The Rainbow Theatre Project, dedicated to producing art which captures the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, will present a five-production sixth season which includes a cabaret and a work from one of America’s greatest playwrights.
The season will begin with Siegmund Fuchs’ In the Closet, a story about four gay men, each in a different stage of his life. Fuchs is a Washington lawyer specializing in litigation for the Department of Justice; in addition to his playwriting, he has written academic work about abuse victims. Broadway World’s Roy Berko, reviewing a 2017 production of the play in Cleveland, observed “it is a script that incites a great deal of thought.” Chagrin Valley Today’s Herb Hammer says “ Mr. Fuchs insists you stay alert and use your senses. If you do, you will find ‘In the Closet’ to be gratifying.” Rainbow Artistic Director H. Lee Gable will direct; the play will run from August 16 to September 15, 2018.
Next up for Rainbow is a two-day cabaret by composer and signer Jeffrey Higgins which he’s entitled A Deafening Sound. Higgins styles his cabaret, which will run on November 23rd and 24th of this year, “one gay man’s life through song.” Higgins’ life is certainly an interesting one; in 2015, he was fired as music director of the Mother Seton Catholic Church in Germantown, Maryland because he was a gay man living with his husband, Robert Higgins.
Rainbow’s next show will be Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, the story of a young gay man in 1990s Manhattan who is so tired of negotiating safe sex that he decides to become celibate. The New York Times’ Steven Holden called it a “wildly funny…comedy” which “captures the strained social tenor of Manhattan life as it is lived right now perhaps more acutely than any play since John Guare’s ‘Six Degrees of Separation.'” From January 17 to February 10, 2019; Robert Mintz will direct.
Rainbow will then produce Tennessee Williams’ last Broadway play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, an examination of the writer’s loneliness through the lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The play begins at the mental hospital where Zelda spent her last days and spirals backward into their lives together. The play was not a critical success, principally because it was not an accurate biography of the Fitzgeralds — though Williams later said that he never intended it to be. Responding to critics, Williams said, “I put too much of my heart in [my plays] to have them demolished by some querulous old aisle sitters.” Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which Greg Stevens will direct, will run from April 4 to 28 of next year.
Rainbow wraps up its season with Stonewall 50, an anthology of stories and other art to mark the 50th anniversary of the resistance to the police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a tavern frequented by gay men. Rainbow has not announced a director for this production, which will run from May 31 to June 2, 2019.
All shows will be in the DC Arts Center at 2438 18th Street NW in Washington. Tickets for Click here for tickets to In The Closet and Jeffrey Higgins; season tickets are not yet available.
