And at that juncture — that one-to-one personal calling to account of conscience — A.D. 16 as a musical turns into a stunning epiphany of the highest form of love — what the Greeks called agape, as distinct from eros, or erotic love, and philia, or brotherly love.

The theme continues in the final scene of the play when (spoiler alert) Jesus and Mary part ways:

JESUS: Mary, if I ever had a girl, it would be you. But I think I’m on this earth for a different kinda love. There’s a bigger kind of love than — this. There’s the kind you can have for everybody else. Your enemies, your neighbors, people who scare you.
MARY: Yeah. You gotta love them like they’re yourself.
JESUS: Love your neighbor like they’re yourself. That’s good, can I steal that?
MARY: Please, what’s mine is yours.
JESUS: Oh, that’s good too.

Here the humor and the homily of the play become as one.

And a beautifully profound new musical is born.

Running Time: Two hours and 20 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission.

EXTENDED: A.D. 16 plays through March 20, 2022, on the main stage at Olney Theatre Center—2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road in Olney, MD. Regular performances are Wednesday–Saturday at 8:00 pm; matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 8:00 pm; and a Wednesday matinee at 2:00 pm on February 9, 23, and March 2. Tickets ($42–$85) can be purchased by calling 301-924-3400 or online. Discounts are available for groups, seniors, military, and students.

The program for A.D. 16 is online here.

There will be a sign-interpreted performance on Thursday, March 3, 2022, at 8:00 pm and an audio-described performance for the blind and visually impaired on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, at 8:00 pm. Audience members who wish to use these services should contact Julie Via, Patron Services Manager (jvia@olneytheatre.org) to confirm.

COVID Safety: Masks and proof of COVID vaccination are required to attend for all patrons. Exemptions may be made for those who are not vaccinated, such as children under 5, people with certain medical conditions preventing vaccination, or those with closely held religious beliefs. These patrons must provide proof of a timely negative COVID-19 PCR test taken within 48 hours or a rapid antigen test taken within six hours of showtime. Visit OlneyTheatre.org/vax for more information.

SEE ALSO:
Olney’s new musical ‘A.D. 16’ entertains immensely (review by Darby DeJarnette)

The post Exegesis of a sexy Jesus: A look at love in ‘A.D. 16’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

It was high time for a pop culture intervention in the roles that fairy tales prescribe for girls. For centuries these stories have idealized a disempowered female identity. As Andrea Dworkin wrote in her 1974 book Woman Hating,

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel — all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence, and victimization. They are archetypal good women — victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate, confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question.

To this day fairy tales promise young women a happily ever after that is contingent on being desired and a debilitated sense of self.

That subtext is the crux of Once Upon a One More Time, a fun, feminist new musical just opened spectacularly at DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company on its way to Broadway. It wakes up centuries of bedtime stories, and I predict it will be an intergenerational smash.

The plot (book by Jon Hartmere) is nearly as outlandish as the fairy tales it critiques, and it’s delivered with sensational musical theater performances and stunning stagecraft to the tune of music made mega-famous by Britney Spears. Some have wondered what such a piece of work is doing at a theater renowned for doing the Bard. And therein too lies a tale.

An assortment of storied princesses — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel, plus Snow White, Belle, Princess and the Pea, Little Mermaid, Gretel, Goldilocks, and Little Red Riding Hood — dwell in a fabula rasa dreamland (set by Anna Fleischle, lighting by Sonoyo Nishikawa, projections by Sven Ortel, special effects by Jeremy Chernick) where they must play out their prescripted stories at the command of an overlord male Narrator. In a nod to modernity, the princesses all have hip nicknames (Cinderella is Cin, Rapunzel is Pun, Little Mermaid is Little, Red Riding Hood is Red, etc.), they’re dressed in snazzy storybook chic (costumes by Loren Elstein, wigs by Ashley Rae Callahan), and their vocals and dance moves have the pulse and polish of a pop star tour (Keone and Mari Madrid choreograph and direct, music direction by Britt Bonney). But the princesses can’t move on; their stories must be told as is.

Cin is first to balk. For starters, the smarmy and egocentric Prince Charming does not charm her. He wants her to marry him and have a baby. She wants more. Then lo and behold, who should appear but “the Notorious O.F.G.” — Original Fairy Godmother! She comes bearing a gift: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (the 1963 book that catalyzed the second-wave women’s movement). Cin — who besides being unswayed by princely wooing is incessantly demeaned as a menial domestic by her imperious stepsisters (“You better work, bitch!” they sing) — is intrigued.

CINDERELLA: Ugh. I know, as a woman, I’m supposed to love housework, but…
FAIRY GODMOTHER: No. You aren’t. Chapter 2 deconstructs that.

As Cin’s consciousness elevates, she’s moved to share the book’s message of female empowerment with the other fairy tale princesses. She tells Snow, for instance:

CINDERELLA: I mean, “true love”? That starts when a guy you’ve never met kisses you? An anonymous guy who basically assaults you in the woods —
He discovers you, unconscious in a clearing, and instead of calling for help, he decides to take advantage of you.

Later, with equal zeal, Cin runs it down for Red:

CINDERELLA: You get EATEN. By an apex predator. You spend half your story stewing in lupine stomach acid.

A diverting subplot has Prince Charming caught two-timing three different princesses (“Oops! I did it again” he sings in one of the show’s many showstoppers). A hyperkinetic chorus of princes dances in and out. An incidental gay male romance blooms. But the show’s focus is the passel of princesses, who own the stage like gangbusters whenever they’re on it, as when they charge Prince Charming with being a “Womanizer/ Princessizer.”

By the end of Act One, the princesses have united and gone on strike. And in Act Two, inspired by “Princess Betty,” they determine individually and collectively to change their narrative.

CINDERELLA: WE can be in charge of our own stories!
Women. Can. Write!
….
If we can be the authors of our own destinies, I demand that we, all of us, get a voice — be the voice — in our stories.
…
Once upon a time there was a girl who demanded to be heard!

This pop feminist messaging is a far cry from the passivity and victimization promoted to girls for eons in classical fairy tales (“Well-behaved princesses rarely make history,” as Cin reminds Snow). But not coincidentally this specific message of female self-reliance and empowerment is also the most foundational raison d’être for mounting this production at the estimable Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Here’s why.

Theater as an art form has a particular power to shape human understanding of gender and gender relations. That’s because theater can show gender in action, which is where gender happens. Gender can’t exist in stasis; it is told and acted out in stories that reveal character — the very stuff of theater. We mistakenly think of gender as an appearance, a costume, an esthetic. It’s actually an identity that transpires transactionally in the ethics we enact: Who does what to whom and why and with what consequence.

Shakespeare in his own time, and in his own way, was bending and extending contemporary cultural conceptions of gender. To be sure, he inherited tropes about how men and women are supposed to act, and he stuck with some of them, but with others, he shook them up, reconceiving gendering meanings and empowering women in tragedy, history, and comedy where gender as identity in action can clearly be seen.

“What’s possible when women raise their expectations” (in the words of Red and Pun) can be said abstractly to be the aspirational theme of Once Upon a One More Time. But it is only by what the princesses do during the show — they think, act, initiate, confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, question — that they and we see who they become.

Artistic Director Simon Godwin, explaining this show’s relevance to the mission of Shakespeare Theatre Company, writes in a program note:

Like Shakespeare taking old stories and making them new, this show continues our glorious tradition of reworking the classics for now.

But this show’s take on “reworking the classics” is only part of what makes it an apt fit for STC. Even more salient is this show’s deliberate interrogation of gender expectations as handed down in male-supremacist lore. That’s a job theater is uniquely suited to do (and ought to do more often) — and that’s what Once Upon a One More Time does delightfully.

Princesshood is powerful. Who knew that could come true?

Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission.

Once Upon a One More Time plays through January 9, 2022, at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F Street NW, Washington, DC. Tickets ($35–$190) are available for purchase online. Premium seating is also available for weekend performances. Special discounts are available for military, students, seniors, and patrons age 35 and under. Contact the Box Office at (202) 547-1122 or visit ShakespeareTheatre.org for more information.

COVID Safety: Through the end of the run of Once Upon a One More Time, all patrons must provide proof of vaccination to attend any performances or events. In addition, COVID-19 vaccinations are required for all performers and theater staff. For full guidelines about providing proof of vaccination, visit the theater’s Health and Safety page. Only performers and people invited onstage for talkbacks may be unmasked. Venue attendees must remain masked, including during performances, unless eating and drinking in designated lobby areas.

SEE ALSO:
‘Once Upon a One More Time’ is wacky but it works (review by Nicole Hertvik)

CAST (in order of appearance)
Narrator: Michael McGrath
Little Girl: Adrianna Weir, Mila Weir (alternate in the role)
Original Fairy Godmother: Brooke Dillman
Snow White: Aisha Jackson
Sleeping Beauty: Ashley Chiu
Belle: Belinda Allyn
Rapunzel: Wonu Ogunfowora
Princess and the Pea: Morgan Weed
Little Mermaid: Lauren Zakrin
Gretel: Selene Haro
Little Red Riding Hood: Jennifer Florentino
Goldilocks: Amy Hillner Larsen
Cinderella: Briga Heelan
Stepmother: Emily Skinner
Belinda (stepsister): MiMi Scardulla
Betany (stepsister): Tess Soltau
Prince Charming: Justin Guarini
Clumsy/Prince Ebullient: Raymond J. Lee
Prince Erudite: Ryan Steele
Prince Suave: Stephen Brower
Prince Affable: Stephen Scott Wormley
Prince Brawny: Joshua Johnson
Prince Mischievous: Kevin Trinio Perdido
Swings: Salisha Thomas, Diana Vaden, Matt Allen, Matthew Tiberi

The post What’s ‘Once Upon a One More Time’ doing at the Shakespeare? appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

This interview first appeared March 10, 2020, just days before the coronavirus shut down theaters and stopped the run of The Amen Corner. Shakespeare Theatre Company is reviving that acclaimed production for a limited time only—September 14 to 26, 2021—and single tickets are on sale now online.

In 1955 James Baldwin had just turned 30 and had written a play about a storefront church in Harlem that he could not get produced in New York. There was “no market” for it, he was told. Coincidentally in Washington, DC, Owen Dodson was looking for a play by a Black playwright to be performed by the Howard University Players. Dodson reached out to Baldwin, offered to stage the play at Howard’s Spalding Hall, and invited him to come to DC for rehearsals. There he would continue to do rewrites on what became his masterpiece The Amen Corner.

Shakespeare Theatre Company has brought The Amen Corner home in a magnificent production that has been getting critical raves and rapturous audience praise. Its gifted director, Whitney White, is not new in town. She directed a powerful work by Aleshea Harris called What to Send Up When It Goes Down that late last fall toured four community venues then had a sold-out run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. In form it was a ritual by, about, and for Black people; its content was a response to racialized violence.

I was eager to talk with her because I attended and reported on What to Send Up at each of its tour stops, and I had come to an enormous appreciation of how tightly directed and committedly enacted it was. It seemed absolutely real and true and in-the-moment, every time as if for the first time. So I began by asking how she did it.

John: Would you talk about how as director you achieved that extraordinary sense of personal presence without seeming like performance?

Whitney: When I first read the script, I had a physical and emotional response. It felt very much like a piece of music, it read like a score, with intense rhythms, aggressive spoken language, and beautiful moments of quiet. Then there were all the moments that called for choreography and the songs that Aleshea has written. So the entire work manifested for me like a sonic and physical experience. And I knew the movement had to be something that could activate the actors. The choreography couldn’t be superfluous, it wasn’t about a step-step-touch routine. So when I started choreographing it, I knew I wanted to find things that could allow the actors to fall deeper into the purpose of the piece. And the purpose of it is to celebrate Black men, women, and children who’ve lost their lives to racialized violence. I wanted it to feel ritualistic, but I also wanted it to be something that actors needed. The movement isn’t for the audience. It’s not decorative. It’s necessary. So I knew I had to pull this incredible text together with purposeful choreography, with the beautiful songs Alesha had written then with the purpose of the evening, which is to celebrate and acknowledge Black lives.

When you were directing The Amen Corner, was your process similar? 

When I read The Amen Corner, I also had a very physical and emotional response to the story. The play is focused on a mother trying to keep her home and church together while also zooming in on a Black community that is dealing with issues of power and safety. I had a physical response to Margaret as a single Black woman trying to hold her world together, trying to keep her seat of power. But I also had a physical and emotional response to David in the story, because I identify with this young man whose family is trying to keep him close to home and away from the outside world. The dangerous, white world. And he, David, wants to go out there and be an artist, which is a dangerous thing even to this day. So I had a similar response. But what’s different is that The Amen Corner is told on such an epic scale. You see the inside and outside. And my mantra for directing it was: It takes a village. I feel that’s very true in the Black community. We have to pull so many resources from so many places just to survive. And I wanted to make a world that felt like the village was always there. Everything was always on view and privacy was very hard to have. The piece is very different [from What to Send Up] structurally, but I still wanted to have movement and music. That’s the root of it that activated the actor. The choreography you see in The Amen Corner really was generated with the actors. In the church services, for example, we looked at video and researched and a lot of people in the cast had experience with movement that surrounds Black worship. But we added things to activate the actor: what do you need in this moment to be as emotionally radically vulnerable as possible? What both pieces share in common is radical vulnerability.

My next question is about the problematic history in American theater of how white audiences watch Black people perform.

Oh God.

I’ve seen shows where the cast is all Black and the audience is almost all white and I can sense some of that problematic history still happening—you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

What to Send Up changed the terms of that history dramatically. It was unapologetically Black, it was about Black lives, and it was explicitly not about centering the experience of white audiences. So my question is: During production of The Amen Corner, did that problematic history come up in your mind? And if so, how did your direction bend that history toward justice?

Wow. First of all, I want to thank you for that question. It’s not many journalists that are looking at that so deeply and I’m grateful that you asked it. You know, it’s a complicated thing, the history of viewing the Black body in America—that’s what we’re talking about. Every form of entertainment you see that you consider to be American really comes from a community of Black people who were taken from their homes and brought here. Singing and dancing and laughter and worship and movement was always a form of survival and defiance; and that survival and defiance, those mechanisms, have been appropriated by mainstream culture—jazz, hip hop, contemporary music and movement as we know it. So we have this longtime history of being culture creators but not often recognized for it. And then you come to the theater, which is usually predominantly white audiences, and people are looking to digest entertainment, looking to have catharsis, looking to feast, you know, on the Black body in these ways.

We had really great conversations about it. I was gifted on The Amen Corner with a very incredible cast of professionals, from E. Faye Butler to some of my students at Howard. And they all were actively engaged with their own artistry and the way they engage with white audiences, so it wasn’t the first time they had these conversations. Turning it into justice is such a great question because I often told the actors, “Give the moment what it needs.” Like, you’ll go to a musical on Broadway and at the end they’ll come out after the curtain call and sing and dance a whole new number and they’re turning out to the audience and they’re working so hard for the white gaze. In The Amen Corner there are many moments when the dancers’ backs are mostly to the audience—for example in Act Two when Sister Moore does that beautiful service, with the thunder and lightning—because that moment is for them; it’s not for the audience. You can witness it but you are not invited into it the same way you are in the opening service—because the dramatic circumstances have changed and the community now needs to look in within itself to decide what to do about Margaret. Often the way that I tried to deal with this issue of the gaze and having it be dignified and having there be justice in it was to just remind the actors, “Hey, you don’t have to overwork in this moment. Do what you feel. Do what you need.” So we broke traditional musical theater logic sometimes to honor the truth of what it feels like to be viewed by a white audience.

The action of Baldwin’s play happens among Black people in a particular community—though it’s very accessible to non-Black audiences and can be appreciated as universal. But Baldwin, never one to hold back, clearly meant it to tell some Black folks’ family business, to air some laundry—a metaphor that literally hangs over the set. How as a director did you approach both that universality in the play and that particularity in Baldwin’s intent? Put another way: How do you think about and direct a work that racially, and necessarily, has a dual audience?

Well, in a way it was refreshing for me to work on a piece that dealt with Black people dealing with each other and trying to survive with each other—intraracial relationships versus interracial relationships. Sometimes when you’re working on a play with non-Black characters, it so fast becomes about them. I call it the Iago effect. Othello is a play I work on a lot in my artistic life. I’ve directed it, I was an associate on it once, I’m doing a music adaptation of it. But the play is called Othello and every time I go see it, it’s the Iago show. It’s insidious how white characters can take over our own narratives. So it was incredibly freeing just to focus on this little amen corner, this corner of life, this microcosm of Black spiritual life in Harlem. I didn’t have to take extra care of anyone or step outside myself in any way. And we had so many beautiful, honest, easy moments in rehearsal. I was like, this is too good to be true.

How do you hear Baldwin’s voice in The Amen Corner? Is it the voice of the preacher he was as a boy, the justice oracle he became as a man, the poet he always was—?

Everybody knows James Baldwin as the political activist, the man doing the brilliant speeches, the man dealing with racism in America and preaching and educating about that. But I feel here we get to see Baldwin as an artist. He is really making a world with character and plot and emotion and I feel his voice pop up in every character, even our fierce Sister Moore. When she says [of Sister Margaret], “If you think this woman who can’t bring peace to one person can bring peace to a whole lot of people,” I hear Baldwin there that we as Black people are looking for peace and light. I hear it when David says, “Mama, who’s going to speak for us?”—because Baldwin turned away from that religious community to speak for himself and for us. I hear it when Luke is dying and confronts Margaret and confronts the hypocrisy of the lifestyle that she has chosen to lead. Because Baldwin allowed himself to make this play that was focused on the Black community, he was able speak so many ways, with so many points of views through different characters. He gets to have his voice come from the many.

What about this time and this town makes The Amen Corner mean more than when it was written? 

Baldwin’s play is kind of a masterpiece, and it’s crazy to me that it hasn’t been done at every regional theater with a major cast and budget. But it was particularly powerful doing it in DC. It was a homecoming. It had its time at Howard; Baldwin himself spent so much special time in DC. And DC is also the capital of our nation. The conversations I had with people in DC about politics and race and theater and music were so rich, and it just felt very important to bring the work back home there before it hopefully spreads across the nation again. I purposefully tried to work with as many DC-familiar or DC-local artists as possible. That’s also what made it feel so special to the region, I wanted people to come and see themselves reflected on stage, not just because they’re Black, but because they’ve been in shows you love, you might know them. The strongest aspect of The Amen Corner is the notion of community, and so I was like, I need to invite the DC community into the work as early as possible. It just felt right for me to do it here because I feel like here I could really focus on community building and the story—less glitz, you know, less of the hype, just focus on the play itself. I had the space to do that in DC, which I’m very grateful for.

The location as written is a storefront church and you and the design team have opened it up on a grand opera scale.

Yes, the designers took what was in the text and exploded it in such a thrilling way!

Would you talk about your impulse and vision for that expansion?

Daniel Soule, our set designer, and I have been working together for several years. When we had to visit the theatre, we took the train down to DC and we sat and just felt the aura of the space. The Harman is so vast. People who had worked there in the past told me, Oh, that’s the hardest thing about it; you’re going to want to cut it down. But we thought, No, this space’s greatest asset is its size. We wanted to embrace it however we could.

I kept telling Daniel that I wanted to feel in a real way that the inner emotional world is the outer world and vice versa, because I kept imagining how invasive it would be to be Margaret, trying to make your breakfast after you preached all morning and then people just come into your house. I don’t know what I would do in that situation if I always had the watchful gaze of the community literally in my home. So we expanded that idea. I was like, Let’s put it all outside. And Dan was drawn to the world of  film noir, which manifested in the black brick walls. And it was just the greatest way to obliterate the traditional structure and go for the emotional feeling of the landscape.

I was so impressed with the way the production moves back and forth between the church drama and the family drama, from ritual/ecclesiastic to kitchen and bedroom, between the gorgeous and moving big music scenes and the smaller domestic scenes where some of the darker themes are.

Thank you. DC kind of welcomed me on both productions with open arms, and I’d like to say, Oh, it’s all me and the design team and we thought it all up. But what makes theater theater is the community you do it in and the people you do it for. I travel around directing a lot now, which I’m very grateful for, but being welcomed, welcomed in, it just sets the tone of the work you’re able to make.

In many ways The Amen Corner is a play about women. The main character is Sister Margaret, a Pentecostal minister. Women are the mainstays of the congregation. And for a script written in 1955, it can be very proto-womanist, like in that line where Margaret says:

The only thing my mother should have told me is that being a woman ain’t nothing but one long fight with men. And even the Lord, look like, ain’t nothing but the most impossible kind of man there is.

And later when Brother Boxer says:

Sister Margaret weren’t nothing but a woman who run off from her husband and then started ruling other people’s lives because she didn’t have no man to control her.

What do you make of Baldwin’s sexual politics in the play?

It’s outrageous, isn’t it? Sometimes when I’m reading The Amen Corner, I feel the way I feel about Hedda Gabler: Ibsen wrote an extremely bold, noir, radical sex art femme piece, and I don’t know how he did it but I feel the same way about Baldwin. This was the era of the politics of Black respectability. Dr. King is coming and the Civil Rights Movement is coming and so many people felt the only way to advance our ethnic group was through perfectionism and showing our best side. And Baldwin says, Let me show you this side, these women, Odessa, Sister Moore, Sister Boxer and Margaret. I mean, they have some of the most intense intellectual dialogues about power and faith and what a woman should be like in order to be in power. It feels incredibly forward-thinking. Baldwin has imagined a world of women leaders. The other church that’s talked about is also run by a woman, and then Sister Moore takes over the church [that Margaret led]. Baldwin has envisioned this world in which Black women rule, literally. And it was very, very fun to get into doing that. I think Baldwin’s showing how Black women can be pillars of our community, and he’s showing that in a unique way. He’s also showing us in an imperfect way, which I think is really good, because we’re living in the time of the independent woman who can do it all. That’s a myth that breaks women’s backs. And Baldwin is showing that we are human. Powerful but still human.

There’s a main plot and a subplot. The main one is about Margaret’s fall: the congregation learns she has deceived them and they turn on her. The subplot is about David, Margaret’s musican son, and his journey to liberation—which you have called a queer narrative. Would you talk about how Baldwin relates those two story lines, and how what’s female-centric and what’s queer in the play connect?

I think that David’s story has a very queer aspect to it because he goes against what he’s supposed to go toward. He comes out by the end of the play into his artistic self. He admits, “Mom, I’ve been lying to you for a long time and I don’t want to lie anymore.” It’s that brave moment of declaring to the people that you love, something that many people who are minorities—whether you are a person of color or Black or queer, LGBTQ, questioning, anything—there’s that moment when you have to say to the mainstream or to your own family, Hey, this is who I am and I don’t want to lie about it anymore. That language is so, so specific and beautifully honest. David says, “I can’t stay here in this house. I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want to tell any more lies. I’ve seen your life. And I’ve seen my father’s life and I want my own life.” And that’s where I get the idea of queerness. He’s been trying to pass as his mother’s idea of a good child and finally he can’t.

We have David’s story against a very Julius Caesar kind of power takedown, the other story of Margaret. This is also why the play is relevant for DC: It’s a chilling look at groupthink. It’s hard to say who’s right and who’s wrong. Sister Moore can be viewed as a villain but she’s not. She’s genuinely looking for peace for her religious community. And Margaret has been lying to that community. But if we’re talking about God and Jesus and faith and love, is it right to push her aside in that way? Sister Moore systematically wins over the hearts and minds of the people to the point that by the last scene they’re trying to make their own decisions but the decision’s already been made. It’s a very chilling look at what happens when humans group and are fearful because ultimately they’re just trying to keep their corner of the world safe from the dangerous outside world. Fear drives us to groupthink in what can be very odd ways. So it’s interesting to have the story of a young man coming out against the group and then that group eating itself and spitting one out. You have a quintessential look at the individual versus the group. What is the individual citizen’s responsibility to groupthink and group politics and what is the point at which you can’t follow the group anymore?

There’s also a love story in the play, an embattled one, between Margaret and her wayward husband Luke, and there’s an almost unbearably emotional scene before he dies where it all unfolds—

I know!

—and it took my heart away. How as a director do you know when you’ve got a scene like that to work so it will work for the audience? Because it was just overwhelming to watch.

Well, Luke’s bedroom takes up the smallest real estate of the stage. It’s all the way stage right in this intimate little corner. And I credit the power of that scene to the two actors, Chiké Johnson [Luke] and Mia Ellis [Margaret], because they had a beautiful chemistry and way with each other from day one. They had an immediate respect for each other that translated every single day when we were working. It was inspiring to see. I kept holding onto: We never do things in the right time. That was my only guiding light there. Something will happen and you’re full of regret and you’re full of: I wish, I should, I did this or I should’ve done that, or “if only I could start again”—which is what Margaret says. And I wanted the scene to be over before I could feel like it was over. To me that’s what life feels like. You always think you’re going to have another minute to say the things you want to say to the people you love or to get what you want or to be honest or true to yourself. And then boom, life subverts that. And when Luke dropped the trombone mouthpiece, I just wanted to feel like it came too soon.

Finally, I wonder if you would respond to this passage from Baldwin’s introduction to the play:

I was armed, I knew, in attempting to write the play, by the fact that I grew up in the church. Knew that out of the ritual of the church, historically speaking, comes the act of the theatre, the communion which is the theatre. And I knew that what I wanted to do in the theatre was to recreate moments I remembered as a boy preacher, to involve the people, even against their will, to shake them up, and, hopefully, to change them…

Wow. How brave is that to look back on your own childhood, on people you loved and people who probably loved you, and to try and change those people and people of the now and people of the future? I just think it’s a testament to his brilliance as an artist and political, intellectual seeker to be able to take his own very specific experience. I mean, how much more specific could you get than being a boy preacher? That’s not something most of us in America have experienced. And somehow he takes this hyperspecific human experience and you’re watching in the audience and you’re like, This is my story. And it’s just incredibly bold and dangerous. I love what you said: The laundry is literally on the stage. Baldwin is doing something that could have really, really cast him out of the community at the time. But he’s doing it so honestly and with such empathy that you don’t feel that he’s talking dirty about his Black community. You feel like he’s trying to understand that. I’m incredibly moved by that quote because he took the personal and made it universal. So if he can do it then maybe we’re all not that different at all. It’s really hopeful. You know, if a white audience member who lives in DC can come and see this story inspired from the experiences of a Black boy preacher, then maybe we’re not so across the divide as we thought.

Running Time: Two hours and 30 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission

The Amen Corner plays September 14 to 26, 2021, at the Harman Center for the Arts, Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F Street, NW, Washington, DC. For tickets, call the box office at (202) 547-1122, or go online.

READ Ramona Harper’s review, “James Baldwin’s ‘Amen Corner’ bears witness to the Beloved Community”

Whitney White
NEW YORK: WP Theatre/Second Stage: Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord | Soho Rep: Zawe Ashton’s for all the women who thought they were Mad | The Movement: What to Send Up When It Goes Down (New York Times Critic’s Pick). REGIONAL: Williamstown Theatre Festival: Jonathan Payne’s A Human Being, of a Sort (starring Andre Braugher and Frank Wood) | PlayMakers Rep: Jump (National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere) | IAMA Theatre Company: Canyon (LA Times Critic’s Choice) | Long Wharf Theatre: An Iliad | Juilliard: Rita Tambien Rita | Trinity Rep: Othello | Endstation: Br’er Cotton. OTHER: Associate Director: Broadway: Marvin’s Room | Roundabout Theatre Company: If I Forget | Atlantic Theatre Company: The Secret Life of Bees. Whitney is an Associate Artist at Roundabout. AWARDS: Recipient of the Susan Stroman Directing Award. Past fellowships: 2050 NYTW Fellow, Ars Nova, Drama League, the Inaugural Roundabout Directing Fellowship, and Colt Coeur. PERSONAL: Whitney’s original musical Definition was part of the 2019 Sundance Theatre Lab and her musical look at Macbeth, Macbeth in Stride, was part of the 2019 Under the Radar Festival (Public Theater). Training: Brown University/Trinity Rep: MFA, Northwestern University: BA.

SEE ALSO:
Elegies for empty stages, by Whitney White and Psalmayene 24
Whitney White and Soyica Colbert join Shakespeare Theatre Company  

The post Whitney White on directing James Baldwin’s classic ‘The Amen Corner’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Men behaving badly is a masterplot in life and art as old as time, and Mike Daisey has given it a doozy of a twist. Not ten minutes into his one-night-only monologue Scott and Andy and All the Boys, he poses a jaw-dropping question: “Why not just get rid of men?” For the moment he means it, in all earnestness. “How do we get rid of the men?”

Then with Swiftian wit he pivots to a comic scenario about putting down all men as one would euthanize a dog. Realizing that goofy plan wouldn’t work globally, he invokes a Marvel supervillain named Thanos, renowned for wiping out half of all life with a finger snap. But Thanos does so at random, which for the gendercidal purpose is no use. Getting rid of men, Daisey concedes, would be kind of impractical.

As he says this there is in his voice and face what seems a trace of disappointment.

I was tuning in on YouTube, so I do not know how Daisey’s riff on offing men landed with the folks watching in person at the Kraine Theater in New York. I heard scattered, startled laughter and what seemed stunned silence. I can only surmise that fans familiar with Daisey’s inimitably expressive range as a monologist sensed here the brink of dead-seriousness and hilarity to which he often brings his rapt audiences. It’s disconcerting and unsettling, but in a good way. It’s how he discombobulates us out of our preconceptions.

Still: a man talking with personal passion about hating patriarchy so much he imagines getting rid of it by getting rid of all men. That’s got to be a hot button topic one is not likely to hear in a locker room much less an off-Broadway black box.

The publicity hook for this 80-minute show is two boldface names—the theater and film producer Scott Rudin and the New York State governor Mario Cuomo—whose histories of male-pattern bullying and abuse have recently become widely known. Daisey engrosses us with a damning dossier on each.

Scott Rudin—he of the eye for award-magnet art—has for decades hired a procession of young assistants into a hellscape work environment where he berates them and breaks them and hurls objects to hit and hurt them. In effect they were in training to be victims. Rudin’s reputation as an abuser was no secret in the biz; it was only when Vulture and Hollywood Reporter delivered the receipts—first-person testimony from those he abused—that he was publicly outed as, in Daisey’s words, “an asshole.” Yet industry reaction to the stories, Daisey says, was silence. “When does the American Theater reckon with Scott Rudin?” he asks, galled at the social complicity that enables men in power to throw their weight around.

Andrew Cuomo was for a brief time “America’s Governor,” calming a country with caring counsel as he filled the COVID-info void left by 45 (“a man who was a walking syphilis culture”). Cuomo was finally shining his own light in the shadow of his father, New York State governor Mario Cuomo. But then his reputation unraveled. He was caught sending COVID-infected people back into nursing homes and covering up how many were dying inside. He was exposed by testimony about an office culture where attractive young women hires were made to dress up daily in heels and where Cuomo touched and groped and otherwise sexually harassed them. To this day, Daisy notes, there has been no justice, no accountability, not even a formulaic lame apology such as Rudin’s. Andrew Cuomo is still in power.

“Shitty men are everywhere,” Daisey shares, hardly an original observation. But what Daisey does in this monologue is count himself among them. Genuinely and astonishingly. With a singular sincerity rarely seen.

He does this with a framing story about “a very gendered fight” he had with his girlfriend. It was about something homey and humdrum: sheets. She asked him one day when they were rushing out on a trip if the sheets on their guest bed needed to be washed and he said they were fine. They were not fine and he knew it; they were far from fine. But he said they were fine anyway. When she learned of the lie she was furious (justifiably so, he fully admits).

Daisey devotes a compelling chunk of this monologue to parsing that seemingly minuscule incident. What was he thinking? Why did he think he could get away with it? Why did he do it knowing it was wrong? “I’m still trying to figure out,” he says, “what I thought would happen.”

And in a breathtaking leap of logic he connects this ethical micro to all other shitty men’s ethical macro: knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway.

I want to understand what I was thinking when I said the sheets are fine. Why I thought that would work. I need to be awake enough to not do it again.

Amid all the laughs, there’s a lucid lesson here. With Scott and Andy and All the Boys, Mike Daisey singlehandedly redefines the concept of mansplaining. He strips the practice of its condescension and defensiveness and turns it into a conscientious and humble discipline of self-examination as a man.

Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes

Scott and Andy and All the Boys, created and performed by Mike Daisey, was livestreamed May 7, 2021, from the Kraine Theater in New York City produced by FRIGID New York. 

To view the video, send $15 via Venmo to @FRIGIDNewYork with the note “Mike Daisey” and your email address, and you will be sent the link.

Epigraph page from the program
for Mike Daisey’s Scott and Andy and All the Boys

SEE ALSO: Dispatches from Mike Daisey’s ‘A People’s History,’ Chapters 1 to 18 by John Stoltenberg

The post Mike Daisey mansplains appeared first on DC Theater Arts.