DC Theatre Scene

DC Theatre Reviews has an announcement!  Lorraine Treanor who has been working unheralded  here at DCTR has decided to be an official part of the team. Please welcome Lorraine as our Promotions and marketing Director!

Lorraine will be a wonderful addition to our website and brings a wealth of theatre knowledge and production experience to our staff.

Lorraine Treanor loves making things happen She was a Theatre Major at Emerson College in Boston, and spent her nights watching musicals bound for Broadway and playing piano in after-hours jazz clubs. In Chicago she produced theatre, dance, concerts and festivals. She is amazed to be here in Washington at this exciting moment in its theatrical history. She edits the email news service ONSTAGE NEWS for members of Brian’s Theatre Group, contributes occasional interviews to Potomac Stages, and is working on the revival of the Broadway musical The Nervous Set. What’s next? Whatever makes her heart dance. She lives in a log house in Waldorf, MD with husband (and DCTR reviewer) Tim Treanor. Her daughter, Nina, is a faux artist in Chicago.

By Valeria Lamarra with Lorraine Treanor

The Hundred Dresses at Imagination Stage.
Book by Eleanor Estes. Adapted by Mary Hail Surface

In 1944, Eleanor Estes wrote a children’s book called The Hundred Dresses. Set during the Great Depression, it is about a child who stands by and watches as others tease a classmate for being different. Wanda, a Polish immigrant, is taunted because she is poor and speaks with an accent. Trying to gain acceptance, she tells the bullying students that she has 100 dresses. Since she always wears the same dress, this just makes matters worse.

Maddie is the girl who does nothing to help. After Wanda leaves town, Maddie finds out that Wanda did have a hundred dresses after all. But it is too late to stand up for her friend.

The second act belongs to local playwright Mary Hail Surface who allows us to see what happens when Maddie is given another chance to defend someone. “I wanted a play which would help children flex their moral muscles, something that teaches about actions and consequences,” author Surface explained. She has succeeded.

The talented cast is headed by Sarah Fischer, who just closed Studio’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in the lead role of Maddie, and Bette Cassatt, recently of Journeymen’s acclaimed Experiment with an Air Pump, who plays Wanda.

From Valeria:

You are right. It was a talented cast. The adults played children very believably. Ms. Cassatt as Wanda particularly played a child well. She, along with Jacob (Kyle Magley) and Mr. Petronski (Terence Heffernan) had good Polish accents. I would have thought they were Polish. The boys (Magley and Michael Propster) were always in competition with each other and running all over the place. Especially Jack (Propster), who slid across the stage like crazy.

The set worked well. It was a single set which became the school yard, inside the school, their houses, or Mr. Svenson’s yard with just a few changes, so they didn’t have to move set pieces on and off all the time. Tony Cisek was the set designer and Dan Covey was the lighting designer.

The staging was very subtle. For example, if her father’s lunchbox was on the table, Maddie knew it was a bad day. But if the lunchbox was gone, it meant her father found work that day. I also enjoyed Maddie’s daydreams, which gave her the courage she needed, I think, to confront her friends.

Speaking after the show, Mrs. Surface described how children were and still are bullied at school. In her own words, the bullies “have a magnet around their moral compass.”

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