Mary Lincer - Page 3

Led by the masterful Mabel del Pozo in the title role and Luz Nicolás as her aunt, GALA Hispanic Theatre has mounted a nuanced and visually rich production of Federico García Lorca's 1935 play, Doña Rosita la soltera, adapted by Nando López.

It doesn't get more site-specific than this, people: Solas Nua's doing a play called In the Middle of the Fields in the middle of a field! Starring as the field, P Street Beach; who knew she's been waiting for her close-up as a legit house all this time?

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused many theatres and theatre companies to struggle to stay afloat. But the 39-year old Actors' Center of Washington (AC) has found ways to adapt which sustain its mission to provide actors with resources to help them to succeed. The importance of the on-line audition announcements, the library of plays, the postings of PWYC performances and other events, and the on-line casting database, which the AC manages for its 800+ members, has necessarily receded during this time of closures. But Emily Morrison, Acting Executive Director of the AC, says that the classes, workshops, and training services always announced and provided by the AC have now increased in significance. Historically, the non-profit Actors' Center has organized its activities around actors' needs, she explains, pointing out that actors have to stay in shape just as athletes do. Since auditioning for shows has been curtailed by the pandemic, Morrison notes that it's the perfect time for actors to work on developing new skills while maintaining techniques. Accordingly, the AC has expanded its role in actor training.

Theatre people pre-date the gig economy.  Itinerant performers entertained villages centuries before the first theatre building was constructed.  And Shakespeare's Globe Theatre often had to lay off the whole company because of epidemics of plague.  Now, in the Washington, DC area, ninety theatre companies have had to cease operations because of covid-19.  Many of those who work in them as actors, designers, lighting, sound, and costume staff, directors, and box office personnel do not have benefits such as sick leave and health insurancea?'they just get paid show to show.  Fifty productions had to be cancelled and twenty more, which were about to open, never will.

By 1939. the Depression had begun to wane, but Dorothy still took a road trip to Oz to find out that there's no place like home. John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath that year; the Joad family also had to leave their Oklahoma home and hit the road because the Dust Bowl was no Miss Gulch nor a dream they'd wake up from. Steinbeck called the road they took, Route 66, the Mother Road which has given Octavio Solis his title for Arena's current production through March 8.

Angry irony does not usually get used to describe the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein. But there isn't always a bright golden haze on the meadow. 'You've got to be taught to be afraid/of people whose eyes are oddly made/and people whose skin is a different shade,' came from his pen as did, 'You've got to be taught before it's too late/before you are six or seven or eight. . . .' The character who sings these words in South Pacific is furious because he's a white man in love with an Asian woman, and in the late 1940s, he's surrounded by people who'd find her eyes to be oddly made. Adam Turner, the eponymous character in Anna Ziegler's Boy being taught what to be before it's 'too late,' also has the double whammy of being the person who doesn't fit society's idea of how to be. The situation jumps out of Hammerstein's league into Orwell's because it's doubleplusungood. But that word's off the table as applied to Keegan Theatre's fine production of the 90 minute Boy; directed with skill and compassion by Susan Marie Rhea.

Jim Thompson, an Army Ranger and POW of the Viet Namese for 9 years, deserves to have his story widely known. In 2001, Tom Philpott published an oral biography of Thompson; later that year, the next undeclared war was triggered. Glory Denied, a 90 minute opera based on Philpott's book, definitely contributes to raising Thompson's profile. Urban Arias has mounted a strong production of the 2007 one-act work in English through January 19 in the Keegan Theatre's space on Church Street.

Conor McPherson's 2006 play, Port Authority, now onstage in Bethesda at Quotidian Theatre, lacks bells, whistles, or coups de theatre. But Thornton Wilder quoted Molière as saying that all he needed for theatre was passion and a platform or two. And that's what's on offer in the well-acted revival of the 90 minute piece.

So much theatre nowadays derives from other media, for better or worse. It can be fun to watch teacups dance and phantoms pilot gondolas, but all mermaids do not get creatively adapted equally. Fortunately Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Live depends on its hybrid nature: the fun of it comes from the fact that it's salad. Once a TV show that combined bad movies with snarky comedy, now at the National Theatre, it's still bad movies and comic takedowns of them, but also people, bots (er, puppets), songs, and sketches.

Soprano Amanda Palmeiro, now performing the title role at English language performances of Butterfly for the InSeries, deserves an opera career as sensational as her voice. Already a prize-winner at Met auditions, she'll perform Papagena with the Washington National Opera's Domingo Cafritz Young Artists program at the Kennedy Center in November.