Arena Stage Research Articles

Retrofitting a performance space: Everyman Theatre.

The new home of the Everyman Theatre company opened in 1910 as a Vaudeville house and has had many reincarnations throughout its lifetime, including a parking garage and 1550‐seat movie theater. In its latest reincarnation, the space under renovation was a large movie theater. A challenge for the project team has been to take this configuration and turn it into something that fits the needs of the Everyman Theater company. The current renovation is underway and will include a large studio theater, with approximately 250 seats and several different configurations including a typical end stage, thrust stage, and arena stage, a Blackbox theater, and support spaces such as classrooms, offices, and rehearsal space. One of the main issues related to the pre‐existing space is its current structure. The current design has two theaters stacked vertically and there is concern that noise and vibration from activities from the upper theater could disturb occupants in the lower theater. Upgrading the structure is complicated by the location of the building which sits directly above a metro tunnel and therefore has strict weight requirements. The approach currently proposed is to include a floating concrete floor and sound barrier ceiling. [Chris Pollock (SMW), Rima Namek and Diane Cho (Cho Benn Holback), Millie Dixon and John Coyne (Theatre Projects), and Vincent Lancisi (Everyman Theatre).]

Is that “acoustic?” Unexpected finishes used to shape the acoustic environment.

The visual aesthetic desired by many contemporary architects includes surfaces that are incompatible with acoustic requirements for sound absorption and sound diffusion—particularly concave walls and large expanses of smooth, flat surfaces. Additionally, the necessity of sustainable design requires the creative use (and reuse) of unexpected construction materials. Case studies to be presented include the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation of Evanston, Illinois, the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, The Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Illinois, and the North Campus Auditorium at the Walgreen Drama Center of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. These projects will be used to highlight the use of woven textures, shaped precast, and poured‐in‐place concrete, screens, and repurposed construction waste to solve common (and some uncommon) acoustic challenges.

The Play—and the Musical—Is the Thing in D.C.

The Play—and the Musical—Is the Thing in D.C.

As You Like It at the Here Arts Center, March 15?April 1, 2007

As You Like It at the Here Arts Center, March 15-April 1, 2007. As You Like It is a social play that addresses primarily social concerns, and throughout its four-hundred-year production history, it has remained a particular favorite--especially for newer audiences to Shakespearean theater, it seems--because of its deceptive outward accessibility and crowd-pleasing androgyny. It is a play marked by its daring initiative to cross lines of social stability--oscillating between comedic cross-dressing and the gravity of questioning gender roles. Yet, due to the relative dearth of plot, As You Like It relies heavily on its actors' own personal contributions. Thus, as in the eighteenth century we might have clamored to see one actress's peculiarities, or in the nineteenth wondered how another would fare with physical exposure, we are similarly expectant in the twenty-first about how the actors will act: so many social and cultural changes have occurred and are occurring (such as a more sympathetic public stance on issues of homosexuality and trans-genderedness), that the way we see As You Like It once again becomes a question of who's playing whom. I recently had the opportunity to attend an all-male production of the play in New York City. Poortom Productions (billed as the city's only all-male Shakespeare company), ran the piece from 15 March to 1 April 2007 in a small theater with an arena stage. Although I recognize the necessity for a somewhat minimalist approach regarding scenery, I was disturbed to notice that not one, but two set designers (Wilson Chin and Kanae Heike) had merely managed to furnish two dingy shag carpets (one red, for the court, and one green for the Forest of Arden) in the center of the stage. Any pre-conceived notions of actual agrarianism I might have had silently fluttered away. This production was not going to be pastoral, but pastiche. The characters' costumes were a medley of home-spun nineteenth-century dress and several pairs of what were obviously tweaked twentieth-century jeans. Efforts were made to convey a time period--the problem was deciding which one it happened to be. In a way, however, Poortom's choices ultimately worked: because no one could decide what anything was supposed to be, the main draw of the play in performance--the cross-gendering role of Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind--took on a life of its own. But Rosalind, played by Erik Gratton, soon became problematic on a level entirely unrelated to costume; the gender-switching notwithstanding, Gratton seemed to forget that Rosalind is a woman. What we ended up with was often a theatrically appropriated, comedic version of a gay male in drag, and it was never clear whether this move was intentional. …

The Cradle, Arena Stage

The Cradle, Arena Stage

Theatre Collections at Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University Libraries

Special Collections & Archives contains several important named theatre collections. Notable collections include the Arena Stage Collection, the Robert Breen / American National Theater and Academy Collection, and the Theater of the Thirties Collection. Used by researchers all over the world, these collections contain production notebooks, playbills, playscripts, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, and news clippings.

Violent Inscriptions: Writing the Body and Making Community in Four Plays by Migdalia Cruz

Migdalia Cruz is a Nuyorican playwright from the South Bronx who studied under the mentorship of Maria Irene Fornes at the International Arts Relations (INTAR) Hispanic Playwright's Lab in New York City during the early to mid-1980s. The author of more than thirty plays, Cruz is one of the few among the current generation of Latina dramatists able to secure a series of grants and fellowships enabling her to work as a full-time professional playwright. Her plays have been commissioned nationwide by such established production houses as The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Playwright's Horizons, Cornerstone Theatre Company, INTAR, the W.O.W. Cafe, Theater for a New Audience, Arena Stage, and The Working Theater. A 1991 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Cruz has also received critical recognition as an NEA and McKnight Playwrighting Fellow and a TCG/PEW National Artist in Residence. In 1995, Latino Chicago Theatre Company produced a season of her work that included Fur, Cigarettes and Moby Dick, and Lolita de Lares (on Lolita Lebron). [End Page 51] Published in several literary anthologies and texts for actors, 2 her dramatic writing represents a variety of genres with such wide-ranging works as Frida: The Story of Frida Kahlo (a musical), Telling Tales (a collection of monologues), and The Have-Little (realist drama). Cruz's willingness to experiment with different types of aesthetic forms and thematic content stems from her five years with Fornes at INTAR writing alongside other prominent voices in US Latina/o drama, including Cherríe Moraga, Caridad Svich, Carmen Rivera, and Nilo Cruz. In interviews, she credits her experiences in the lab, most especially through Moraga's political boldness and Fornes's inimitable commentary, for playing the largest role in her development as a playwright. Of her time with Fornes, Cruz says, "She was very tough on me. I had been writing things that didn't really have any meaning. I was thinking this is what I should be writing, or this is how writing sounds, or this is how you sound intelligent. Instead, she made me look inward and think about how people talk, what people say, who are the people I know best to write about." 3

Peformance Review: Mr. Bundy

Reviewed by: Mr. Bundy Claudia Barnett Mr. Bundy. By Jane Martin. Actors Theatre of Louisville, Bingham Theatre. 14 March 1998. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Catherine (Stephanie Zimbalist), Cassidy (Margaret Streeter), and Robert (Mark Schulte) in the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s production of Jane Martin’s Mr. Bundy, directed by Jon Jory. Photo: Richard Trigg. Mr. Bundy shares its topical subject matter with Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (see Jill Dolan’s review in Theatre Journal 50.1: 127–28). Vogel’s complex and troublingly sympathetic child molester, Uncle Peck, is replaced, however, by a simplistically sympathetic, harmless old man, and consenting, alluring Li’l Bit is instead an absolutely innocent eight-year-old girl. In fact, the audience can hardly imagine Mr. Bundy, white-haired and stoop-shouldered, molesting anyone—or spunky Cassidy Ferreby allowing it. And that’s the point. Whereas in Vogel’s play the bystanders form a Greek Chorus, a cast of clowns, in Martin’s they fight the serious battles. Cassidy’s parents are informed by a scruffy trucker and his leopard-clad wife that their next-door neighbor is a convicted child molester. Jimmy Ray and Tianna Bosun insist that the Ferrebys organize the neighbors and run Mr. Bundy out of town. Their arguments play on everyone’s worst fears, leaving the Ferrebys in a quandary. Mr. Bundy seems so nice, and Cassidy adores him. Catherine is a psychologist and trusts Mr. Bundy’s rehabilitation, especially because of his advanced age. Hers is the voice of reason throughout the play, the one who insists that we examine each individual on a case-by-case basis. But the Bosuns have “evidence”: smudged, barely legible copies, as well as their own murdered five-year-old daughter. And they have God. As in Keely and Du, the playwright paints terrifying portraits of right-wing Christians who use un-Christian means to achieve questionable ends. Jimmy Ray, bearded, long-haired, and ominous compared to preppy Robert Ferreby, bullies his way into the Ferreby house one night with “information” about Cassidy’s safety. His dialogue throughout the play is characterized by implied threats and half truths, and his wife Tianna is not much different, though together they form a sort of good cop/bad cop duo. The Bosuns are not-quite-comical stereotypes who, in spite of their methods and mannerisms, manage to capture our (and the Ferrebys’) attention by arousing instinctive fears. Peggity Price struts across the stage in a white party dress, microphone in hand, as Tianna-turned-televangelist, preaching shrilly that “evil” cannot be forgiven. Forgiveness is in the foreground at the Ferreby house, where Catherine attempts to pardon Robert’s extramarital affair and cannot understand his unwillingness likewise to pardon Mr. Bundy. Stephanie Zimbalist and Mark Schulte play the Ferrebys as subdued and uptight; they wear browns and beige, and their clipped dialogue—almost always an argument—has a Mamet-like rhythm. The problem is, these characters talk too much—always a liability with a psychologist on stage. And at some point toward the end, they stop making sense. The Bosuns give them three days to get rid of Mr. Bundy before they will publicly expose him, but Catherine invites him over for coffee as if he will be there next week. They ignore the external threat as their internal world disintegrates. Margaret Streeter plays Cassidy with a disarming innocence; at points her shirt rides up above her waist and, like the child she is, she does not notice. When Cassidy’s parents awaken her at night to assuage their fears, she rolls her eyes and tells them that their questions are “yucky.” She is smarter than they are, knowing less. Director Jon Jory has made excellent production choices, including casting children as stage hands who receive their own curtain call. The many scenes of this play occur in several locations, represented simplistically with tables, chairs, and a couch. Watching children labor with adult furnishings seems fitting. Monologues are spoken throughout the scene changes and the arena stage is never fully dark. The sparseness of the set also lends itself, however, to distracting moments of pantomime, such...

Cast and caste in the performing arts: Simulacra of character

In November 1987, the Arena Stage in Washington hosted a symposium on non traditional casting in the theater. Even though Blacks and other racial minorities account for some 17 per cent of the population at large, minority actors have filled only 12 per cent of acting jobs in regional theaters and a mere six percent of casts in Broadway plays (Gelb, 1988). Accordingly, participants in the symposium were asked to identify the most appropriate remedies for enabling actors who belong to minorities to display their talents. Clearly, the exploration of these remedies raises questions about the social bases of the theatrical illusion. The co-chairman of the non traditional casting project, a non profit organization seeking to change the processes by which actors are traditionally selected points out that: "While a white actor is perceived as a human being, the third world actor is seen as a Hispanic, or an Afro-American human being. . . . Minority actors are limited to embodying the thoughts, feelings, and aspirations of their own races [we would add or their gender]." Since audiences are partly responsible for the contrasts between the universalism assigned to the former and the particularism assigned to the latter, "[they] should be taught to focus on the essence of what is presented rather than stumbling over the fact of an actor's size, weight, pigment, whatever" (as quoted by Gelb, 1988). Yet, as in any other form of communication, failures of the theatrical illusion may be attributed to conflicting forces (Jauss, 1982). To be sure, audiences may feel cosmopolitan enough to regard the ethnic or physical appearance of performers as irrelevant to their understanding of the dilemma which is at the root of the play, the scenario, or the argument. But even when they consider it to be essential to such an understanding, their responses may be mere a posteriori reactions to the performing skills of the interpreters. As the initial concern of the debate is focused on bread and butter issues, it highlights the universality of the miseries experienced by all occupational groups. As the debate evolves toward an assessment of the nature of the theatrical illusion, it also underscores dilemmas

A Review of Roe by Arena Stage, a co-production with Oregon Shakespeare

This performance review examines the Washington, D.C. premiere of Lisa Loomer's Roe, which is a coproduction by Arena Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Berkeley Repertory. The review explores the way in which the Loomer's play with its exploration of history, and this particular production's rendering of that exploration, has taken on new urgency in the shifting political climate caused by the election of Donald Trump.

Designing Random Focus

People gather in two different basic ways. Fixed focus. Multiple focus. In the fixed focus relationship the audience and the performers are locked together within a clearly defined limit, like TV in a bar, the math professor at the blackboard, or a cock fight. The event is fixed between limits. The TV camera moves to keep the football “on camera.” The professor will not write on the floor. The cocks will not be let out of the pit. The Stratford, Ontario theatre, the San Francisco Opera House, the Washington Arena Stage, and your local Loew's are all fixed focus.

The White Man's Burden

When questioned about the audience at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre, a man who ought to know said, “Well, we're working out a deal with New York. They're going to send us 300,000 Jews and Italians and we're going to send them 300,000 Swedes and Norwegians.” The Guthrie started because Sir Tony wanted a regional theatre and Minneapolis came up with the best bid. Like starting an industry or relocating a plant. Three years have passed since the missionaries arrived. Sir Tony is leaving and his associate artistic director, Douglas Campbell, is replacing him. The theatre has developed into one of the two best in the nation (Washington's Arena Stage is the other). But something is missing—dialogue with the audience.Sir Tony directed two plays last season, The Cherry Orchard and Richard III. The first was a museum piece of exquisite taste, the second a bold and bald exercise in condescension.

The Stratford Shakespearean Festival

UMMER stock is a light-hearted affair. Summer festivals often feel some obligation to be equally attractive to the dilettante tourist. The Canadian Stratford could hardly have been accused this year of following the trend. In fact, as far as much of the press of Canada was concerned, a program which offered The Comedy of Errors, Troilus and Cressida, and T imon oJ Athens seemed eccentric-a little-known comedy, a little-played tragedy, and a difficult, dark-period drama. Michael Langham, the artistic director of Stratford, does not, however, conceive his role to be entirely one of purveying the old favorites to a summer audience. The Stratford Theatre is, and always has been in its ten-year existence, a place where Shakespeare is done just as well as the resources of the Foundation permit. Since the Foundation has a first-rate, permanent theater seating over 2,000 people, and a yearly budget near the million-dollar mark, its resources are considerable. Excellence then is the aim of the Ontario Stratford and each of the three plays this summer was to be approached in its own way to give a new and vital interpretation to a public paid the compliment of being regarded as intelligent. Each play was produced in an entirely different fashion: Troilus and Cressida was a fairly orthodox production, but the arena stage of Stratford could make the battles hair-raising; The Comedy of Errors, directed by a French Canadian trained in the French classical tradition, was commedia dell' arte; Timon of Athens was done in modern dress with a musical score composed by Duke Ellington. Of these three plays, the one which excited most comment and interest was not, curiously enough, the modern dress Timon, but the commedia dell' arte Comedy of Errors. Jean Gascon, the director, was the co-founder of Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde in Montreal, and has had a rigid training in French classical theater. Whether because of this or despite it, he chose to ignore the text of The Comedy of Errors and make it a Punchinello pantomime affair. All the costumes were exaggerated pantaloon (designed by Robert Prevost and Mark Negin), and the whole performance was done as a play within a play, five Punchinellos acting as general theatrical factotums around the stage. They lighted the little lamps which stood around the center area and in which the action was from then on confined. They made comments in mime on the action of the play, which sometimes called for the actors to stop dead in their tracks and wait for this foolery to happen and to get its laugh. Though the idea of presenting it as a play within a play was good, in Jean Gascon's hands it had three disastrous effects. First, it reduced his playing area