Performance

Gary Tischler • March 24, 2016

The plays of William Shakespeare have long inspired other artists, from composers to filmmakers. “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, the classic tale of doomed young lovers, has been transformed into an opera by Gounod and several ballets and films (not to mention “West Side Story”).

But what about “Hamlet,” often considered Shakespeare’s most confounding play, where words matter, where the hero’s intellect and psyche is a critical part of the play? There are, of course, film versions of the play itself, including the Oscar-winning Laurence Olivier version, and there is the 1868 opera by Ambroise Thomas (which resurfaced recently, after years of semi-obscurity, with productions including a Cold War version at Washington National Opera in 2010).

But what about dance? How do you make a psychological and word-driven play like “Hamlet” come to life as a ballet?

Washington audiences will get the answer when “Hamlet,” choreographed by Stephen Mills, artistic director of Ballet Austin, gets a company premiere by the Washington Ballet, featuring music by contemporary music icon Philip Glass. The ballet will be performed March 23 through April 3 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater.

For Mills, “Hamlet” is a milestone work that echoes with meaning for him in different ways. In 1959, the folks at Ballet Austin went looking for a new artistic director. They found him in Mills, already a critical member of the company. His first work in his first year at Ballet Austin? “Hamlet,” of course.

“It meant a lot to me and I wanted to begin with something new, and something significant,” Mills said in a telephone interview. “I would probably guess ‘Hamlet’ wouldn’t be everybody’s first choice for a ballet, a dance piece. In part, it’s about language and words, but, I think, it also lends itself to a ballet. It’s a silent ‘Hamlet,’ but not a mimed ‘Hamlet.’ Dance has its own language, of movement, of gesture, where you use every part of your body to illustrated emotions, to show feeling and, most importantly, in this case, to tell a story.”

Mills has created other Shakespeare dances, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” which were part of the Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America series, in collaboration with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. One of his signature works is “Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project” from 2005.

“I think, and thought then, that the story of Hamlet and all of its incidents — the urge for revenge, the father-son relationship, the killings and plots — they’re part of a highly dramatic story that can be done in a ballet, in dance,” he said.

“If the story, the play, is in sharp, clean focus, you can make something very special about it. You don’t need elaborate costumes, and castles. It’s a universal, timeless story, very resonant in our time.” Mills has seen the Olivier film, which he found inspiring. “There’s so much movement in it, choreographed, stylish. And it’s all in black and white. Visually, it was stunning. It was very minimalist.

“I think in musical terms. My ballets don’t always have music in them, but most of the time, they do. And I think the music of Philip Glass is perfect for this,” Mills said.

“Philip’s music is often pigeonholed, I think — that’s somehow it’s atonal or difficult — but his work can also be very accessible, very powerful and moving, which I think when you’re dealing with ‘Hamlet’ is critical.

“‘Hamlet’ is about big themes, big feelings,” Mills continued. “Narrow it down and it’s about relationships and relatives, revenge and politics, which are very contemporary themes. So what’s important in terms of the ingredients are the situation, the score and the look. They’re all design elements that are very important.”

The focus in this “Hamlet” is squarely on his family: his father’s ghost, the adulterous mother Gertrude and the new and murderous King Claudius, along with Ophelia, her brother and her father.

Artistic Director Septime Webre called the production “sleek and dramatic, from the choreography to the sparse and contemporary scenic design,” by Jeffrey A. Main. “This is like no Shakespeare work you’ve ever seen. Mills strips down the complex play by focusing on the lead characters, all the while interjecting several take-your-breath-away moments.”

“It’s a real pleasure to have ‘Hamlet’ at Washington Ballet,” Mills said. “Septime and I are old friends, we’ve known each other for over two decades. We were both in the same company in Texas — I think we both wore the same Peter Pan costumes.”

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2016

“The City of Conversation,” Anthony Giardina’s play set in the politically atmosphered home of a Georgetown hostess — from 1979 to 2009 — is a play that, in and of itself, reads surprisingly well.  It’s witty, sharp, smart, full of sometimes daggered bon mots and a plot that has its revealing twists and turns.

Yet the current Arena Stage production in the Fichandler reveals something else about the work:  it plays really well on the stage as a very human family drama, as a political comedy-drama that echoes mightily in these crazed primary times, and as an evocation of halcyon days in Georgetown when women like Hester Ferris, an avowed liberal player, presided over dinners that might decide the fate of bills making their way in committees in Congress, or larger issues, like Supreme Court nominations.

Viewing the play, you get what’s not on the page—the raised eyebrows, the pauses between the launching of a sharp barb is launched and when it lands, the texture of language as a kind of combat and the emotional and dexterous back-and-forths that reference political leanings and social and financial classes.

The play occurs within three economically written and emotionally punchy settings. It opens with President Jimmy Carter’s infamous or famous — depending — “malaise” speech in the background, even as the players on hand talk about Senator Ted Kennedy’s impending run for the presidency.  The middle—and most acidic and personally combative—phase occurs during the zealously partisan battle over the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court during the Reagan Administration.  The end game, elegiac and surprisingly almost sentimental, occurs on the day of Barack Obama’s historic inauguration as President of the United States.

Phase one introduces us to the primary combatants.  Hester Ferris is having one of her famous dinners  at which she hopes to persuade a Kentucky senator to sign on for Kennedy’s proposal to have some Southern judges disavow their membership in private clubs that bar African Americans from membership.  Her son Colin arrives unexpectedly a day early from London, his fiancé and fellow London School of Economics student Anna Fitzgerald in tow.  Ann bluntly states her ambitions for a Washington career and offers to study Hester as a way of learning about the city’s and Georgetown mores. “Oh, I’ve seen that movie before,” retorts Hester, referencing “All About Eve.”   Ann — along with Colin — is a budding member of the new, conservative energy, which affronts the true-blue, iron-fisted Kennedy liberal.  The dye is cast when Ann, a la Sally Quinn, invades the cigar-smoking domain of the after-dinner, usually men-only part of the evening and does so with aplomb and blonde charm — so much so that it costs Hester her Kentucky ally.

Things come to a full head of bile in act two, when Colin and Ann, now married, have left their young son in the care of his grandmother, a Hester fully involved on the opposite of the Bork battle. The living room, when all (most of it pitiless and vicious) has been said and done, has become a personal battleground over politics with the grandson as a kind of hostage.

At this point, you can see the personal cost of politics for Hester, who makes a tragic sacrifice, and for Anna, a ranking GOP lawyer, who is so involved in the battle that she can’t abide the thought of losing.  These, we see, may be the roots of the great political divide that’s in our political life and shown on our screens almost nightly — a divide that’s become as irreconcilable as the split between Hester and her family.

Margaret Colin as Hester has to carry the show—with her home as its center revealing her views and her heart. She has plenty of both—and must dominate.

Colin does this with uncommon strength married to a flirtatious confidence—the character is having a long-standing affair with a married senator.  She also has a worthy opponent in Anna, played with a sexy ferocity by Caroline Hewitt.  Michael Simpson has the more difficult and less flamboyant task of not only playing Colin, but also Colin’s son, both diffident men with limitations not shared by the women they love—be they mother, wife or grandmother. Ann McDonough gets a lot out of the somewhat mysterious and self-contained role of Jean Swift, Hester’s ever-present, not quite long-suffering sister and companion in tightly held liberalism.

If the first two acts, swiftly and toughly paced by director Doug Hughes, are portraits of intimate political and family battles, the final act is something else again. It is Hester at twilight, her great battles over and seemingly won with Obama’s inauguration. But she is also alone with Jean, as her grandson Ethan and his partner Donald, a historian, arrive. The battle has cost Hester her family, and this is the first sight she’s had of her grandson. This last scene is almost a self-contained playlet, a sweet, awkward scene full of small tendrils of hope and echoes of the past (as well the future).  Hester’s home—full of artifacts, letters and photograph—has become a kind of museum of the political heyday of liberalism.

In this way, “The City of Conversation” strikes a loud echo and sends a warning of the cost of political passions held too strongly.   You don’t, after all, have to be suicidal to still suffer the pain of self-inflicted wounds.

Gary Tischler •

Judging by all the buzz and attention on social media and elsewhere, you’d think the Kennedy Center had become hip hop nation after Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter announced that the center would launch its first Hip Hop Culture Series for the 2016-2017 season and that the noted emcee and rapper and record producer Q-Tip would become the Artistic Director for Hip Hop Culture.

That was certainly news, and, because it marked a first-ever of its kind  to invest heavily into making hip hop a major part of the Kennedy Center culture and regular programming — to go with the rest of its more mainstream offerings — it got a lot of attention in the social media world.

There was a lot more to be talked and think at the 2016-2017 season announcement, not the least of which was the fact that this was the first season that clearly has Rutter’s stamp on it since her arrival, succeeding Michael Kaiser a year and a half ago. As such, the season bears her mark, her sensibilities, which includes a desire for inclusiveness across genres and generations both, an expansiveness and willingness to seek out new artists, new leadership and new audiences, and an acknowledgement that the Kennedy Center is not just a kind of national and (very much so) an international cultural shrine, but a community cultural center for a city that’s booming, changing and perhaps hungry for performance art that addresses the needs and taste of its citizens.

The 2016-17 season seems to be both forward looking and looking to the past, what with the year-long celebration of John F. Kennedy’s 100th birthday. Part of this year’s season, beginning May 17, will be “Ireland 100: Celebrating a Century of Irish Arts and Culture.” Ireland is famous for being John F. Kennedy’s ancestral homeland which has enriched the world’s (and American) culture with its outpouring of literature in the form of novels, plays and poetry, its music and dance.

The Kennedy Center’s leadership will also be expanded and enriched with artist-focused leadership.

“Our  team has dedicated a great deal of time reimagining how we can put the artist at the very center of our work here at the Kennedy Center,” Rutter said. “I have invited three very forward-thinking artists , Yo-Yo Ma, Renee Fleming and Q-Tip, to collaborate with us on the deepest levels as we shape the future of the center’s programming and seize our responsibility to represent the performing arts in contemporary culture.”

Named Artistic Advisors at Large, Ma and Fleming will co-host the April 25 Kennedy Center Arts Summit this year. Fleming will curate “Voices”, with presentations in every space at the center, working across genres for singers and songwriters, to include jazz, classical, pop and beyond. 

Q Tip, an active member of the pioneering Universal Zulu Nation, said that his new position gives him “the ability to show many lanes and perspectives in which hip hop is breaking and has broken new ground.”  Q- Tip emerged in the 1980s as an emcee and part of “A Tribe Called Quest,” which showcased a pioneering blend of jazz and soul samples with a “celebration of African heritage, individualism, fashion and fun.”  Although hip hop performance and festivals are not new at the Kennedy Center, its emergence as an important and permanent  part of the center is a dramatic step.

The season of “Performances for Young Audiences” will have seven new commissions, featuring works by jazz legend Terence Blanchard, violin superstar Joshua Bell, the Hip Hop Collective B-Fly Entertainment, local dance pioneers Company E, breakbeat poet and playwright Idris Goodwin, poet-performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph and playwrights Kirsten Greenidge and Finegan Kruckemeyer.

Included among the premieres are “Bud, Not Buddy,” written by Greenidge with music and performance by Blanchard, the legendary trumpeter Terence Blanchard (he’s an artist in residence at the center for the season) as well as “The Man With the Violin,” which, you guessed it, is a work based on Bell’s picture book about the time Bell worked as an undercover street musicians at a Washington, D.C., Metrorail station.

Blanchard is also part of the Washington National Opera Season with “Champion,” which he wrote. It’s an opera about welterweight world champion and closet gay man Emile Griffith. Another contemporary opera on the schedule is “Dead Man Walking” by Jake Heggie, whose “Moby Dick” wowed audiences several seasons ago. The opera season kicks off in a more traditional way with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and ends with “Madame Butterfly.”

Highlights of the dance and ballet season, under artistic advisor for ballet Suzanne Farrell, include Damian Wentzel’s “Demo” series,  Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Little Humpbacked Horses” and Michelle Dorrance’s “The Blues Project” and Alvin Ailey.

Also on the innovative side, the theater series will include “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family,” a three-play series written by Tony-award winner Richard Nelson (“The Apple Family”).

On the National Symphony Orchestra front, this season marks the last for maestro Christoph Eschenbach. It’s a season that includes “Slava at 90,” a celebration of the former NSO music director, two programs with Music Director Designate Gianandrea Noseda, a residency with Joshua Bell and programming themes that include “Shakespaere at the Symphony.”

If you look at Rutter’s programming and outlook, it’s rich with cross-pollinization, genre mashes, new forms coming out of old forms, programming that is led by individual artists — like Q- Tip, Blanchard, Fleming, jazz director Jason Moran and resident composer Mason Bates and others.  It also combines edge, risk with tradition and old favorites, “The Gabriels,” but also “The King and I” and “Wicked,”  in jazz Jyoti, and tributes to Ella Fitzgerald and Abbey Lincoln,  “Ballet Across America” curated by Justin Peck and Misty Copeland, and “The Blues Project.” 

Gary Tischler •

You have to make your way — take an elevator, walk — and be willing to think about quantum physics and string theory (and a little bit about how honey is made) to get to, and get, “Constellations,” the play by Nick Payne at Studio Theatre through March 27. But in the end — and in the beginning, too — it’s well worth the effort.

Directed by David Muse, “Constellations” is a two-character romance that also happens to bring in the universe, and the prospect of multiple universes, which is apparently the favorite topic of quantum physicists and string theorists. Boy meets girl, or girl meets boy, girl asks boy if he can lick his elbow and what that might entail. Boy says, “I’m married.” Blackout.

If that was all there was to it, it would be a very short play indeed, shorter than the relatively brief length that “Constellations” is: a little over an hour with no intermission. But playwright Payne asks us to entertain the notion that that brief encounter is just one thing that could happen, that actually there are countless ways things work out — decisions and replies and choices that would result in a different world and outcome altogether.

In other words, after several different back-and-forths, the couple — a high-hopes, energetic physicist named Marianne and a quieter, hesitant beekeeper named Roland — do get together and embark on a life together (and apart); they break up (or not); they re-connect (or not); and face life’s tragedies, including a big one at the end. All along the way, they choose: yes, no, maybe, let’s do this but not that, let’s define love this way and that way, let’s stay together, let’s move on. They do things (or don’t), they betray each other (or not), they sleep together right away (or much later).

This could get cute — like a blueprint for a Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan movie with study notes — but most of the time the play avoids the pitfalls of goo. It perhaps does not avoid an equally alarming danger, of being sometimes a little too enamored of just how clever and intelligent the concept is. But what the play demands most of all from the audience isn’t so much awe and admiration as engagement.

The artists certainly have worked hard to create a kind of welcome mat for the audience. It’s ultra-theater in the round, a circular wall (like a beehive?) with an entrance where you can, if you want, pick up a pillow to sit in a spot not conducive to lying back in comfort. Overhead, the space is lit by fluorescent tubes that change colors as the two actors — Lily Balatincz as Marianne and Tom Patterson as Roland — live out the characters without props. The dialogue is witty, often a verbal ping-pong match, but it’s not difficult to keep track of things once the concept reveals itself on stage.

Balatincz and Patterson have a tricky task here. They have to be verbally sharp, changing the emphasis in a word here and there. Mostly, though, it’s their heartbeats that keep the concept alive. The characters don’t appear to be movie creations. They seem to have a place in reality, real lives which sound to be somewhat tony English, what with the broad accents. Balatincz gives Marianne a smart self-assurance, but also a feathery kind of imbalance and uncertainty about herself, as if she’s not quite sure where her next breath or word might take her. Patterson has a grungy, skinny, bewildered quality that makes Roland a frustrating, sometimes annoying, but also appealing man-boy-child.

These two are charmers in audience terms; they’re not dazzlers, they’re something better: attractive and funny. Concept aside, a lot of what’s really going on here is as simple and complicated as the difference between the sexes, something no amount of scientific theory seems to know how to manage. What happens in this small, very intimate space is something that obviously resonates with the audience.

It’s interesting to watch the watchers here — mostly because you can’t avoid it. Some couples, especially in the front row, closest to the action, settle in (a few close together, touching or holding hands). This seems to change over the course of the play as each character betrays the other, wounding verbally or otherwise. The hands disengage, a tiny distance appears between the twosomes in the audience that disappears again toward the end, and in the aftermath, when there’s a lot of talk about theory and love.

Director David Muse moves things along briskly, with a deep affection for the characters. Set and lighting designers Debra Booth and Michael Lincoln, respectively, have given the audience a very special place that can contain so many possibilities and outcomes with ease.

Gary Tischler •

When it comes to Laurie Anderson, the word “icon” comes to mind. In her program, “Language of the Future: Letters to Jack,” performed with cellist Rubin Kodheli at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater last weekend that word comes to mind, but I find myself resisting.

You want something more simple than her resume in the program or available online, both of which are long and informative, but not necessarily revealing.  Anderson is in her sixties now and has been doing challenging, footloose creations of works of performance art, or art-art,  film, music, instruments, singing-talking, with and without someone, since the 1970s. In 1981, she sort or burst into the world consciousness with a little number called “O Superman,” a hit song — yes, a hit song — which you can see performed online, and which reached number two in the British charts, which may tell you something about what was going on in British pop mentality those days.  It was a chant and a song, part of  a larger project called “United States” as well as “Big Science.”

These titles, incidentally, sound like novels, epic poems, a wandering poet-minstrel in search of a large subject.  Anderson was married to the late iconoclast and soulmate Lou Reed. His jarring, boundary-stretching  music, we recall — dum dad um, take a walk on the wild side. He died in 2013.

There is all of this, too much to take in, all at once, the many, many projects, including the affecting film “The Heart of a Dog”, about the last days of her dog in which we learn that you can teach an old dog new tricks (like learning to play the piano).

None of this is nonsense, but it is just a little too much.  None of it prepares, and none of it is suggestive of what Anderson does.  There is even a category for invention: the tape-bow violin.   She has been doing what she does for a long time now, and one thing I can say is that she is exactly suited for our times, nonetheless.  She has not seen and done everything — it’s as if there’s a lot to  fill in.

Anderson makes you ramble.  In “Language of the Future: Letters to Jack,” she reveals herself to be above all a story teller, a contemporary Scheherazade, who uses words, music, video, film, like a roadside witch, to beguile us into thinking of our own stories.

On a stage, she is a small presence, heard every which way, playing a violin, a version she invented herself, surrounded by tablets and electronics, alongside Kodheli, framed behind her by back projections, of snow falling unbearably wet and slow, of pictures of the Kennedy folk (hello, Pierre Salinger). She begins to talk about herself as a young girl in a Midwestern small down. The voice is seductive, warm as a heated drink, inviting even, self deprecating. She talked about the letters to Jack, which refer to Jack Kennedy — John Kennedy, a presidential candidate at the time.

“I had this confidence, self-awareness, annoying teenager type,  that was me, and I wrote a letter to him, and told him I was also running for office, for student council, and if he couldn’t perhaps write back to me with some advice and pointers.”   And Kennedy apparently did with one simple thing:  “Find out what the people you know want. Then, promise them everything.”

Later, she wrote another letter, she said, to Jack, pointing out that she had won her election.  Nothing happened for a time, and then a package came.  There was a note of congratulation on her victory, and inside the package were a dozen roses.  “Everybody in town knew about it and that was something special, of course, because every female in town was in love with Jack Kennedy at the time.”

Other things happened. When I was 14, she said,  I was at a pool in town and watch people doing somersaults and I thought, that looked easy, and I could do that and I went off the board into the air like a bird and I missed the pool.  She broke her back and nearly died and did not fully recover for a long time and spent considerable time in a hospital where nurses read books about a grey rabbit and she would wake up to their faces.  “But at night, they left, and I was in a ward full of children with burn injuries, and at night, when it was dark I would hear them breathe, moan and scream. And some of them disappeared and died and for a long time I did not allow myself to remember that, about the ward at night and the screams and dying children.”

In between these forays into stories, there is the music — both disjointed and suddenly beautiful in ways hard to talk about.  It is not soothing — the mix of this particular violin and other sounds and the aggressive cello are a bit other worldly, but not necessarily warm or comforting. They are meant to be listened to carefully, because there appears to be no plan, no guided composition.

There are other stories still. One about the grave of Herman Hesse in Switzerland where she left a not entirely respectful note. A longer tale was about going to a convent where she was going to be doing a workshop of some kind, and how the nuns rarely if ever spoke, and how one night, there was a gathering, which resulted in a sentence that you might never expect  to hear in your own and whole life: “After the pizza was delivered, the mother superior began to speak.” It was a striking sentence.

Through it, the presentation, her voice, especially and the stories, inspired you to drift off into other stories and memories — not to stray far off, the stories and the words and the music and images were like jumping off points.

I thought of a lunch where Salinger was present among us. I thought of not reading Hesse, but Rilke, and not Gibran, either. I thought of high school, and how even now, when some of my classmates from the 1960s have found me on the Internet. I still see them with butch haircuts and pony tails. Then, I remembered a girl from a summer I spent working at a Howard Johnson on the Ohio Turnpike, who had thoughts of becoming a nun,  and who wrote me a letter about how in 1960 she was going to work for Nixon — and that though we disagreed, we lived in such terribly exciting times.

Towards the dark side of the sold-out evening, Anderson brought us jarringly to 2016 with another letter, this one to Donald Trump. Her voice was electronically cloaked, sounding like one of those voices you always hear on secret procedurals: $30,000 in cash at the park and no cops, except she was talking about promises and votes.

After all of this, I find myself thinking of Anderson as a great interloper and innovator, someone who hardly sleeps and is always making us think that everything she still does feels like fresh salad, unrepeated, new ingredients all the time, living in the modern world.

Gary Tischler • March 16, 2016

The noted and sometimes notorious American playwright of despair and hope Tennessee Williams would have been 105 years old March 26. Given his often turbulent life and bouts of precarious health, there was never much chance that he would even come close to that kind of old age.

But the Mississippi-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning author nearly made it to 72, succumbing Feb. 25, 1983, in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée, to what the coroner described as “Seconal intolerance.”

Gone he may be from life, but his plays live on. In the playing, they seem still to be entirely original works of art, continuing to challenge audiences and theater artists alike — especially actresses, for whom Williams wrote indelible, memorable and iconic roles.

For many actresses, women like Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat and Alexandra Del Lago are as demanding and enticing as a Hamlet, an Othello or a Lear; they long to jump into Maggie’s slip, Blanche’s madness and Alexandra’s crumbling charisma the way a cat might a approach a poisoned bowl of milk, with interest, fearless.

Proof positive of Williams’s place in American theater and cultural history exists all around us, especially, it seems lately, in the Washington area. Madeleine Potter just finished a run at Ford’s Theatre as Amanda Wingfield, the diva-like single mother who lives her life through the prospects of her delicate daughter in “The Glass Menagerie.”

Now Round House Theatre in Bethesda is taking on “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” from March 26 through April 30, as the Keegan Theatre did when it opened its renovated space on Church Street in Dupont Circle last year.

Maggie, the rest-less, frustrated, sexually seething wife of Brick, will once again roam the stage, challenging her hard-drinking, wounded husband and going toe to toe with Big Daddy and Big Momma — just as Elizabeth Taylor did in the 1958 film version and Elizabeth Ashley did on Broadway in 1974 (directed by Michael Kahn in what many see as a definitive version). Mitchell Hébert is directing, with Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan as Maggie, Gregory Wooddell as Brick, Rick Foucheux as Big Daddy and Sarah Marshall as Big Momma.

Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, in its new location in a renovated vaudeville house, will stage “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in which the feverish and unstable Blanche DuBois visits her sister Stella in New Orleans, sparking a tragedy and an electrically charged crisis involving Stella’s violent husband Stanley Kowalski. The production, directed by Derek Goldman, artistic director of the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University, will be presented as part of “The Great American Rep,” alternating with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” directed by Everyman Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi. Both run through June 12, with “Salesman opening April 6 and “Streetcar” April 13.

The theatrical ghost of Williams has been a regular presence in Washington. A highlight was the major Tennessee Williams festival at the Kennedy Center in 2004, which included “Cat,” “Streetcar” and “Glass Menagerie,” as well as five one-acts, a one-man show starring Richard Thomas and, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, the rarely produced “Camino Real” — a colorful smorgasbord of a play that resists sense but is as compelling as a ragged wizard’s parade.

In 1998, the Shakespeare Company assayed a production of “Sweet Bird of Youth,” in which Ashley once again returned to Washington to work with Kahn and embody a Tennessee Williams woman, this time the beleaguered, voracious actress Del Lago, accompanied by her young lover, who’s back in his Southern hometown looking for love in just the wrong place. Few theater moments are more memorable than when Ashley, who had a gift for Williams’s work, emits a long, painful growl from underneath the sheets, emerging slowly, as if in emotional and physical sections.

Williams’s great gift was to create plays about characters with horribly wounded but shining and indomitable hungers, souls who embrace both a kind of spiritual physicality and a tortured, killing, searing and shameful choice. He was a gay man whose relationships were public at a time when being openly gay amounted to living a difficult life, especially for a man of his sensitivities and insecurities.

Williams would bring poetry to the often unpoetic situations and events in his plays, many of which were inhabited by a host of sinners and not a few monsters and potential saints. His works were filled with dramatic tension, things left unspoken then suddenly given loud and rude voice, in the manner of a cry of pain.

The persistence of the work on stage, coming alive again and again, also speaks to his life and persona, and perhaps accounts for the popularity of and critical acclaim for the 2014 book “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” a biography written by New Yorker critic and writer John Lahr with bravado, style and great but unblinking empathy.

A finalist for the National Book Award, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography category. The paperback version was published late last year and remains a steady seller. It is a superb theater book, full of stories connected to the writing and making of a good chunk of American literary and theatrical history.

Actors seem haunted by his work, and attracted to it, generation after generation. Cate Blanchett brought the theatrical company she runs with her husband in Sydney to the Kennedy Center to star in “Streetcar.” Last year, there was a version of “Streetcar” starring Scarlett Johansson as Maggie.

Marlon Brando of course starred as Kowalski in the original stage production and in the film version, which featured an unforgettable (and Oscar-winning) performance as Blanche by Vivien Leigh. Years and years later, when we talked to the late actor Anthony Quinn (who was doing the musical version of “Zorba”), he told us that he had taken over for Brando after he went to Hollywood. “People told me I was better than him,” he claimed, obviously still consumed by the part.

The movies proved fertile ground for Williams’s work: Taylor and Paul Newman, with Burl Ives as Big Daddy, in “Cat”; Taylor, a crazed Katharine Hepburn and a hollow Montgomery Clift in “Suddenly, Last Summer”; Richard Burton and Ava Gardner superb in “The Night of the Iguana”; Vivien Leigh returning in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone”; the crazed “Boom,” a Taylor-Burton vehicle.

It’s certain that the new “Cat” in Bethesda and “Streetcar” in Baltimore won’t be the last. The best plays of Tennessee Williams represent a siren song, for audiences and artists alike. “It’s about the poetry,” a director once said to me.

I think it’s about us — that these burning hot, suffering souls are us, at some time or crossroads, complete with a cross. That’s this playwright’s triumph, that his work is in this sense deathless. Happy birthday, Tennessee.

Georgetowner •

The noted and sometimes notorious American playwright of despair and hope Tennessee Williams would have been 105 years old March 26. Given his often turbulent life and bouts of precarious health, there was never much chance that he would even come close to that kind of old age.

But the Mississippi-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning author nearly made it to 72, succumbing Feb. 25, 1983, in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée, to what the coroner described as “Seconal intolerance.”

Gone he may be from life, but his plays live on. In the playing, they seem still to be entirely original works of art, continuing to challenge audiences and theater artists alike — especially actresses, for whom Williams wrote indelible, memorable and iconic roles.

For many actresses, women like Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat and Alexandra Del Lago are as demanding and enticing as a Hamlet, an Othello or a Lear; they long to jump into Maggie’s slip, Blanche’s madness and Alexandra’s crumbling charisma the way a cat might a approach a poisoned bowl of milk, with interest, fearless.

Proof positive of Williams’s place in American theater and cultural history exists all around us, especially, it seems lately, in the Washington area. Madeleine Potter just finished a run at Ford’s Theatre as Amanda Wingfield, the diva-like single mother who lives her life through the prospects of her delicate daughter in “The Glass Menagerie.”

Now Round House Theatre in Bethesda is taking on “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” from March 26 through April 30, as the Keegan Theatre did when it opened its renovated space on Church Street in Dupont Circle last year.

Maggie, the rest-less, frustrated, sexually seething wife of Brick, will once again roam the stage, challenging her hard-drinking, wounded husband and going toe to toe with Big Daddy and Big Momma — just as Elizabeth Taylor did in the 1958 film version and Elizabeth Ashley did on Broadway in 1974 (directed by Michael Kahn in what many see as a definitive version). Mitchell Hébert is directing, with Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan as Maggie, Gregory Wooddell as Brick, Rick Foucheux as Big Daddy and Sarah Marshall as Big Momma.

Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, in its new location in a renovated vaudeville house, will stage “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in which the feverish and unstable Blanche DuBois visits her sister Stella in New Orleans, sparking a tragedy and an electrically charged crisis involving Stella’s violent husband Stanley Kowalski. The production, directed by Derek Goldman, artistic director of the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University, will be presented as part of “The Great American Rep,” alternating with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” directed by Everyman Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi. Both run through June 12, with “Salesman opening April 6 and “Streetcar” April 13.

Williams’s great gift was to create plays about characters with horribly wounded but shining and indomitable hungers, souls who embrace both a kind of spiritual physicality and a tortured, killing, searing and shameful choice. He was a gay man whose relationships were public at a time when being openly gay amounted to living a difficult life, especially for a man of his sensitivities and insecurities.

Williams would bring poetry to the often unpoetic situations and events in his plays, many of which were inhabited by a host of sinners and not a few monsters and potential saints. His works were filled with dramatic tension, things left unspoken then suddenly given loud and rude voice, in the manner of a cry of pain.

The persistence of the work on stage, coming alive again and again, also speaks to his life and persona, and perhaps accounts for the popularity of and critical acclaim for the 2014 book “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” a biography written by New Yorker critic and writer John Lahr with bravado, style and great but unblinking empathy.

A finalist for the National Book Award, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the biography category. The paperback version was published late last year and remains a steady seller. It is a superb theater book, full of stories connected to the writing and making of a good chunk of American literary and theatrical history.

Actors seem haunted by his work, and attracted to it, generation after generation. Cate Blanchett brought the theatrical company she runs with her husband in Sydney to the Kennedy Center to star in “Streetcar.” Last year, there was a version of “Streetcar” starring Scarlett Johansson as Maggie.

It’s certain that the new “Cat” in Bethesda and “Streetcar” in Baltimore won’t be the last. The best plays of Tennessee Williams represent a siren song, for audiences and artists alike. “It’s about the poetry,” a director once said to me.

I think it’s about us — that these burning hot, suffering souls are us, at some time or crossroads, complete with a cross. That’s this playwright’s triumph, that his work is in this sense deathless. Happy birthday, Tennessee.

Gary Tischler •

Paul Emerson is back. More importantly, perhaps in this case, so is the work of Pola Nirenska, the Polish choreographer celebrated for her creations themed around the Holocaust.

Emerson, well remembered in Washington for co-founding the highly original City Dance Company which was once headquartered at Strathmore and performed all over Washington, D.C.,  is back heading the equally original and internationally flavored and connected Company E, which has already caused quite a buzz in local dance circles.

He and Company E are finally able to mount “Generations: Poland,” which includes works by three generations of Polish choreographers, ranging from those of the Holocaust to today’s  twenty-somethings, in a special evening, which will also feature the Washington Performing Arts Children of the Gospel Choir — at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theatre Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

“We’ve had this in mind for a long time. I’m especially proud to center this evening around the work of Nirenska,” Emerson said. “She survives through her work, and we honor her and keep the work alive with new work as well.”

The Warsaw-born Nirenska fled Europe presciently at the start of the Second World War and lost 27 family members to the Holocaust.  Already an artist with a mature body of work when she left Europe, she was haunted by the Holocaust and its aftermath. She is famous for her “Holocaust Tetralogy,” which occupied the last decades of her life.   “Dirge,” staged by Rima Faber,  the conservator of Nirenska’s art, with music by Ernst Bloch, is a part of the tetralogy. “We are finally able to honor that vision,” Faber said.  

“In some ways, this particular program and project is what Company E is all about,” Emerson said. “With this program, we’re building on her work, inspired by her.”

“Generations: Poland” was originally slated to be performed in January but was postponed because of the Jan. 22 blizzard, known as “Snowzilla.”

Emerson and Faber worked with Doug Wheeler, the president emeritus of Washington Performing Arts and one of the members of the Pola Nirenska Dance Awards Committee to bring the evening to life.

Nirenska, who died in 1992, was considered by many to be a matriarch of modern dance in Washington. She had made Washington her home, a place where she became a force, a renowned teacher and director of her own company. 

The evening will also feature the presentation of the annual Pola Nirenska Awards, which were established in 1993 in memory of his wife by famed Georgetown University Professor Jan Karski, a Polish expatriate and member of the Polish underground during the war. Karski died in 2000. This year’s honorees are Erica Rebollar, Deborah Riley and Douglas E. Yeuell.

“Our modern choreographers, of Polish descent, are building on what she created,” Emerson said. Lida Wos, who grew up in Soviet-era Poland, will have her “Who Let the Dogs Out?” dance performed, with an original score by Marcin Brycki.  Robert Bondera, 26, will give a world premiere of his “Didi and Gogo,” with music by Pavel Szmanski.  Faber will direct Nirenska’s “Dirge.”

Emerson will direct “Air,” choreographed by Emerson and Alicia Canterna, Vanessa Owen, Kathryn Sydell Pilkington, Robert J. Priore and Gavin Stewart, performed to Henryk Gorecki’s Third Symphony, known as the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” and performed live by the Washington Performing Arts Children of the Gospel Choir.          
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Gary Tischler • March 10, 2016

On Thursday afternoon at the Kennedy Center, you could see them milling around in the Hall of Nations, taking selfies, young Chinese men and women, with Chinese media types in tow.  It was a small moment of a hint that this weekend—Feb. 5 to 8—will be all about Chinese New Year and the arts in China at the nation’s performing arts center on the Potomac.

The young people were part of a musical group that would be performing during the course of the Kennedy Center’s  Celebration of the Chinese New Year. The four-day celebration marks the first of what will be an annual festival at the center. For the first time, the Kennedy Center will be celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year with a big, four-day festival filled with live performances of all sorts, most of them free including a family day on Saturday.

While the New Year’s initiative is a first-time celebration, it’s not the first time that the Kennedy Center has celebrated Chinese culture.  For Alicia Adams, the vice president for International Programming and Dance at the Kennedy Center, the festival will bring back good memories from the center’s first major celebration of Chinese culture and performing arts in 2005, a festival that featured four weeks of performances and exhibitions from some 900 artists.

Adams remembers making 13 trips to China in preparation for and in the coordination of the unprecedented 2005 festival. 

“We discovered the tremendous variety inherent in the performing arts there—not only its own traditions and styles in dance and music and visual arts but in its embrace of Western arts, especially classical and pop music,” she said. “Some of the top classical musicians in the world are Chinese.  A case can be made that it’s the Chinese who are helping to keep interest in classical music alive on all levels—performing, education and audience appreciation.”

Adams has curated and organized numerous acclaimed international festivals at the Kennedy Center, including “Iberian Suite, global arts remix” (2015), “Nordic Cool” (2013), “maximumINDIA” (2011) and “Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World” (2009). She is spearheading this year’s “Ireland 100: Celebrating a Century of Irish Arts and Culture.”

The Chinese New Year’s Celebration won’t be quite so elaborate, but it offers a significant number of examples of Chinese contemporary performance art practitioners.

Adams cited the  center’s history of presenting Chinese artists on Washington stages. “The Lunar New Year celebration is a little like our holiday seasons. The festival gives us a chance to present some of China’s most established artists and its younger performers.”

“It’s amazing to me how the Chinese have taken to Western traditions in addition to their own,” she said. A principal example of an internationally renowned group is the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Muhai Tang. “Shenzhen is known as ‘piano city,’ ” Adams said. “It’s known as an incubator of young musical talent and is known to have 8.5 pianos for every 100 families. It also hosts the China International Piano Concerto Competition every three years.”

The Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra will perform in a ticketed event at the Concert Hall which is the actual Chinese New Year Day, Feb. 8 (This year, it’s the year of the monkey). Guests soloists include pianist Haochen Zhang and violinist Dan Zhu. The program will include Chinese folk music the Kunqu Opera, and classical masterpieces by Puccini and Waxman, composers who are favorites in China.

Most the performances and events throughout the festival are free. They include free performances at the Millennium Stage, including a pop music show that highlights popular Chinese acts on Feb. 5. Also on tap is a recital by the world-class all-girls choir from Shenzhen on Feb. 7 as well as a multi-disciplinary production by an arts troupe from Henan, showcasing opera artists, acrobats and traditional Chinese music.

Saturday, Feb. 6, is a family day, celebrating the Year of the Monkey, with Monkey King mask demonstrations, Chinese paper cutting and paper lamp lessons and other activities in the Kennedy Center atrium.

Gary Tischler •

Theater Alliance  brings the #BlackLivesMatter slogan vividly alive at the Anacostia Playhouse with productions of the American theater classic, “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf,” by Ntozake Shange. It, in turn, inspired Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s “Word Becomes Flesh”.

The two productions will be performed in repertory Feb. 25 to March 26.

There are some resonant names involved in the two productions, not excluding Shange herself, who began life as Paulette Williams but changed her name to the Zulu words “Ntozake” — she who comes with her own things — and “Shange” — she who walks like a lion. 

Shange re-invented not only herself in terms of the resounding name change but also a new form — “colored girls” exists in the form of what she called a “choreopoem,” which integrates poetry, movement, music and dance.  Call it and her what you want, the play exists as a classic, inspiring several generations of African American and white audiences, and continues to do so. It’s a favorite in the American theater repertoire.

The production is directed by veteran Deidra Starnes, who directed “The Word” at the recent Hip Hop Festival and Mary Stone Hanley’s “Street Life” for the D.C. Theatre Festival. She also acted in a production of “colored girls” directed by Ntozake Shange herself.

The play will contain the same cast size as the original, which is seven, but will be using a version of the text that Shange updated in 2010, with references to HIV and Desert Storm. Sharisse Taylor, who starred in “Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea” for Theater Alliance, heads a cast that includes Christa Bennett, Kashayna Johnson, Naomi LaVette, Allina Collins Maldonado, Lolita Marie and Natalie Graves Tucker.

“Colored girls …” will be in repertoire with “Word Becomes Flesh” by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “Word” is directed by Psalmayene 24, an apt pairing with Joseph, both being hip hop pioneers.

Producing director Colin Hovde said, “These pieces are such a natural pairing. Bamuthi drew inspiration from Ntozake when first creating ‘Word Becomes Flesh,’ and the poetic form and ensemble-driven storytelling really complement one another.”

Theater Alliance first presented “Word Becomes Flesh” in 2013, in a touring production modified from an original solo production to a cast of five performers.  The production is choreographed by Tony Thomas, and includes Louis E. Davis and Justin Weaks, as well as Chris Lane, Clayton Pelham, Jr., and Gary L. Perkins III.  Nick tha 1da created original music for the piece.

“They’re such powerful pieces on their own, and we believe will be more powerful together,” Hovde said. “Though the shows present the experience of one gender, the other gender is always present and alluded to. Our hope is that presenting these pieces together will help to open up a conversation in the community about traditional gendered behavior and provide opportunities for audiences to really listen to the stories being told and find unexpected connections to the stories, and to one another.”