Director’s Cut on ‘Richard III’ at Folger Will Last
• January 16, 2015

Directors of Shakespeare plays try to find something new in their approach to plays that have after all been staged many times over time.

Robert Richmond, who’s done his share of kings at the Folger Theatre (“Henry V” and “Henry VIII”), but the murderous “Richard III” presented a whole new set of challenges for this director. Some of the results are immediate. For that reason, if you haven’t yet, you should head on over to the Elizabethan Theatre at the Folger while you have the chance. The production—powerful, exciting, thrilling and not a little scary—runs through March 16.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the Elizabethan Theatre isn’t the Elizabethan Theatre any more. Normally, a raised stage with two imposing pillars, the traditional stage has been reconfigured pretty much totally so that “Richard III” can be staged in the round (although it’s actually a square circle), with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides or encircling it.

“I just had this idea,” Richmond said, “that doing it this way offers up so many different sorts of opportunities for me, for the design, for the character and certainly for the audience. Somehow, we managed to do this physically, and it makes for a very different sort of play. I’ve always felt that a lot was going on the play—underneath, if you will, or off stage, that the audience heard about or didn’t even know about.”

The result is that the audience is almost part of the play. It’s a kind of trap in which the audience is hurtled into close proximity with the characters—King Richard himself, along with the thugs and assassins he uses to eliminate the opposition or people he has no further use for. Depending on where you’re sitting, you might suddenly have Richard himself standing or sitting next to you, musing in his sly, sinister way.

“It’s very up close and personal,” Richmond said. “I think we have to look at him from our time as well as his. And the fact that his body was more or less recently discovered and dug up after all this time only lends more immediacy to the production.”

For all of its length and complications, “Richard III” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. It’s been done many times in films (Lawrence Olivier, Al Pacino and Ian McKellen), as well as on stage. “I think he’s a complicated, modern, ambitious man who carries a lot of pain, rage and anger within him. But he’s also very smart, very charming, sexy. Obviously, he’s a villain, but it’s when he’s most self-aware that you like him the most. You don’t altogether know what makes him behave the way he does—perhaps all the women in his life, including his bitter mother.”

What Richmond has produced—with a fury-filled, compelling performance by Drew Cortese in the title role who was in the Studio Theatre production of “The M-F in the Hat”—is a kind of vision of a clean, smooth, hell, which opens up periodically to receive one of Richard victims, from his brother, to the princes, to Buckingham and Lady Anne. And when it does, as bodies tumble or slide in, you see a living world down below. Which is downright scary.

The in-the-round stage is not permanent. But the memory will stay with you for a long time. So is this “Richard III.” Go while you can.

Tischler’s Picks
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**“Richard III”** at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre is a never before re-configuration of the Elizabethan Theatre, murder most foul all around, tense direction by Robert Richmond and a frightening and sly Drew Cortese as the murderous king, through March 16.

**“We are Proud to Present….,”** like nothing you’ll ever see on stage, as six actors take on the subject of race and genocide. A new play by Jackie Sibblies Drury at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 9.

**“Moby-Dick”**— by the Washington National Opera Company in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. Even if you don’t like opera, this is the one that will get you into the game. Spectacular, beautifully sung with grand music by Jake Higgie. Through March 8.

**Coming Up:**

**“World Stages: International Theater Festival 2014,”**on Kennedy Center Stages March 10-30. A feast at multiple venues of the best theater from elsewhere. Check out “The Suit,” from the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, legendary director Peter Brooks adaptation of a South African short story; “Savannah Bay,” starring Emmanuelle Riva, from the Theatre de ‘Ateleir; and “Rupert,” about, you guessed it, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, making its U.S. premiere, by the Melbourne Theater Company. Go to [kennedy-center.org/worldstages](http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/festivals/13-14/world/index.cfm) for more information.

**“Water by the Spoonful,”** a Pulitzer Prize winner by Quiara Alegria Hudes. is at the Studio Theater, March 5-April 23.

**Schubert’s “Winterreise,”** a great song cycle for voice and piano, performed by bass-baritone Ryan McKinny and pianist Kim Pensinger comes to the Barns at Wolf Trap, March 7.

**“Hamlet, the rest is silence,”** Synetic Theatre’s, wordless rendering of Shakespeare’s tale of the Danish prince, March 13-April 6.

**“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,”** a play that will sneak up on you like a friend you didn’t know you had. At Ford’s Theatre March 14-May 17.

**“Camp David,”** a new play, about Carter, Begin, Sadat and a peace treaty, directed by Molly Smith, at Arena Stage, Mar 21-May 4.

**Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival. Theater J presents its annual festival, featuring “The Admission,”** in collaboration with the Cameri Theatre and the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa, by Motti Lerner, March 20-April 6 and “Golda’s Balcony”, April 10-27, with Tovah Feldshu portraying Golda Meir in a play by William Gibson (“The Miracle Worker”). Plus readings and other events.

**The British Invasion: The Beatles & The Rolling Stones**—The Washington Ballet presents two rock ballets, “Trey McIntire’s ‘A Day in the Life’” and Christopher Bruce’s “Rooster,” March 6-8 at the Kennedy Center

**Some Musical Highlights:**

**March1**

Kathy Mattea at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, a Washington Performing Arts Society concert.

“Sweet Honey in the Rock” at Music Center at Strathmore.

**March7**

The Minetti Quartet at the Embassy of Austria, Embassy Series.

**March 29**

Johnny Clegg at Lisner Auditorium.

**April 11-12**

“The Romantics: Schubert and Goethe,” In Series at Heurich House Museum.

**April1 2**

“Of Thee We Sing: The Marian Anderson 75th Anniversary Celebration (Washington Performing Arts Society), with Jessye Norman and Soloman Howard at DAR Constitution Hall.

Hilary Hahn, Music Center at Strathmore (WPAS)

**May 4-11**

Blue Note at 75; jazz celebration concerts at the Kennedy Center.

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Roseanne Cash: `River & Thread’ of Memories
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The voice on the phone is clear and friendly, not unlike the singing voice. It’s conversational, the voice of a woman who seems well rested and comfortable.

It’s the voice of Rosanne Cash, who’s coming to town this Friday for a concert at Lisner Auditorium, singing songs from her new album, “The River & The Thread.” It’s a group of songs which seem at once personal and intimate, but also generously sung as stories we all can share in, songs of experience, passed on down or rediscovered.

The idea for the songs came from various road trips Cash took through several southern states with her husband, John Leventhal, who is the producer, arranger and a guitarist on the album.

“It’s not an exercise in nostalgia,” she said. “I’m from there, I was born in Memphis, I worked there, my family is a part of all that—Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, but I had my growing up in California, and I’ve lived in New York for the last 20 years, so I’ve been in different places in different times. I’ve been here for twenty years now, so I guess you can say I’m a New Yorker.”

She has a pretty good handle on who she is now, who she was and what she’s a part of.

She is after all the daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian, and stepdaughter of June Carter Cash.

She started out as a sharp voiced introspective singer. In her twenties, she married country-folk star Rodney Crowell.

There’s enough drama, history, threads and talent in her life to make for an epic musical series: two marriages, three daughters, and a son; the daughter of a weighty legend; bearing the weight of expectations that go with that; and a period of illness that began with brain surgery, after she announced that she had the rare brain disease, Chiari Malformation Type I.

We don’t talk about her dad, her step-mother or her mother—all of whom died within a fairly short time of each other. Maybe it’s because it’s a conversation she’s had so many times and the residue is in so much of her music, that there’s no doing justice to it in the brief time we have.

Instead, we talk about the South, about working with her husband—“he wrote 98% of the music, I wrote most of the words,” and “it was really good for our marriage”—about her recent residency at the Library of Congress with Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and, of course about the album.

Those things are connected, especially in the music, which, because of her considerable gifts as a writer, seem to course out of the river that also contains poetry and the rich word lore of the South.

“I think the South is especially rich in writers and literature, it’s in the blood, in the history,” Cash said, who’s especially fond of Carson McCullers.

Although she had hit albums and records and was often consideredcby connection, if not necessarily by style—to be a part of the Memphis-Nashville musical community, Cash grew up favoring the California style music by the likes of the Eagles, and the musical intimacy of singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Some of her early efforts reflected that influence.

These days if you Google her name, in terms of genre or music, it crops up in the all-encompassing halo of “Americana” music, which has its own Grammy category.

“I don’t know, I suppose its about singer-songwriters, about folk-blues-and country,” Cash said. “Emmy Lou Harris has always said that she was Americana before there ever was such a thing.”

Crowell, with whom she had three daughters and with whom she remains friendly, recently won a Grammy with Emmy Lou Harris for best Americana album.

If there is an artist today that encompasses a kind of contemporary Americana, a voice with enough range and experience to speak to large parts of the country, it’s probably Cash. She is in her 50s now, and has dealt musically with her rich and sometimes troubling relationship with her father, in memorial concerts, in the great “Black Cadillac” album—which was highly personal, but also resonated with her father’s audiences—and with the “The List,” which features selections from “100 Essential Country Songs,” which her father compiled for her a long time ago.

But “The River & The Thread” is something different. It’s witchy, folky. It feels like someone traveling through her memories, but also keenly at home with herself. The songs are richly written—musically and word-wise. They have a way of making you want to rummage through them again, right away, and for sure later, like some fresh treasure trove found in the attic.

That’s especially true of “A Feather’s Not a Bird,” the first track, which is as simple as a modern incantation. Her voice is clear and mature in the way some of her early songs were not. Leventhal joins in from time to time, giving resonant timber to parts here and there, and his guitar-playing carries everything along like a boat on a river. The New York Daily News said her music translates “the passion and specificity of roots music into her own graceful language.”

Her voice is traveling here—but not staying—rummaging in her roots and her people. It’s looking into the mirror out on the road. And it’s affecting because while it’s about particular people, journeys and stories, like a Virginia Civil War soldier, for instance, she sings for all of us. We get it right away.

The refrain from “A Feather’s Not a Bird” seems like a riddle solved, but it’s also haunting: “A feather’s not a bird/the rain is not the sea/a stone is not a mountain/but a river runs through me.”

Rosanne Cash appears at Lisner Auditorium, Friday, Feb. 14, at 8 p.m.

Intense ‘Richard III’ Is in Your Face at Folger
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When you watch actor Drew Cortese stalk the stage or stand and scan the audience for approval as the murderous Plantagenet King Richard III at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, you’re almost for a moment tempted to avoid his eyes, lest he gives you that look that says, “You’re next.”

You could, of course, do like one audience member at the Robert Richmond-directed production of William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”: just bow down before the king or cheer him like any member of the groundlings. This is because you’re cajoled, invited, and encouraged to react and interact. It’s the most intimate, interactive “Richard III” that you’ll ever encounter in a lifetime, short of becoming one of his victims in real time. When the Duke of Buckingham, who’s been Richard’s greatest enablers in procuring the royal crown, asks him for his reward and Richard replies by saying “I am not in a giving mood,” you want to yell, “Run, Buckingham, run.”

If the folks at Synetic Theatre offer you silent Shakespeare, Richmond gives you tumultuous, up close and personal Shakespeare, a bang the drums loudly in your face, “Richard III.” Richmond basically had the genteel, front-and-center proscenium with two big pillars façade of the Elizabethan Theatre at the Folger Library renovated into a theater-in-the-round space, complete with spaces that open to receive the remains of murder victims as they are sent on their way, tumbling, struggling, defeated and breathless into a pit. The audience is quite literally on top of everyone. It is in the balcony and rings the square stage. A white stalking ground only occasionally populated by scenery, table or chair, as dark spaces open up to receive the corpses and victims.

This brings a quality to the play which it doesn’t always have. There’s a relentless, time-compressed pace here, compressing the action of what is historically at least five or more years into what seems like several days, and on stage, a couple of hours plus. Time doesn’t so much pass as race by as Richard seems in the end to finally run out of people to kill, murder, seduce, charm, manipulate or ground into bones.

There’s even a piquant in-the-news intimacy, provided by the fact that Richard’s body was found recently in the foundation of a parking lot in Leicester, England, bringing a double whammy of “He’s baaack” to the proceedings on stage.

He’s never been gone, really. The subject of Richard the evil king (or not) has always been up for grabs in historical debates—in novels (“We Speak No Treason”) and most recently in a rather lurid mini-series on Starz cable network, called “The White Queen,” which focuses on many of the women in the Wars of the Roses saga, a fight to the death for the crown of England between the York and Lancaster factions of the Plantagenets.

Shakespeare himself was not a disinterested party in this manner. It is his portrait of the murderous, evil Richard that many people think of as true, and he wrote during the reign of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I, whose grandfather Henry VII (with a somewhat questionable claim to the throne) killed Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.

This Richard—as portrayed by Cortese (he was intense and watchable in the Studio Theatre’s production of “The M-F with the Hat”)—is a charmer, ruthless, even sociopathetic, like some royal serial killer who sweeps away everyone of his path to the throne. He doesn’t have horns, or a hump, or any serious deformity except a limp. All the unnatural stuff is in his voice and eyes. He can be hurt—in the end, he’s killed—but watch how easily he is wounded when one of the princes mocks him by imitating his limp. Most of the time he gets others to do his dirty work. With low-life assassins close to the throne and with orders on paper, hints and lies, the play—one by one—becomes de-peopled.

He’s capable of charm and has the power to bring people to his side—where power sits waiting, and he knows love. “Why Richard loves Richard,” he says at one point.

Mostly, he acts with a kind of self-appreciation and delight that is frightening. Here’s Anne, wife and daughter of enemies he’s killed, and he seduces her into becoming his wife. Here’s his brother Clarence, murdered on false orders. Here’s the nephews, declared illegitimate and murdered. Here’s Stanley and Hastings and Rivers. Sometimes, it almost seems as if proximity can do you in as easily as being a real or perceived threat.

One of the more interesting and powerful aspects of this play is the presence of the women. This is still relatively early Shakespeare before “Hamlet,” “The Tempest” or “Macbeth.” You can see the beginnings of the witches from “Macbeth,” when a quartet of the women gather together in a furious incantation of their sorrows. Julia Motyka as Elizabeth, Nanna Ingvarsson as the Duchess of York, Richard’s mother, Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan as Lady Anne and Naomi Jacobson as Lady Margaret make for a curse-like chorus. Jacobson especially rages like a witchy, ancestral queen who makes a grief-swollen necklace of loss out of every word she spouts.

This production is an engaging one—in the sense that it meets you head on. There’s no ignoring it or any danger of nodding off. Who knows but that Richard might be standing right next to you in the aisle with a death warrant?

— “Richard III” runs through March 9 at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, 201 East Capitol St., SE.

View photos of the production by clicking on the photo icons below. (photos by Jeff Malet).
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‘Earnest’: Wilde at His Best, Delicious Word Play
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On so many levels, there’s just no other word for it: the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s most popular play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is delicious.

It sounds delicious. It looks delicious. Sometimes, you swear you think you’re sniffing flowers from a Victorian English garden, and that’s delicious, too.

This is a production for theatergoers who remember the importance of being Oscar Wilde and why we still pay attention to his writing, works and life. It’s Wilde at his most accessible.

Watching this production—with Keith Baxter, who knows his way around Wildean manners and manors—you get an odd, conflicting set of feelings. It’s a production that seems almost exotically removed from the way we live today, while at the same time it feels familiar as songs you danced to when you were young.

Sometimes, listening and watching the characters at home in their perfectly dressed and outfitted comfort zone of Victorian sunset, is almost like watching an authentic resurrection of an ancient civilization—sort of like the Mayans or Aztecs, minus the human sacrifice. At other times, the Wilde epigrams flow like a rippling stream of smart, wise daggers and darts aimed at the cash-anemic, land-and-title wealthy aristocrats, so consumed by the outward flash of manners, dress codes, pedigree and ritual. They’re like a crescendo of bon mots of vanity .

Many of the epigrams act as dialogue: “work is the curse of the drinking class” and “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” are instantly familiar when spoken, and pertinent today.

We’re in good hands here with the direction by Baxter, who has directed dazzling productions of Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” and “Lady Windemere’s Fan.” He has staged it in such a way—with the great help of costume designer Robert Perdziola and set designer Simon Higlett—that it feels like a fine-tuned three-act epic, even though it has two sets and a cast of only 11 actors.

But it has words, complete-sentence conversations and battles, spoken in ways that feel like another form of English entirely—and that would cover British English and American English. Surely not even in England do aristocrats speak quite in such a mannered, musical way in which the vowels wage a successful war on consonants and with each other, the o’s swamping the a’s in every skirmish, elongating like Plastic Man.

The story—the kind of story that allowed Wilde to be the bad boy of English high society-is the gilded stuff of farce where closet and bedroom doors are forever slamming, except that there are no closets and bedrooms. There is only a drawing room in London and a rose-rich garden in the countryside. So, instead of slamming doors, you have almost magical and quite unexpected appearances of characters causing havoc and silent screams.

We have two high-minded, extremely well-dressed friends, John or Jack Worthing and the impeccably named Algernon Moncrieff. Algernon is the scion of an aristocratic family, dominated by Lady Bracknell, one of Wilde’s greatest creations, played here with magnificent, steely, nose-up determination by Sian Phillips. Worthing, who lives in the country where he is the guardian of the fetching Cecily Cardew, passes himself off as a non-existent brother named Earnest (thus, the importance of). He can’t drop his disguise because the object of his affections, Gwendolen Fairfax, loves the sound of the name, much more than she might love, say John or Jack. She is also Lady Bracknell’s daughter, a hitch for Worthing, since she disapproves of him.

Meanwhile, Algernon also pretends to be Earnest and heads to the country where he encounters Cecily and the two become immediately smitten with each other. Whereupon, Worthing, then Gwendolyen, followed not much later by Lady Bracknell, arrive in the country. Throw in a pastor, a butler, and a governess, and you have a most delightful, farcical battle of the sexes and classes.

There is a reason of course why this play—as opposed to “Ideal” or the salacious and ground-breaking “Salome”—is Wilde’s most popular play. For one thing, it’s just about perfect in dealing with serious things in a frivolous way—there is no scene more delicious than when Gwendolyn and Cecily, straight-backed and steely, sit down to tea and cakes and muffins and size each other up. It’s a battle of powerful insincerities stated sweetly and with a touch of both sugar and bitters. It’s much the same as when Lady Bracknell measures Cecily as a lovely girl, and bashes her hair, her dress and so forth in devastating and perfunctory fashion. In those days, a woman couldn’t simply say I’m wearing Ralph Lauren, but was immediately spotted for being not quite up to stuff.

There’s also the problem of Worthing not really knowing who he is—as a baby, he was left in a train station in a handbag. The secret behind this little bit of problem is one of maneuvers which Shakespeare often used himself. It’s the kind of things where love is dropped in a box neatly tied with a bow, just waiting to be discovered and resolved.

The cast is letter-perfect, especially Anthony Roach as Algernon, who looks and acts like a refined sort of wastrel, whose stock in trade is a kind of nearly insufferable charm. The two young ladies—Vanessa Morosco as Gwendolen and Katie Fabel as Cecil make great high-spirited foils and sisters to each other. It’s also great to see Floyd King back in the WSTC company as the pastor, revealing once again how to turn a double take and reaction into an Olympian quadruple take.

“Earnest” was Oscar Wilde’s breakthrough play, his first that made the upper classes squirm and like it because they were being amused, even as they were being verbally assaulted. He became a high society darling, achieved fame, wealth and if not acceptance, a certain delicious, acceptable notoriety which lasted only until he was brought down by a relationship he had with Lord Alfred Douglas, which would ensue in suits and Wilde being sent to prison for “gross indecency.” He never again returned to his adopted homeland, to be a proper, aristocratic Englishman. He died in 1900 in Paris.

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is Wilde before all that—at the top of his game. He could say with no modesty, but great accuracy, that “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” And in “Earnest,” it’s a delicious and true declaration.

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” a Shakespeare Theatre Company production, is at the Lansburgh Theatre through March 2.
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‘Tallest Tree’ at Arena: the Grandeur and Range of Paul Robeson
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When you look at the length of “The Tallest Tree in the Forest”, the remarkable resurrection play, written and performed by Daniel Beaty in the Kreeger Theatre at Arena Stage—which runs two hours—you think two things at once.

It’s too long. It’s too short.

Beaty—singer, actor, playwright, author, educator—has taken on the task of presenting the remarkable and turbulent character, personality, life and times of Paul Robeson—as singer, actor, athlete, teacher, activist, political figure, and civil rights leader in a biographical piece of theater, densely populated by some 40 characters, all of them played by Beaty.

It’s an exhausting, sometimes steamrollering, experience for an audience, no matter what your level of experiential or personal attachment to the subject at hand. As such, it has the effect of feeling too long.

Yet, it’s also an exhilarating experience. It works as drama and works as a kind of wish that you knew more and want to know more. As a result, it also feels too short.

It’s a daunting task Beaty—who has connected with Arena before as performer and playwright—has set for himself because not only is he playing all the parts, somewhat like an actor doing a one-man “Hamlet”—but he is also portraying a redoubtable, giant figure in American cultural, political and civil rights history. Robeson and his amazing rise, all gifts blazing gloriously, his commitments to social justice for African Americans all in and all the way, require almost equal performance gifts on the part of the actor on stage. He has to have the range to play young Robeson, the great singer Robeson, the philandering Robeson, the roused, courageous and stubborn Robeson and old and dying Robeson.

That life of Robeson’s resonates on the stage during the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and the impending celebration of Black History Month. Before there was King and the March on Washington and the heroic, massive changes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, there was Robeson. He himself called himself “the most famous African American in the world.” He was in the vanguard, a huge contradiction of a man, speaking out, singing out and speaking truth to power before there was ever such an imposing voice and man doing so.

Beaty, working with director Moises Kaufman (“The Laramie Project” “The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde”, and “33 Variations” among others) and his edgy Tectonic Theater Company Project, gives us the man in full, if not the total man.

Robeson, one should remember, grew up the son of a minister who was a former slave, was a high school star athlete and student-performer, got a scholarship to Rutgers University and was a football All-American there, became famous for his singing early on during the Harlem Renaissance, starred in two plays by Eugene O’Neill, including “The Emperor Jones,” was the first Jim singing “Old Man River”, took up the cause of civil right, confronted President Harry Truman on anti-lynching laws face to face, fell into the clutches of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and ran afoul of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for his stubborn embrace of Soviet Union policies.

That doesn’t even include Robeson’s troubled but long marriage to Eslanda “Essie” Goode, whom he married in 1921—she was confidante, manager, lover, wife. The relationship was often quarrelous and wounding. Robeson was a habitual philanderer and had many affairs notably with his Desdemona Uta Hagen in “Othello,” but the couple stayed together.

Somehow, Beaty manages to pull together—if not always in focus—the many strands of Robeson’s overpowering personality and gifts, especially when singing a number of songs that range from “Get on Board Lil’ Chillun’,” “Go Down Moses,” “Great Day,” “Go Down, Moses” and many others. The voice is not necessarily Robeson’s (check out Robeson’s “Ol Man River” on the Web), but it’s supple, more rangy and affective in its own way, striving for the grandeur of Robeson. Nevertheless, it’s in his characterizations that Beaty really shines—we get Truman, civil rights leader Mary Bethune McLeod, who dubbed him “The Greatest Tree in the Forest”—Robeson’s father and others. So effective is in a blistering argument between Robeson and Essie that you feel for her, literally, before you remember that you’re listening to a voice, not seeing a woman.

Robeson—who believed with all his gifts and heart that the artist should be an activist, a fighter against slavery and for freedom and justice —seemed sometimes willfully inclined towards tragedy. His support of Stalin’s Soviet Union even after he discovered that Stalin was murdering and imprisoning Jewish intellectuals goes beyond stubbornness, it’s a clinging to a good principle in defense of evil, a kind of forgiveness he did not apply to his own country. Robeson suffered for his principles as well as mistakes. HIs passport was taken away, thus robbing him of his livelihood singing worldwide. There was a deliberate effort to erase him from history on the part of Hoover and the government.

There are harrowing scenes in this play. His confrontation with Truman on the issue of rising instances of lynching in the South is conducted against a stage background of increasing shadows of men hanging from trees and his interview with a noted Jewish poet in the Soviet Union is a kind of dance of tragic tension.

You walk away with several feelings. You feel the freshness of the material, remember references and music, and wonder from which context members of the audience at any given time are experiencing this resurrection of Paul Robeson. And you walk out feeling, as if you’ve been at a fragmented feast, daunting, but also richer than expected. And you walk away hungry for more.

“The Tallest Tree in the Forest” runs at the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage through Feb. 16.

Fringe Festival Is Back for 18 Days, 15 Venues
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There’ll be over a 150 plays and shows to choose from. Here’s a look at a few we thought might be interesting. Making choices at the Fringe is not always a rational process of course, but here goes. Sometimes the titles and descriptions are worth the ride.

DATELINE: MACBETH (Quattro Gatti Theatre Company) and MACBETH; THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS (The Rude Mechanicals). Two very different takes on the Scottish play. “Dateline” takes place in a tropical setting, with this hook: “As funny as it is macabre, it goes TV mysteries one better.”

ANTIGONE (The Wandering Theatre Company) and BITCH: A PLAY ABOUT ANTIGONE (Naked Theatre Company). When’s the last time you had a chance to see not one but two plays about Sophocles’ ancient Greece heroine who defies her father and pays for it. Not ever, except at the Fringe.

THE FEVER (Patrick O’Brien, director). O’Brien’s “Underneath the Lintel” was a big hit at last year’s Fringe, and now the director brings Wallace Shawn’s horrific and provoking play to the Fringe.

WISTARIA (The Wistaria Project). “A traveling meeting that questions our historical past and present through a hallucinatory amalgam of U.S. texts, traditional song and actions mysterious and banal.” We like it because we have no idea what this meant but it sounds interesting.

THE OLD MAN NEVER LET IT GO (Hector J. Reynoso). A visual adaptation of “The Old Man and the Sea,” with music and dance, starring Reynoso. Hemingway lives!

CABARET XXX: EVERYBODY FCKING DIES (Pinky Swear Producitos). The life and death of Femme Fatales and other matters. Great title.

REPORT TO AN ACADEMY (Scena Theatre). An ape named Red Peter presents a thesis on his life in captivity to a scientific academy. From Robert McNamara’s Scena Theatre.

DISTRICTLAND (Bucharest Inside the Beltway). For the Millennial in your life, a satire and play about starting your career in the District. “Spoiler: You are Not Your LinkedIn Profile”

CONTRAFACT OF FREEDOM (Hunger and Thirst Theatre Collective). We are always interested in anything to do with Francis Scott Key. The Star-Spangled Banner: American history’s most unlikely origin story. By Alex Pappas.

DRACULA: A LOVE STORY (Wry Press). Written by DC Theatre Scene critic Tim Treanor, an intensely romantic take on the all-knowing, ever present vampire of our times. Directed by Christopher Henley with Lee Ordeman.

CHESAPEAKE (The Edge of the University Players 2). This magical realist fable is by Lee Blessing, one of America’s best and most evocative playwrights. A tale about a New York performance artist, a firebrand conservative Southern politician and a Chesapeake Bay Labrador retriever.

MEDEA’S GOT SOME ISSUES (No Rules Theatre Company and Spain arts & culture). Classy Babe turned ancient Greek temptress tells all. Featuring Lisa Hodsoll.

FEISTY OLD JEW (Charlie Varon). A one-man show about Bernie, 83, who hates yoga studios, S6 coffee, young tech millionaires and what they’re doing to San Francisco.

THE MONSTER SONGS (Dr. Dour & Peach) Dr. Dour sings and plays 10-string guitar. Peach plays cello and banjo and they sing and tell the personal stories of lovesick mummies, giant lizards and bargain-hunting zombies. Featuring Toby Mulford (composer) and Rachel Spicknall Mulford.

It’s back.

The theater festival that anticipates changing times and has become a hot bed for everything new in performance art, the Capital Fringe Festival, returns for 18 days of “uninhibited and creative performances” at over 15 venues round the city, July 10-27.

Tickets are already on sale at the Fort Fringe Box Office at 607 New York Ave., near the Washington Convention Center.
This festival will mark the last year Capital Fringe will be headquartered at this location. The good news is that it will move into a new space at 1358 Florida Avenue currently occupied by the Connersmith Gallery.

This year’s venues include a variety of locations in the continually changing downtown world. Performances will be held at several spaces at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, located in the new and hot H Street Corridor area; Caos on F; the Bedroom at Fort Fringe; the Baldacchino Tent Bar; the Dupont Circle Q Street Exit; DC Reynolds Bar; The Shop at Fort Fringe; Gearbox on 7th Street; the Gallery and Main Stage at the Goethe Institut; Hillyer Art Space; Jet Hair Designs; the Martin Luther King Library; Mountain at Mount Vernon United Methodist Church; Plush Beauty Box; the Fridge; The Source Theater; Union Stylus; the Warehouse; and the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

Fringe, under the leadership of founder, president and chief executive Julieanne Brienza, has continually expanded the boundaries of theater and performing arts. The Capital Fringe Festival is one of many around the world, a tradition of cutting edge theater that began in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Today, you’re likely to run across a mixture of drama and dance, classical plays and vaudeville acts, stand up comedians, puppets, opera and drama, shows that include Twitter and Facebook, straight forward dramas and not so straight forward plays, musical acts, site-specific plays, one-man and one-woman shows and much more. This is a festival for every generation.

Walking Through History, Past, Present and Future
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One  thing about living in Washington, or maybe even in the modern world, there’s always something going on. There is something to look forward like a birthday or a holiday, something to look back on like the 57th Inauguration, something to celebrate, like Groundhog Day.  For every month of the year, the calendar is pretty much full, if you choose to fill it.

February, for instance, is Potato Lovers Month and Umbrella Month. It is Black History Month or African American History Month. It is Creative Romance Month and Condom Month as well as Friendship Month, and that includes the celebration of Flirting Week and birthdays galore  and special days every day of the month, just about, from Morgan Fairchild’s birthday (Feb. 3), to Thank-a-Mailman Day (Feb. 4).

You get the drift.  In this issue, we celebrate February for our readers, by concentrating on love and history, if you will, specifically, we’re going to take a look at Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14),  the birthday of presidents, specifically, that of  Abraham Lincoln and the presence of history in our city and daily lives, and the celebration of February as Black History Month with its accompanying round of events, commemorations and celebrations.  It is a fact that in this city, especially, remembering the past allows us to anticipate the future more fully.

Our cover photo is of Barack and Michelle Obama in their inaugural night glam and glory by former White House photographer David Hume Kennerly.  In many and most ways, the Obamas embody the themes of our February story. As a couple and as parents, they are very much about the essence of Valentine’s Day which is love both romantic and familial.  As the first African American president and first lady, first and second terms, they are giant figures in the stream of American history as well as African American history, and their presence adds to the enrichment of our daily lives as citizens in a city embraced by history.

ST. VALENTINE’S DAY

It is probably fair to say that President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, as couple and parents, represent many of the qualities and virtues that sell Hallmark Cards, inspire a rush to the flower stands, give rise to a man going to Jared Diamond, make us think about couples and parents and the subject and celebration of love.

The inauguration revealed those aspects about the Obamas and not for the first time. Here were the daughters suddenly grown into adolescents and near-teens, acting like older and younger sisters under the beaming eyes of their parents, fooling around, texting, and look at that couple coming down the stairs there in the glare of a gala, Obama’s killer-watt smile at high, courtly beam, the tux, the red dress, the white bow tie, she serenely proud, billowing, what a rush of a date night.

They bring evidence of the love and romance in their lives to the public regularly.  It is speculation, of course, but you guess that they’ve had their rough patches because politics is not an arena for starry-eyed beginners, but you also guess that their relationship is one of deep and shared love and respect, and got-your-back loyalty and pride. While both are husband and wife with guy and gal things, they are total grown-ups as parents. 

In terms of glamour, the Obamas give Camelot a run for its residue of dazzle and razzle and youth and kids.  Their elevation to the White House seems to have strengthened them as a couple, it has been an addition as opposed to an imperilment. They appear to do honor to the idea of love.

The rest of us have to do what we often do at times like these—forget our workaholoic tendencies,  and appreciate the fact that someone other than the face in the mirror or our pets love us.  If you are loved, and share a love, how to show your appreciation of the person you so nonchalantly introduce as your better half?  Praise, wine and dine, kiss and give a shout out, buy roses, Godiva, cupcakes and a little shiny bauble from somewhere, if not Jared’s. 

Do something, besides dinner and champagne.  Here are some suggestions: go to a movie.

Specifically, go to the “Screen Valentines: Great Movie Romances” at the American Film Institute Theater, a series of some of Hollywood’s classic romantic movies which will move you, make you laugh and make you cry, running from Feb. 1 through March 14. 

Some of the films include “Ninotchka,” a 1930s movie billed as “Garbo Laughs,” in which the Great Greta, playing a dour Soviet commissar is wooed and led astray by American Melvyn Douglas; “A Man and a Woman,” the classic example of French sensuality starring Anouk Aimee and Jean Louis Tringinant; “The Way We Were,” in which passionately opinionated New York Jewish princess Barbra Streisand and rabble rouser meets blonde golden boy Robert Redford in his prime.  There are more—go to the AFI website for details.

It was always Hollywood to which we looked for guides to the joys, sadness and perils of love: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” was Oliver’s epigram for his lost love, but don’t try that one on your girlfriend or you’ll be sorry.  And my favorite love line from a western: Wyatt Earp, smitten with a school teacher, asks a bartender: “Hey, have you ever been in love?” to which  the reply is “Nope. I been a bartender all my life.”

You could check out the Washington Ballet, Feb. 13 to 17, at Sidney Harman Hall in the Harman Center, where the company’s “L’Amour (love, baby . . .) features three sensual, sexy, hot and love-stuff dances. That would be “Dangerous Liasons,” a world premiere choreographed by David Palmer; “Opposites Distract,” a company premiere choreographed by Elaine Kudo, and “Under Covers,” a world premiere choreographed by Amy  Stewart.  It all sounds like various reflections on the sexual and romantic and sometimes darker sides of love.

Or you could go where he goes: “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?”  That would be our good swain Romeo upon discovering Juliet. You will hear those lines again, but in a somewhat different context at the Signature Theater’s production of Joe Calarco’s play “Shakespeare R&J,” in which students at a repressive and all-male Catholic boarding school go against the rules and begin to “perform and act out” the forbidden Shakespeare play with dramatic results.  This “Romeo and Juliet” is modern, or as Calarco says, “wildly passionate and sexy.”   At Signature, Feb. 5 through March 3.

Don’t forget, in fact, to give your dog a Valentine’s Day treat. Their love for us is, after all, and unlike that of anyone else who might love you, unconditional.  (February is Responsible Pet Owner Month)

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Just by being who and what they are, Barack and Michelle Obama stand at the center of Black History Month, and the president, in his speech and looking back on the thousands-strong multitude understood the historic nature of where and how he stood,  knowing he would not be in that place again.  When he was elected and inaugurated for the first time, I suspect much of Washington’s overall, day-to-day citizenry re-discovered themselves as neighbors after all.   In Adams Morgan, my friend and neighbor Mickey Collins, who often regaled me with tales of U Street glory days of the black community, told me how sad he was that his aged mother had not lived to see the election. Then, I was sad also that Mickey did not live to see the results of the second election.

Black history is neither an overlay nor a background noise in Washington, D.C., the city which we inhabit. It belongs to everyone who lives here, not just in traditionally African American neighborhoods but the entire city, now changing in its makeup, but always rich in a permanent history.  We have a network of black churches and congregations, we have Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memorial, we have the Frederick Douglass Museum in Anacostia, we have slave and church cemeteries and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial which is as much a shrine to the memory of the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech as it is to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. And we have all that jazz everywhere.

Some people have argued that with the election of Obama, we are living in what’s called a post-racial era, yet the subject of race is always on the mind like a prayer and an unanswered question.  At the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, there will be an exploration of the subject with “Race in America: Where Are We Now,” an arts and ideas weekend with panel discussions, films and performances of David Mamet’s play “Race,” Feb. 16-17.

Here are some events to watch out for, including the Feb. 2 Black History Month Family Day at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum.

On Feb. 14, THEARC at 1901 Mississippi Ave., SE, the DC THEARC Theater will present two free performances in honor of Black History Month, featuring “Harriet Tubman: The Chosen One,” a 45-minute play performed by Gwendolyn Briley-Strand, taking the audience on one of Tubman’s 19 journeys on the Underground Railroad.

In addition, such institutions as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the D.C. Public Library, the Anacostia Community Museum, George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, and others will hold special events throughout the month of February.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE CIVIL WAR

February is the month we celebrate the birthdays of both President George Washington and President Abraham Lincoln, but it is Lincoln, the Civil War president and the Great Emancipator who resonates most strongly during the years of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  While we look to the past and hear echoes of Lincoln’s words as spoken by Daniel Day Lewis in the hugely popular film “Lincoln,” President Obama will address a joint session of Congress with his annual and much-anticipated State of the Union address on Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12.

We are by now almost reflexively calling Washington a divided city in terms of the governing classes, but when the Civil War began in 1861, those divisions were searing, real and often bloody. Washington, itself, became at times a city under potential siege as well as the seat of power. 

Our museums especially have focused on the Civil War.  You can go to the Smithsonian  Museum of American Art for “The Civil War and American Art” to the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture Gallery (inside the National Museum of American History) for “Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863 and the March on Washington, 1963” and “Torn in Two,” a geographic and cartographic approach to exploring the causes and memories of the Civil War with political cartoons, photographs, prints and maps at the Ford’s Theatre through Feb. 24.

Carla’s Angels
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It’s a drive and a time to get to Country Club Kennels and Training in Fauquier County, Virginia, a drive and a time filled—once you get off the interstates and main drags—with stretches of statuesque barns, sheds that are peeling some original paint, crosses and churches, markets, even a Baja Bistro, a tasty deli-style roadside restaurant serving generous portions of taco and enchilada dishes close to where you’re going. You can practically hear fragments of the Bill Danoff-penned, John Denver anthem “Country Roads.”

We’re far removed from Washington, D.C., its bike lanes and hundreds of restaurants and monuments and neighborhoods and eclectic and electric urban scene. We’re in the country—rolling hills, quiet, sky-filled, field-filled country where Carla Nammack lives and works and lives her twin creations, running her closely connected enterprises, the Country Club Kennels and the Chance Foundation which are at the center of her life.

It’s a life filled with dogs—her own dogs, currently a remarkable 13 in number, but also the dogs being boarded at the 44-acre farm and estate, being groomed, watched over, tended to, spoiled and exercised at the Kennels. There are also the rescue dogs getting tender care, training, socialization and medical attention so that they will more likely be adopted through the auspices of her great and loving charity effort, the Chance Foundation. The foundation is a no-kill rescue and adoption facility, nurtured by Nammack with a series of fund raising and charity events, donations from dog lovers who want to help and by a special place in her imagination and emphatic heart for the dogs that find their way to this place.

For Nammack, the line between her business and her foundation is thin. It’s almost a kind of perpetual motion machine that is bridged by nothing but serendipity and by the common denominator of the presence of dogs. The dogs—those coming here to be boarded for a kind of vacation of their own while their owners vacation—and those abandoned, often wounded and suffering dogs left behind and often saved from being euthanized have something in common. Both groups are loved—no other word for it—one by one and together by Nammack and her staff, in a human illustration of the famous unconditional love attributed to canines.

Nammack loves to talk about dogs—particular dogs like Nellie, or her own first dog which she got as a birthday present when she was nine, or dogs in general, and why they’re special. But you don’t know any of that when you turn into the driveway at Wind Haven Farm at 10739 Bristersburg Road in Catlett, Va. You see a long driveway, green fields, a shed, a lengthy area of vegetation and a tree- rich pond, an office, spotted by dog and animal sculptures here and there. “If it’s a dog, or a horse, I tend to buy it,” she tells you later.

We spot her coming accompanied by two dogs, a brown chocolate lab who comes to check us out with nose, sniff and friendly nudging, and another black dog. She walks at a brisk pace, smiles a greeting, accompanied by an outstretched hand, a petite, attractive blonde woman in a black top and white slacks. Nearby is one of her employees’ truck, with a placard that reads, “You would drink too, if you were a dog groomer.” Nearby, behind a large fenced enclosure, several dogs—recognizably big and small, a Beagle here, a Pomeranian, an eager Cocker—are barking out of curiosity and greeting.

After working in marketing for her father John’s business, she moved on to starting up the kennel in 1996, with the help and support of her dad. “How to describe him—a charismatic, hardworking, always supportive dad, a proud dog lover who taught me about the value of hard work, persevering, and reaching for my dreams.” Her mother is Aina Mergaard Nammack, an accomplished artist whose father was from Norway and mother from Spain. “She raised me to be responsible, independent, to care about others and to make wise choices in life. She is my role model,” she said.
It’s hardly quiet in the kennel’s office—dogs—especially Nellie, who’s due for adoption and, while she’s been here, has acquired quiet diva characteristics. “You cannot get by her without petting her,” she said. Nellie, a beautiful, graceful small grayish Miniature Schnauzer came to Nammack as a rescue with the kind of story that seems typical of Chance Foundation rescues: “Nellie was found lying on the side of the road…someone spotted her and took her to the nearest shelter. She was matted, covered in fleas and ticks, filthy, with an infected tumor on her back. …. After l2 days at the shelter, she was scheduled to be put down, but Carla and two of her employees, Jenna Seale and Madison Ross saw her and immediately agreed that she did not deserve to die at a shelter. They brought her to the kennel assuming she would be a hospice situation. After some antibiotics, a good grooming and one day as the office greeter, she made a complete 180-degree turn around.”

Nellie—scheduled for an operation to remove the growth on her back—has since been adopted by two women who had previously adopted two others dogs from the Chance Foundation.

More than a few times, rescued dogs get adopted by Carla herself. She has “13 dogs, at last count, not counting the ones who passed on,” she said.

There are other stories than Nellie’s—including that of Pom Pom, a small, energetic Pomeranian hit by a car with devastating effect. Pom Pom had part of his jaw removed by surgery, which had the salutatory effect of making him appear oddly cuter.

Her own first dog? “I got to pick for myself,” Nammack said. “There was this one dog, they were all puppies, and I just scooped him up right away.” He was a ninth birthday present, “part great dane, part mastiff, part boxer.” He got quite large. His name was Treve. It was the start of a love affair with Great Danes, who “are just big babies”. You can tell—there’s a painting of one of her Great Danes in the house, and he’s on the kennel’s business card. “Sampson,” she said. “Handsome Sampson, he was the most majestic boy on earth. He was my best friend and was perfect in every way.”
If it is true that, as some have claimed, that “all dogs go to heaven,” there are probably quite a few dogs who will think that heaven looks just like the Country Club Kennel grounds, the green, green grass—and pool, and pond and vast exercise yards and runs—of home.

Here’s what you see and get when a dog is brought for boarding here—extra-large kennel runs, exercise and play time six to seven times a day, all play closely supervised and only with the owner’s permission, supervision by a staff of 12 plus volunteers, a pool, a waterfall pool and the ponds. This is a place where dogs forget to think about their owners.

Nammack, an expert trainer herself—you can find her advice on various training and behavior issues on You Tube videos and her website at www.countryclubkennels.com—is straight forward about her love of dogs. “Dogs,” she said, “don’t want that much—food, a little attention, sleep, play—and they’re happy. And that’s the least you can do, because they give so much back.” And it goes without saying, the best, most valuable medium of exchange—when all is said and done—between humans and dogs is love.

Nammack started the Chance Foundation in 2000 after a heart-rending meeting with a dog named Chance whose time left in life could have been measured in minutes or at best hours, but who was rescued and saved by her and in turn inspired her to do more. Dogs up for adoption, their stories and their life and times show up on the Kennel website—their faces, their journeys are both touching and joyful, and for dog lovers, a treat.
Nammack leads us on a journey with her dogs, from her office, where a pug and the Beagle Pringles eye you with hope, to the pool, where the brown lab and the expectant Cocker with the tennis ball always in his mouth leap exuberantly into the pool and time again.

Through the spacious house we go, where sometimes geese fly overhead, and the orange cat comes out for a look, and off they all head to the pond, Nammack moving ahead like a pied piper, the dogs behind, in front and beside her. Pom Pom—who avoided the pool’s depth—leaps into the pond like a breaststroke swimmer, time and time again, then rolls in the grass, showing none of the vanity of a Pomeranian.

It strikes you then watching them all—Nammack, the handlers, young women and the dogs—that this is a happy site and sight. With the dogs leaping in, shaking off water, Nammack’s slacks turning muddy brown (“I knew I shouldn’t have worn white today”) there is no affectation here at all, everything—dogs and human, Carla Nammack and her angels, the dogs—are all in the moment, Kennel and Chance together.

For more information, please visit Carla Nammack’s website at CountryClubKennels.com.
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Bowser Heads to San Francisco to Push D.C. Olympic Bid
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Are you ready for the 2024 Olympics?

Some powerful folks in the District of Columbia are hoping that the city will get a strong shot at hosting the Olympics that year.

That includes Mayor-elect Muriel Bowser, who’s now joined a delegation heading to San Francisco tomorrow to make a final pitch for the District as a candidate to host the 2024 Olympics. The delegation, which includes Bowser, D.C. 2024 chairman and Caps and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, Russ Ramsey, former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Montgomery County Olympic swimming superstar Katie Ledecky, will make the city’s final pitch in front of the U.S. Olympic Committee in the city by the bay.

Advocates of bringing the Olympics to the District argue that a number of factors make D.C. a great place to host the Olympics: the city is ready and able to handle large crowds with regard to transportation and security; it is located near other cities like Richmond, Annapolis and Baltimore, which could host some events; and has a number of areas that would benefit from Olympic-sized economic development.

According to reports in the City Paper, District Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, after hearing from Olympic bid advocates, moved the legislative portion of the committee meeting to Wednesday. That allowed the mayor-elect, who’s still a council member, to join the delegation in San Francisco to push for D.C.’s bid.

D.C. will face off against San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles in front of the USOC. USOC can choose one city to present to the International Olympic Committee for further determination, or decline to endorse any U.S. city. The U.S. hasn’t hosted the summer Olympics since 1996.