Performance

Gary Tischler • September 17, 2013

Just being around Jenny Bilfield,
the new president and CEO of the
Washington Performing Arts Society,
you get the sense she’s the kind of
person that can fill and command a
room, whether it’s a board room, a concert hall
stage, or a small downtown D.C. coffee shop
on this occasion.

Although she’s been around less than a
year, Bilfield, the artistic director of Stanford
Live at Stanford University in California since
2006, she already sounds like a Washington
D.C. booster. That, you suspect, comes out
of her deep appreciation and sense of place. A
New Yorker, she acknowledged that her work
and time at Stanford changed and enriched her,
and that’s exactly where she’s coming from
in her approach to her new job—taking over
the reigns of an organization with a long (48
years) history as a premier world arts presenter
and arts educator. She comes across as accessible,
really smart, unpretentious, and probably
knows more about most things you’d care to
talk about in conversation.

“This is such a terrific, unique place,”
she said. “We [composer husband Joel Philip
Friedman, 12-year-old daughter Hallie, a rescue
dog and a few parrots) live right next to the zoo.
We can walk to the zoo.” This is said with all
the verve of a genuine enthusiast, a woman
who can generate enthusiasm for just about
anything. She is seen as, has a reputation for,
and talks a lot about risk taking. In terms of
classical music, for instance, she’s known for
a passionate commitment to encouraging new
work and compositions, in addition to holding
fast to established artists and work which is the
hallmark of most presenters and their seasons.
“If you look at this year’s Stanford Live
season, some of which I’m responsible for, if
you run across some names that you may not
be familiar with, I’m probably responsible,”
she said.

She seems to have gotten a handle on the
unique qualities of Washington pretty quickly.
“You have a rich and diverse performance art
world, so many venues from the big to the
small, it’s full of opportunities to do many
unique things. You have a city that’s rich in
neighborhoods too, and it’s full of gifted artists
that work and perform right here. You can draw
from that. You have unique opportunities for
arts education. You have the embassies and
the whole international framework to draw on.”
Reginald Van Lee, executive vice president
of Booz Allen Hamilton and chairman of
WPAS’s Board of Directors said that “Jenny is
a visionary with a proven track record of success
who is passionate about the arts and their
role in the community. She is the right person
to lead WPAS’s new strategic plan and build
upon our core strengths: rich, educational and
community engagement programs, the nurturing
of young talent, and presenting the finest
artist of our classical, jazz, dance, and world
music performances.”

Upon the announcement of her appointment
in January, Bilfield said that “WPAS is an
essential, deeply valued anchor of the Capital
region’s cultural scene and has earned a sterling
reputation as a premier American arts presenter,
and an engine of high-impact arts education
programs and alliances. I feel the same rush of
energy and optimism that I experienced when I
joined Stanford University in 2006.”

That rush, that energy is on full display,
when she’s touting the new WPAS season,
tellingly built around the theme of “The City
Is Our Stage,” the neighborhoods in the city,
the diversity, the opportunities for expansion
and new partnerships. “We hope to engage
audiences and artists for the long term, and
get people to participate in the arts, not just by
going but by being a part of the whole,” she
said. “Audience here are very committed, very
smart and intelligent, and receptive, I think, to
new forms and ideas.”

At Stanford, she transformed Stanford Live,
from being a university presenter to a producing
organization along the lines and size of
WPAS, and was also instrumental in bringing
the vision for the Bing Concert Hall to fruition.

“The challenges here are not the same,” she
said. “WPAS exists in a unique place and is
a unique organization, with unique opportunities.”
She provided a hint of how she might
approach her new tasks, in a kind of farewell
interview with the San Jose Mercury News.
“Ultimately,” she said then, “specificity and
sense of place are central for me. My litmus test
is that our vision, mission and programs need to
reflect the unique DNA of the organization and
its community. …Washington Performing Arts
Society has had a significant impact upon the
cultural life of Washington D.C., from nurturing
new talent to substantive arts education,
and serving as a destination for outstanding
performers at venues around the city.”

It’s obvious that she’s already gotten the
vibe of the city’s cultural DNA. It would
appear that it matches hers.

Georgetowner • September 16, 2013

Dumbarton House will host the Jane Austen Film Festival on the lawn of its North Garden on Wednesday, Sept. 18. This free showing of “Pride and Prejudice,” starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, puts action to Jane Austen’s most famous novel. It is about a headstrong young woman, Elizabeth Bennet (Knightley), entering womanhood with four sisters, a crazy mother and no men that seem worthy of her time. Elizabeth is thrown when she meets Fitzwilliam Darcy (Macfayden), a rich and seemingly pompous man. She puts all her energy into hating and avoiding him, until she finds his hidden side.

The show will start around sunset or approximately 8 p.m. The lawn will open at 7 p.m, 2715 Q Street entrance only. Tradewinds Specialty Imports, Dean & Deluca, and Café Bonaparte will be selling food and drink. No pets or smoking allowed. Please bring blankets. You can thank Long & Foster and Christie’s International Real Estate for sponsoring this event.

The museum will be closed during the event but is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Visit the Dumbarton House, the Headquarters of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America, during that time to experience its rich history — DumbartonHouse.org.

Gary Tischler • September 12, 2013

There are probably some very hip, very cool theater customers with their thumbs on text and their minds on Twitter and the next thing going viral who might find the national tour of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” bewilderingly old fashioned, as in an old fashioned with all the right ingredients.

In the annals of musical theater history, “Anything Goes,” now getting a jazzy, spiffy run at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, is practically ancient history, a show so old that, for god’s sake, it made a star out of Ethel Merman and featured such old plot devices—as least as old as “Twelfth Night” –as people pretending to be other people, jokes that shake with burlesque dust, chorus girls and tap dance numbers and a faux dog, stuff that you could find on a vaudeville production roster.

Man, it’s so old that the usual admonition to turn off your phone was accompanied by the information that in the time of “Anything Goes,” iPhones and iPads had not been invented yet. That’s how old this show is.

Tell it to that great genial genius composer and song writer Cole Porter, who, in 1934, managed to sneak in a reference to cocaine (in “I Get a Kick Out of You”). Porter could rhyme on a dime. When it was decided to title the show “Anything Goes,” he went home and wrote the song overnight, or so the story goes, which is to say anything goes.

Tell that to the chorus boys and girls and who ever invented tap dancing, a thing so simple and complicated that it can induce a warm glow for the duration—you get a kick from all the kicking and tapping.

Tell that especially to Merman and Mitzi Gaynor and, more recently, Sutton Foster, who wowed in the Broadway version of this production. Now and forever, tell it to Rachel York who’s taking on the role of the wise-cracking, dazzling, leggy, high-stepping Reno Sweeney and making it her own. Not only is York the best reason to see the show, she’s practically a swaggering, swanky, swell, walking, dancing, tapping check list of what I call Broadway babies, the indispensable stars who can do anything, anytime, on stage. Can she act? Check. Dance? Check. Wise-crack Check. Tap? Check. Deliver punch lines? Check. Be sexy and mesmerizing? Check.

York is a seasoned trouper and star of the stage—and television where she played Lucille Ball in “Lucy” and several movies as well. She knows her way around Cole Porter, that’s for sure, having played Reno twice before and the lead in the Cole Porter backstage musical about feuding Shakespearean stars, “Kiss Me Kate.”

In fact, “Anything Goes” resembles “Kate” in its show bizzy busy tropes, its vaudeville ticks and its absolutely fabulous songs, music and dancing. Bobby Van, Bob Fosse and Ann Miller were in the MGM movie version of “Kate” as were old pros James Whitmore and Keenan Wynn, urging the audience to “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Bing Crosby, Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O’Connor starred in the movie version of “Anything Goes.”

It’s York who’s the real show in the production at the Kennedy Center. She puts every tough, gold-hearted, sassy dame you ever saw and won’t see again into her performance: a shoulder-whisper of Bacall, a breathy Monroe, a brassy dare-you-to-take-me-on Mae West. The big voice, the dynamo energy, the sexy head-of-the-parade walk, the knowing way with words, that’s probably all York.

You think this is easy: watch how she sort of glides almost casually into the “Anything Goes” number at the end of the second act, a number that’s like winning the lotto for those of us who get dizzy in the presence of tap. It builds and builds and multiplies and brings the curtain down like an unexpected kiss. Act two starts about ten minutes later and it’s “Blow Gabriel, Blow,” another powerhouse number featuring York/Sweeney, who’s a sort of slightly shady, glitzy gospel-preaching gold entrepreneur, in which Sweeney comes clean parading from church-wear to dazzling, slit shirt gown.

The two numbers stacked like that are the broadway version of a marathon, and York breaks through in style.

The rest is fizz, pure entertainment that Porter with his magic way with words and music turns into art. The stage at some time or another is filled with sailors, a crook on the lam named Moonfaced Martin, a Chinese convert with a yen for poker, the Angels, Sweeney dancers, Purity, Charity, Chastity and Virtue, who managed to embody the opposite qualities, a near-sighted rich tycoon, a young ingénue engaged to a twitty, slightly off British lord, named Evelyn Oakleigh, and Billy Crockett, a handsome but slightly pennyless Wall Streeter in love with the sweet ingénue Hope who’s more of an angel than the angels.

Chaos, disorganized, silly, naughty and nice ensues, if you’re interested in plot matters. Astaire-Rogers type dancing ensues. Pratfalls ensues. Song satisfaction ensues. Entertainment ensues.

If this is old fashioned, it has the peculiar of something just gone viral on YouTube. Thank York for that and Cole Porter, but also Josh Franklin for his insistent wooing as Billy Crocker, the graceful Alex Finke as the ingénue, Fred Applegate for having so much fun with Moonfaced Martin and Edward Staudenmeyer for having even more fun with Evelyn, oh lord, Oakleigh.

That’s entertainment.

“Anything Goes” runs through July 7 at at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.
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Gary Tischler •

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"]