Edward Albee & Tennessee Williams

July 26, 2011

In the annals of 20th-Century American theater history, there are few playwrights more influential, more continually fascinating to theatergoers and theater makers, than Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.

If there is a hierarchy of American playwrights, then Williams and Albee belong in the highest tier, along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, for their strong, echoing and expansive bodies of work, an output that rarely dates in reading or performing, and continues to draw the attention of generations of theater artists.

Both playwrights are getting their full due in two ambitious, wide-reaching, far-flung local festivals. Arena stage will be hosting a two-month long Edward Albee festival. And “The Glass Menagerie Project” at Georgetown University, which runs through March 27 and picks up again in the summer, is part of a nationwide Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival.

There’s a vital, live-wire connection between the two festivals—“The Glass Menagerie Project” is part of an Arena Stage/Georgetown partnership and will be picked up again in June at the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. And both festivals will be graced with the in-person presence of Albee.

The Arena Stage Edward Albee Festival kicks off with a visit from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and its electrifying production of Albee’s most produced and famous play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Starring Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts as George and Amy Morton as Martha, it will be running in the Kreeger Theater February 25 – April 10.

Meanwhile and simultaneously, Arena Stage itself is mounting “At Home at the Zoo,” which will be performed in the Arlene and Robert Komodo Cradle February 25 — April 24.

That double bill would normally count as a mini-festival and ambitious project in itself. But wait, there’s more. Beginning in March and running through the end of April, 16 theater companies will present staged readings of Albee’s works. The readings, by such companies as the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Theater J, Taffety Punk, Round House Theatre, American Century Theater and Forum Theatre, with directors like Irene Lewis, Howard Shalwitz, Wendy C Goldberg and Amy Freed, are free, but reservations are required.

The readings will include “Lolita,” “Fragments,” “The Lady from Dubuque,” “Marriage Play,” “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” “The American Dream,” “Tiny Alice,” “The Play About the Baby,” “Three Tall Women,” “A Delicate Balance,” “Seascape,” and Albee’s version of Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café.”

In addition, Albee will be honored with the presentation of the American Artist Award on March 14, in “An Evening with Edward Albee.”

Albee will also be present at Georgetown, appearing at Gaston Hall in a conversation with Susan Stamberg, a special correspondent for National Public Radio, talking about his perspectives on the work and influence of Tennessee Williams. The conversation will include performances from leading actors, curated by Albee himself. (March 24)

“The Glass Menagerie Project,” presented by the Georgetown Theater and Performance Studies Program, is a re-envisioning of what is generally considered Williams’ most autobiographical work, a work often called a “memory play.” The project—really a Williams festival—will include performances, discussions and events intended to illuminate Williams’ most familiar and perhaps least controversial play.

The project, of course, will feature a production of “The Glass Menagerie,” starring Georgetown theater professor and one of Washington’s most luminous, gifted actresses, Sarah Marshall as Amanda Wingfield. The show will be directed by Professor Derek Goldman and runs February 24 – March 27 at GU’s Davis Performing Arts Center’s Gonda Theater.

Other special productions and events include appearances by playwright Christopher Durang (who wrote “For Whom the Southern Bell Tolls,” a takeoff on “Menagerie”), and a performance of “Camino Real,” Williams’ most gaudy and mysterious play March 26. There will be readings, discussion, and plays throughout the festivals.

Among a trio of readings on March 26 is “Mister Paradise” directed by Joy Zinoman and featuring Ted Van Griethuysen.

Albee’s presence at both festivals should be electric, illuminating and haunting. Williams died in 1983, seemingly played out, but his plays continued to be performed everywhere, including as part of a notable Tennessee Williams festival at the Kennedy Center.

Albee and Williams both concerned themselves with aspects of that big theater theme, love—sexual, romantic and any otherwise. As such, many of their plays were considered controversial at the time of their debuts. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with its plum, rich and profane language and sexual themes, had to be cleaned up a little for the movie version. Years later, “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” still had walkouts at its performance at Arena Stage because it was about…well, a man who loved a goat.

Williams’ later plays, like the classic “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” with its overt references to gay themes and violent incidents, were also controversial, while featuring grand roles for women, a Williams trademark.

Both of them continue to be influential writers and playwrights with their body of work, much of which will be celebrated in the two festivals. Go to ArenaStage.org for details on the Albee festivals and PerformingArts.Georgetown.edu for more on Williams.
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Twisting Corridors of a Deranged Suburbia, in Woolly Mammoth’s “House of Gold”


 

-“House of Gold” has closed its doors, shutters, and weird basement entrance down at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, but I will say this: it lingers.

The new play by Gregory S. Moss—which got a world premiere production at Woolly—is not a terrific play. It surely is not a classic, well-made play, and it doesn’t even make any kind of narrative sense. But it pushes your buttons, and they’re the buttons you don’t usually wear out in public.

Director Sarah Benson and a production design that seemed to have been made by a nervous student on some unidentifiable drugs—and that’s a compliment—plus a cast with some gifted actors, put the show together as if they were all throwing a big bag of goo on the wall to see what sticks. A lot of it did, or I wouldn’t be thinking about it still.

“House of Gold” is ostensibly about the infamous, shameful and still unsolved—and therefore still haunting—Jonbenet Ramsey murder case, in which a six-year Colorado beauty queen contestant was found strangled in the basement of her home. The case—incomprehensibly sad, icky, sensational—touched all kinds of nerves in the country, and created a tsunami of celebrity publicity that washed over the whole country and left everybody feeling a little dirty.

Suspicions fell on the parents under a cloud because they had entered their little blonde girl in the wheezy world of children’s beauty contests, in which little girls are dressed up like grown up Barbie dolls, with a full arsenal of lipstick, teased hair and makeup. The mother first called it a kidnapping complete with a ransom note, a grand jury investigation was launched, and the parents Patsy and John Bennett Ramsey, were eventually cleared. Nearly ten years later, Patsy died of cancer. Months after that, a school teacher named John Mark Karr confessed to the murder, but DNA evidence nixed his claim.

Through it all, the paparazzi, the media, the scandal bees, show biz shows and Billy Bush wannabes had a carnivorous carnival feast. The case had all the hot buttons, the underbelly-of-America nightmares and daymares you could want: the queasy child beauty contests, the constant rumors, gossip and television appearance by cops, the parents, investigators and, for all I remember, seers and Sesame Street fans, psychics, psychologists, celebrity mag “reporters,” and thousands of people pretending to be insiders inside of the looking glass.

“House of Gold” touches on all of that, sometimes like a mosquito, sometimes like a fully engaged bloodsucker, sometimes in ways not imagined. Not only is the case front and center, but so is the picture of a middle class enthralled by cop and CSI shows with all the bones, guts and blood.

It’s hinky, it’s kinky, and it’s downright disturbing. The best thing in “House of Gold” was the performance by Kaaron Briscoe, a smallish, youthful-looking African American actress as “the girl,” aka Jonbenet, decked out in a distressing blonde Goldilocks wig, but also with a keen awareness of the disastrous vibes emanating from her own impending tragedy. I wouldn’t have said it upon first look, but the casting and performances sticks with you like a sad song at a piano bar.

There are scenes that ought to all but make you throw up, no more so then when a detective pulls out the child’s innards at an autopsy. There’s a lot of shock-schlock here. There’s the bullying, hopeless, overweight, wannabe friend Jasper, tormented at the hands of the Apollonian Boys, the worst the suburbs offer up. There’s the parents going at each other, not like the Cleavers, but with verbal cleavers. There is one Joseph M. Lonely, who entices Jonbenet into the basement by way of his van.

We never quite see the room—we see her peering out sometimes—as it is designed with glimpsing angles, like the set from “The Cabinet of Caligari,” the German expressionist silent movie. The rest is video, which is as it should be.

I think “House of Gold” is probably one of those plays that won’t endure as literature; you have to have seen it to disbelieve it. But the play itself threw some light, some hint of the event’s enduring power to fascinate, and hints at the stuff we’ve been fed ever since.

This is cutting-edge theater all right. The kind of cuts made with a knife dripping drool and blood and the remains of compassion.

Madama Butterfly Comes to the Washington National Opera


Spring is on its way to Washington. And if we need a sign of spring—and a beautiful, highly anticipated one—we’ve got the Washington National Opera’s “Madame Butterfly.” Puccini’s enduring, tragic opera, although critically blasted in its first version over a century ago, has proven to be perhaps the one opera in the canon that is loved even by those who say they hate opera.

“Madame Butterfly” kicks off the second half of the WNO season Saturday, February 26 and runs for a phenomenal 14 performances through March 19, with two world-renowned sopranos sharing the role.

“I would guess that maybe along with ‘Carmen,’ ‘Tosca’ and ‘La Boheme,’ ‘Madame Butterfly’ is probably one of the most recognizable and beloved operas, and probably lands on more schedules than any other,” said Christina Scheppelman, Director of Artistic Operations at the WNO. “Certainly it’s popular. That’s why there are more performance dates. But it’s a great work of art. Let’s face it, it has brilliant, gorgeous music, and like the others mentioned, they’re tragic, romantic stories. If you don’t cry in ‘Madame Butterfly,’ you’re perhaps not quite human.”

“Madame Butterfly” kicks off the latter part of a season as part of a trio of high-profile operas and other events, and it’s bound to seem just a little bittersweet.

On July 1, the WNO will enter into a contract with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts which will affiliate the two organizations, a move that will strengthen the missions of both organizations, according to officials from both groups, and will certainly be a boon for the WNO in terms of financial stability. But it remains a major change in a time of major changes at the WNO, after the announced departure of Artistic Director and renowned singer Placido Domingo back in September. Domingo has been the face of the WNO since becoming Artistic Director in 1996, as well as serving as General Director for the last eight years.

In addition to “Madame Butterfly,” two other operas are on the spring menu, and of particular interest will be “Iphigenie en Tauride,” by Christoph Willibald Gluck, a company premiere for the WNO. This show also offers a chance to see and hear Domingo as the great performer that he is, in the starring role as Oreste.

“This is certainly a highlight of the season,” Scheppelman said. “It’s always a major occasion when Domingo performs here, and I’m sure that it won’t be the last time.”

“Iphigenie en Tauride” is rooted in Greek tragedy. It is the story of Iphigenie, the high priestess of Taurus, as she is faced with impossible choices—often the case in Greek tragedy and opera (see “Madame Butterfly”). But the opera, with its soaring, emotional music has enjoyed a renaissance of late, and the WNO is catching the crest of its wave.

“Iphigenie en Tauride” will have eight performances, May 6 – 28, and “Don Pasquale,” the great comic opera by Donizetti, will be performed for eight performances, from May 13 – 17, with James Morris in the title role.

Thereis also the Placido Domingo Celebrity Series, in which contemporary and rising opera stars get a chance to perform solo. It kicks off this weekend on Sunday with tenor Juan Diego Florez and continues with the great Welsh Bass Baritone Bryn Terfel, conducted by Domingo on March 12.

But it’s “Madame Butterfly” that will be the chief attraction in town, which is expected to get big audiences with its tragic, super-romantic theme, its heart-breaking arias, its exotic and historic setting.

Here’s the scoop, in case you don’t know: a handsome 19th century American naval officer named Pinkerton, hungry for a variety of romantic experience, lands in Nagasaki and meets Cio-Cio-San—the butterfly—a young, naïve teenage Geisha. He makes her his temporary wife. She is rapturously in love—always a perfect state of mind for singing arias—but Pinkerton, a cad of the highest order, departs with promises to return, leaving Butterfly behind, with a child. Eventually, he does return, but with an American wife. The climax is about as sad as things can get, and therefore musically and emotionally perfect for audiences.

Two of today’s most acclaimed sopranos, Ana Maria Martinez and Catherine Nagelstadt, will be performing the title role during the course of the WNO run, each with special qualities and gifts. This is Naglestad’s debut as Butterfly, but she is a veteran of Puccini’s operas, and it’s the second time around for Martinez.

Tenors Alexey Dolgov and Thiago Arancam share the role of Pinkerton. Domingo and Philippe Auguin will conduct, and Ron Daniels directs.

Scheppelman has seen numerous performances of “Butterfly” over the years, not counting rehearsals.

“It never gets old. It never fails to move the heart,” she said. “Certainly, companies inevitably will put it on their schedules. It’s a great audience draw, and it’s a demanding opera for the performers.”

“Candide” at the Harman Center


Washington’s theater season ended in an embarrassment of riches, especially for anyone who loves full-bodied productions of musicals.

We had not one but two productions of classic Rodgers and Hammerstein fare—Molly Smith’s wondrous staging of “Oklahoma”, which managed to honor the original in spirit with a freshness that made it a perfect launch for Arena’s impressive new, $100 million plus digs at the Mead Center for Theater Arts, and the touring company of “South Pacific” still present at the Kennedy Center, a rousing production both entertaining and emotionally strong.

If that wasn’t enough there was Andrew Lloyd Weber’s dark musical of “Sunset Boulevard” at Signature Theater and a warmly received and popular staging of “Annie” at Olney Theater.

In the middle of this bag of musical goodies, the Goodman Theater-Shakespeare Theater Company co-production of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” stood out because it seemed almost to be a brand new show, and a kind of climax to the burst of musical theater, an extra goodie that went well beyond the standard of what we might expect out of musical theater.

“Candide” has its own pedigree, it’s mythology and history in Broadway lore, although not necessarily of the splendid kind. It had all kinds of big names attached to it, the most important of which was the music, composed by Leonard Bernstein. There was Voltaire, the author of the slim, cautionary 18th-century Enlightenment novel about a naïf whose life becomes one long illustration of Murphy’s Law after another. It had all kinds of additional literary heavyweights attached to it—Lillian Hellman, the playwright noted for “The Little Foxes” and acid wit chief among them, but also poet Richard Wilbur and a not-so-well-known lyricist named Stephen Sondheim, who would join up with Bernstein on “West Side Story”. “Candide” opened on Broadway in 1956 to little in-the-seats action, and lasted only for two months.

But “Candide” had legs—first as a best-selling cast album, then repeated revivals that kept the show in the public eye and mind of another generation of directors and talents. Now we have a new “Candide”, and this one clearly is the work of one chef—that is besides the glorious music and vision of Bernstein—and that would be director Mary Zimmerman, who knows a little something about epic theater.

Because “Candide” in spite being based on a slight—page-wise—volume, is an epic, it’s a great, rueful, adventure, a tale of journey’s embarked upon in the search of such verities as true love, and “the best of all possible worlds” in a world that , to any reasonable eyes and hearts, is no fit place for such notions.

Candide is a young man of dubious lineage who lives in a privileged world, is in love Cunegonde, the daughter of the lord of the manor somewhere in France. To these two, it seems they were born to be each other’s true love. This naiveté is aided and abetted by their tutor, who teaches them that they live in the best of all possible worlds, as they all sing happily.

Instead, because of his love for the spritely, slightly dizzy Cunegonde, Candide is kicked penniless out of the castle, drafted by an invading army, helped by a kindly Protestant type, and is re-united with Cunegonde whom he believed to be dead, and worse, raped. She’s gone up or sideways in the world, being the mistress of two men including a high-ranking cleric in the local inquisition. He ends up killing both men almost by accident, and off they go into the even crueler world, accompanied by the re-found tutor, and an older woman wise to the world, a kind of funny, lusty Mother Courage type. Their journeys take them to South America, where Candide manages to find El Dorado, gain and lose a fortune; lose Cunegonde again, before ending up once again in Europe, where he finds his true love older, defeated, and a slave to the Turks, along with his tutor and her brother. Freeing them takes the last of the gold he found in El Dorado, and so they end up becoming urban farmers, much, much sadder, and wiser.

Zimmerman tells this story—which tracks across a number of years and two continents—with a vast, shining set, puppets, and miniatures, tools which she used to great, magical effect in her production o f “The Argonauts” here. The style always steals up to the border of being awkwardly silly, but it never falls into the obvious trap. Instead, the story, based more firmly in Voltaire’s novel than in Hellman’s contemporary politics, moves along like a grand tale, a memory of a story told around a campfire, it’s told with great, almost cinematic zest.

The music is Bernstein’s elevated Broadway fare, with a tinge of his operatic work, sweeping, difficult to sing at times and always to the point and engaging. The music has a big wing-span that embraces the naivety of “The Best of All Possible Worlds”, to the slap-in-the-face irony of “A Fine Day for an Auto-Da-Fe”, to the Brechtian “I am Easily Assimilated” to the heartbreaking “Make Our Gardens Grow”, which is a kind of majestic solace of a song.

It’s a wonderful show to look at (love those red lambs) and it’s driven by two beguiling young performers, Geoff Packard as the breathless hero Candide and Lauren Molina as Cunegonde. Both of them are high-energy, youthful players and gifted singers, especially Molina, who tackles the rousing and rangy “Glitter and Be Gay”, a song which has a life of its own as a kind of testing game for sopranos. Molina passes with flying colors.

For musicals at least, it’s been the best of all possible worlds in Washington.
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“Black Watch” Brings War to the Stage with Grit, Style, and Wonder


War plays are tough, and not just because war is hell.

With perhaps the exception of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” there aren’t many plays that take place IN a war, in its atmosphere of tension and danger, portraying soldiers as they live and die. Certainly, there are few if any that deal with the immediacy of ongoing conflicts like Iraq or Afghanistan.

But the absolutely amazing new play, “Black Watch,” from the National Theatre of Scotland, breaks new ground in ways that will open your eyes like a splash of cold water. At turns tough and tender, gritty and realistic in its language, and powerfully theatrical in its style, “Black Watch” focuses on a unit of the legendary Scottish regiment while it served in the darker days of Iraq combat. The soldiers are distinctly Scottish in sound, uniform and history, but they open up a bright light that could easily fit the experience of American soldiers in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

War and combat aren’t easily accommodated on stage—they’re too big, too loud, too bloody, too incomprehensible, and too dangerous to deal with realistically. But the talented director John Tiffany has gotten around that problem by fusing movement, music and sounds. Mortars and explosions go off against the profane language of soldiers and the vague precision of military talk, coming up with a kind of theater that you’re not likely to have seen before.

Because the actors playing the soldiers are so good, natural and physical, the experience of the play—and the experience of the soldiers—gets a grip on your heart. It sweeps you away at times, bringing out both tender and angry feelings, and sharpening whatever ideas we might have about what has happened to American troops who fought in Iraq, as well as those still battling in the weathered, bleak outposts in Afghanistan.

Writer Gregory Burke interviewed Scottish veterans who served in the Iraq war and got some pungent, moving stories. Depending on where you’re sitting, you get a visceral feel for barracks life—the dirty talk, the razzing, the tension, the bitching about daily boredom broken up by patrols in armored cars, the occasional explosions, the frustrating combat and forays that result in casualties and no discernible triumphs.

This is not an anti-war play, nor is it a beat-your-chest patriotic piece about the war on terror. It’s a play about the life of a particular military unit, a proud, glory-rich unit in Scotland, and what that war was like for them.

The troops, uniformly speaking in rich, spit-full Scottish accents, comprise a cohesive group, almost a classic, clichéd combat squad. You have every type of soldier: experienced, naïve, short, tall, big and thin, blondes and brunettes, quiet and blustering. They come from the same places in Scotland, their points of references are the same, and to varying degrees, they’re proud of being in this regiment with its storied history.

You get the bull and tension of barracks, tents, day rooms, the fuzzy television, the lockers posted with porn, the sergeant who tries to be a leader to his men, the grizzled commander who stomps about like a square bowling ball. The lads are never anything less than real, but the environment is stylized: a pool table morphs into an armored vehicle, from which soldiers in full combat gear emerge, like the Marx Brothers tumbling out of a state room.

When the soldiers talk about home or recall their experiences to a reporter or rag each other mercilessly, the scenes are sharp, funny, crisp and dirty. Hearing them, listening to them, seeing them move around each other, you get a sense of them as individuals, like the two young looking, almost bratty duo of Kenzie and Fraz, thin, dark-haired bundles of energy, played by Scott Fletcher and Jamie Quinn, respectively. There’s Jack Lowden as the thoughtful, sometimes brooding Cammy, and Paul Higgins who plays both the sarge and a news reporter.

But Tiffany has added something, making the experience poignant and as new as a hungry baby. He has created movement, stylized and militaristic in the same breath; they are marches and forms of dance that hype the war with emotion, driven by powerful music. It can be a small thing—the boys passing a single letter from home around, for instance, and each man makes something of his own in how he touches, holds or reads the letter, before passing it on. There is a parade-style march that reaches a rhythmic tempo, which energizes the audience, and might make you want to enlist—at least on stage. Tiffany creates combat and battle this way too, and the effect is heart-breaking as they continue to march, some of them staggering, falling, picked up and caught like trapeze artists, always moving on and together.

The end effect is that when they suffer loss and losses, we, the audience, do too. That’s something new.

“Black Watch” is on a national tour here. It’s at the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Harman Hall through Sunday. Drop what you’re doing. Go see it while you can. Visit ShakespeareTheatre.org for more information.

“Return to Haifa” at Theater J


When is a theater company more than a theater company? When does a play become something more than a play?

The answer to the first question is Theater J. Under Artistic Director Ari Roth and working out of the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street, Theater J has become something much more than a theater company, presenting plays that are both universal and specific to the Jewish community.

Roth—in cooperation with many other artists and patrons—has taken this specific mission and enlarged it by using the theater to reach out and become involved in the great Middle Eastern issues of conflict, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which resonates as a critical and unresolved problem.

Roth has done this in a number of ways, including the creation of the Peace Café with Iraqi-born restaurateur and arts patron Andy Shalala. The Peace Café is a gathering occasion for Jews, Arabs, Palestinians and others to meet and discuss ongoing Middle Eastern issues peacefully.

The answer to the second question is a play called “Return to Haifa,” adapted by Israeli playwright Boaz Gaon from the novella by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. The show is now being performed by the renowned visiting Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater and Morris Cafritz Center for the Arts at the JCC.

More generally, “Return to Haifa” is the the weightiest matter and main attraction in Theater J’s Fourth Annual Voices from a Changing Middle East Festival, which includes a series of nine one-night events, readings and performances from and about the Middle East (running through February 17). “Return to Haifa,” a remarkable, brave, emotionally stirring play, runs through January 30.

All of these combined efforts on the part of Roth and his theatrical conspirators are to take part in peaceful happenings that try to famliarize the “others” by bringing them together through art, culture and lively discussion.

In “Haifa” and in the festival there is an arena where this sort of thing happens—and not necessarily painlessly. The modern conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has its roots in ancient history, in the debate about the ownership of land, culture and history.

All of those issues come into play in “Return to Haifa.” It is based on a work by a Palestinian writer named Ghassan Kanafani, who once wrote a moving fictional story about a Holocaust survivor in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War. The war ended in a remarkable Israeli military victory bearing strategic but poisoned fruit: the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai and the Golan Heights. The result turned Kanafani into something of a militant and spokesperson for the PLO. He was killed with his young niece in 1972, allegedly by the Mossad.

Those bits of history, which you can find in the program for “Haifa” alone, ought to give audiences an idea of just how startling the presence of this play is at a Jewish Community Center.

Performed by a splendid Israeli theater company, there is dialogue spoken in Hebrew and Arabic with subtitles. It touches nerves like a live wire. It is discomforting, painful and difficult. It has the potential for healing and opening hearts, but the process is pain-inducing, depending on where you sit.

The play is acted at an emotional level that manages to overcome the difficulty of following the languages and translations. The acting is direct, subtle and all-consuming, creating an atmosphere that resembles emotively the power and function of music in an opera.

“Haifa” is about memory, and the ownership of memories and place. It concerns a Palestinian couple named Sa’id and Saffiyeh, who are coming to Haifa from Ramallah to revisit the home they abandoned in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which displaced thousands of Palestinians. They also left behind an infant they had named Khaldun. Miriam, who was granted the house by the Jewish authorities with her husband Ephraim, is now in residence, along with a son named Dov, who is in the Israeli army.

Dov is the son left behind by the Palestinian couple, raised as a Jew. The father has passed away, but Miriam is here to confront Sa’id and Saffiyeh.

This might sound like classic melodrama, and ways it is: lost birth rights, lost children, lost homes, confrontations with the past. Nevertheless, it comes with the power of an earthquake to raise timeless issues still causing bloodshed today. A similar thing occurred in Germany when “Holocaust,” an American-made mini-series starring Meryl Streep, was broadcast. The series was melodramatic, and therefore had the power not only to resurrect the ghosts of the past, but to make Germans confront the human issues, the cost, and the suffering by way of in an individual story, not just impossible statistics.

“Haifa” is a lot less simple than pure melodrama because it deals with the morality of justice and the inconsistent nature of memory. At the time of the 1948 war, for instance, with space scarce, and only incoming Jews from Europe with a child could own a house. The baby left behind gave Miriam ownership of the house. Miriam had also lost a child in the Holocaust.

And there is the eternal conflict, with so many unresolved grievances on both sides that it beggars description. Yet “Haifa” attempts to do just that; it describes what is lost, what seems irreconcilable, what is hopeful and what is not. When Dov, going to sleep, insists there will be no more wars, he is wrong and naïve, but he embraces the right impulse.

Every conflict—from the original 1948 War, to through the Suez War, the 1967 War, the Yom Kippur War, the PLO Wars, the Lebanese Wars, the Intifadah—provides another cache of grief and grievances for future generations.

“Haifa” looks inside that cache and finds humanity, and that’s thanks to the actors. It’s not always easy to follow the back and forth; concentrate on the subtitles and you lose some of the emotional force of the acting, and vice versa. You can lose strings and strands of what is at stake by missing the meaning.

But the cast, notably Rozina Kambos and Raida Adon (as Miriam and Saffiyeh, respectively) override such consideration. They sweep you away by letting you feel the emotions as well as their details. That is a remarkable achievement of theater.

Readings for the “Voices from a Changing Middle East: Portraits of Home” include:
“The Promise”, by Ben Brown, January 31
“To Pay the Price”, by Peter-Adrian Cohen, February 5
“I’m Speaking to You Chinese” by Savyon Liebrecht, February 7
“Wresting Jerusalem:” by Aaron Davidman, February 12
“Hour of Feeling” and “Urge for Going”, by Mona Mansour, February 14
“The Admission” by Motti Lerner, February 27
The 10th Anniversary of the Peace Café will be celebrated with a one-time production and reprise of “Via Dolorosa” by David Hare, which launched the discussion program ten years ago.

Septime Webre’s “Nutcracker”


 

-In a November 14 New York Times Arts and Leisure article by Alastair Macaulay, entitled “The Sugarplum Diet,” it was discovered that “The Nutcracker” had become an American holiday institution. Tchaikovsky’s snowflaked Russian masterpiece from the 19th century has become a staple and an icon of Christmas, USA, right alongside that most British of creations, “A Christmas Carol.” Here in Washington, you won’t find a more American “Nutcracker” than the one created by Septime Webre, the Artistic Director of the Washington Ballet, which has become a DC institution when it was first introduced in 2004.

“No question about it,” Webre said in a phone interview. “‘The Nutcracker’ has become an American Christmas tradition. It’s not being done in Europe as a Christmas thing. It’s a very American occasion—very much a part of the holidays. And yes, it’s a very traditionally popular program on our schedule, and I think every ballet and dance company in the country. It’s a big part of the business of ballet.”

Webre has taken Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet to his bosom and made it an American ballet. “I believe in community,” he said. “Washington is our community, and we try to reflect that in the production.”

“The Nutcracker” is a children’s fantasy that adults, parents, couples, and grandparents can and usually do enjoy. It revives their memories of childhood. “We’ve turned it into something of an American story,” Webre said. “The nutcracker hero has become George Washington, and the rat king has become George III so that the battle against the mice is kind of a Revolutionary War battle, with the mice being English soldiers.

“We’ve set the production at a Georgetown mansion very much like Dumbarton Oaks, and the second half of the ballet is set around the time of the cherry blossom blooming. And yes, there will be little cherry blossoms as well as sugar plum fairies. Some of the iconography of the original has been changed to become more American. There are Indians, for instance, and the kids receive toys like wooden horses and Indian headgear. It’s something we can all recognize.”

Plus, there will be some 300 children, all of them from the Washington Ballet’s education program, who will at one point or another be a part of the show. “That’s where the community comes in,” Webre said. “Certainly we have our interests, but this company, this institution that Mary Day created, we now reach out into all our schools through a special education program, and during the course of ‘The Nutcracker’ we can see the results of that.”

Webre, a gifted choreographer whose parents came to the United States from Cuba, remembers doing several roles in a performance at a beach in the Bahamas when he was a child. “We all remember ‘The Nutcracker,’” he said. “To me, it’s always about the children, about our own childhoods. Many children learn about etiquette of the theater going to see ‘The Nutcracker’. For many of us, it will be the first theater performance we’ve ever attended.”

Webre pointed out that the production will once again have “guest” performers present, which have included Ward 2 City Councilman Jack Evans, soprano Denyce Graves, and others.

“Having been artistic director now since 1999, one of the things I love to see, and you can do this with ‘The Nutcracker,’ is watching kids mature from being mice, or sugarplum fairies to taking on lead roles such as Clara. You get a parental pride out of that, and the other thing is, of course, that this is a coming of age story; it’s about Clara and her experiences and how she grows up.

“I believe the audience to some degree has to recognize themselves in theater,” Webre said. “You can see yourself in ‘The Nutcracker.’ Children do. We remember ourselves. There’s the great and familiar music, of course. There’s the beautiful costumes and sets. But it’s a story. You see a family celebrating the holiday—that warm atmosphere of giving and playing.”

That’s as American as apple pie.

This year’s production of “The Nutcracker,” at the Warner Theatre, runs December 2-26. Call 202-397-7382 for tickets.

A Not-So-Holiday Theater Roundup


Just because it’s the Christmas season, not everyone wants to be entertained by all things Christmas.

That’s true for theatergoers, who have more than enough Scrooges, Nutcrackers, Santa Clauses and elves than they probably need.

But take heart and beware of what you wish for. There’s plenty of theater fare that isn’t in the spirit of the holiday season, and which sheds a light on how we live today or how we used to live. Here’s a sampling.

The Studio Theater has a play by Traci Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning super-charged new writer who gave us the generational and family drama “August: Osage County.” The scale is smaller this time but no less human and acerbically funny. In the wonderfully titled “Superior Donuts,” Letts focuses on the fortunes and friendship between a grouchy, cantankerous white shop owner and a very ambitious black teenager in a changing Chicago neighborhood. The new friends bond over literature, of all things, and American economic values. And there are secrets. Aren’t there always.

This show has already been extended through January 2.

Also at the Studio, in its Stage 4 space, is “Mojo,” by Jez Butterworth. It’s all about London criminals, underground rock and roll and, of course, music and revenge in 1958. It runs through December 26.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is at once a fantasy of wish fulfillment and a quest that goes as far as it can possibly go (another planet). This whimsical theatrical adaptation by John Glare comes to life at the Round House Theater.

And if you’re really not in the mood for Joyous Noel at all, you can welcome back Cherry Red Productions, once Washington’s most outrageous theater group which returns after a number of years with “Wife Swappers,” by Justin Tanner of “Coyote Woman” fame. Despite its subject and some (all right, plenty of) nudity, this comic play about the doings of conservative types trying to get some sexual variety, is surprisingly operatic (think soap) and even sympathetic to its self-justifying characters who talk dirty, but see themselves as otherwise clean.

It’s nice (or dangerous) to have Cherry Red, Ian Allen, Chris Griffin and the gang back. After all, they gave us such plays as “Dingleberries” and “Zombie Attack,” to name a few. In the very intimate space of the DC Arts Center on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, through December 18.

There’s more than “Oklahoma” at Arena Stage and the Mead Center for American Theater. Now through January 8, in the smaller Kogod Cradle Space—meant to nurture new American playwrights—there’s “Every Tongue Confesses,” in which writer Marcus Gardley mixes jukebox blues with church gospel blues and television news to tell a blazing story.

And speaking of news, opening in January at the Kreeger is “Let Me Down Easy,” which marks the return of one-woman dynamo Anna Deavere Smith. Smith wrote and will perform the play in which she lets varied voices speak out and “explores the power of the body, the price of health and the resilience of the spirit.” Beginning December 31 and running through February 13. At the Kreeger in the Mead Center.

Only a few more days left to see Synetic Theater’s dynamic, loud silent style at work in Washington, where a theater piece on the Russian classic “The Master and Margarita” is being performed through December 12 at the Lansburgh Theater.

If you like musicals, but still aren’t interested in the holidays, there’s “Candide,” the Leonard Bernstein cerebral, but very entertaining musical, directed by the magical Mary Zimmerman, based on a novel by Voltaire, with some of the words by Lillian Hellman, and some of the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and poet Richard Wilbur. With Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard in the leads. At the Shakespeare Theatre Companyn through January 9.

If “Oklahoma” at Arena doesn’t satisfy your Rodgers and Hammerstein jones, there’s the road company of “South Pacific” at the Kennedy Center, which will run December 14 through January 16.

A well-received production of “Annie”, the most optimistic little redheaded girl in the world, with her friend Daddy Warbucks and her dog Sandy, has already been extended to January 7. At the Olney Theater in Maryland. Be prepared to have faith in “Tomorrow.”

A Theater Note

Actor James MacArthur, son of legendary American actress Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur, passed away recently at the age of 72.

Best known for his series role on the original “Hawaii Five O”, MacArthur is fondly remembered in Washington for carrying on the role played by his late mother, annually presiding over the Helen Hayes Theater Awards, named after her. [gallery ids="99577,104880,104876,104872,104868,104864" nav="thumbs"]

Carmen Cusack Brings it Home In ‘South Pacific’


One thing about headlining not one, but two tours of major Broadway shows: you can go home again.

That’s certainly been the case for Carmen Cusack, who is starring in the national tour of the Tony-Award winning revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” now at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through January 16.

Cusack stars as the brimming-with-optimism Army nurse Nellie Forbush, the role originated by the legendary Mary Martin in the 1940s original. Singing some iconic R&H songs like “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” and “Wonderful Guy,” this national tour has brought her home in a big way.

“It’s good to be back,” Cusack said. “I’m thinking when this is all over that I want to settle in New York, make the rounds, do the process.”

Cusack has a personal pedigree as American as her character, Nellie. Born in Colorado and raised in Houston, she has a performing arts degree from the University of North Texas State. But she left soon after getting her degree, first signing a contract to basically tour the world performing on the QUE2, settling down in England, touring and performing on the continent. In England, she built a pretty large and eclectic resume, starring as Christine in “Phantom of the Opera,” as Fantine in “Les Miserables,” and for something completely different, a role in “Jack and the Space Vixens.”

“South Pacific,” with which she’s been touring nationally to great reviews, is something of a nationally iconic show, and Cusack knows it. “You know, I think people sometimes think of Nellie as naïve or innocent,” she says. “I don’t think that’s the case. I mean, this was army life in World War II, so you can’t stay innocent for too long. But she is naturally optimistic, and that’s a great, appealing part of her character. What happens when she falls in love with the French planter is that some innate prejudice comes up which she can’t shake.

“It’s hard to play that,” she says. “It’s hard to find that in yourself. Because that’s not what I’m like. I sort of touched base with growing up in the South where things were said you might not hear so easily elsewhere.

“I think the show tries to be realistic about life in wartime,” she said. “You don’t see black and white soldiers hanging out together, mingling. The director, in fact, separated us off stage too so we could get a feel for what it was like.”

If you check out her personal website, you get the feel that Cusack can handle pretty much anything, that she may surprise you every time out. Her looks, of course, change every time out. “I am the woman of many hair colors,” she quips, noting the blondish, curly do for Nelli,e which hides her naturally lustrous dark brown hair. She is also the woman who may end up with the jolly green giant. She landed the road company lead of Elphaba—the green-skinned Wicked Witch in the Land of Oz—in “Wicked.”

“Yup,” she said. “I was green.”

Her voice has range. Technically she’s a soprano, but she pours all kinds of surprises into the sampling of songs on her site, from brassy, breathy and witchy, seductive, to anthem-out-there.

One of her favorite projects, and one of her apparent idols, was the late Eva Cassidy, a local legend in the DC area for her poignant, piercing, aching singing as much as her early, tragic death from cancer. “I performed her music, played her in a show called ‘Over the Rainbow,’” she said. “She was a phenomenal talent, and it will be interesting to be here.”

The green girl brought her back to the United States when she joined the touring company in Chicago as a standby. She jumped in to land the national touring starring role and now she’s in the quintessential American tour, being “as corny as Kansas in August.”

“I think it was time to come back. It’s great to be back,” she said. “Right now, I’m touring, so I’m not settled,” she said, calling from Rhode Island before coming to DC. “But after that, I’m thinking about New York.”

With the presence of “South Pacific,” Washington becomes practically R&H headquarters, what with the hit revival of “Oklahoma!” at the Arena Stage. Welcome home, Nellie, and Carmen too.

Tamara Laird’s “Paisley Monuments”


The Cross Mackenzie Gallery, in Canal Square in Georgetown, has kicked off their artistic season with a small but resounding triumph. “Paisley Monuments,” the gallery’s latest exhibition of DC artist Tamara Laird, brings together a playful, natural whimsy with serene elegance, offering a fittingly contemporary aesthetic in a subtle sea of history.

Laird is an accomplished professional artist and a ceramics professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, whose travel has had a tremendous impact on her work. When still a student, she traveled to England and met many renowned British ceramists, including Bernard Leach. She spent time in Zaire, and in 1984 moved to Nairobi, Kenya, where she worked at the National Museum of Kenya on a project funded by the United Nations and taught art at the Kenyatta University. From there, she went to Bangkok Thailand, where she conducted extensive research in local ceramics, from traditional village production to full-scale industrial ceramic factories.

She participated in a tour of ceramic factories in Mexico that integrated traditional and contemporary industrial majolica production. She currently teaches majolica techniques for an annual summer study abroad program in Amalfi, Italy. Her studies and travels all work toward Laird’s is interested in finding the connection between local cultural and artistic development.

Her current works, exhibited in “Paisley Monuments,” are ceramic sculptures based on the paisley motif, a universally recognizable pattern that has been used for thousands of years. It originated in Persian culture, as a fertility symbol among other things, inspired by the shape of the cashew nut. The shape, mainly seen patterned in fabric throughout the world, is given vibrancy and tremendous fullness in the way that Laird has transformed these symbols into sculpture. It is reminiscent of the delicate beauty of a pregnant belly, the crane of a swan’s neck, the budding of a flower in springtime, and countless other allegorical allusions throughout so many cultures of the world.

And this is precisely why the work has such power. The work prompts your imagination to engage with it.

Which is not to take away from the raw aesthetic power of the works. The texture and luster Larid is able to achieve through her glazing process is remarkable. The works are all high fire ceramics, but she uses metallic glazes, called lusters, on many of the works, giving the feeling of soft, smooth metal. While some pieces resemble the clay from which they are molded, others look equally as if they were cast in bronze.

It would be impossible to review any individual piece in the show, as they all work socialistically (Tea Partyists be warned) toward the collective strength of the show. Walking into the Cross Mackenzie Gallery amidst these sculptures, reminiscent of Brancusi and Tim Burton in the same breath, is like stepping into a garden of suspended creation.

The garden-like quality is not lost on Laird, who has designed them to be outdoor friendly, to be fit among gardens and as outdoor sculptures. She was even in a recent show at the National Botanical Gardens involving plant-inspired artwork. But don’t mistake my intentions—the works would be beautiful anywhere.

The Cross Mackenzie Gallery, at 1054 31st St NW, in Canal Square, is run by Rebecca Cross. For more information about this exhibition and others, visit CrossMackenzie.com or email Becca@CrossMackenzie.com. [gallery ids="99602,105037" nav="thumbs"]