Trees for Georgetown Spring Celebration
• September 12, 2013

The 2013 event, which is the primary source of funding for the trees that appear in local tree boxes each year, was hosted May 8 by Shelly and Bruce Ross-Larsen. A new initiative called GIFT, “Georgetown Initiative for Family Trees,” will allow Georgetowners to “tag” a tree with the name of an honoree to “root the people and businesses of the community to the trees that shade our streets.” Each tree will be tagged with a scannable QR code, providing information on the type of tree, the date it was planted, the tree’s honoree and a story about why the tree was selected in that person’s name. [gallery ids="101311,150229,150199,150224,150204,150221,150210,150216" nav="thumbs"]

Washington Women & Wine Kick-off Dinner
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Following two fun-laden wine tours to France, on May 13 tour operators Robin and Paula McKenzie-Smith of Best of Europe Tours & Cruises were at Ristorante I Ricchi to kick off the next adventure. Washington Women & Wine is planning “A Northern Italian Adventure – Off the Beaten Path” which next March will explore Milan, Venice, Lake Garda and the great wine country of northern Italy. In anticipation, Chef-Owner Christina Ricchi provided a delicious selection of the finest northern Italian and Tuscan cuisine and joined the group to speak about authentic Italian food. [gallery ids="101313,150494,150477,150490,150482,150487" nav="thumbs"]

Tickled Pink, X
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The ballroom of the Fairmont Washington, D.C. pulsated in in pastels on May 11 for the 10th Annual Mother/Daughter Afternoon Tea and Fashion Show Benefitting Make-A-Wish Mid-Atlantic. Lizanne Jeveret of Pink Palm provided the Lilly Pulitzer fashions and recalled visiting the late designer who told her “style isn’t about what you wear; it’s about how you live.” Make-A-Wish grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. Young Catherine Kochenash spoke of her visit to Disney World where she met with Belle. Bob Madigan of WTOP emceed the program as guests enjoyed tea treats including pink palm cookies. The sellout crowd departed with Lilly-laden goodie bags.

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‘Desert Cities’ Is Right at Home at Arena
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For Kyle Donnelly, directing playwright Jon Robin Baitz’s scathing, smart and intense family drama, “Other Desert Cities,” at Arena Stage in the in-the-round Fichandler must seem a little and a lot like a homecoming.

She was last at Arena directing another family play, “Ah Wilderness,” a distinctly and surprisingly sunny and warm play from Eugene O’Neill, that master of theatrical and autobiographical dark family dysfunction (see “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”).

“That was a little different, to be sure,” said Donnelly in a phone interview. She has said that “Wilderness”, an example of theater as a wish, was a kind of fiction that acted as a counterpoint to the personal realism of O’Neill’s other plays about family, the one he experienced painfully in life as well.

Family is a good point to consider when it comes to Donnelly and Arena Stage—this is the place where she served as associate artistic director at Arena from 1992 to 1998 and where over 30 years she has directed 22 plays.

“It is like a home,” said Donnelly, who lives in California. “I’ve spend a major part of my professional life here, working with wonderful actors and design professionals. There was a group of wonderful actors to work with back then—Richard Bauer, Stanley Anderson, Robert Prosky, Tana Hicken, Randy Danson. “

Donnelly is considered by many something of an actor’s director. “It’s a collaborative art, this putting on of plays, but the actors are front and center, and that’s especially true in this play. Doing this play in the round makes for a different challenge for the actors. It changes the focus, where people are on stage, who’s hearing and seeing them in what way. So in some sense, it becomes a little bit of a different play. But what you really want to and have an opportunity to do is to create a sense of immediacy and intimacy with the audience, as if they were right there in the family living room with all this ‘drama’ going on.”

“In Washington, this play really resonates,” she said. “For one thing, the parents in the play haves been written as friends of the Reagans, among a group of politically savvy people in Southern California. And there’s the role of the media—it involves high-profile people dealing publicly with tragedy and scandal.”

If you’ve been going to Arena and plays in Washington for any length of time, Donnelly’s name resonates, it’s a resume full of remarkable and memorable theater moments. She had astonishing success with stagings of “The Women,” “The Miser,” “Misalliance,” “Polk County,” Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” “Shakespeare in Hollywood” and perhaps most notably, a perfect production of Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa”, which received a Helen Hayes Award for Best Resident production.

Her first play at Arena was Moliere’s “School for Wives.” She has said that watching Friel’s “Lughnasa” on stage “broke my heart.” Hers was not the only heart that broke.

Donnelly founded Actors’ Center in Chicago, an acting studio, in the 1980s which may account for her reputation as doing well with actors. Certainly that aspect shows up in “Desert Cities,” where the likes of Helen Carey, who’s also worked many times at Arena, Martha Hackett, Larry Bryggman, Emily Donahoe and Scott Drumond give searing and intense performances.

“I’m going to be slowing down a little,” she said. “I’m a mother of a teenaged daughter, and I’d like to be there for her more, lending some guidance through high school. I won’t be going on the road as much.”

“Other Desert Cities” runs through May 26.

‘Other Desert Cities’: Family Secrets in Palm Springs
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If you go to Arena Stage to see the compelling production of Jon Robin Baltz’s Tony Award-nominated play “Other Desert Cities”—and you really should, despite its occasional frustrations—check out some of your fellow audience members to see how and what they’re doing.

I went to a matinee performance recently and the house was filled with student groups—from high schools from around the area—as well as long-time patrons and season ticket holders and members in good standing of that generation which the stridently wounded and angry Brooke Wyeth rails against in a battle with her Southern California affluent parents, especially her mother Polly, close friend of Nancy Reagan’s back in the day.

“Other Desert Cities”—the reference is a dry, melancholy riff on California road signs directing you southward once you get past Palm Springs—is something of a familiar staple of a play. It’s a generational war pay in which the liberal novelist daughter Brooke, visiting her parents during Christmas in 2004 when the Iraq war was at its height, squares off against her parents with news that she’s written a memoir which focuses on the suicide of her beloved (by her) older brother, who was part of a group of left-wing radicals who ended up bombing a recruiting center which resulted in the death of a homeless janitor in the 1970s.

This kind of situation is a classic one in the theater—the revealing of family secrets long hidden or forgotten or still festering like an odious cancer with all the attendant grudges, resentments and unspoken feelings that come along for a catastrophic ride. Almost all family dramas from Ibsen to Miller, and especially O’Neill burn with secrets—just try to walk away from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” or “The Iceman Cometh,” for that matter (a family play and a bar play), unscathed.

This comparison is not to suggest that Baltz is in that league yet. “Other Desert Cities” is more like a long weekend in the Palm Springs desert hideaway home of Polly and Lyman Wyeth who are hosting Brooke, a one-book novelist who spiraled into depression and now brings her memoir as a kind of brick of coal for Santa’s stocking, her surviving young brother Trip and aunt Silda Grauman, Polly’s sister and former screen-writing partner in house for another bout of staying off the sauce.

These are not by any means your typical American family. Polly—something of a socialite—and Lyman were shining figures in the Reagan GOP circles of Southern California, and Lyman was once a well known movie actor who played cops and cowboys, before being named an ambassador to somewhere by Reagan. Brother Trip is a television producer, his latest being one of those daytime judge shows in which amateurs decided the fate of cases. Brooke talks like a GOP-dreaded East Coast lefty and literati and lives in a cottage on the New England coast, her older British husband having left her.

The early rounds of this battle—and it is a battle set in a house featuring one of those white plastic Christmas trees, with a trip to the country club for dinner on the agenda—are frequently funny, smart and very cool and on the money, with most of the jabbing going on between mom and daughter along political and cultural lines while brother and dad act as referees. Lyman, famous for his death scenes as an actor, plays ones out for the family, and Larry Bryggman, a veteran theater and big and little screen character, turns the effort into a barrel of laughs.

These early goings are abetted triumphantly by a strong cast, ably and unobtrusively directed by Kyle Donnelly who has worked with most of the actors before. There are—blessedly—no heroes and heroines here, just deeply troubled souls having the usual amount of agonizing difficulty showing their love for each other, which nevertheless is very evident as are the resentments, those never-healed wounds.

Bryggman and Helen Carey—who starred in “Long Day’s Journey” at Arena—are the crown jewels in a pretty heady cast.

Bryggman is one of those actors we know by face instantly—we’ve seen him on this show or in this move and on daytime soap opera, but here he is a lion, a giant of a character, he’s so full of the burden of the pains he’s carried around for decades that he finally burst with pieces of heart and soul, like the blood spatter in one of those CSI shows.

Carey, who looks small and thinly elegant but is steely and regal, is one of the area’s acting treasures, not credited as much as she should have been. Until the free-for-all explosion of “the truth,” she dominates every scene she’s in just like her character. There’s love for Polly there, but, boy, it’s true tough love. In this atmosphere of two really great performances, Martha Hackett as sister Silda survives with perfectly placed irony and sarcasm, Scott Drummond as Trip with a long-suffering warmth, while Emily Donahoe has the thankless task of humanizing Brooke, who threatens to become a merciless true believer and whiner. She is the apparent victim here, but she’s also the accuser.

In this two-hour play, there’s one more cat to come out of the bag. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve been hearing soft meows all along. It’s a manipulative kind of plotting—smart by way too much, and it could have derailed the play. But by that time, Bryggman, Carey, Donahoe, Drummond and Hackett have given you too many reasons to give a damn about the people on stage.

Baltz saves things with a kind of epilogue, a nine-years-later summation that remains resolutely ambiguous.

“I wanted more,” a woman told me as we left. In this, Baltz took the side of reality. Life just isn’t that tidy, or, as Sister Mary Ignatius once said in another play, “Of course, God answers all your prayers. It’s just that most of the time the answer is no.”

“Other Desert Cities” runs through May 26 in the Fichandler at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St., SW — ArenaStage.org. [gallery ids="101287,149571" nav="thumbs"]

Wright: at His ‘Mountaintop,’ Playing MLK
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It isn’t easy portraying an icon, especially when that icon is the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Just ask actor Bowman Wright.

Wright stars as King in playwright Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” now in the Kreeger Theater at Arena’s Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater through May 12. It is a play in which Hall imagines King’s last night on earth in a hotel room in Memphis, Tenn., just before his assassination in 1968.

“Let me say this first, I feel I’ve been blessed,” said Wright of playing King during a telephone interview while the play was still in rehearsal, heading toward previews. “I’ve been blessed to be able to do this play, which is an amazing work. And, of course, you feel a tremendous responsibility in some ways to do him honor and justice, because he’s such an important historical figure. I did a lot of reading, his writings, his biography. And we’re in Washington, where there’s the memorial and where he gave his ‘I have a Dream Speech.’ ”

“The Mountaintop” imagines the icon as a human being, alone, except for an attractive maid whom he encounters in his room. “Sometimes, people want icons to be icons and not to be quite so human,” Wright said. “But this play looks at the man, the leader, the human being aware of all of his roles and responsibilities, and his life as a man.”

Making its debut in London, “The Mountaintop” opened in New York with no less than Samuel Jackson in the role of King and Angela Bassett as the maid, now being performed by Joaquina Kalukango.

“Well, that’s something to consider, I suppose.” Wright said talking about Jackson. “You have to do the best you can and not worry about things like that.

“I think what Katori has done is to consider all of Dr. King—not just the rhetoric, the visionary, the leadership, the historic figure who is revered all over the world,” Wright said. “You know, sometimes I feel his heart. It’s what we have to consider, how big hearts do the right thing, and that you have to do right by him. We are not doing a documentary here.”

In “The Mountaintop,” King has just given his other famous speech—the wrenching, full-of-foreboding “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech and now, tired and alone, he smokes, he goes to the bathroom and relates and reacts to the maid.”

Variety Magazine called the play “soul-stirring,” and it appears to be a remarkable play by a young writer who is an inaugural resident playwright of Arena Stage’s American Voices New Play Institute and who hails from Memphis. Hall is the author of numerous plays including “Hurt Village,” “Remembrance” and “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.” Director Robert O’Hara’s own play, “Antebellum,” won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play after being performed at Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

Wright has had difficult parts before, playing the older brother who has taken a job in an ongoing Lincoln show where the president is assassinated every night in “Topdog/Underdog” at the Marin Theatre Company and played Walter Lee Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Geva Thaetre Center and Cory in August Wilson’s “Fences” at the Actors Theatre in Louisville.

“By far, this has been the most challenging part I’ve ever done,” Wright said. “And the most rewarding.”

Vital Voices 2013 Global Leadership Awards
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The theme echoing through the evening was Vital Voice’s Founder Hillary Rodman Clinton’s historic pronouncement in China that “women’s rights are human rights.” The awards were presented in the Kennedy Center Opera House on April 2. Clinton paid glowing tribute to Vital Voices co-founder and chair emeritus Melanne Verveer, the first Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. Presenter Diane von Furstenberg said, “I have never met a woman who is not strong” as “Fear is not an option.” Honorees came from Cambodia, Brazil, Palestine and Somalia. Vice President Joe Biden spoke movingly of his championship for women’s rights and then presented the Solidarity Award to the Kant brothers who seek to combat human trafficking and sexual violence in their native India. [gallery ids="101234,145487,145457,145481,145463,145475,145469" nav="thumbs"]

Patti LaBelle at Duke Ellington School of the Arts
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As Georgetown’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts celebrates its 40th year, honing the talents of aspiring artists while preparing them for continuing academic success, the signature annual fundraising event was held on March 25 at the Kennedy Center, starring Patti Labelle. Previous artists included Ellington alumni Denyce Graves and Dave Chappelle as well as Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson. Leon Harris of ABC7 News emceed the program and quipped, “Be thankful that I am not going to be singing.” Ellington students participated, as did pianist Jamar Jones, who will be producing LaBelle’s next CD. School co-founder Peggy Cooper Cafritz hailed Head of School and CEO Rory Pullens as “the best principal in the city.” It was a joyous occasion. [gallery ids="101235,145501,145477,145495,145484,145491" nav="thumbs"]

Carolyne Roehm’s ‘Flowers’ Book Signing Reception
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International trendsetter in fashion, elegance and taste making and devoted animal lover Carolyne Roehm and her companion, former Georgetown resident Simon Pinniger, were in Washington on April 3. The designer and author spoke at a luncheon at Congressional Country Club and at an evening reception in Kalorama. At both events, she graciously signed her latest of numerous books, “Flowers,” showcasing more than 300 photos that she has taken to capture to the beauty of her gardens at her Connecticut property Weatherstone. [gallery ids="119326,119362,119356,119335,119342,119368,119349" nav="thumbs"]

Capella Hotel Hosts Community for Iron Chef Competition
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On Monday, April 8, the Capella Hotel in Georgetown hosted a friendly Iron Chef-style competition between the Citizens Association of Georgetown, the Georgetown BID and the Georgetown Business Association. The surprise ingredient was red snapper. Georgetowner publisher Sonya Bernhardt joined Capella Georgetown general manager Alex Obertop and chef Jakob Esko in judging the teams’ creations. GBA came in third place, Georgetown BID came in second place, and CAG won the grand prize. [gallery ids="101236,145497" nav="thumbs"]