Performance

Gary Tischler • September 12, 2013

Almost every biographical reference you can find on John Carter—the ones that don’t lead to the fellow who spent time on Mars—tend to lead off with a colorful, intriguing picture, as does the one in the program for his new play “I, Jack, am the Knave of Hearts,” which begins: “John Carter (playwright) is also a poet as well as a former merchant seaman, railroad man and wordsmith for hire who has ceased his wanderings and now lives out of sight with his wife and dogs.”

Somehow, the merchant seaman, railroad man and wordsmith are the grabbers. It’s resonant of the kind of creative types who live fully, breath smoke and traveling air, have seen and done things most of the rest of us mortals haven’t. All of this and the rest of the biography you may read is true and important. Yet it’s more like the beginning sentence of a novel, or better still, a play.

The dog part is true, and more importantly, the playwright and poet part are gloriously true. Carter is also an actor who’s played cops in films and on stage and has performed his poetry on stage in Washington in “various dives with the rock groups Eros and Luna and solo in more polite venues, including the Library of Congress.”

I met Carter in my D.C. neighborhood of Lanier Heights some time ago when we were walking our dogs. Carter looks a little like his biography—smallish, lean, blue jean jacket, a trademark wind-bitten Aussie hat. We met through Ruby, his brown, energetic poodle and my bichon Bailey, who has since passed away. Once our dogs were properly introduced, we discovered mutual interests and common experiences which we shared over coffee and over time. One of those interests was theater.

At the time, Carter was involved in staging an earlier play he had done (there have been four altogether), called “Lou,” a one-man play about Lou Salome, a dazzling woman, contrarian intellectual, muse, companion and sometimes lover to the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Lou” was staged in New York and at the Fringe Festival there. It was performed by Elena McGhee.

In many ways, “Lou” is a remarkable play because of the way it appears to get at the heart and soul of a remarkable woman—a daunting task for any male writer. “I tried to imagine everything that happened to her, everything she talked about from the standpoint of a woman,” Carter said, as if that’s the most natural thing for a male writer to do.

While Carter has written all of his life and been a poet for many years, playwriting is new to him. He is, after all, in his early eighties—82 years old, to be exact. For him, there is still a lot to do in this arena. From “Lou,” Carter tackled something a little different, which eventually became “I, Jack, am the Knave of Hearts.”

“ ‘Lou’ took a long time,” he said. “ ‘Jack’ practically came to me in a rush. It’s a work of the muse. I can’t explain it in any other way.”

Jack is Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, or perhaps all the great philanderers, womanizers of history rolled in one. He is time specific as played by D. Stanley, who is the artistic director of Theatre Du Jour and who also directs. All over Adams Morgan, these past few weeks, we’ve seen cards and posters, at bookstores or galleries or even a shoe repair shop for “Jack,” seen as a darkly-dressed, time-driven swaggering mystery man with a sword, whom you can see at the District of Columbia Arts Center on 18th Street.

The play closes this Saturday, April 6, and has been marked by a roller coaster ride that is a a lot about the life of Carter, the play itself, writers, and Adams Morgan. It’s also about the special qualities of the DCAC, which doubles as an art gallery and has seen the presence of many of Washington’s troubadour theater groups like Scena, Venus, the Landless Theatre Company, and the outrageous and lamented Cherry Red Productions, as well as appearances by burlesque and vaudeville performers.

“We’ve been reviewed twice,” Carter said. “Once negatively, which isn’t much fun, and once positively, which is gratifying. We’ve had good houses, and not so good houses—there was one time when the only people there were three kind of scruffy old guys, which made it difficult for Stanley, because the reaction of women in the house is important.”

“Jack” is a one-character play which sees Don Juan escaping from hell, in a bravado-like confusion, and trying to make sense of the life he led that landed him in hell, and the particular qualities of hell. He wears an open white gallant’s shirt, black boots of the striding kind and carries a spectacular sword and arrives with an attitude.

I saw the play on a night when Carter’s wife Julie Bondanza, a Jungian analyst, was there, seeing it performed “for the first time,” along with his daughter, assorted relatives, a member of the Playwright’s Forum to which Carter belongs, neighbors and walk-ins. The presence of a number of women in the audience seemed to invigorate Stanley, whose Jack was a man in search of his own identity, energetically striding the stage like an adventurer, looking over the fleshly highlights of his life, the death of his mother at the stake, the seduction of a woman and the murder of her father. On the simple, brightly lit, dark-background stage, the search seems to be the one we all march on, in our dreams, in those moments. “I begin to know myself,” Jack says and at another point, notes that “Hell is the end of hope.”

Carter didn’t attend rehearsals. “I like to be surprised,” he said. But he was sitting in the back listening and watching intently, laughing at the laugh lines as if discovering it again, like a true audience member, for the first time.

At play’s end, you walk into the gallery, where a reception for artist Joanne Kent’s amorphous works on the wall is in full swing and swagger. The crowds don’t part, they mix and talk and merge, art not so much imitating life as joining it.

The Knave of Hearts is surrounded by people. John Carter is surrounded by friends and family. The words still seem to be a part of the night, the cool air, hanging there… “A man back from the other side of hell, a man you hide your daughters from, a man with bloody hands. Am I that man?”

That night, he sure—as hell—was.

Gary Tischler •

When we think about the 2013 D.C. Jazz Festival, we can think about a lot of things—the essence and variety of jazz, the boundless talents of the performers, the vision of festival founder Charles Fishman, the way the festival has grown in size and venues.

All of that is well and good, but there’s been another constant through the history of this festival which is critical, and that’s the presence of Paquito D’Rivera in his role as co-artistic director, idea man, iconic figure of Latin jazz and performer.

In some form or another, he’s always there: we remember him from the New Orleans-themed festival several years ago in which he headlined a concert but managed to appear to be in several places at once. On a Sunday, with the bluesy, jazzy uniquely New Orleans sound being generated by Buckwheat Zydeco, there was D’Rivera in a shirt of many colors wailing with Zydeco and his group on the sax, blending and adding.

On the phone, he sounds a little bit like he plays—hard-driving, direct, untethered and not a little unfiltered, boisterous, funny, adventuresome. You think of him immediately as a man who’s comfortable with ideas and appetites, all sorts of people and all sorts of music. He is the pied piper and exemplar in some ways of the marriage of forms and genres. He’s an embracer. He’s speaking from New York, but it feels as if he’s in the room with you.

This year the Cuban-born D’Rivera and his PanAmericana Ensemble headline another special feature of the festival in “Jazz Meets the Latin Classics,” which comes after last year’s Jazz Meets the Classics I in a concert at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater June 14.

“It continues the theme of jazz and classical music, only this time the emphasis is on Latin classical music,” d’Rivera said. “The music will be tackling compositions and works by people like Piazzolla, Lecuona, Rodrigo, Villa Lobos and some of my work.” On hand will be soprano Brenda Feliciano and guitarist Berta Rojas in arrangements and improvisations, along with Alex Brown, Oscar Stagnaro, Yotam Silberstein, Edmar Castañeda, Hector del Curto, Diego Urcola, Michael Philip Mossman, Mark Walker and Pernell Saturnino. Brenda Feliciano is D’Rivera’s wife.

“We explored the classics with jazz musicians and jazz style last year,” D’Rivera said.

“This is a continuation along the same lines but in a Latin vein. I think we’re seeing bridges trying to be built that bring musical forms together, lead to new innovation and the like. A lot of it is coming from the classical end, trying to expand the horizons and audiences. I think on the whole that’s a good thing, the idea of fusion. But, just like in fusion cuisine, you’ve got to be careful of how you go about doing it, otherwise you end up with something like putting together black beans and sushi, which tastes awful.”
“I have to tell you,” he said. “Charlie got this festival done. This is a great city, a city with a jazz history. It’s supposed to be the capital of jazz. It should have a major jazz festival. If not here, where, you know. And Charlie got that done. He’s been a great friend, and so was Dizzy Gillespie, which is how I got here to begin with. But my job here—I think it’s to keep Charlie calm. Seriously, I am so proud of being a part of the festival as much as I have.”

D’Rivera is a multi-tasker, a multi-excellent talent and leader, an innovator. You can see the strains of where his music often goes in his compositions and by the people he plays with and collaborates with, building bridges. He has the stellar, huge reputation that allows him to make major inroads into cross-pollination of musical genres and styles—he has won six Latin Grammy Awards and four Grammy Awards and plays the saxophone, clarinet and soprano sax and flute. He’s won a Gramny for classical music. That may be an influence from his father Tito Rivera, who was a noted classical saxophonist and conductor in Cuba. In a way, D’Rivera’s presence, his association with jazz giants, his own major star status adds to the festival’s luster.

No question, he is also Cuban, through and through. In his colorful autobiography “My Sax Life,” that comes through in anecdotes and pictures and a vibrant, pungent story-telling gift. But you can also tell he’s a serious man, who can improvise with the best of them—he’s a Charlie Parker fan—but insists upon the notion that musicians ought to be able to read music.The book itself is a jazz history of sorts—meeting with men he admired and respected, and probably loved, Gillespie among them. I mentioned that Gillespie used to go to Harold’s Deli in Georgetown for coffee back when he played in town frequently. “Maybe we can have coffee there,” he said. Sadly, Harold’s is no longer around.

He left Cuba in the 1980s and has never returned not even to visit, citing the visa and passport restrictions and a serious lack of love for the Castro regime. “Some people make a hero out of Che Guevera,” D’Rivera said. “Not me.”

He is a jazz man but much more than that. Not by any means is he an elder statesman—he’s in his mid-sixties—but he carries the earned weight of honors, a string of multi-faceted recordings that are mountain-sized. “I’m not crazy about rock and roll,” he said. “The noise, it’s loud. But then you look at the Beatles, those guys they expanded the form.”

That’s what Paquito D’Rivera does with jazz and, one suspects, with life its own self. He expands the form.

Jazz Festival’s Roll Call of Heavy Hitters

With its many venues—especially with the offerings all over town in the Jazz in the ‘Hoods series as well as more high profile venues such as the Jazz at the Hamilton Live series—the 2013 D.C. Jazz Festival, running June 5 through 16, represents a treasure trove of talent on Washington stage.

To paraphrase what people say about theater—with the jazz festival the players are the thing and so we’re presenting a few of the names, the music, the players who are the stars of the festival, including Paquito D’Rivera, the Latin Jazz king who’s also the co-artistic director of the festival.

Player drum roll:

The Roots—If any group exemplifies just how big a shadow jazz casts and how many kinds of music and musicians perform under its big tent, it’s probably the Roots, the Grammy Award-winning hip hop and soul band founded by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and Abmir “Questlove” Thompson in 1987 in Philadelphia. Their music is jazzy, and eclectic, and with its wide reach, man
ages to maintain a broad audience, with no small thanks to its role as the house band for the perpetually hip and cool Jimmy Fallon Show.

Although ranked among the top hip hop bands ever, the group with 10 albums under its belt, two EPs and collaborations with many artists. It’s the festival’s signature event, a concert at Kastles Stadium at the Wharf June 15, with doors opening at 3 pm.

Arturo O’Farrill, is a pianist and the son of Latin jazz musician Chico O’Farill who’s performing with his own band, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, in a concert at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue June 9 , being billed as “From Bagels to Bongos.”

Pharoah Sanders—The legendary saxophonist came out of the John Coltrane bands and made himself known for his “overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques” which were totally new. At the Bohemian Caverns, June 14.

John McLaughlin—The South Yorkshire, England, native who is called Mahavishnu John McLaughlin is a guitarist, bandleader and composer who mixes jazz with rock and Indian music. No less an authority than rock guitarist Jeff Beck has called him “the best guitarist alive.” At the Howard Theater June 16.

Terri Lyne Carrington—Carrington is a multi-talented force as a jazz drummer, composer, producer and entrepreneur who has played with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Herbie Hancock. She’s performing her “Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue” at the Hamilton Live June 8.

The Brubeck Brothers Quartet—The quartet, made of Dave Brubeck sons Chris on bass and trombone and Dan on drums as well as Mike DeMicco on Guitar and Chuck Lamb on piano are presenting a Tribute to Dave Brubeck June 14, also at the Hamilton.

Hilary Kole—Only in her twenties, she heads and sings with the Hilary Kole quartet which has played at Birdland. She’ll be at the Embassy of Turkey June 10.

Ron Carter—Carter—owner of a lifetime DCJF award, is a living legend, a double-bassist who has also played the cello and has appeared on more than 2,500 albums and played in Miles Davis’s second quintet in the early 1960s, a group that included Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. Carter and his Golden Striker Quartet will be the Hamilton June 13. [gallery ids="99246,104157" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

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.

Gary Tischler •

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.”

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"]

Gary Tischler •

There was some head scratching in the seats when the Kennedy Center made Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar’s “The Guardsman” its 2013 centerpiece theater production.

The play—written in 1910 by Molnar, who is also known for plays such as “Liliom” which became the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” had a reputation as something of a warhorse, date and rarely produced, famous mostly as a popular vehicle in the 1920s for the star couple of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

Well, thank God for this war horse, and thank the Kennedy Center for letting us enjoy it in unexpected ways. Thank translator Richard Nelson, who saw the depth and theater magic in the original, and director Gregory Mosher, who staged the newly reconstructed play with flair, panache, and an ear and eye for the world of the theater and those who inhabit it. Especially, thank the actors who may not be all that familiar to theatergoers but who manage the difficult multi-tasking the parts require, by making us see and appreciate not only the nuances in the play, but its heart-breaking dangers.

Of course, “The Guardsman” could have been a door-slamming, laughter-inducing comedic blast—and it remains, still, very funny, but it’s the kind of laughter that’s always loaded with the potential for disaster for the characters and brings an acute tension to the proceedings.

The plot sounds labored—a couple, identified only as the actor and the actress, have reached an impasse in their marriage which the actor fears has gone stale. Now, as we see the two of them bicker and bite at each other in a turn-of-the-century drawing room, a nuanced air of something-about-to-happen has entered their lives. The actor—handsome, excitable, fretful—has imagined that his wife, cool, beautiful, famously restless—may be growing tired of him or falling out of love with him. He confides in their friend, the critic, who has also always been in love with the actress, that he thinks she’s looking for something, perhaps a military type, a “guardsman.” “I’ve seen him,” he tells his friend. “How do you know that?” he’s asked. “Because it’s me,” he replies.

So begins the plot and ploy—the actor will impersonate the guardsman and try to seduce his wife. If he fails, he will “be the happiest of men.” But if not, well: disaster, tragedy, heartbreak, the end of love. But it’s also “the role of my life.” And so he proceeds, popping by in full popinjay regalia at the house (the actor is supposed to be away on a tour), and then pushing forward by visiting the actress at an opera performance (of “Madame Butterfly”) where she’s gone, with her long-time assistant she calls “mother,” who’s always disapproved of the actor.

What ensues, is remarkable, a portrait of two people who have engaged in a passionate high-stakes game where everything matters painfully so on several levels. It’s a kind of war which opens with a big battle and works its way to a kind of irresolute resolution that is perfect for our times. These two are capable of great passions and loves—they’re, after all, gifted and famous actors on the stage when that really meant something. They love themselves, they love each other—maybe—and they love, perhaps more than anything, what they do, which is acting.

Here is Finn Wittrock as the actor—grandly afraid, unsure of what will happen, blustering with big feelings and big gestures. Here is Sarah Wayne Callies, so cool, if not cold, a hot iceberg floating in uncertain waters. Here are the actor and the actress, keenly observed by Shuler as the critic who has a stake in this uncertain game.

This is, of course, what actors do every night—they lie to us by making us believe what they’re doing is real and important every time out, that it’s as fresh as an honest kiss, which is what the actor wants from his wife.

If you’re interested in theater, you should go see “The Guardsman,” and watch what happens. The audience, I noticed, after a quiet beginning, steadily got into the grand deception as if they were at the racetrack with something to win or lose. When the couple kissed at one point, you could hear a voice in the back yell, “Yes!”

I second that emotion.

“The Guardsman” runs at the Eisenhower Theater in the Kennedy Center through June 25. [gallery ids="119161,119167" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Back in 1985, Peter Sellars, who was director of the long defunct National Theater at the Kennedy Center, created something of a stir with his production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” which included an all-star cast headed by Colleen Dewhurst, Kevin Spacey, Kelly McGillis and Paul Winfield, among others.

The problem was not in the stars, but with other things: a shrill score by Scriabin, a set that included a Mark Rothko-like backdrop and a prop—a droopy stuffed animal-like seagull, containing the play’s major metaphor—were among the controversies of the production, not a first for this sort of thing for Sellars. People even argued about what the meaning of changing the title from “The Seagull” to “A Seagull” might be.

Twenty-eight years later, there’s a new take and mash on Chekhov’s masterpiece by playwright Aaron Posner at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. How’s this for a title change? “Stupid F—–g Bird.” You know what we mean to write.

Posner, best known here as a director, has taken Chekhov’s play as a kind of starting point, muse and model, to play with, to send up, and blow up at times, taking care to let you know that this is a play-specific play, if you will. He uses the specific play and its author to say a few things about how we live, create and play and love today, very much today. Along the way, his characters have a lot to say about performance and theater and art, but appear as in the original, befuddled, wounded and totally befuddled about love, the who and why and why not that are as destructive to an artist or playwright, as writer’s block.

“SFB”—this acronym will have to do—is a minefield of a play. It makes you metaphorically speaking afraid to put your foot and your feet down because your expectations—reasonable ones, one and all—are continually blowing up in your face. Posner is mindful of Chekhov’s soul and his creation—a series of the glasses-and-beard large images of him fill the walls on stage—but he’s hardly kissing butt in homage here. He’s created the same characters—some are omitted—as in the original, and they behave in the same ways and have to cope with the same triangulations of love. But they are also in the here-and-now, most of the time—the original is not exactly being copied, it acts as an echo.

So, here again is the frustrated, rebellious young son of the supremely regal but nervous famous actress. Here is the innocent but provokingly beautiful Nina. Here’s the why-am-I-old uncle and brother. Here is the famous, somewhat cynical and attractive writer. Here is the mismatched but settling couple. Here are Cam, Emma, Doyle, Nina, Sorn, Mash, and Dev. Here, briefly, fulfilling his role as metaphor is the SFB.

“SFB” both operate on two levels: it’s a play about art and the artist in society and the search for new forms, and it’s a play about the crying-out-loud-painful difficulties of love. In addition, “SFB” is about theater and plays today and turns almost into a bullfight with the audience. The characters step right through the third wall and make the audience play with the play or participate. At one point, Com, the young son of the famous actor stops and turns to the audience and asks for advice on what to do with his desperate love for Nina, who’s fallen for Doyle, the famous writer who is also the lover of Com’s mom. After some hesitation, they give him such advice as “ignore her,” “forget about her” and so on.

These sorts of things keep happening. Masha, (the miraculous Kimberly Gilbert), sings a song while playing the ukulele about modern life (it apparently sucks) in a sweet, knowing voice, or the characters sit facing the audience, explaining what each wants, or we’re offered an aftermath roundup characteristic of television melodramas. This is heady, affirming stuff—not exactly new—and it makes co-conspirators out of the audience. Yet it sometimes co-authors, always an unpredictable thing.

The Woolly crowd—and director Howard Shalwitz—thrive in this sort of thing. It’s like their very own private theatrical swimming pool and sauna. You can’t get hurt when you have the likes of Gilbert—who always manages to wring her own sort of poetry out of a matter-of-fact delivery that is secretly and deeply weird. Consider Masha, Cody Mitchell, who makes self-satisfaction seem warmly attractive as Doyle, the always savy Kate Eastwood-Norris as Emma, the diva mother/actress, Katie DeBuys, who adds an extra-step depth to Nina, and Darius Pierce (as Dev who married Mash, who loves Com) and Rick Foucheux as the wondering Sorn. If you get irritated with Brad Koed as Con, it’s because the part is written that way. Con is the wounded art revolutionary as whiner, both in the romantic and artistic sense.

It’s tempting—because, for instance, that Sellars production of “A Seagull” was a deeply affecting one to me—to feel offended with Posner’s rough handling but also sometimes awe filled respect of Chekhov. Instead, I think “SFB” is a kind of fantastic, giddy sea voyage, always half a second away from shipwreck. It’s smart. It’s funny and wise, knowing and fearless, most of the time. But you have to wonder, too, if it’s a little too smart. All this inventive, interactive staging, this reliance on the colloquial—as in “Start the f—–g play” or “This sucks”—seems a little too easy. It’s both deft and anarchic at once. We’re seeing both Chekhov’s and Posner’s “Seagull,” one never far from the other. In a way, “The Seagull” is a kind of safe harbor for “SFB.” You can always return home and be moved.

Jordan Hellmuth •

It all started at a poker game. Leroy Justice front man, Jason Gallagher, went to a poker game in Manhattan’s Lower East Side with his brother-in-law. From then on, Gallagher “kind of became the Neil Young to their Crazy Horse.” Despite the evolution of Leroy Justice’s sound, with each change up it “always sounded like us … like Leroy Justice,” Gallagher said.

Returning to D.C., Gallagher and the band hope to reunite with former band member, Michael Kelly, who stars in “House of Cards.”

“I think we’re just figuring out how to get our music to people,” Gallagher said. “I think we can win people over if we can get our music to new people. That’s why we play shows.”

What’s next for Leroy Justice? The five-member, New York-based band will be making its way down to D.C. club, DC9 on June 20 for the Monk Czech Release Party (Dominion Brewing & Dawson’s Liquor Beer Collaboration).

“If you haven’t seen us live, you haven’t seen us,” explained Gallagher. “If you haven’t seen us live, you don’t know Leroy.”

For ticket information for Leroy Justice’s show at DC9, visit www.dcnine.com

Gary Tischler •

When it comes to composing music, the 61-year-old British composer George Fenton has done just about everything—composing music for films, plays, television, even in his youth slinging a guitar in a rock band.

But when he talks about his work on “Frozen Planet,” for which he composed the score, you get the idea that the whole experience—it’s part of three BBC Naturalist Film Documentaries which include “Blue Planet” and “Planet Earth—has utterly moved him.

Fenton will be conducting the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap’s Filene Center Friday, June 28, while “Frozen Planet,” a two-hour distillation of the multi-part BBC Series will be viewed giant-screen style by the audience.

“It’s quite an experience, I must say,” said Fenton, who is a veteran of more than 70 films, including Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” and “Cry Freedom,” as well as “The Fisher King” and “Groundhog Day.” “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done.” He has worked on a number of wildlife television programs for BBC, which marked his entry into big budget wildlife documentaries.

“It’s something new, certainly, but I feel, as I’ve gone along, that it’s very important work,” he said. “I went with the film-makers to the Arctic Circle for a time on location, and it was a revelation. It’s overwhelming, profound, the life forms, the rhythm of life there, the grand sculptures of ice and landscape, the creatures there. And, while I’m no expert, you get a real sense of something passing, too. You know the icecaps are melting. You’re keenly aware of what’s happening.”

Fenton’s work—looking at some clips gives you a fair sense of it—it’s at turns epic, sweeping, playful (when the penguins make their appearance as the crowd pleasers they are), moving, and sometimes, you get a sense of the delicate and dangerous balance in the arctic worlds that exists today.

“Yes, there is a sense of loss, because of the awareness of the disappearance of species,” he said. “But the feeling you truly get is one of awe and power.”

Being there, conducting in the pit, also lets Fenton appreciate just what these concerts are, which is a new kind of performance and film experience for audience. “I would say it’s a new form, in a way, because it mixes music and film together, but in a way that’s unique,” he said. “In a concert hall, people tend to still and listen with rapt attention, focused. In a movie theater, the music is full of cues for audiences, emotional cues even as the audience’s attention is trained on the film. In a setting like this, the audience feels more free to become involved, and I think the music is a key to that. For example, the audience is vocally thrilled and responsive to the animals. They laugh at the penguins. They’re impressed by the whales and polar bears. It makes for a unique experience, for myself and the orchestra.”

Writing music for films, Fenton feels, has changed over the decades. But he’s a deep admirer of the old Hollywood composers—like Max Steiner, famous for “Casablanca” and Korngold for “The Adventures of Robin” and later the hugely prolific John Williams, Steven Spielberg’s composer of choice.

“The early composers worked in the old Hollywood studio system and, of course, worked on all sorts of films,” Fenton said. “But the best of them—if you listen to their work—they wrote music that could stand on its own. I was inspired by them, and I’m a huge admirer of Williams and Henry Mancini.” Fenton also worked with director David Frears on television and in films like “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Hero” and “Mary Reilly.”

For “Blue Planet,” Fenton won the Ivor Novello, BAFTA and Emmy awards for Best Television scores, which was then followed by “Blue Planet in Concert.”

“We’ve taken the concept in venues all over the world,” Fenton said. “It’s been an exhilarating experience.

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“Frozen Planet” is part of the National Symphony Orchestra season at Wolf Trap. Other season offerings include:

“Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration”—a celebration of the work and compositions of legendary and late leader of the Grateful Dead, with vocalist and guitarist Warren Haynes, June 26, 8:15 p.m.

“Carmina Burana”—the NSO and soloists from the Wolf Trap Opera Company present Carl Orff’s choral masterpiece along with Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” July 12, 8:15 p.m.

Also:

“Video Games Live: Bonus Round!”—fusion of big screen game visuals and live music, July 13.

“La Traviata”—the Wolf Trap Opera Company, the NSO and the Washington Chorus join forces for this grand opera, July 19.

“1812 Overture”—Tchaikovsky’s great work, along with Rachmaninoff’s “Second Piano Concerto” by piano prodigy Benjamin Grosvenor, July 26.

“America the Beautiful”—featured in “Ansel Adams: America,” composed by Chris and Dave Brubeck with Adams’ photographs on big screens, along with works by Copland, Gershwin and John Williams, July 27.

“Wicked Divas”—diva show-stoppers from “Titanic,” “Wicked” “Phantom of the Opera” and other works, performed by veteran Broadway soloists and the NSO; directed by NSO Principal Pops Conductor Steven Reineke, July 28.

“Singing in the Rain”—HD version of the classic Hollywood musical shown on big screen, with Gene Kelly, Debby Reynolds, Donald O’Connor and the incomparable Cyd Charisse with the NSO playing the orchestral score, August 3.