Performance

Gary Tischler • November 16, 2015

There’s a kind of historic convergence around the new, extensively revised production of the epic and ambitious opera, “Appomattox,” making its Washington National Opera premiere Saturday, Nov. 14, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.

Originally penned by renowned composer Philip Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton in 2007 around the time when challenges to the voting rights act were being mounted, this “Appomattox” celebrates historic anniversaries of that same Voting Rights Act 50 years ago and the end of the Civil War 150 years ago.  It also comes at a time of increasing racial tensions across the U.S. over police shootings of African Americans and demonstrations over overt acts of racism on U.S. college campuses, one of which led to the resignation of the University of Missouri president. 

The very presence of “Appomattox,” which envisions critical meetings between presidents and civil rights leaders—Frederick Douglass with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., with Lyndon Baines Johnson—echoes loudly in these times.  Douglass, a former slave and eloquent abolitionist, was trying to influence Lincoln, while King was negotiating voting rights with Johnson. 

The issues may be different in 2015, but the central issue remains race in America and how both black and white Americans are still struggling with it.

The opera echoes mightily for Solomon Howard, the rising star African American bass, who takes on the roles of Douglass and King and feels the weight of that responsibility, as well as the convergence of time and place in this city, where he grew up, with he and his family often struggling.

“The opera really speaks to this place—this is where Douglass lived, where Lincoln lived, where King gave that glorious speech and met with Lincoln, where civil rights demonstrations and anti-war demonstrations were part of our landscape,” said Howard, who lives in Virginia. “Everywhere you look there are reminders of the struggle for freedom and civil rights, and what it meant. It echoes in my own life, also.”

“So, yes, I feel that responsibility to do Douglass and King justice, to do right by them, historically and artistically,” he said. “But you can’t be self-conscious about this in the sense that you’re thinking about it every second. These are real people, and my job is to make them real to the audience not stick figures and you do this through singing and acting.  Acting, I feel, is critically important to opera, and that didn’t always used to be the case. 

“You know, you can feel that atmosphere in this city—this is a place where the news plays out daily, and the reminders are all around us—the Lincoln monument and King’s special place. This is where much of our history, America’s history, happened and played out publicly.”

Howard says the music of Glass, who is considered a minimalist and atonal, is a challenge, but a welcoming one.   “People may be surprised,” he said. “The music in some ways functions like a score for a movie, keying emotions. It’s powerful and in terms of singing, if not listening, difficult, certainly.

To some extent, Howard, who rose into the ranks of leading performers with the WNO and elsewhere from the opera company’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist program, has some experience in portraying an American icon.  Howard starred in the stirring one-hour opera, “Approaching Ali,” which had its world premiere at the Kennedy Center two years ago, a production that put the spotlight squarely on him.  “It’s daunting,” he said.  “But it’s the kind of challenge where you can bring much of yourself to the project, you’re making a difference in ways that are not quite like working in a more traditional opera.”

One can hear his voice beam over the phone, talking about “Ali.”  “You know, I met him [Muhammad Ali] this year,” he said. “That was something.  It was amazing.  He’s frail, of course, and all of that which goes with it.  But still—meeting the champ, that’s special, very special. It was an honor.”

Howard is a star on the rise, as is Eric Owens, with whom he co-starred as Banquo in Verdi’s “Macbeth” as well as having a leading role in “The Magic Flute” at this year’s Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, New York, where WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello is also the artistic director. He was Banquo to Owens’s Macbeth, in a moving performance in which he showed that Macbeth’s murder of his best friend Banquo was his final descent into darkness. Howard will have big roles in the WNO 2016 production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle.”

All eyes will once again be on Howard in “Appomattox,” but he won’t be alone, In addition to Douglass and King, other familiar American historical figures will stride the stage: Robert E. Lee (David Pittsinger), Uylysses S. Grant and Nicholas Katzenbach (Richard Paul Fink) Julia Grant and Viola Liuzz (Melody Moore), and J. Edgar Hoover (Robert Brubaker), among others. Tazewell Thompson directs, and Dennis Russell Davies will conduct. `

“Appomattox” will be performed Nov. 14, 16, 18, 20, 21 with a Nov. 22 matinee at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Georgetowner • November 12, 2015

The accent over the phone is English, and the background and history seem decidedly English, Oxonian or Cambridge to some extent, a place where university is a word without a definite article. The man who’s speaking is a gentleman named Jonathan Howard who speaking both with speed and precision.  Yet, he’s part of a musical group whose appeal is universal to a fault—they have been, in one  incarnation or another, just about everywhere, high and low, Asia and America, concert halls and churches, cathedrals and musicales.

The group is. once and for all and after all, the King’s Singers, a hugely popular  British a cappella vocal ensemble, which, for 47 years, have expanded the idea and the experience of the enjoyment and appeal of contemporary music all over the world.  The singers will be at St. John’s Episcopal Church on O Street in Georgetown 5 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 15, in a concert that is likely to contain both music intricate and music joyful, music steeped in tradition, and music composed, if not last week, at least in this century.

Given the nature of time, Howard is part of a six-man group that has varied with the passing of time. Howard, a bass, joined the group in 2010.  Its oldest current member is David Hurley, a countertenor who joined the group in 1990, the most recent members are Julian Gregory, a tenor, and Christopher Gabbitas, a baritone. The group also includes Tim Wayne-Wright, another countertenor, and Christopher Bruerton, another baritone.

“I am sometimes am astounded that I am where I am at all, and that we go where we go,” Howard said. “This is the way it has always been, of course, the group re-forms over time, but there is always a mix. David [Hurley] grounds us, brings the memories, the traditions that are part of the previous incarnations.”

Loosely speaking, the group was formed in 1968. The singers are or were, indeed King’s men, in the sense that they attended King’s College in Cambridge, England.  The original members were all studious types, being choral scholars—they performed madrigals, choral works with an ever increasing dose of more modern music, less formal, but still heavy in the traditions of choral music.

“I think the singers, including our bunch, tend to have similar backgrounds, university in one form or another,” Howard said. ” Some of us have experience in composition, all of us know the structure and workings of both classical and contemporary music. We know by now our audiences, and they vary, and that always amazes me.  In this concert, in a smaller venue, which we like, you get a great degree of intimacy, a feedback from the audience, it’s like being in an old drawing room, in some ways, there’s much more response.”

These days, the group is reflective of what is going on in contemporary music, contemporary composition and audiences. “I don’t mean we’re rock and rollers per se,” he said. “We’re a choral group, but we do include things from the great American songbook, for instance, or the Beatles.  The songs of the Beatles, in fact, are ready-made for choral performance. Think of “Eleanor Rigby,” “Penny Lane” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”—what you can do with that as a group.”

The group comes to Washington “quite often”— the Kennedy Center, the Washington Cathedral, but it travels, Howard said, “all over the country. It’s great way to experience the country. “  The singers are in some ways musical chameleons, tradition bound, but flexible in identity.  When you view a video of their “Down By The Riverside”, they could pass for a very tony but very accessible barbershop quartet.

“All our music is about integrity, authenticity of the music,” Howard said.

The group has won Grammys, but more importantly, they’ve won over audiences.  In his biographical statement, Howard says he considers the King’s Singers “the world’s greatest a capella group.” He’s astonished at the accumulated repertoire which includes “Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsaries for Maundy” and the Great American Songbook in back-to-back concerts.

The King’s Singers come to Georgetown by way of Lutz Hall, in Annville, Pennsylvania, and are off to Middlebury, Vermont, after Washington, D.C. On Nov. 18,  the group will travel to Krakow, Poland, for a concert with Filharmolnia Krakowskas, and fly back the next night to All Saints Chapel in Sewanee, Tennessee, which could be down by the riverside.

The King’s Singers, 5 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 15, St. John’s Episcopal Church, 3240 O St. NW. Tickets, $40; students, $25. For more information, call 202-338-1796 or visit StJohnsGeorgetown.org. Free parking is available at Hyde-Addison Elementary School across O Street from the church.

Gary Tischler • November 9, 2015

From 1979 to 1993, “Knots Landing,” a hugely popular television melodrama which was itself a spinoff of the even bigger “Dallas,” occupied a major part of the life of triple-threat performer Michele Lee, who headed and starred as part of a large cast playing the part of Karen Fairgate. 

It was a momentous time of change in American life, and the show blocked out the sum and sun of Lee’s professional life, before and after, to some degree.  She appeared in all 334 episodes, the only member of the cast to do so and was considered the focus of the show.  During that time,  she won a Soap Opera Digest Award for Best Lead Actress in a Prime Time Soap Opera and was nominated for an Emmy in 1982 for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Show.  On the show, she lost a husband and in real life, her marriage ended, and she became a single mom, as she did on the show.  In the process, she became nationally and instantly famous and a kind of forever person since the depth and breath of television in modern time is a time machine, a streaming memory vault.

I must admit that— if push came to shove—I do recall the recurring phrase, “Who shot J.R.?” on “Dallas.” Nevertheless, I never quite succumbed to the charms of prime soaps, including the latest reinterpretation, “Blood & Oil,” which is a “Dallas” redux starring Don Johnson. 

Talking with Michele Lee on the telephone, it soon became apparent that soaps were not the main course on the conversation menu. Lee was instantly recognizably as a most honored and vivid member in good and better standing of the tribe of on-stage performer, those razzler-dazzler types who will do almost anything to seduce you, wow you, make you laugh, make you cry, make you want to dance and spend too much money on a Broadway show. She has all the gifts that can dominate a movie and a television series, to be sure. Those same gifts make her unforgettable on stage and — wouldn’t you know it? — over the phone.

Some of those gifts will be on display 7 p.m., Friday, Nov. 5, at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, when the two-time Tony Award and Emmy-nominated star brings her show, “Nobody Does It Like Me: The Music of Cy Coleman,” part of the Kennedy Center’s “Barbara Cook’s Spotlight” series of cabaret evenings and singers. What you get instantly is what Lee’s always been first and foremost: a Broadway star long before television made her a household name.

The stage brings out her inner entertainment soul. “I don’t really like the term cabaret,” she says. “I’m an entertainer, that’s always from when I was little that I ever wanted to be. I wanted to entertain people, make them happy, make them pay attention.” 

It’s a funny feeling talking at first in the usual way—ask a question, get an answer, the process. Soon, however, you sense that she’s that person, that performer.  I don’t mean to suggest anything false or phony, not at all. She is, by any definition, down to earth, a lady mensch, if you will. It’s more like a feeling you’re in her dressing room, or living room, or on a small stage and there’s nothing so distant as a television  or computer screen separating you. It’s not the content but the context, the experience of conversation that’s memorable.

Lee started early, gaining almost instant success on television with a role in the sitcom, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” at age 19. But her Broadway musical life truly began in the same year when she made her debut in 1961 in the role of Rosemary Pilkerton in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” a landmark musical which featured Rudy Vallee and Robert Morse. 

It was Cy Coleman’s presence and his unique gift as a composer that left a mark on her life, an influence to which she continues to pay tribute.

“He was a remarkable man,” Lee said. “Everything he did was original. He was my friend and my mentor. He made people laugh.” Lee also starred in “Seesaw,” another Coleman work on which he collaborated with Michael Bennett of “A Chorus Line” fame.”

“I love doing what I’m doing now,” she said. She’s proud of her television and movie work, including a made-for-television film on the life of the star-crossed country singer Dottie West and a much-praised film “The Comic,” directed by Carl Reiner and featuring Dick Van Dyke. She also recently took up the role of Madame Morrible in the Broadway mega-hit “Wicked.”

“What I’m doing now, that was my first love, and being able to sing Cy’s songs, that’s special,” she said. She sang lines from “Hey, Big Spender,” the big number from “Sweet Charity,” another Coleman hit.

Kaitlyn Davidson, who’s starring in the title role of the Disney musical, “Cinderella” — coming to the National Theater Nov.18 through Nov. 29 — recalled working with Lee in a production of “Mame” in Pittsburgh.  “I had a small part and she was awesome,” Davidson said. “Working with her was like having a master class in musical theater.”

It’s a safe bet that you can catch her act online somewhere.  In her show, Lee often includes a song by Joni Mitchell, the mistress of cool sadness. It’s “A Case of You,” a song that’s full of rue, the kind of song that travels and changes through time and to listen to Lee grab it by the heart is to witness a transformation. She makes the song hers, and more importantly , yours, the way we live now. 

You hear and see the affinity with Coleman: one of a kind.

Gary Tischler • November 6, 2015

The spirit of Halloween, situated as it is in the heart of fall, has a way of lingering amid the spidery white threads on bushes, the leaves falling and falling and piling up, the nights earlier and longer, the air a little damp and the vistas full of fading beauties everywhere.

It lingers also musically with the presence and presentation of choral and chamber music composer and performer Nicholas White and the Raven Consort, performing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and other poems as part of the Dumbarton Concerts series Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 7, Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Georgetown.

The musical work, a chamber union of words by Poe and music by White, a noted conductor, composer, organist, pianist, is making its second appearance at the Dumbarton Concert Series being first presented in February,  2013.   White, who is a native of England,  is currently Chair of the Arts and Director of Chapel Music at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, as well as being the Music Director of the Boston Cecilia.  One Washington critic called the work “an evening of sheer heaven in an acoustically ideal performing space.”

“The atmospherics, the candlelight, the intimacy, and the spiritual feeling at Dumbarton is, I think, perfect for Poe,”  White said.  “’The Raven’” is also an ideal poem for performance as music, as choral music for voices and instruments—strings and piano.”

White is very much the modern composer, not in the sense that his work is modernist in an atonal way—listening to “The Raven” is to experience rushes of lyricism throughout.  “I think perhaps there’s too much made of what modern classical music should sound like in contemporary times,” he said.  “And in this setting, this very intimate place, what you’ve accomplishes echoers and lingers, just like the poem.”

While the concert deals with other Poe poems—“Annabel Lee” and “The Bells”—the main work is a cantata for ensemble performance, voices, string quartet and piano, likely a first for any poem by the great American poet and prince of poetic darkness, who died at age 40.

Dumbarton Concerts commissioned the work, which proved to be very popular when first performed.  “You know, I think what happens with Poe, there’s a romanticism associated with his melancholy, he was an unhappy man, haunted, and his work is haunting.  But the music doesn’t have to be as dark as Poe’s life. ‘The Raven’ is a very musical poem, it’s a man calling out his anguish, his hope and feelings, confronting an apparition.  I kind of doubt that he was as miserable as all that’s been made out.”

While White has written big works, in  the “The Raven,” he said,  “I wanted to evoke the idea of a Victorian parlor, which quite often is how most people in the 19th century received their entertainment, gatherings in homes, or in churches, by natural light, it was very social, but also very cultural.”

“I think Poe had a unique appeal. He was enigmatic, lonely, often alone. He had this dark side,  which was mystical. He was, by all accounts, self-destructive, but what he created, the poetry especially, but also his stories, they endure. They remain, in their own way, modern, and it’s material ideally suited for music.”

White is something of a prodigy in the sense that he held his first organist and choir master position at the age of 15 in England, and became Organ Scholar of Clare College in Cambridge.  After coming to the United States, he held positions in churches, colleges and schools, including Washington National Cathedral as assistant organist and choirmaster, the Cathedral Choral Society, as keyboard artist, and music  director of the Woodley Ensemble.   He is the founder of the Tiffany Consort, an acclaimed group of eight singers, whose first CD “O Magnum Mysterium” was nominated for a Grammy.

= Nicholas White and the Raven Consort, performing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and other poems as part of the Dumbarton Concerts series 8 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 7, Dumbarton United Methodist Church, 3133 Dumbarton St. NW; 202-333-7212.
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Georgetowner •

Julian Raby, the Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian art, is the November speaker in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series. Born in London, Dr. Raby earned his doctorate in Oriental Studies from Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, where he was series founder and series editor of Oxford Studies in Islamic Art. He became director of the Freer-Sackler in 2002.

Tickets for the breakfast are $20 ($15 for George Town Club members). RSVP to Richard@Georgetowner.com. George Town Club, 1530 Wisconsin Ave. NW.

RSVP by November 3, 2015 by emailing Richard@georgetowner.com

Gary Tischler • October 29, 2015

If you look up the name “Charles ‘Sancho’ Ignatius,” you can find him listed as “writer, composer,” known for his “influence over abolitionists, his published correspondence” and being, under the heading of ethnicity, a “black Briton.”

If you look up Paterson Joseph, he is listed as being born in London and being an actor from 1998 until now.

For two nights at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 23 and 24, the two men, Ignatius Sancho,  actor, essayist, writer, composer, grocer, a black Briton born as a slave, friend to David Garrick and Laurence Sterne, and the first black man ever to vote in England, and Paterson Joseph, an actor, writer, sometime cook, at home in roles created by Shakespeare as well as in the HBO Series “The Leftover,” also a self-described black Briton, converge, become one, when Joseph brings his play, “Sancho: An Act of Remembrance” to the stage, as both actor and star. And therein lies a tale.

Joseph—who has led an actor’s life since 1988 with much acclaim and success on the stage — including the Royal Shakespeare Company in films (“The Beach” with Leonardo DiCaprio) and television (in the cultish “Doctor Who” series and in “The Leftovers”) — did not discover Sancho online. He read a book, and he saw a painting.

The painting is famous, being the work of William Gainsborough, probably the greatest British painter and portraitist of the18th century.  The painting was made at a time when Sancho had already achieved some standing and some apparent means. He looks a bit questioning, but comfortable in his skin and clothes, which are those of a gentleman of the time.

But it was the  book called “Black Britain” (which included the portrait) by historian Gretchen Gerzina, which affected Joseph’s feelings and thinking dramatically when he discovered it in 2008.  “Truth be told, I hadn’t known anything about Sancho at the time,” he said during a phone interview. “I think there are a lot of people—myself included—who probably there hadn’t been a major presence of black English people until the arrival of a large group of immigrants from Jamaica. I mean we all knew about the slave trade  and the islands and all of that, but here was this full-bodied man, who had risen up from service, learned to read, raised a large family, became interested in the theater,  rose in society and became a highly vocal and literate advocate for banning the slave trade.”

“He was the first black man to cast a vote,” he added.

The voice on the phone is affable, free-wheeling, easy with humor and sports a decided English accent.  It’s a voice—an actor’s voice, you think—that is spurred by curiosity, in a general way, but also the kind that even as you hear it, you imagine him listening, gathering information.  He  relishes the discovery of Sancho, but wonders that he perhaps should have known about him.  “We actors tend to be a bit self-absorbed,” he said.

“His story—and it’s a complicated, meaningful, but also very theatrical story—resonated profoundly with me, certainly,” Joseph said. “He is a forefather for all of us, for one thing, and he had a life full of accomplishment.

“Right from the beginning, I’ve been wanting to do something with his life, to do this,” he said. “So here we are, it’s the first time for this in the United States.  I’m not given to be being a writer so much, but this project comes from me and it means an enormous amount to me. Plus, it’s history, and I do love period pieces.”

Joseph’s already led a rich acting life. “One of the things that interested me about him was that he was friends with Garrick,” he said. “Garrick was in his way a revolutionary force in English theater, and in the way Shakespeare was done. The producers and directors of that time tended to rewrite Shakespeare, they would tack on happy endings to the tragedies—imagine an upbeat Hamlet, things like that.”

“Sancho was also a writer,” he said. “He wrote to and for the newspapers on everything, but especially the abolition of slavery. He wrote letters to the English novelist Laurence Sterne (‘Tristram Shandy’) to get him to support and lend his weight for abolition, which he did.” Sancho was on the side of Great Britain during the Revolutionary War.

“I think Sancho is a thick, dramatic story,” Joseph said. “It’s different from the American black historical narratives like ‘Roots’ and ‘Twelve Years a Slave.’ It’s original and rather idiosyncratic.”

Listening  to Joseph, you get the sense that this project is a kind of legacy for himself as well as Sancho.

“Acting has been my life, and it’s been remarkably rewarding in many ways,” Joseph said. “That world, especially in the theater, is always changing for everybody in terms of audiences and in terms of roles and race.  There are always things in the theater and as an actor, that are indelible.  I had the opportunity to perform in ‘Julius Caesar’ as Brutus in South Africa.  That play, by the way, was Nelson Mandela’s favorite Shakespearean play.  And Brutus—perhaps the play should have been called ‘Brutus’—is critical to the play, but he’s complicated. He struggles with the deed and the aftermath constantly. He is not prone to act quickly, somewhat, yes, that’s right, like Hamlet.”

Charles Ignatius Sancho and Paterson Joseph­ seem made for each other.

Georgetowner • October 26, 2015

It’s pretty plain to see that Jason Moran, the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, is quite the explorer, quite the collaborationist, quite the expansionist.
It was pretty evident back in September, when he curated “Finding a Line: Skateboarding, Music and Media,” set in a skate park constructed on the center’s front plaza. The festival kicked off the new “Jason+” series, which features Moran, a virtuoso jazz pianist with his own group, in cross-genre and cross-discipline collaborations.

“It’s a continuing examination, a deeper exploration of what you can do with jazz, how it can be transforming and transformed, both,” Moran said. “We’re talking here about teenaged skaters, a world-renowned classical pianist, a contemporary dance choreographer who stretches the boundaries of his own discipline. It’s kind of a holistic approach to music, and to jazz, because jazz has a global presence, and a global vision.”

Moran comes by his collaborative tendencies naturally. He’s married to mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran. (They have 7-year-old twin sons, Jonas and Malcolm.) “She turned me on to and got me to listen to more atonal kinds of classical music, which was something of a revelation to me, since at the time I was heavily into Duke Ellington, which is more melodic kind of music.”

The most recent example of putting musical genres together was “Jason+Jeremy,” a collaboration (and co-presentation with Washington Performing Arts) in which Moran and classical pianist Jeremy Denk performed as dueling pianists. “Neither one of us knew what the other would play, how it would work out, and so we sort of played with and off of each other. At one point, Jeremy talked about trying out a Charles Ives piece, and that made me think about old Negro spirituals, and in that way, we came back to jazz, to the core music. Jeremy can play just about anything, and that’s sort of what it’s about. No one thing is purely jazz, or purely classical, or purely anything. There are other elements out there, and what we did was to explore that and come up with new things.”

That’s also at the heart of the Jason+ program on Oct. 28-30 with choreographer Ronald K. Brown and his dance ensemble Evidence. Moran and his Bandwagon jazz trio will play on stage at the Eisenhower Theater through the dance pieces “The Subtle One,” “Why You Follow” and “Bellows.”

“We’ve never done that, playing live music with a dance piece,” Moran said. “And they’re different pieces, it all adds something to the piece, and the piece demands something from our music.”

Brown founded Evidence in 1985, which means the company is marking its 30th anniversary. He’s known for creating choreography for jazz legends like pianists Ahmad Jamal and Mary Lou Williams. “His dance creations are rooted in West African, to basic rhythms. They’re infused with that kind of tempo and feeling.”

“The Subtle One” is a dance premiere, commissioned in part by the Kennedy Center, with the music composed by Moran. “Why You Follow” is an exploration of rhythmic Afro-Cuba stylings. “Bellows” is a solo piece taken from the work “One Shot,” the nickname of photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, who documented the life of a single African American community — that of Pittsburgh — over a 40-year period.

Other Jason+ projects will include: “Jason+Mason,” the Mason being Kennedy Center Composer-In-Residence Mason Bates, a March 5 performance in the Crossroads Club in the center’s atrium; and a collaboration with tenor saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master Charles Lloyd on April 29 in the Terrace Theater.

“I think this sort of approach will bring in new audiences,” Moran said. “At the Kennedy Center, collaborations are like incubators of new forms and genres. Jazz is in many ways the most innovative kind of music — it takes in from everywhere.”

Gary Tischler • October 22, 2015

During the course of the opening night performance of “The Guard,” (part of the ongoing Women’s Voices Theater Festival in the Washington area), the usual pre-performance formalities are always engaged in—thanks to benefactors, donors and supporter, and, in this case, a shout-out to the playwright, if they happen to be in house.

From a distance, you could see a blondish woman rise out of her chair and take a modest head bow for the ensuing applause.

“For me that was quite a moment,” said Jessica Dickey, the playwright in question. “I had my loved ones there, my family and my partner.  It was special, I have to say.  It was special having my play performed here in Ford’s Theater. That was a little different, to say the least.  And it was that moment, too, when you sort of let go of your creation, it’s completely belongs to others now, the people on the stage, who inhabit the characters, and everyone else.”

Ford’s Artistic Director Paul Tetreault, one of the founders directors behind the women’s theater festival, knew of Dickey’s previous work and commissioned her to write a play for the festival.  The result was something a little different but from but also in the tradition of the theater in the sense that weighty matters were being discussed, disguised as drama, and in the most accessible  and sometimes even profane ways.

She laughed when we talked on the phone about some of the language in the play, which is an exploration of art in the life of human beings of all sorts, primarily, but not excluding, a museum guard who could be working at any of our city museums.  Somehow, in the course of things, people grieve over loss, guard the premises, talk about the art on the wall—Rembrandt—and see how, in the presence of art, life becomes richer even with the impending death of a loved one.  In the course of things, Rembrandt himself, as well as Homer, the subject of a painting, take the stage both vividly, and quite colloquially.

We asked Dickey about her approach to such weighty matters—it’s in the DNA of her previous plays, which includes a haunting, well received work on the massacre of Amish children, and Confederate re-enactors of the Battle of Gettysburg.  She’s also currently working on a play about Galileo’s daughter.

“Well, I hadn’t quite thought of things as weighty per se,” she said. “I think art deals with things we confront and encounter and inspire us to think about life. And I am a writer, and an artist, as well as an actress. So, this is how I express myself.”

She expresses herself extremely well in the theater, and over the phone.  As on stage, so in person by way of conversation, she is funny, and smart, with popular references and language (the word “dude” comes up)  mixing in with sharp, referenced observations.  One thing that’s probably worth knowing about her is that even on the phone she sports a spirited, full-throated laugh, which probably means that she’s a person worth telling a joke or funny story.

“The Guard” came out of a visit to the National Gallery of London, and observing a guard there. Out of this came much—the play is a full-bodied contribution to not only the festival but the theatrical canon.

“You know, what we do is so intimate,” she said. “I like to be involved in the process, not in terms of interference, but how it works—plays these days undergo a lot of versions, readings, workshops and finally the rehearsals, and the closer it gets to the finished play and its production, the further removed you become. I was offered  to attend a meeting of the board here—maybe it was just routine—and I accepted, and it was exciting and informative.

She is not, as she will be the first to admit, shy. “I was a bit of an athlete when I was in school, I played boys basketball when I was little, and I’m in the theater and an actress. We’re in the business of story-telling—look at what’s happening in television, these continuing stories.”

“In this play, I was interested in the things that last in memory and time,” she said. “As a writer, you wonder if your work will last, will be around long after you’re around. The stage itself, acting, that disappears the moment it’s done which is ephemeral.”

“As far as the festival goes, to me, it’s a remarkable thing,” she said. “I mean that it’s being done at all, and on such a scale where a whole theatrical community is basically committing to this at the beginning of a season, all premieres, at all levels.  I’m incredible glad to be a part of it.  It’s been quite an experience.”

In many ways, her work—and Jessica Dickey herself, are quite an experience.

Gary Tischler • October 15, 2015

The haunting, embracing play “Chimerica” by the young, gifted British playwright Lucy Kirkwood is ambitious, swiftly paced as well as sharply and intelligently written. It is a long, powerful offering about the fate of two modern nations as embodied by a moment in history, given a smart and swiftly paced production at the Studio Theatre with artistic director David Muse at the helm.

About the only thing that “Chimerica” isn’t is a part of the massive ongoing Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which features around 50 world premieres, all written by female playwrights throughout the Washington theater community. Technically, “Chimerica” isn’t a world premiere, although it is the work of Kirkwood, probably the hottest young playwright in Britain right now. The play–with dozens of  scenes dealing with 23 years in the history of American-Chinese relations–was a smash hit in the West End. In any case, Studio also world-premiered “Animal” by Clare Lizzimore Sept. 30 as its WVTF entry.

At well over three hours, “Chimerica” is a challenge, for actors, for Muse and certainly for the audience. It runs from 1989—when a fledgling (and fictional) American photographer manages to shoot the iconic image of a young Chinese activist with a shopping bag defying a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square—to 2012, when that same photographer, by now disillusioned, is covering a presidential campaign while wondering whatever happened to what the world described as “tank man.”

The question soon turns into a compulsive, obsessive search for the identity of the man who performed a clean act of moral courage, the kind of act he sees as missing from his own life and the world.  Soon enough, that search consumes him, to a fault, while in China, an old friend of his, still grieving over the death of his wife, watches as a neighbor dies a painful, lingering death from the withering effect of pollution, a by-product of resurgent China’s powerful economy.    We follow a small army of characters, Joe the overbearing photographer, his friend Zhang Lin, as he alerts Joe about the pollution through e-mails and gains the attention of the Chinese party police, much to the consternation of his brother, Joe’s fellow conflict zone photographer, his boss at a publication which, by all accounts, stands for the New York Times and Tessa, an attractive British marketing consultant drawn to the hyper Joe.

Lots of thematic balls are in the air—the overarching progress of Chinese-American relations, the power and meaning of images in the internet world, the need for heroic figures and heroes, the difficulty of dealing with love in a helter-skelter atmosphere, the clash of cultures and politics, the desire for fame and meaning at the same time.

In some ways, even with its great length, “Chimerica” is decidedly cinematic. It functions as a dangerous political thriller, a mystery, a tough play written with both intelligence and humor, and a tolerant, even generous, empathy for all of its characters.

You’d think there would be lag time in a play like this, but Muse has directed with a keen sense of sharp scenes and pacing, aided by a set that uses two box-like constructions to serve as everything from a one-room apartment in Beijing, an art gallery, back alleys and sophisticated New York party settings, aided vividly by imaginative projections. It’s a kind of immersion for an audience in search of intelligent, engaging new plays and productions, and “Chimerica” lets the audience engage with the material, because everyone involved seems fully engaged as well.

One of the hallmarks of Studio productions under Muse is a focus on acting and actors, which may come as no surprise that the theater is the site of the Studio Acting Conservatory, still headed by founder and former artistic director Joy Zinoman. 

In a large cast, Ron Menzel has the most difficult task in portraying Joe, who is easily the most frustrating, bombastic, annoying character in the play. Joe has a typically American moral arrogance, a self-immersed energy, a dose of paranoia, engaging in a reckless pursuit of a truth that may not after all be worth knowing in the larger scheme of things. But he has a presence that is undeniable and which serves him well, given that Joe is the engine driving the plot like a, well, tank, with almost a similar effect.  But Rob Yang, as the mourning Zhang Lin is the heart of the play, he inhabits a sadness mixed with humor and courage that in its own way is as reckless as Joe’s in terms of its results.

Tessa Klein gives a rueful, sexy quality to a young woman who wears her insecurity on her cocktail dress sleeve, hard-living, and appealing.  There are other fine turns—the veteran local actor Paul Morella as Joe’s editor, a knowing resignation by Lee Sellars as Joe’s fellow action junkie, a sympathetic turn by Kenneth Lee as the much-put-upon brother of Zhang Lin, among many others.

Kirkwood, in “Chimerica,” which won the Laurence Olivier and Evening Standard Award for Best Play in 2013, has a certain audacity in this play. She has an intelligence that gives the audience a gift by inviting into the world we live in—quite an amazing amount of it. If the ending may not be as surprising as it should be, it still packs a jolt, a shot to the heart.

“Chimerica” may not be a part of the festival, which is bringing us an abundant explosion of the work of talented female playwrights, but Kirkwood is surely one of the most talented playwrights working today.  That’s worth celebrating and checking out.

“Chimerica” runs through Oct. 18 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW.
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