Catching Up on Our Post-Show Conversations #1: Roth Family Responding

It’s more than two weeks since the first really scintillating post-show discussion convened for ANDY AND THE SHADOWS; the long-anticipated reflections of parents Walter and Chaya Roth responding to their son’s play. What did they really think of it all? Alas, our video isn’t going to tell you. Not because Walter and Chaya weren’t candid and generous in their reflecting; on the contrary, they shared openly, even as their thoughts and reactions have continued to evolve over the days since first taking in the performance. The bummer in our documenting is that we only got our camera into recording position for the last 5 minutes of the discussion, and Walter and Chaya aren’t the ones we hear from in the Q & A with the audience. But there’s visual evidence that they were on our stage. So check out the visual, and the fairly brilliant question offered by their grand-daughter, Ms. Isabel Roth, who follows up on her more demure younger sister Sophie’s pensive reflection on the meaning of the play. Yes, the whole Roth family wound up getting involved by the end of the 50 minute conversation (but yes, we only captured the last 5 minutes).

A Conversation with The Roth Family from Theater J on Vimeo.

So you’ve heard from the 2nd and 3rd Generation in the video above. But what of the parents–authors, of course, of their own respective tellings of their own respective stories of escape and forced leave-taking from home. We know from our playbill that Dr. Chaya Roth, Clinical Psychologist, professor, child refugee/survivor/hidden child has written prodigiously about her family’s experience of the war and how that history has been transmitted to offspring and their offspring; to relatives and their progeny in her memoir “The Fate of Holocaust Memories: Transmission and Family Dialogues (Palgrave Macmillan – due out in paperback later this spring). Chaya’s response was characteristically generous and complex. Perhaps soon we’ll get it from her in our own writing. For now, trust a son’s recollection:

Chaya saw the play as a thing distinct from the history; “It was a play,” she said. “A good play.” She appreciated the pathos, the humor, the family interaction. And the history drawn from stories she told her children, she recognized that history. It was a different history than the one she lived. But then her own memories, she added, involve elements of invented synapses — connecting pieces where she’s inferred an event or an incident to fill in the gaps of her memory. And in some cases she noted, “what the play makes up is better than what I made up!” She was referring to the scene in the Central Police Station. What she said to the police about the step-father who accompanied her in the round-up of the Jews of Nice; a round-up that her mother and older sister avoided. Chaya’s version of the story is less dramatic. And has less remembered dialogue. And missing components to it as well. “It’s a better story the way it’s told here.”

She shared certain observations about the characters that caused her to reflect on how she raised her children. “The mother in the play inflicts a burden on her children; the burden of absorbing and living with this legacy. And I imposed a burden on my children. Wally and I committed to telling our children, each in our different way, about where we came from and what to happened to our families. Perhaps we told too much. Because the burden is heavy; it’s cumbersome. And our story telling evolved, as we evolved.”

Upon returning to Chicago, Chaya’s had continued complicated thoughts. I’ll let her share those. Thoughts we’ve continued to process.

Walter thought the play, as a play, succeeded because it was funny and that humor was important in offsetting the tragedy of which there was plenty. Wally responded to the angel wings. He saw in our rendering of the mother as a young girl in an Italian convent a mirror image of what he remembered of his mother, after she passed away, and how she would reappear in his window, when he was still a young boy in Germany. “It was eerie.” Walter Roth’s latest book on history is his post personal book to date. Still a practicing attorney (of counsel) at the age of 84, president emeritus of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, and author of three books including “An Accidental Anarchist (The Lazurs Averbuch story);
“Avengers and Defenders: Glimpses of Chicago’s Jewish Past,” and “Looking Backward: True Stories of Chicago’s Jewish Past,” Walter has most recently written a memoir retrieving memories of life as a Jew in small town Germany during the course of visits to his birthplace, in his latest book “Escape and Return: Trips to and Memories from Roth, Germany.” Walter shared stories from his book with the audience, building off the foundation that the character of Nate establishes at the end of the play when he says to his son Andy, “I want to write about Jews who grew up in small towns.
As farmers; as bakers; as laborers. In Germany. The way they lived their lives.”

The moderator of the discussion was our production dramaturg; actor, published author, and resident artist on staff with us this season, Peter Birkenhead. Here are a few of Peter’s notes jotted down in preparation for the discussion:

A Performance Dedicated to Desmond

We lost a wonderful member of our team here at the J, Desmond Obamogie, our parking lot attendant, officially an employee of UniPark, who was a great friend to so many of our stage managers, crew members, actors, and everyone on our staff, not to mention all the patrons Desmond interacted with in accommodating 32 cars inside a 20-slot lot. Desmond was with us at the J for the past three years, an employee of E-Park for 8 years, and a native of Nigeria.  We knew him to be a religious man; a continuous reader of the bible, the most dapper of dressers, and the kindest soul to help a harried patron or artist running late to show or call-time.  Desmond was with us at the J this past Sunday, presiding over another busy weekend.  He had intermittently complained of chest pain or stomach pain, and security and receptionist staff urged him to see a doctor.  But he demurred and insisted that he was fine; that it would pass.  E-Park reported that Desmond didn’t make it to work on Monday or Tuesday and by Wednesday, a relative checked in at his apartment and found that Desmond had passed.

Alisha Ridley-Frost, Unipark’s Office Manager, told us that they are still not sure  what happened and that they will let us know where we can send condolences as soon as they have that information.  Alisha said:

“Desmond was one of our best employees and a dear friend. I know he thought highly of the DCJCC staff and enjoyed working there.  He will truly be missed. We appreciate your kindness to him while he worked there.”

Last night’s performance of ANDY AND THE SHADOWS was dedicated to Desmond. He will stay in our hearts as long as we think of our good experiences at the theater.

More From Tony Kushner, On The Future of Theatre

As noted in the previous post, at the end of our discussion, Tony Kushner fielded Crowd Sourced questions collected off my facebook page. I ganged three up into one final query about the future of American Theatre.

From Michael Rohd of Sojourn Theatre: Tony, you are passionate about democracy. Your stories ask us to consider our private, public and collective souls. If you imagine artists engaging in the practice of democracy beyond their role as storytellers, bringing their assets as makers of meaning, as collaborators, as problem solvers, into public process, what do you imagine?

from Marin Academy’s David Sinaiko: As a decidedly analog art form in an increasingly digital age how does theater stay relevant – not just in content, but in the cultural aesthetic?

From DC playwright Nicole Burton: Working and middle class Americans, when given encouragement and opportunity, LIKE to attend theater. They they the liberation of ideas. In Tony’s opinion, what does a transformational American theater look like in our times?

Here’s how Tony responded–Tremendously optimistic! Full of faith (and a little bit of envy) in a new generation of playwrights like Annie Baker and her uncompromising confidence in addressing that shift from analogue to digital in her latest play, The Flick…

And then Tony ended with this flourish:

“Finally, [theatre] is always just these people on the stage in the light talking to these people in the dark. It’s completely not capital intensive. It’s not labor intensive. It doesn’t last. We always need an unsuccessful illusion. That’s what theatre does. It teaches critical consciousness. It is a model of the human predicament. Things are and are not what they seem at the same time. And the only way to live in the world, to able to read the world, is to interpret it, to take meaning from it. And the only way to do that is to not be fooled by surface appearance. And film creates at this point, a visual manipulation, an increasingly overwhelmingly, perfect illusion.

I think we’ll always need theatre. We’re always going to be caught in this dilemma—of being in a world that we both inhabit, are born into, and create by existing in and demands our interpretation. And theatre, whatever else it teaches, and it can teach many things, is always teaching that. It teaches empathic imagination and at the same time gives you reason to doubt. It gets you locked in that cycle and being locked in that cycle is critical consciousness. I don’t think we can live without that.

quotation notated by Theater J friend, Kurt Nemes

My Evening With Tony Kushner. The One-Way Conversation That (Fortunately) Didn’t Happen

Luckily, I didn’t use my 25 notecards.  But for posterity’s sake, here are the contents that I wisely didn’t refer to in interviewing Tony Kushner at The George Washington University yesterday in their Jack Morton Auditorium in the School of Media and Public Affairs. To learn how I got the gig, click here.

By all accounts, it was a good session, and Tony was generous, erudite, unpretentious and deeply insightful. In time, we’ll annotate his answers. Here are the questions, framed by a bit of an introduction, and ending with some crowd-sourced questions culled from my facebook page comments.

TONY 25 YEARS AGO, AND TONY NOW
Notes in preparation for an April 9th conversation with Tony Kushner on the night of the final preview of ANDY AND THE SHADOWS…

GWU President Steven Knapp, Tony Kushner and Ari Roth

The pleasure, the honor, the excitement, and the nervousness… the unworthiness and feelings of massive unpreparedness are all mine now before you—As we all gather (and good it is to be together as brothers and sisters, as the Hebrew “Hiney Ma-Tov” goes) to keep company with Tony Kushner, model and mentor, artist, activist, citizen, author, History Buff, and Current Events Scribe, commencement speaker extraordinaire, ubiquitous and then for months reclusive and illusive, agnostic, Jew, embattled-Israel engager, editor, screenwriter, best friend of Steven Spielberg AND Maurice Sendack (ala v’shalom) Intelligent Homosexual, and so much more.

My job tonight is to effectively represent the myriads of us who look up to you, Tony; the colleagues who are inspired by you, the activists who beseech you to lend a hand, to show up, to write… We all have relationships with you, of which you know only a little about. So we’ll share a bit of that; what you’ve meant to us and how you’ve inspired and emboldened us, but also perhaps confused us; how we’ve possibly misinterpreted you (and the trouble you’ve gotten into, from time to time); tonight let’s set some records straight. And since we’re on a college campus, and since I’m opening a show tomorrow night that’s very much about a 50-something year old man looking back on a younger self—let’s make some effort to remember yourself as a striving young artist as you reflect on where you and we are now.

As a writer cut from some of the same cloth—that of The School Of Over-Sharing—perhaps my job here tonight is get to know the less revealed and articulated parts of the public you; the parts that draw inspiration from the private/personal/familial you; a reservoir that’s been always there for you to draw upon but perhaps—because your other achievements have been so singular; so necessary; and your prowess so conspicuous, we haven’t as much time as we might like looking at the portrait of the artist looking back to when he was a young man…

Or (since, of course we have, in CAROLINE, and ANGELS) perhaps we haven’t spent as much time as we’d like looking back at the artist as young questing artist; the striving, hungry, frustrated artist and how he nourishes the soul (and slurps from the same trough) of the older practitioner—always an extraordinary artist, but perhaps one who’s DNA is less well-known.

What you’ve meant to playwrights in the field — those who were coming along and coming of age as you were bursting forth on the scene:

Rolling Out Theater J’s New 2013-14 Season!

“Crucial Questions, Critical Fault Lines, Necessary Conversations” All drama is predicated on a question. The more incisive the  inquiry, the more penetrating the drama. Ours is an artistic home where heat and light, respect and learning are being sewn into the fabric of a community quilt we’re creating together. We’re not hammering out position papers or policy platforms; we’re painting portraits of who we are in times of tension on a path toward more clarity and understanding and something close to resolution. The questions we’re asking are about loyalty and representation; the right to life and the right to choose; whether we acknowledge, refute, defend, or apologize for the ravages of war; whether we place our faith in God—and whether we believe that fate, luck, or good works determine our ultimate future. 2013 – 2014 SEASON After the Revolution The Argument Our Suburb Yellow Face The Admission Freud’s Last Session SPECIAL EVENT PRODUCTIONS Woody Sez The Prostate Dialogues These are the questions being asked by our playwrights; unafraid authors and performers who enter the arena of our fiercest cultural contretemps, whether the subject be The Blacklist, race and ethnicity, collateral damage from Israel’s War of Independence, or the existence of a deity.  Our playwrights are slugging it out and finding the light, presenting well-argued plays about people caught along a precarious seam of earth splitting underneath their feet. One playwright, Tony Award winning David Henry Hwang, even writes a play with himself in the drama, as his name’s sake gets caught in the cultural and political crosshairs and indictments against him grow, extending to his entire family, involving questions of national security and the scourge of dual loyalty.  It’s his Pulitzer-finalist play Yellow Face and marks the first time Theater J has looked at the Asian American experience in America, a parallel story to the Jewish immigrant family sojourn and that generational drama of growing up in the Diaspora. All our plays this season underscore the theater’s function as a place where The Big Questions are not just asked but enacted in story, debated not just in dialogue but in action, wrestled within the audience as plots unfold, and discussed after performances–not with policy-analytics but with the experienced emotion of a humanized debate informed by character and complexity. The conversations extend beyond our theater and lobby, onto our social media platforms in surprising, enlightening, engaging ways. We’re offering an entertaining, hard hitting season, full of variety and relevance, tackling history and the present, birthing plenty of new but paying homage to some of the most established literary talent on the scene today. Once again we’re local, international, and national in scope, recommitting to our twin signature festivals, “Locally Grown: Community Supported Art” and “Voices From a Changing Middle East” offering workshops, readings, Arts & Ideas Symposia, and inspired partnerships, this year with Arena Stage (in conjunction with their world premiere production of Camp David) and the Herzliyah Theatre Ensemble in our collaboration of The Admission. One new innovation: Our Monthly Directors’ Forum where we will host an up-close look at each of our directors’ careers and their vision for their respective production currently in rehearsal with us.  We’ll feature a special segment this fall on Female Directors of DC–proud that we’ll have three great female directors working with us this season. It’s a privilege to make theater in this city, in this Community Center, with this wonderful company of artists, for a spectacularly engaged and intelligent audience.  We’re full of thanks and appreciation for making a season like this possible. Do join us! Ari Roth Artistic Director, Theater J

By Amy Herzog  (regional premiere) Directed by Derek Goldman Featuring Nancy Robinette The brilliant, promising Emma Joseph is primed to follow in the footsteps of her progressive political family. But when she discovers a troubling secret about her blacklisted grandfather, Emma must confront her family’s legacy, and her own path. A bold and moving play from the Award-winning author of4,000 Miles (The New York Times – Outstanding Playwright), staged by the director of our Helen Hayes nominated production of Our Class. “American’s most interesting young playwright.” - The Wall Street Journal back to top	A newly commissioned 2013 edition by Alexandra Gersten Vassilaros Directed by Associate Artistic Director Shirley Serotsky Sophie, a charming, vibrant artist, and Phillip, a loyal, solid businessman, are a 40-something couple whose new relationship is rocked when Sophie learns she is pregnant. As each fights for the only future he or she can imagine, they are both forced to recognize the profound cultural differences between them. And when the word “abortion” is introduced into the debate, all bets are off.  The Argument chronicles the arc of a relationship with humor, passion, brutality, and up-to-the-minute relevance. From the co-author of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize-finalistOmnium Gatherum. back to top
SPECIAL EVENT PRODUCTION Devised by David M. Lutken  with Nick Corley A special encore presentation of the three-time Helen-Hayes nominee. “Bound for Glory!” raved The Washington Post of last season’s sold out production. This boisterous musical celebrates America’s troubadour, the man behind ‘This Land is Your Land,’ ‘The Ballad of Tom Joad’ and more, with musical numbers, ample humor and heart-break from Woody’s rich life. Followed by rousing weekly hootenannies after select performances. back to top	A world premiere By Darrah Cloud  Directed by Tony-award winning actress and Broadway director Judith Ivey An homage to Our Town, this world-premiere invites audiences to suburban Illinois in 1977, when the Nazis marched on Skokie. As the Major and Edelman families prepare for Christmas and Hanukkah, Ricky and Thornton fall into an interfaith teenage romance. Off to embark on exciting futures both inside and out of their suburban hamlet, the teenagers find themselves absorbed in a growing menace that turns into heartbreak, surprise, and headlines involving the whole community. From the author of The Stick Wife and adapter of O Pioneers. back to top
By David Henry Hwang  (regional premiere) Directed by Natsu Onoda Power A satirical comedy about political correctness. When a Caucasian actor is cast as the Asian pimp in Broadway’s Miss Saigon, Hwang leads a public outcry protesting the cultural insensitivity. But when Hwang himself unwittingly casts a white actor to play the Asian protagonist of his new play, he must confront his own hypocrisies. As he struggles to ‘save face’ amidst family politics, international intrigue and government investigations, Hwang explores timeless questions surrounding cultural identity, dual loyalty, and responsibility. By David Henry Hwang (Tony-Award-Winning playwright of M. Butterfly and librettist for Disney’s Aida).Staged by the visionary director of Astro Boy and The God of Comics. back to top	Voices From A Changing Middle East Festival An English language world premiere By Motti Lerner  Directed by Sinai Peter Produced in collaboration with Herzliya Ensemble Theatre Featuring Michael Tolaydo An Israeli homage to All My Sons set in Haifa during the first Intifada. Giora is a young professor engaged to Neta but in love with Samia, the Palestinian daughter of a family friend who becomes troubled when Giora’s father’s company begins building on the site of a battle that took place 40 years ago. Giora struggles to find the truth about his father’s war-time secrets, confronting the causes of his brother’s death and how Giora came to incur his own war-time injuries in Lebanon. As Giora’s family presses him to look forward, not back, the play asks how we can move forward toward peace while still wrestling with the ghosts of war. From the author of Pangs of the Messiah and the winner of the Prime Minister of Israel Award for Writers, and staged by the Theater J’s director of Return to Haifa with designers from the Israeli premiere. Presented in cooperation with the world premiere of Camp David, by Lawrence Wright at Arena Stage.  With Festival readings, workshops and discussions. back to top
By Mark St. Germain  (regional premiere) Directed by Serge Seiden  Featuring Todd Scofield The celebrated long-running Off-Broadway hit stages a clash between intellectual giants Dr. Sigmund Freud, the legendary psychoanalyst, and C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia. On the day England enters World War II, Freud summons then unknown professor Lewis to his office for an impassioned exchange about God, love, sex, and the meaning of life. From the author of Camping With Henry And Tom and inspired by Harvard’s Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr.’s best-selling book The Question of God. back to top	SPECIAL EVENT PRODUCTION Part of Locally Grown: Community Supported Art Festival World Premiere Written and performedBy Jon Spelman Directed by Jerry Whiddon Commissioned in Theater J’s 2012 Locally Grown festival, this dynamic solo performance by renowned story-teller John Spelman explores masculinity and mortality in the face of disease with humanity and humor.  Drawing from personal experience and interviews, Spelman examines the effects of prostate cancer and treatment on sexuality and relationships with warmth and candor. back to top

SPECIAL PROGRAM Get to know the talented directors of Theater J’s 2013-2014 season in a series of intimate discussions presented in the style of ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio’. Each of our directors will discuss their body of work, their process and their upcoming Theater J production – select dates, Sep 2013-Jun 2014.Available as a subscription add-on back to top

SPECIAL PROGRAM Theater J is dedicated to taking its dialogues beyond the stage, offering an array of innovative public discussion forums, readings, and outreach programs which explore the theatrical, psychological and social elements of our art throughout the year.Purchase a Beyond The Stage PASS and get unlimited access to all Beyond The Stage programming including Tea@2 Readings,Voices From A Changing Middle East Festival, and Locally Grown Festival Readings.back to topTo subscribe, click here

As Our New Play Continues Previewing, Many Important Premieres Around Town

Today’s Weekend Feature in The Washington Post Arts section profiles five playwrights reflecting on the process of writing and revising their Charles MacArthur/Helen Hayes Award nominated new plays.

We’re particularly proud of Renee Calarco and the wonderful reflecting on the process of making THE RELIGION THING; an 8 year process that led to a highly successful run last winter.

As ANDY AND THE SHADOWS enters into a weekend of preview performances, let’s pay homage to some other new plays recently opened, or soon to open around town.  We’ll give folks a chance to respond to the spring awakening of many engaging new works, including:

Mike Daisey’s AMERICAN UTOPIAS at Woolly Mammoth…

Tazwell Thompson’s MARY T. & LIZZY K. at Arena Stage…

And soon to be opening at Round House Theatre, HOW TO WRITE A BOOK OF THE BIBLE.

Will let student subscribers and others share their opinions here about these new productions, and possibly any other new work bursting forth this month.

A Glimpse Into The Rehearsal Process – “Andy And The Shadows”

A little Facebook digest to share with you, looking back on 3 weeks of the rehearsal process of ANDY AND THE SHADOWS. In the comments section, we’ll be hearing from our student subscribers from UM, UC and ND. For interesting reference, click here to check out what an earlier semester’s group of students had to say about the November 2012 workshop reading of the play.

March 6
Gratifying first read of ANDY AND THE SHADOWS, some 26 years in the making. Cried a lot, early, often, and late in the read as well. A good sign. It meant something. It means a lot to have reached this day with a wonderful company, making art from life over time. And now our Crazy Weather Karma continues – as with our workshop reading on October 29 (which had to be canceled cuz ‘a “Sandy”), today’s we’ve got Snowquester shutting down the J. We’ll see if we’re meeting for rehearsals. Hope so. Work to do!!!

March 7
Day #2: 6 hours of table work – nothing canceled – actors present and accounted for – same for audience (mostly) – RACE goes on – the J is closed but the entire theater staff shows up to do what we do because that’s who we are and that’s how we roll – unbelievable dedication from everyone – that’s got to inspire, right? Onward! Cuts and restores, insights and clarifiers, progress and, every so often, a Stump The Playwright Moment – those are fun! What we can’t answer at night, reveals itself in the morning. Let’s see if that’s true! An early rise to tackle some tough stuff. Ready for revelation — And coffee.”

March 8
Day #3: More intensity – another straight six at the table – we go from working on relationships, one at a time, to eventually adding the whole company, finding strategic changes in Act I that must be folded into Act II – that stitching keeps me up too late – after taking students to see the 3 hour THE CONVERT @ Woolly. Guess what? They lied! For whatever reason, the 3 hour show came down at 11:15 and the parking lot closed at 11 and… the lot waited, thank God, but I regret bolting out during the 2nd part of the curtain call. Guess why that’s why I was up too late making changes. More to come. More coffee too.”

“Race In America: Where Are We Now?” Presidents Day Weekend Symposium Begins with “Jackie Robinson Steals Home & Other Meditations on the Presidency”

Six months in the planning, the weekend is finally here, and so far, so excellent. Our “Race in America” weekend has gotten off to a rousing start.

You can read the preamble to the weekend here.  And check out highlights of the first presentation below.  Video clips will be coming once edited.  Until then, we’ve got opening remarks to share, and our student bloggers following up in the Comments section on the first day’s sessions.

Prologue: 
Presented by E. Ethelbert Miller, poet and director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University

A multi-media think-piece on the backlash against the Obama Presidency, using as its model the audacity of the first African American in Major League Baseball’s unforgettable act of stealing home in the 1955 World Series against the NY Yankees and the outrage and inspiration it provoked.

Here are some of my words of introduction to Ethelbert:

Words about E. Ethelbert Miller – Poet, Sportswriter, Teacher, Activist, Agitator, Artist, Board Member, Father, Friend.

Mamet Opens at both Theater J and Round House – GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS and RACE Share Reviews!

We’re extraordinarily proud of our production of RACE which has opened and is creating plenty of heat in the theater, while 7 miles up the road, Mamet’s GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS has opened at Round House Theatre–a production I’ve now seen twice this week. Both plays speak volumes about Mamet’s usefulness as a dramatist — and both productions speak beautifully for the extraordinary talent in our community, in all realms: acting, directing and design. These are two superb renderings. Proud to be so closely aligned with Round House on this venture as well, as we share marketing energies (and wall-space, discounts, ad placements), audience, and brain power. In a separate posting, we’ll discuss the upcoming RACE IN AMERICA: WHERE ARE WE NOW? Symposium which will conclude with a consideration of David Mamet at this particular crossroads in his career — a panel I’ll co-moderate with Round House Theatre’s artistic Director Ryan Rillette, and we’ll be joined by the director of RHT’s GLENGARRY, Mitchell Hebert (who, of course, won a 2012 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in Resident Theatre Production for his performance in last season’s AFTER THE FALL) and by actor Kenyatta Rogers of the RHT production of GLENGARRY, joining an estimable panel of other theater biggies including Joy Zinoman (founding artistic director of Studio Theatre, Javier Rivera (Assistant Professor Theatre/Music Theatre at American University), and Jennifer Nelson, writer/director and former producing director, African Continuum Theatre Company).

Reviews for RACE are in and they’re both sizzling and less than that. The omnibus reviews (2 for the price of 1) are disappointing in that so little space (only 350 words in the Post) is accorded to the actual write-up of RACE. But then RACE has never been everyone’s cup of tea. It’s ranged all over the place since it’s 2009-2010 commercially successful run on Broadway. Here’s a run down of the press so far:

4.5 stars out of 5 in DC Metro Theater Arts by Sydney-Chanele Dawkins

3 out of 4 stars in Washingtonian “…controversial case feels more relevant than ever” – by Missy Frederick

‘Race’ and veracity at Theater J – Washington Jewish Week, by Lisa Traiger

‘Race’ and ‘Good People’ Reviewed in Washington City Paper by Bob Mondello

and just out, GLENGARRY and RACE reviewed together by Peter Marks in The Washington Post “Two Mamet plays are on the boil on D.C. stages”

So there’s the round-up. The HUGE Weekend Symposium awaits.

Eager for your responses to both RACE and GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS.

Jimmy Whalen and Michael Anthony Williams in RACE

Alexander Strain and Rick Foucheux in GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS at Round House

Michael Anthony William, Jimmy Whalen, and Leo Erickson in RACE

OUR TOWN at Ford’s Theatre Offers Sneak Peek For New Offering at Theater J

A bold new production of Thornton Wilder’s OUR TOWN has opened at Ford’s Theatre, directed by Stephen Rayne who did such a magnificent job last season directing the Theater J/Ford’s Theatre co-production of PARADE. The new staging brings back some of the cast members of PARADE and reunites Rayne with scene designer Tony Cisek, who does so many brilliant sets for so many companies around town, including us. Now you wouldn’t think there’s much design at play in this production of OUR TOWN. What there is, for a good long while, is very little set.

Oh, there’s the cantilevered, radically-raked stage, swooping down from back-to-front at most-likely the maximum allowable gradation. And there are the 40+ identical white chairs. Now these are chairs one mostly expects to find in Act III of the play, in the simple (though devastating) cemetery scene, and here they are in this production, more chairs than needed laid out in rows for Act I. Clearly, this production team has a surprise up its sleeves for Act III. And, boy, do it ever! I’ll let the students explain. Suffice to say that between Acts I and II I didn’t see a curtain descend to mask any scene changes. Between Acts II and III while I was out getting a drink of water, a black screen was quietly dropped. And when it was lifted to start Act III, a totally startling, brilliant pay-off was in place. That, my friends, is the definition of a “coup de théâtre” (or a “sensational bit of stagecraft!) and a brilliant realization of the truly magical, stark, haunting specter that is the cemetery scene in Act III.

I look forward to reading what others had to say about OUR TOWN, whether it be their first time seeing it, or, like actress Kim Schraf (a frequent Theater J performer and cast member of OUR TOWN who so graciously spoke to our group on Thursday night, together with PARADE cast member Kevin McCallister) someone who’s seen (and been in) the play multiple times. Never have we seen a physicalization of this play in the way Rayne and Cisek allowed us to experience it.

But this Ford’s production is certainly not the first racially integrated version of the play. Our own Delia Taylor and her mother Deborah staged a similarly conceived, non-traditional version at The Theatre Lab. And then there’s this version of the play performed by young students in Compton, LA — do check out this incredibly video documentation; OT: Our Town is a documentary which looks at Dominguez High School’s brave experiment and the people who struggled to make it happen.

A radically new visioning of OUR TOWN is also on our minds as we introduce to you the first glimpse of what we’re looking to produce at Theater J next season: The world premiere staging of Darrah Cloud’s reimagining of Wilder’s classic, moved from Grover’s Corner, NH to Skokie, Illinois. The play is called OUR SUBURB. It’s an homage to OUR TOWN (there have been many over the years, but never has there been one to conjoin the Chicago suburbs, serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Holocaust survivors, the Nazis threatened march through Skokie in 1977, amid all the hijinks and angst of senior year at Niles East — or is it New Trier West? — I’m forgetting). Anyway, with the playwright’s permission, I’ve given our Theater J student subscribers an insider peek at Darrah Could’s play, and we’ll be getting some feedback on the adaptation in comments here as well. It’s interesting to go from Ibsen’s AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE and examining the adapters’ strategies in the two different versions we’ve now read and experienced in BOGED (TRAITOR) and Arthur Miller’s version, and to now see how Darrah Cloud pays homage and also departs from the Wilder. Will be interesting to continue contemplating the value of such updating of timeless classics — choosing, as many a playwright has done before, to rewrite a masterpiece to make it speak in new ways to a new situation. Why, if a masterpiece is indeed “timeless,” does it make any sense to transplant and transpose and give new language and new character names and actions to already-durable prototypes? What’s the case to be made for a radical update like BOGED or SUBURB? And are the updates “radical” enough? What if a transposition is more subtle and gentle? I’ve had experience with that — see THE SEAGULL ON 16TH STREET! and click through a bunch of different links to see differing reactions to an adaptation that may not have gone far enough… or did it go too far?

Veronica Del Cerro and Alexander Strain as Nina and Treplev (photo by Stan Barouh)

Anyway, a salute to all the great artists at Ford’s who brought Wilder’s enduring masterpiece to life!