Arts & Society

Georgetowner • May 23, 2015

Georgetown Village “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” celebrated May 13 with its supporters and volunteers on the rooftop at Georgetown Harbour in the handsome penthouse offices of Foley & Lardner. Executive Director Lynn Golub-Rofrano was cited as the heart of Georgetown Village, the volunteers as the second heart and the guests as the third heart. The non-profit provides services and programs so that older residents can live better and longer in their homes. Major donor Nancy Taylor Bubes sent everyone home with a marigold plant and gardening gloves in appreciation for helping her business “bloom.” [gallery ids="102089,134228,134226,134223,134219" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Spanish Ambassador Ramón Gil-Casares hosted Opera Camerata’s production of “Carmen” at his Foxhall residence May 15 with a cocktail reception and seated buffet dinner before the performance. Randall Roe, president of Opera Camerata, spoke of the power of voices in an intimate setting and expressed appreciation to Robin Phillips, the evening’s narrator. Opera Camerata also brings complimentary opera performances to classrooms around D.C. throughout the year. [gallery ids="102088,134227,134232,134230" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Washington Performing Arts Gala Passport at the Marriott Marquis May 2 celebrated the 40th anniversary of its Embassy Adoption Program, which acquaints D.C. Public School fifth and sixth graders to the people, culture and arts of another country. D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson was honored at the dinner, which ended to the sounds of the Hot Sardines, whose jazz evokes the spirit of an earlier Paris and New Orleans.

Robert Devaney • May 21, 2015

The National Museum of Women in the Arts celebrated its landmark show, “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea,” which ended April 12, with a spring gala April 10 that opened up the floors of the New York Avenue building to lively art lovers. Concerning one of the most powerful women in history and art, gala co-chair Janice Obuchowski said that “The Virgin Mary in her self-giving is the antithesis” of what goes on in D.C. “Mary has left the building but not our hearts,” said Bertha Soto Braddock, gala co-chair. [gallery ids="117983,117957,117988,117994,117967,117976" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

There is often comedy in operas, but there are few comic operas, certainly not the kind that Giaochino Rossini put together—“The Barber of Seville,” his first success, and “Cinderella” or “La Cerentola”, which he wrote in 1816, on the heels of the success of “Seville.”

Both operas are highly entertaining, and often laugh out loud funny, and both might be called the opera versions of cinematic rom-coms, in the sense that the action is spurred by romance and love, the idyllic kind that overcomes all obstacles as in the case of “Cinderella”.

“Cinderella,” sourced from a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault, which may account for its very likeable lightness, as opposed to the often grim output of the brothers Grimm. As a generic subject—a lovely young girl loses her beloved father and is pushed into the role of a dirt-sweeping servant girl, run ragged by haughty, cruel in-laws until her essential goodness and good looks triumph to snare a prince in search of a princess.

The images and themes of “Cinderella” are never far from the public eye. There have been ballets, fictional stories, television and stage musicals, and a classic Disney cartoon complete with a pumpkin that turns into a carriage and beloved mice and a fairy godmother.

This year, the Disney folks re-visited the story again in a big box-office live action film, directed by Shakespearean great Kenneth Branagh, no less. The story of a virtuous princess, a handsome prince, and noteworthy villains never seems to lose its appeal.

Now, we have the Washington National Opera ending its 2014-2015 season with a spritely, lively, full-of-eye-candy and blessed with musical and vocal bravado production of Rossini’s enduring success. It runs through May 21 at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Purists might cringe at this thought, but this is one of those operas and productions that’s a crowd pleaser for the whole family—for fussy, comforted boomers, for millennials who get the jokes and for budding princesses dressed up for the occasion by their moms. A larger audience of thousands will get to view the production when it’s simulcast for free at Nationals Park May 16 as part of M&M’s “Opera in the Outfield.”

There are even mice, a half dozen or so of them, the friends of the princess-in-waiting, scurrying about, consoling friends and protectors of Cinderella, who dotes on them. This is an exercise in stage whimsy, and for those with a low tolerance for whimsy … well, too bad.

This is not quite the same old story—there’s no lost slipper (a piece of mother’s jewelry serves the same function), no evil stepmother, but there are two spectacular evil stepsisters in high-rise, high-color wigs, given full-bodied passion, nastiness, humor and drama by Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Soprano Jacqueline Echols as Clorinda and the mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel as Tisbe.

“Cinderella” should be one of those accessible (as in “Carmen” or “The Magic Flute”) operas for people who supposedly don’t like operas. It’s practically a textbook case for opportunities to admire and be in a little awe of music full of pitfalls and difficult to sing. Rossini wrote “Cinderella” at top speed , and the music seems to have a little breathless quality to it, it is as if the orchestra were part of a running marching band. It’s not music or singing made for contemplation, including two bravura sections which end in characteristic Rossini crescendos, as six characters pass the vocal ball back and forth, sometimes seeming to levitate.

Aside from the sisters—and an energetic Simone Alberghini as Dandini a fake prince—it’s the Italian baritone Paolo Bordogna who has the showiest role as the wicked stepfather modestly named Don Magnifico. He sings his arias and words faster than a machine gun, puffs himself up like a red-faced puffin and struts like a short man trying to be tall.

Goodness wills out, but it has a tougher go of it in terms of the music, which rises to inspiration, but not necessarily and perforce to singing that makes you jump out of your seat. What rising star mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard manages to make of the part of Angelina (as in Cinderella) is to give the part and the music a great deal of warmth and grace, if not drama, which is just so, given the nature of the character. It’s really hard to bring purity and goodness to great musical heights—Cinderella is, after all, the most forgiving creature on earth, which foregoes a political career. But, in the end, she shines too, as does Russian tenor Maxim Mironov as Don Ramiro, the prince.

When the sisters and Don Magnifico and Dandini are on stage, the production acquires a brash stylish, almost tongue-in-cheek knowingness to it, but when Cinderella takes center stage, it becomes quieter, an overlay of some lovely remnant of the story whence it came.

For an opera that has so much vocal virtuosity in it, the first act is something of a haul at a hefty two hours. But conductor Speranza Scappuci and director Joan Font pull together to keep things at a pace where the hours, although they do not pass swiftly, pass engagingly.

Gary Tischler •

There’s still another chance—Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Center Opera House—to see “Cinderella,” a revival of Rossini’s classic romantic comedy, and a number of reasons to take the opportunity.

This version of the French fairy tale  spins happily along with any number of audience treats. There’s the blazingly colorful costumes. There’s the lively Rossini music, the thrilling and trilling vocalizing by a top-notch cast. There’s Don Ramiro, an appealing prince, and Angelina (aka, Cinderella, aka La Cenerentola), an appealing heroine, and an outrageous villain (appropriately named Don Magnifico).

But there’s more — two more to be precise.  Two young performers who add a major portion of the fuel for the high-dudgeon energy of “Cinderella” are also two good reasons to laud the effectiveness of the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Arts Program. That would be American soprano Jacqueline Echols and American Mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel, who take on the gaudy parts of Cinderella nemeses, the stepsisters Clorinda and Tisbe, respectively..

Both Echols and Nansteel had already built an impressive list of credentials, including appearances at the Washington National Opera and at the Glimmerglass Opera Festivals in Cooperstown, New York, where WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello is also in charge.

“The sisters are just terrific parts,” said Echols, who is a Detroit native. “You really an opportunity to emote, and I’m sure it looks like we’re having a great time, which we are.  But the vocals, the music, the singing in tandem together and with other characters, that’s really difficult music.”

“The sisters are great roles,” Nansteen said. “And those costumes, those wigs, wow.  You have to be able to really work together, and in the sense of this production, we operate like sisters.  We get along really great.”

Even in a telephone interview, you can differentiate their voices, which operate on the thin no-man’s land between soprano and mezzo. Nansteen’s voice a shade lower.  

Both began their careers in the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program. Echols appeared with the WNO  as Musetta in “La Boheme” (a Domingo-Cafritz performance) in the American Opera Initiative, as the Water in “The Little Prince,” covered the role of Pip in “Moby Dick” and was First Lady in “The Magic Flute.”

Nansteen sang the title of “Penny” in WNO’s American Opera Initiative and was Curra in ‘The Force of Destiny” and was Third Lady in “The Magic Flute.”

Watching the two singers and listening to the two, you can imagine them as real sisters, even though each had a different journey to the world of opera.  Thoughts about jazz, listening to chorus music, gospel and the art of acting in opera intermingle in their conversation.   They both agree that acting is important, especially in contemporary opera.  As the sisters, Echols and Nansteen prove their point—they are masters of the singing, and they dive with relish into the more obvious comedy.  But, somewhere, you see the sisters as sisters, and as real people, or as real as opera characters get.

The Washington National Opera’s “Cinderella” runs through May 21 at the Opera House of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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Gary Tischler •

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright of comedic melancholy, is either spinning in his grave or sporting a modest smile these days.

His mostly 19th-century plays, which chronicled the decline of Russia’s privileged and landed classes, remain a source of fascination for 21st-century playwrights and — more important — 21st-century audiences, especially in Washington.

First, there was “Stupid F—–g Bird,”  a take on “The Seagull,” staged twice at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, followed by “Life Sucks,”  a riff on “Uncle Vanya” at Theater J last season.  Both were written by director-playwright Aaron Posner.

Posner is also directing “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” the Tony-Award winning play by Christopher Durang now at Arena Stage. At the same time, we have “Uncle Vanya” itself, by way of playwright  Annie Baker who’s modernized the language for this production at Round House Theater which features an all-star cast that includes Joy Zinoman (who in her time as founder and artistic director of Studio Theater, staged and directed an award-winning production of “The Three Sisters”).

Round and round it goes. There is even a comedic production—by  way of the New York Three-Day Hangover Theater Company called “Drunkle Vanya” at the Pinch Bar on 14th Street through April 25.

For the play that probably contains more references to—and probably reverence for—the Chekhov canon, you have to go to “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” hereafter referred to as VSMS, in the theater-in-the-round confines of the Fichandler at Arena Stage. 

Christopher Durang remains one of the most scathing, full-of-surprises satirist and comedic playwrights in American theater. In plays like “The Wedding of Betty and Boo,” “Sister Mary Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” and “Beyond Therapy, ” he displayed a sharp eye on American culture. He poked tough love fun at what passed for modern society and did it with verve and imagination of the kind that made your eyes roll and your migraines start up.  Where else could you see a priest give a sizzling imitation of bacon frying on a griddle in “Betty and Boo”? Consider how Sister Mary Ignatius explained God’s answers to all our prayers: it’s just that “most of the time, the answer is ‘no.’ ”

Something seems to have happened to Durang with “VSMS.” He appears to have mellowed a little. He has afflicted his characters with painful modern crosses to bear and little wherewithal to withstand the pain, but he’s also bathed them in the warm (and sometimes fuzzy) light of hope. This is also good for the audience, which has opportunities to become fully engaged with these often hapless, self-centered, funny, sad (in a thoroughly Chekhovian way), glib, defiant characters.  At a recent matinee performance that I saw, the audience did just that and then some in a surprising and clearly visible and audible show of emotions. 

Durang makes sure we know we are in Chekhov land.  Vanya and Sonia are both from “Vanya,” and Masha is one of the “Three Sisters”, but could pass for the monstrous mother of “Seagull.” There is also Nina, a budding young actress beauty who embraces and worries over an assignment to play an molecule with all the nervous seriousness of a Broadway ingénue.  Spike is entirely with it in the here- and-now. He’s an actor wanna-be (he just missed landing a spot on “Entourage”) and Masha’s boy toy.

We’re not in a Russian dacha, but a big old house in Bucks County, Pa., where brother and sister Vanya and Sonia, in old bathrobes, start their caretaker day and get into a fight about coffee—or wait for their favorite birds to show up at the pond.  There’s also a housekeeper named Cassandra, tangled in braids, omens and warnings, from another world entirely, the old Greeks or voodoo New Orleans.

In marches Masha, a movie star in some decline but still acting acting the star and queen and a barely clothed Spike in tow. Things happen: there’s preparations for a costume party down the street. Masha wants to sell the house, which would evict the aimless Vanya and Sonia.

All of this is typical Chekhov material,  but we don’t need to know Chekhov plays to get this. In fact, a funny thing happens.  Somewhere along the way as things started to fall apart, all of the audience—which at this matinee was made up of mostly baby boomers, and two or three busloads of high schoolers—got involved.   When Sonia, (played with a startling range of emotions by Signature Theater star Sherri L. Edelen) bereft of love all her life, suddenly gets a call from a would-be-suitor, you could see many audience members were leaning over in their seats to see what she’d do, thoroughly engaged. 

Then, there was the attentive silence when Vanya (played with irascible spirit and warmth by Eric Hisson), having written a play which did include molecules, global warming and other matters, explodes into a roaring, raging riff after catching Spike texting. “We wrote letters back then. Yes, we licked stamps then,” he yelled, making it sound like Nora Desmond’s anthem, “We had faces then.” He launched into a dirge about all things lost to the Internet age, including coonskin caps, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” and the habit of snail mail.  Nobody snickered, and everyone applauded.

Sometimes, things happen in the theater:  chief and often among them, the notion that we—the audience—are all in this together.  I suspect that happens often in “VSMS,” no matter what the makeup of the audience.  To be sure, it’s full of laughs, great writing, startlingly original performances—the worried star quality of Grace Gonglowski as Masha, Rachel Esther Tate’s warm Nina and Jessica Frances Dukes as Cassandra.

But mostly, it sparkles with communal acts of recognition, from a century ago and from right now.

“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” is at Arena Stage through May 3.
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Gary Tischler •

There is a lot more to Steven Knapp, 16th president of the George Washington University, than meets the eye.
Standing up and speaking at the George Town Club recently, the last of the spring speakers in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series, is one sort of person, an affable, impressive man talking about a range of subjects, but focused on the university’s rise to its own cultural leadership role in Washington.

But this is the same man who – when he became president of the university in 2007 after a stint as provost at Johns Hopkins – focused on building the stature of the university as an “intellectual contributor to the solution of national and global problems,” presided over the building of a new Science and Engineering Hall and hired a neurobiologist as president of research.

Talking with him later in a corner of the George Town Club, and reading about the man on paper, you get a sense of how it all fits together.

“You can no longer focus on one thing in terms of leadership, in terms of the kind of university we are,” he said. This, to him, is about being an urban institution of learning in Washington, “the most unique city in the country.”

What’s happened is also a reflection of the man who wanted to be a percussionist and still plays, who thinks that Dostoevsky is relaxing reading and who bonded with students who were initially skeptical of him by participating (at some risk) in a snowball fight.

His memberships and leadership in any number of organizations reflect a drive toward cross-pollination, not only of disciplines but of institutions and of intellectual and artistic taste. He has seen the future – for quite a while now – and finds it rife with opportunities for collaboration.

“Our world,” he has said, “has reached a level of complexity at which problems can no longer be solved by relying on the contributions of any single discipline.”

You have to think a little about his specialty: Romanticism, literary theory and the relation of literature to philosophy and religion. A longtime teacher of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Knapp is used to dealing with intersections in thinking and creating; he knows how poetry can become infused – in the case of a Blake or a Coleridge – with matters near-holy.

The arts were a place rife with opportunity. GW was a major player, along with Arena Stage and, later, other universities and theater companies, in the National Civil War Project conceived by choreographer Liz Lerman, a GW alumna. “It was something important, and it was a chance to work with other institutions for me and for us. It was a great experience.”

“The arts are the source of innovation, a constant search for innovation, and we have to do everything in our power to become involved, to innovate and lead, in the arts,” he said.

His belief and focus on enhancing partnerships with neighboring institutions couldn’t be better illustrated than by the moves GW and Knapp have made over the last two years.

In 2014, GW joined with the National Gallery of Art to assume responsibility for the Corcoran, saving the venerable museum and its art school, which was merged into GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Science. According to Knapp, there will continue to be art on display in the landmark 17th Street building – the National Gallery, which has control of the collection, is planning to mount “Corcoran Contemporary” exhibitions and to show works representative of the Corcoran legacy – free of charge. The college is now called the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, the plural suggesting that studies in the non-visual arts will be added.

The university also took under its wing the Textile Museum, a small, almost unassuming institution of the kind often described as a hidden treasure. Hidden no longer, the Textile Museum moved from its former location on S Street to its current one on the GW campus at 21st Street. Its new building, connected to historic Woodhull House, now home to the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, is part of the complex called the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum.

In the May 6 issue of The Georgetowner, Ari Post called the Textile Museum’s “Unraveling Identity” exhibition “a well-earned retrospective of the museum’s historic collection of textiles, spanning centuries and almost every continent.”

In addition, the university has a high functioning, high profile performing arts center at the Lisner Auditorium, where Executive Director Maryann Lombardi oversees a program laden with global performers and artists.
It’s all of a piece for Knapp: science and pragmatics, the Economics Council as well as the NSO board, drums and snowballs, art singular and the arts plural, textiles and Washingtoniana, being part of the city and a citizen of the world. His wide embrace suits a university whose mission – from its namesake – was and is to “educate future leaders, not only for the nation, but for the world.”

Gary Tischler • May 11, 2015

It’s been 35 years since Woolly Mammoth Theatre began its Washington theatrical adventure and journey.  Looking at this season’s offerings, and especially the current production of playwright Chad Beckim’s “Lights Rise on Grace,”  it seems like yesterday.

The play—poetic,  crude, raw and wholly imaginative—is what audiences might call a “Woolly” play, even though it had its beginning as a New York Fringe Festival entry.   It seems carved out of the time of now, it’s unlike anything you’re quite likely to see here (no disrespect to other companies meant), it’s beautifully acted and totally engaging.   The faces—three remarkably gifted actors—are new, and so is the spirit of the play and its structure, which seem beyond category. 

It’s not that we don’t see new plays in Washington these days, staged by familiar companies and groups as well as new ones with attitude and style.  It’s that new plays, new writers,   new artists, has been a Woolly trademark under Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz for all these years that a play like “Lights Rise on Grace” is part of an ongoing and singular achievement—even though it’s now in permanent downtown digs, Woolly continues to dance on the sharp edge of edgy with every offering.

“Lights Rise on Grace” is a particularly daunting, and moving example of that tradition.   It concerns a kind of unusual love triangle that plays itself out in a tough and layered urban environment of neighborhood and school, not to mention prison.   It sees Grace, a shy, but eager-for-experience daughter of strict Chinese immigrants meeting an affable, charismatic, “can’t help loving him” African American boy in school, who greets her with by saying, “I want to know you”, clearly meaning both senses of the phrase.  His name is Large—named for his size at birth, not for anything else—and the two fall deeply, it seems, and passionately, and very physically in love, in spite of disapprovals from their peers and families.

And then, Large disappears for a long time—into prison, as it turns out, for an assault.  Grace doesn’t know why, she just known that young man who filled up her live and soul is gone without reason.   In prison, Large meets and eventually is protected by and gets intimate with a white prisoner named Riece. Eventually, Large gets out of prison and is reunited with Grace, who has left her home, made a life for herself, and is both astonished and in total turmoil of the return of her one and only love, if not lover.

Riece soon follows, and the three begin a sort of awkward, confusing, tense relationship, pushing toward a kind of family.  But Large is not the same—prison has changed  and damaged his natural optimism and charm, and his assurance about his place in the world and who he is.  Grace, too, is confused by the new Large whom she’s longed for. Adding to the confusion, but also providing a kind of solid steadiness, is the presence of Riece, especially after Grace becomes pregnant.

Things don’t tidy up—they become more confusing for the audience and characters as well as they try to do the right things for themselves and each other, faced with difficult decisions.

They occupy a space for themselves in a rich and rough environment, physical, cultural and emotional.   This is an urban and changing world of neighborhoods—much like that world is changing in the city, in this case where generations maul each other pitilessly, where violence is abundant and, economically and identity-wise, life is a grind where love, and a paying job are difficult to achieve.

The stark, prison-like set is a kind of metaphor not just for incarceration but for life itself — or at least their particular lives, which echo strongly here.

The actors are (relatively) new to Washington, although Ryan Barry (Riece), has workshopped  the play in New York, where it was directed by Robert O’Hara, who is directing Woolly’s next production, “America  Zombie.”   “Grace” is directed here by Michael John Garces, who is the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and is a company member of Woolly where he directed three powerful and difficult plays, “We Are Proud to Present…” by Jackie Sibblies Drury,” “The Convert” by Danai Gurina and “Oedipus el Rey” by Luis Alfar.  If “Lights Rise on Grace”  resembles any of the three, it is “Oedipus,” which also had a stark, crackling urban air to it in taking the Greek classic to the barrio.

“Grace” is almost elliptic in the way it tells the story, which is always open-ended—characters turn to the audience to tell the story, their point of view, an effective and intimate approach, especially when Jeena Yi, as Grace, opens the play with an almost verbally naked telling of how she met and loved Large, lost him,  and then embarked on a series of almost brutal sexual encounters in the aftermath.

Yi, the hugely appealing DeLance Minefee as Large, and a quietly effective Ryan Barry as Riece, seem the best kind of actors: they’re naturals, inhabiting their characters fully, while also playing the parts of Chinese parents and relatives, Large’s street and school peers, inmates and prison folk.

In these days of instant communication and entertainment gratification, I haven’t seen a play in a very long time that so stilled the audience into silent attention.   I think there are acts of recognition here—these are characters that live in a changing world, where attitudes about sex, gender, race and multi-ethnicity are shifting rapidly.   

Beckim, who describes himself as growing up as a white kid with a preference for African American culture, is a gifted writer. Even in the realistic attitudes on stage, he finds a way to make poetic observations and gives his characters a generosity they both deserve and need.

“Lights Rising on Grace” runs through April 26 at Woolly Mammoth.

Gary Tischler •

It’s hard to categorize actor Julian Sands except for one thing: if you see him in anything—movies, television, what all—you can’t quite get his image out of your head.

He’s in Washington this Saturday at the Lansburgh Theatre to do “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” presented by Washington Performing Arts. It is a one-man performance-production directed by the actor John Malkovitch, a theater piece that concentrates on the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s poetry, which is rarely heard, but probably much read, given the giant shadow cast by Pinter and his plays.

This project has become something of a legacy for Sands, who works regularly, on stages, television and in movies, but was approached by Pinter himself as far back as 2005.

Sands called out of the blue, and for some reason, beside the fact that his name popped up on Caller ID, I recognized his voice. I remember him distinctly from one of his best films and roles, the 1991 “Impromptu”, about the lives and loves of great artists, composers, and writers in which he played the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Bernardette Peters played his wife, Hugh Grant was Chopin, Judy Davis played George Sand and Mandy Patinkin played a French painter whose name escapes.

“That was a wonderful experience,” he said, remembering. “Working with so many terrific actors, and the subject, well, that was a rare thing.”

Pinter, of course was the master of the oblique, the unsaid, discerning and dissecting the lives of contemporary relationships in such plays as “No Man’s Land,” “Old Times,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal”.

“This all began in 2005,” he said. “I knew him of course, and he approached me about doing a one man piece focusing on his poetry. He wrote quite a lot of it, even long before he started writing plays. The thing was, he wanted me to do a master class with him, basically with him overseeing every inch of material. It was a very strenuous, even difficult task, to make something of this, me working with him. But it was a tremendously rewarding. We became friends during the course of things. The poetry is very different from his plays. More personal. You get a real sense of the person, the man. He was also a very funny man.”

The finished product premiered at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival to considerable acclaim and he has toured with it ever since, off and on. Sands had worked with Malkovitch on “The Killing Fields.” Malkovitch is an American actor who has had a similar career filled with oddities, highs and lows, independent small films, then villains in big budget Hollywood action movies—memorably “In The Line of Fire”.

“What we’ve ended up with it in not just a poetry reading,” he said. “I’ve added anecdotes from working together with Harold on this, stories about his plays, the poems, certainly, and his life,” he said. “It’s a celebration, but you know, when the lights go up, you feel like a soloist, you’re alone with the audience in a way that most playwright surely ever do.”

“Personally, I think he was the most influential playwright of our times,” he said.

Pinter was famous for the pauses—written into the script—that characterized his characters, often while taking puffs on cigarettes. “There are pauses, yes,” Sands said.

“I think it’s done very well, and so here we are, all roads lead to Washington, right”. Actually, Pinter’s plays have been performed regularly on Washington stages—at Arena, Studio, and Scena Theatre among others.

“He was all about language,” Sands said. “The utterances, the sentences are precise and revealing.”

Sands, in his 50s now and still retaininh the matinee blonde good looks of his early career, which included quality films like “The Killing Fields,” “Room With a View,” “Impromptu,” as well as distinctly offbeat fare like “Gothic,” a Ken Russell take on the Victorian poets like the Shelley and Byron, not to mention “Boxing Helena,” and “Leaving Las Vegas.” On the BBC he played Laurence Olivier in a film about the enfant terrible of theater, Kenneth Tynan.

He’s always had a penchant for offbeat horror films—the title role in “Warlock” and its sequels, the non-musical film version of “The Phantom of the Opera.” “I’ve just finished a part in ‘Gotham’”, he noted by way of his television career, which included a memorable turn as the terrorist Vladimir Bierko in “24.”

He’s married to his second wife, the writer Evgenia Citkowitz, author of “Ether,” a critically acclaimed book of short fiction. They have two daughters, Natalya and Imogen.

As for Sands, “I am an actor, I go where the work takes me,” he said. He had just completed a film in Turkey, and would be going to Mexico soon after the performance here. “I get on a train, and it takes me to the work. That makes it sometimes difficult for my family, I know,” he remarked.

An actor’s career can seem like a careening kind of thing, from one role to the next. “I’ve had stellar heights, and some projects that were perhaps less so.. But I make it a business to have no regrets. This is what I do.”

About the Pinter celebration, he feels “responsibility to do him justice. But there’s the audience. Myself and Pinter and the audience. I respect that, it’s an intimate kind of thing.”

“A Celebration of Harold Pinter” plays at the Lansburgh Theatre this Saturday at 8 p.m.