Arts & Society

Alison Schafer • March 20, 2014

It’s the story of two powerful forces. One is human; the other is integral to future of the human race. Robert Nixon’s documentary film, “Mission Blue,” is the story of renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her relationship with the sea.

“I hope ‘Mission Blue’ shows people what we are doing to the oceans,” Nixon says. When he began working with Earle on the film, he says, “She said, ‘Please, make a hopeful film.’ And this is classic Sylvia, because she knew how hard that would be. But we believe we’ve done that. The film is very much about Sylvia’s life as a witness to nature and as a witness to what we’ve done to our planet.”

“Mission Blue” is coming to Washington as part of the 2014 Environmental Film Festival. It will make its D.C. premiere March 22 at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Earle is an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic Society, and where, as Nixon says, “she has ten of thousands of specimens.”

Washington is also home for Nixon and his family, and he says he’s been delighted to watch the Environmental Film Festival grow into a major event and a first-rate place to show films. And he would know. He’s made a dozen acclaimed films, including “Amazon Diary,” “Real Jaws” and “Gorillas in the Mist.” He also inspired and documented a massive clean up of the Anacostia, led by teenagers who live close to the river.

“Mission Blue” opened this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival. Directed by Nixon and Fisher Stevens, the movie, Variety said, captures the “majesty and imperiled status of the world’s aquatic life,” and the “spectacular underwater photography offers eye candy aplenty.” It also tells the story of the ocean story in human terms, through the eyes, drive, and lungs of Sylvia Earle.

“She is the hardest working, most tireless person I’ve ever met,” Nixon says. “We dove all over the world with Sylvia. And as exciting as it is to go diving with her, you don’t want to be her dive buddy, because she just does not use any air. We’re in the Galapagos, a hundred feet down, I’m hanging onto things and moving all over the place. I’ve got a camera. Sylvia’s next to me with a camera, just as calm as could be. After a while, I look at my air. I think, “Oh, I’ve got to be thinking about going up,” and I’d look at her air and it’d hardly moved at all. You know, you don’t want to be the reason why Sylvia has to go up.”

Mary Bird • March 16, 2014

Red boas were sported at the Cosmos Club March 4, as William Dunlap, Linda Burgess and publisher Twelve Books hosted a celebration of Myra MacPherson’s latest book, “The Scarlet Sisters: Sex, Suffrage and Scandal in the Gilded Age,” which chronicles the notorious Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Tennessee Clafin. The honoree thanked “the women who brought us to the second floor and even became members” of the Cosmos Club in the 1980s, perhaps less in recognition of their merits than the club’s fear of losing its liquor license. McPherson’s son Michael Siebert spoke proudly of his mother’s accomplishments. The party’s guest list was a Who’s Who of Washington journalists. [gallery ids="101672,144609,144614,144616" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2014

The actor Richard Thomas knows a little about icons. He’s pretty close to being one himself.

After all, he became something of an icon in the 1970s, when he played John-Boy Walton, Jr., on “The Waltons.”

The hugely popular television series – about a big family growing up during the Depression and World War II in Walton’s Mountain, Va. – ran for nine seasons. It’s still remembered for its closing good-nights among family members, as in “Good night, John-Boy.”

To this day, he remains John-Boy to thou- sands of fans, even if he’s in his early sixties now. He’s not bothered by that. “I call it the gold- en pain,” Thomas said in a telephone interview.

John-Boy may have become an iconic fictional figure. However, playing a living former president of the United States, that’s something else again.

Thomas will be playing President Jimmy Carter in the world-premiere production of “Camp David” by Lawrence Wright, directed by Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. “Camp David” will run Mar. 21 through May 4 in Arena’s Kreeger Theater.

Thomas will be joined by veteran stage and screen actor Ron Rifkin as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Egyptian actor Khaled Nabawy as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Tony Award nominee Hallie Foote as first lady Rosalynn Carter.

Named for the presidential country retreat near Thurmont, Md., “Camp David” centers on the events and difficult negotiations surround- ing the talks held there in September 1978. The resulting Camp David Accords, the ground-breaking peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, are still in place 35 years later.

The historic peace treaty remains the singular, uncontestable achievement of the Carter Administration. While it was not enough to help Carter earn a second term, it was the kind of accomplishment that gave him a prominent role as a former president. It echoes throughout Washington, where many players from the Carter Administration, and the administrations before and after, are still active.
We reached Thomas in a break between rehearsals. His voice still sounds as youthful as it did during a 1987 Georgetowner interview, when he was in town to play another historic figure in “Citizen Tom Paine.” “Gosh, that was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?” he said. “A lot of years.”

“Playing a living president, that’s quite a challenge,” Thomas said. “I read the script and found it impressive. It was an engaging script, a theater piece about real events, solidly grounded. And here I am, and here we are.”

“People forget what happened, and most people don’t know the details,” Thomas said. “It was a very human process among three men who had ideas and ideals, a big sense of themselves, and it was extremely difficult. It was dramatic.”

President Carter is a public figure about whom people have strong feelings, one way or another. Here in Washington, Carter’s involvement in the talks was one of those occasions when news of historic proportions became local news, too.

“You have to avoid certain things,” Thomas said. “You’ve got to watch the accent, the things you’re overly familiar with. You can’t put him on a pedestal or you’ll be playing a statue. You can’t slip into stereotypical things or try to do an impersonation. It’s a little nerve-wracking, initially. In the end…I try to think of him, not as president of the United States, but as a character in a play, because that’s what I do.”

It is expected that the Carters will be in attendance at the official red carpet premiere on Apr. 3. “Well, that could be a little extra pressure, I guess,” he said. “That awareness will no doubt add a little to the night.”

“Camp David” is produced by Gerald Rafshoon, White House communications director in the Carter administration, who brings intimate knowledge along with access to tapes made by the president during the negotiations.

Playwright and screenwriter Wright is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”

Thomas was excited to be back in Washington. “It’s such an unusual town, and I love working here,” he said. “It’s a great theater town.” He worked with legendary director Peter Sellars at the Kennedy Center in “The Count of Monte Cristo” and a trio of plays by Samuel Beckett. Thomas also played the title role in “Richard II” at the Washington Shakespeare Company.

Thomas and his wife, Georgiana Bischoff, have a large family with seven children, including triplet daughters from his first marriage. “They’re all grown up now,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest roles you can have, being a father and a parent.”

Ralph Waite, who played Thomas’s father on “The Waltons,” passed away Feb. 13. “It was a huge loss,” Thomas said. “He was like a second father to me. I lost my father last year.”

“Camp David” will run March 21 through May 4 in Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theater.

Corrie Dyke •

The 6th Annual Heroes Curing Childhood Cancer gala took place at the Four Season Hotel Feb. 22. More than 400 guests gathered to hep raise funds for pediatric cancer patient care and research at Children’s National Medical Center. The 2013 gala provided the Dream Clinic in oncology at Children’s National, and this year’s gala will benefit the psycho-social support team in the center for cancer and blood disorders.

Georgetowner •

Franco Nuschese of Café Milano hosted a birthday bash for public relations maven Gwen Russell at the Georgetown hot spot. During the birthday dinner, a festive table ran the length of the upstairs Wine Room. Offering the first toast, Gina Adams referred to Russell’s recent surgery, announcing “2014 is cancer free,” and said guests were celebrating “not only a birthday but a rebirth.” For dessert, coconut birthday cake was eagerly devoured, as Nuschese toasted, “Gwen has always been in our family.” Russell happily added: “No family secrets will be shared.” [gallery ids="101671,144628,144623,144617,144630" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The 5th Annual Tea on March 9 at the Ritz-Carlton Washington, D.C., had a circus theme to the delight of a sell-out crowd. The Levine at THEARC String Ensemble serenaded on the stairwell. Magician Eric Hennings delighted, and there were games and entertainment for all ages. For the third year, NBC4’s Eun Yang emceed and noted that, with nearly 50 percent of D.C. children living east of the Anacostia River, THEARC offers “the best the city has to offer in one location.” Washington Ballet @ THEARC dance instructor Ralph Glenmore introduced student Kennedy Jackson before the Washington Ballet Youth Ensemble performed “Garden of Colors.” [gallery ids="101665,144742,144722,144717,144725,144730,144734,144739,144745" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2014

You read about him, you talk to him, you see his life and resume, and you think life probably couldn’t get much thicker and fuller for Washington Concert Opera Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker.

Here we were, on a long distance call from Australia, where he was raised, and where he would return to conduct a production of “Carmen” at the Sidney Opera House, directed by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, thinking out loud about home, hearth and the WCO’s next production, Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” on March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

“I understand you’re having a bit of snow,” he said. “It’s not too bad here. But being so far away, even though I love it here, you miss Georgetown.” Walker lives in Georgetown with his partner Lauren, their daughter, Genevieve, who is not yet one-year-old, and their 10-year-old border collie mix named Sadie.

“I love Georgetown,” he said, “I love the sense of history here.”

Walker is also a rising presence in the world of opera and classical music. In his early forties, he got high marks from the Sidney critics on “Carmen.” They wrote: “It’s a joy to be carried along by his [Walker’s] zesty reading of a score that in lesser hands can sound over-familiar or routine.”

“ ’Carmen,’ in a way, is the exact opposite of what we do at Washington Concert Opera,” Walker said. “It’s the most familiar of operas, even to people who don’t often go. And it’s a full-scale dramatic piece, the whole of opera, sets, and costumes galore.”

Walker has been artistic director and conductor of the Washington Concert Opera since 2002 and also serves as music director of the Pittsburgh Opera and artistic director of the Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. Since his professional debut in Sydney in 1991, he has conducted more than 200 operas, large and smaller scale choral and orchestral works as well as symphonic and chamber works with companies all over the world. On the opera stage, he has led performances by the Metropolitan Opera and numerous major opera companies.

He is big and getting bigger and is very much in demand, but you also suspect that the work he does with the WCO is close to heart. “We have a slogan,” he said. “It’s all about the music. It’s not an either-or thing. It’s a different way of seeing, experience and hearing opera, for that matter. It’s the stage, the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, performing a full opera, no sets no costumes. In a way, you ‘see’ a different sort of opera. It’s much more intimate. And, as a conductor, you’re very much exposed. You’re a part of everything in a way that everyone can see.”

“We’ve also specialized in doing operas that are rarely performed, works by composers everyone knows, but works that aren’t done often,” Walker said. “It’s not because they’re obscure or because they’re not good. I think ‘Il Corsaro’ is a masterpiece or very near to it.”

“It’s very characteristic Verdi,” he added. “This was a time of revolutionary passion in Europe and Italy. It was Byron’s time, too, and you can hear and feel that in this opera.”

Tenor Michael Fabiano takes on the title role of the pirate and corsair Corrado, with the noted lyric soprano Nicole Cabell, starring as Corrado’s great love, with Tamara Wilson, named Washington’s singer of year in 2011, as Gulnara, in the the Washington Concert Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

Ari Post •

National Portrait Gallery

Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction

April 18, 2014 – January 11, 2015

Portraiture in the 20th century was a difficult terrain for artists to traverse. It was a time when many members of the artistic community agreed that abstraction was the new artistic language and figurative work had little more to offer the world in terms of progress and innovation. “Face Value” is a group exhibit of artists who helped reinvent portraiture for their era and demonstrated the enduring value of exploring the face and figure. Pulling a collection of work from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, the exhibit features artists such as Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenburg, Chuck Close, Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol and more, highlighting those who pushed the boundaries of portrait traditions, invigorated and challenged by new modes of abstraction and the roiling currents of their time.

American Art Museum

Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget

May 2 – August 3, 2014

Ralph Fasanella’s parents were among three million Italians who immigrated to America in the early 20th century, searching for a better life for their families. Growing up in the working class neighborhoods of New York City, Fasanella (1914 – 1997) worked as a truck driver, union organizer, gas station owner and ice delivery man before turning to painting in the 1940s. Though untrained as an artist, he developed a style that reflected his working class and immigrant roots, celebrating the common man and tackling complex issues of postwar America in colorful and infectiously exuberant paintings of urban life. “Lest We Forget” celebrates the 100th birthday of this quintessential American artist, bringing together paintings spanning his 52-year career. Don’t miss this one!

The Kreeger Museum

K@20: Kreeger Museum 20th Anniversary Exhibition

February 20 – July 31, 2014

As a longtime champion of local and regional artists, it is fitting that the Kreeger’s 20th anniversary exhibition should highlight Washington area artists. “K@20” features 14 artists from all walks of life who have played a large part in shaping this city’s unique and remarkable arts scene. Showcasing a broad spectrum of mediums, subject matter, and styles by renowned artists such as Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis, Jeff Spaulding, Yuriko Yamaguchi, Tom Green, Ledelle Moe and Michael Platt, the selection of artworks offers a fresh perspective on the collective strength of Washington’s art community.

Freer and Sackler Galleries

Bountiful Waters: Aquatic Life in Japanese Art

March 8 – September 14, 2014

If there is one thing that Japan is known for in America, it is its sushi and seafood culture that is second to none in the world. Indeed, since prehistoric times, the waters that surround the islands of the small and powerful nation have informed its culture and sustained its inhabitants. Flowing from mountain ranges to form rivers and lakes and feeding into the ocean, the plants and animals that live in and around the waters continue to be a major source of a revenue and a primary dietary source for its population. “Bountiful Waters” features a selection of prints, paintings, illustrated books and ceramics that depict Japanese appreciation for the beauty and variety of fish and other species. The highlight will be the public debut of the “large fish” series of twenty woodblock prints by renowned Japanese artist Hiroshige (1797 – 1858).

The Phillips Collection

Made in the USA: American Masters from the Phillips Collection

March 1 – August 31, 2014

The Phillips Collection’s private collection of American masterworks is finally coming home, after a years-long worldwide tour. The exhibit tells the story of American art from the late 19th century, when it was entirely dismissed by the prominent European art communities, through post-war American art in the 1950s and 60s, when it came into its own as a significant international force of artistic progress and innovation. The exhibit will be a landmark artistic experience, featuring over 200 works by over 100 artists, and taking up most of the museum’s gallery space. Artists range from early American progressives such as Arthur Dove and John Marin, to Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis and Richard Deibenkorn. Don’t miss it.

Art Museum of the Americas

Territories and Subjectivities: Contemporary Art from Argentina

March 27 – Summer 2014

Identities of boundaries and belonging are formed through cultural affiliation and familiarity, and so in many ways the idea of territory is quite subjective. For instance, most of us born in the United States will proudly bond with any fellow citizen over this mutual belonging, while a native Texan and Oregonian might have bitterly conflicting ideas of politics and cultural history. “Territories and Subjectivities” will examine the very notion of territory as something that we define for ourselves, not as an inherent condition of the world. Featuring contemporary artists from each of Argentina’s 23 provinces, this exhibit will present a panorama of modern-day Argentinian identity, revealing interweaving and conflicting notions of cultural ownership and identity within a single country that reflects the juxtaposition between any nation’s singularity and clashes of regional identity.

National Sporting Library and Museum

Foxcroft School: The Art of Women and the Sporting Life

March 15 – August 24, 2014

In conjunction with Foxcroft School’s Centennial Celebration, “Foxcroft School” is an exhibition focusing on women as sporting enthusiasts, sporting artists and sporting art collectors. The exhibition is comprised of loans from alumnae of the prestigious Middleburg college-preparatory school for girls and their relatives. Approximately thirty paintings and sculptures will provide a picture of the collecting interests of these remarkable women and their role in 20th century sporting life and art.

Corcoran Gallery of Art

Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson: Loop

March 15 – April 20, 2014

Drawing on the architecture of the Corcoran’s rotunda, “Loop” is a site-specific visual and music installation created by media artist Jennifer Steinkamp and electronic composer Jimmy Johnson. Originally commissioned in 2000 for the Corcoran’s 46th Biennial Exhibition, the artists use a high functioning graphics computer to create electronic visual patterns that enhance the space with rows of undulating multicolored digital rope and projections. Music plays along with the moving images. It will be an immersive and completely unique exhibit.

National Gallery of Art

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In

May 4 – November 30, 2014

While no artist could be farther from the abstract, post-modern and pop art movements that define American art in the 20th century, Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009) is one of our era’s great painters, who created a quiet shift in the tectonic plates of the American landscape. A painter of formal virtuosity and stamina like almost no other of his lifetime, he used both Renaissance traditions (like egg tempera) and new world techniques to create some of the most indelible images of our time, largely centered around farms and quiet landscapes of his hometown in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. “Looking Out, Looking In” will present an exhibit of over 50 of Wyeth’s paintings, drawings and tempera paintings focused around the artist’s frequent use of windows as symbol, subject matter, framing device and inspiration.
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Gary Tischler •

After the young actor Andreu Honeycutt has staggered downstage and out, apparently wailing, after they’ve put away the large lynching rope, after the explosion of n-words in the last minutes of the play and the telling of horrible racist jokes, after all that and the two hours preceding all that, there’s an awkward silence that descends over the audience at “We are Proud to Present…” at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

The audience, squared off across the stage in different sections, eventually claps, but the six actors in the play do not return for a bow. In some ways it seems awkward to clap, like cheering at a funeral or the site of a bloody traffic accident. Nobody’s helping us out. So, we wander out kind of dutifully, and there are the actors, handing out programs and smiling expectantly.

Even for Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with its long history and reputation of presenting new, edgy theater nobody else does, in ways that are driven by daring, sometimes discomfiting, staging, “We Are Proud to Present…” is unusual, like a daring and beautiful woman going out for a date dressed as a menacing clown.

This isn’t really a play in the usual sense. Worked out in detailed, rehearsed ways, it nevertheless resembles a provocation, an improvisation, a little like a street performance with lots of grounded details, not to mention the tail end of a day. And, in what amounts to a recent trend with Woolly productions, its immersive, inside-and-out activities surround the performance — chores to do if you choose — along with information provided to excite debate and talk. Add in the re-arrangement of the furniture of the theater, so to speak. Also, there are echoes and contexts from other plays, books, history to chew on and a zig-zag course from out-and-out-laughter to discomfiture to silence that you can actually hear.

We should afford you the full title, which may or may not spark recognition from audience members: “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From The German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.”

The play—actually a play within a play—is about six actors trying to put together a play about Kaiser Wilhelm-era imperial Germany’s occupation of said Sudwestafrika (now Namibia) as a way of getting into the colonial games of great power nations, chief among them Victorian Great Britain. During the course of that occupation of an area populated by several different tribes, chief among them the Herero people, the Germans tried the usual imperial gambits of pitting tribes against each other. In the end, they took the course of attempting a mostly successful genocide of the Herero people because the Herero had resisted and fought back. Orders were given to kill the males and force women and children into the desert. When it was all over, some 100,000 Hereros had died. In 2004, 100 years later, Germany apologized for what happened.

Six actors — three black, three white; two women, four men — have gathered to create a play that deals with that history, but their only source material are letters written by German soldiers to their families, none of them referencing what happened or offering descriptions of the tribal population. They are full of Victorian romantic and sentimental cliches about hearth, home, love and children, missing the fireside and the wifely presence.

Initially, led by the director (in a spirited, decisive performance by the compelling Dawn Ursula), the cast members struggle, they are actors after all, of various degrees of commitment, all of them with enough ego to spare. This cast is made up of actors playing actors in search of a part and understanding of the material. The world they’ve entered suggests, at least, Pirandello’s mystifying “Six Characters in Search of An Author.”

The squabbling among them is initially about the roles: there’s the angry young black actor, the aforementioned Andreu Honeycutt, who has no interest in playing Germans and reading German letters, an older black man played by the commanding Michael Anthony Williams, and two white men—the arrogant one, played with odd confusion by Joe Isenberg, and the older guy, played with contained force by Peter Howard. There is also the generic white woman, who gets to have a name—Sarah—played with aplomb and sometimes quaint, silly goofiness, by Holly Twyford, who, asked to feel sad about the death of a cat, guts out a cat wail.

Much of this is initially very funny—actors after all often offer a ridiculous face to the world—but as they continue to fail to come to grips with the subject—the murder of the Hereros—racial concerns rise to the fore.

“We haven’t dealt with what happened,” says the angry young man, and he tries to get them into that area. There’s talk of appropriating suffering, appropriating roles, until prodded by their director, they come face to face with the monster in the historic woodshed.

When the young white actor has to shoot a defenseless Herero, he at first can’t do it. “I’m not like that,” he says. “I can’t do this.” But, of course, he can, and now we are in the thick of it: songs of loss and home and massive suffering. In a kind of not surprising, but nevertheless shocking, segue, we appear to be in the American south. The white actors are talking “Cracker Southern,” and the rope is raised. It becomes hard to swallow, because there is a temptation to say stop.

The play by young playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury walks into the muddy waters of comparative crime, of the unsettled cloud of race American style, not to mention the Holocaust, also perpetrated by Germany, and other genocides of all kinds. The segue into our times, or the times just preceding, is not smooth. It happens all of a sudden and here we are, and suddenly everyone gets quiet.

Does it add up that way? A question that’s raised, but only individuals can answer it. As it is, the proceedings lets you look not only at yourselves, but across the way at other members of the audience who sit silent, crossing legs, scrunched up, or a couple that hold hands strongly, after appearing to argue, the faces changing every bit of the way. It’s uncomfortable to look at people like that because surely they’re looking at you.

“We Are Proud to Present” is all of a piece in recent theatrical offerings by Woolly Mammoth—last year’s almost stately “The Convert,” which dealt with Christian missionaries in Africa, “Detroit,” which was configured somewhat similarly physically, and “Appropriate”, a wildly feverish play about buried secrets among members of a white Southern family written by an African American playwright.

However worked out this play was, and it was done with care, it had the look of stuff that happens every day to most of us: life and death, cab rides in which a driver offers up the notion that there may be such a thing as a coming apocalypse, the hurly burly of demographic change in this city.

“We are Proud to Present … “ runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 9.