Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • September 12, 2013

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"]

Gary Tischler •

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.”

Mary Bird •

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"]

Mary Bird •

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"]

Mary Bird •

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"]

Nico Dodd •

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"]

Gary Tischler •

Just when you thought you had gotten tired of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Mary Todd’s seamstress Elizabeth Keckley and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” along comes Tazewell Thompson’s deeply affecting new play “Mary T. and Lizzy K.” And you are moved all over again.

Watching Naomi Jacobson as Mary Todd Lincoln, Sameerah Luqmaan Harris as Keckley, Thomas Adrian Simpson as Lincoln as well as Joy Jones as Ivy, Keckley’s youthful assistant at the Kogod Cradle at Arena Stage makes you at times think of the omni-present film, but it is, of course, hardly like watching the movie.

Thompson, a director at Arena Stage for many years, has done something almost unimaginable: he has re-imagined, re-shaped our views, pictures and feelings about these familiar and iconic people who loom so large in our memory’s imaginings without traumatizing long-held feelings. “Mary T. and Lizzy K.” is a labor of digging deeper, closer to the heart and bone about not only the history-held people but also our notions about them and the larger shadows of slavery, race, obligation and married love and marriage, intimacy and friendship. This production becomes for the audience something personal and intimate—we all have our feelings about these subjects and these people, certainly Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, singular and together, and certainly race. All of us will see on stage some part of our joys and wounds and confusions of thought.

The relationship between Mary and Lizzie seems to front and center here. The two have, in a way, as much an intimate relationship as the Lincolns did. No one seems more intimate than the woman who pulls, pushes, contours and shapes a dress to the body, which is what Keckley did for all of the Lincoln’s White House years. She did so well enough that she herself gained some measure of fashion fame that was available in that day.

We see Mary Todd Lincoln in the drab, prison-like clothes of an asylum patient or inmate and Keckley, splendid in outbursting dress, has come to visit and to demand payment from Mary for all her years of work dressing the first lady, for which she was never recompensed.

This is in some ways a time machine play, a memory play. Soon enough, we are back on the night—victory won, war is over—that the Lincolns are preparing to go Ford’s Theatre. In the scene, they are unaware of Lincoln’s last night alive. There are fittings, there is Keckley’s assistant Ivy affectingly telling the story of her rape and there is Mary’s boiling jealousy over one, any and all.

The narrative—really in some ways a series of soliloquies, long stories and arguments and exchanges—returns infrequently to the asylum, to the making of accounts, to the ties that bind between Keckley and Mary Todd where even arguments over fashion and style can bring out wounding words.

When Lincoln—performed with a burst of gusto initially by Thomas Avery Simpson (he was Colonel Pickering in the recent Arena production of “My Fair Lady”)—makes his first appearance the play threatens for a moment to become “Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd and Lizzie K and Ivy.” He appears to be not only trying to win over all three women but the audience as well.

When Lincoln and Naomi Jacobson in a bravura performance as Mary launch into a knock-down, drag-out brawl—very much like that between Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Field in the film—it is just as shocking, only more so, because they threaten to involve us, spill off the stage like fighters in a ring.

But the steady rock throughout these proceedings—it’s more than an hour-and-a-half without intermission—is Sameerah Luqmaan Harris as Keckley. She has horror stories and points of view and losses, but she brings them to the forefront obliquely with grace and tart, dark humor. Even when she is in a scene merely watching and listening, you always sense her presence. Check it to see what is happening in that intense but serene and beautiful face. This woman is shy and very judicious with her emotions. She is watchful and observing at all times. When she breaks out with her view of heaven, it’s like a burst of sunlight bathing us all. It’s an accomplished performance—accomplished with few obvious tools.

If you’ve seen the movie “Lincoln,” this play will once again show up the obvious—that being here is different than being at the multiplex or watching a DVD. However brilliant, for instance, the performance of Daniel Day Lewis, it is locked up forever. At Arena, this Lincoln seems to be emerging before our eyes. You become in the theater a witness, not a consumer.

Thompson writes beautifully, with no fear of poetry, and with great compassion for human suffering—even the thoroughly combative and paranoid Mary Todd gets her glorious due here. The play is aided and abetted by Donald Eastman’s set which is at once functional and contains hidden wonders. Tt’s a place of starkness with left-over physical discarded memories—a trunk, curtains and boxes and briefcases, containing the stuff for dressmaking and discovery.

Wherever you sit during the course of this play, it seemed to me and felt to me, that you were only an emotion away from wanting to be a little closer, to help them, as they try to stop the story from moving forward to its appointment and to its opening scene. [gallery ids="101222,145137,145134" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington announced the finalists for the “Oscars of D.C. Restaurants” at a March 19 event at the Hamilton emceed by Kelly Collis and Tommy McFly of Fresh FM.” The annual restaurant awards will be bestowed at the gala at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on June 23. This year’s theme is “Restaurants in Bloom.” Incoming RAMW President Kathy Hollinger hailed the individuals who have made D.C. a “dining destination” and recognized Clyde’s of Georgetown with the Milestone Award for 50 years of continuous operation. The awards recognize excellence in 16 categories including Casual Dining and New Chef of the Year. The public votes on three categories including Hottest Restaurant Bar Scene. [gallery ids="101215,145018,145012,144989,145008,145003,144996" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Barton and Leslie Gordon graciously hosted a May 23 luncheon at their Kalorama Residence as Pen/Faulkner celebrated James Conway’s Nose, a novel and insider’s view of life in Napa Valley. The author, who previously wrote a Washington Post wine column, shared that, as a Memphis native, he sampled Thunderbird. Ambassador of Liechtenstein Claudia Fritsche said, “I am deeply grateful to be taken out of the diplomatic world and thrown for a few hours into the literary world.” The non-profit brings together American writers and readers in a wide variety of programs to promote a love of literature. [gallery ids="101324,151371,151367,151357,151362" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Princess Selene Obolensky, American-born and titled by her marriage to the late Prince Alexis Obolensky of Russian nobility and Chief of the State Department’s Russian Translation Section, who helped draft arms-reduction treaties at a tense time in U.S.-Soviet relations, was celebrated by her many friends on May 28. She is the founder of the grand Russian New Year’s ball, which benefits “Children of Berezichi,” residing at the Boarding Schools for Special Children in Ulianova and Sosenskaya, Russian Federation. [gallery ids="119170,119153,119137,119145,119165,119159" nav="thumbs"]