Washington Stage Guild, well known as the premier DC producer of the works of George Bernard Shaw, won’t be producing any of the master’s plays this year. Instead, it will serve up four contemporary plays about days gone by, including the concluding episode of Arlene Hutton’s Nibroc trilogy.
Long before the days of Photoshop and fake news, photography was a gravely serious practice, with emotional and spiritual significance. It was colossal enough that a photographer, using only a camera, could present the world with the precise image of a person or a scene. But what if they could, as William H. Mumler claimed, not only photograph the living but the dead, as they sat among us in their ghostly state? The story of Mumler and his persistent debunker, Joseph Tooker, is the subject of Arlitia Jones’ Summerland, which will lead off the Washington Stage Guild’s season on September 27, 2018. Mumler’s claim was particularly powerful in his time — shortly after the Civil War, when the dead were much with us. “Taken at face value, Jones’ Summerland is an engaging and cerebral thriller,” said David Lyman of the The Cincinnati Enquirer. “But why leave it at that? Allow yourself to get caught up in some of its deeper reflections and you’ll find a tale about the pursuit of faith and truth, about our willingness to accept senses that reach beyond science and logic.” Until October 21, 2018; Kasi Campbell directs.
A different form of fakery is the subject of All Save One, a world premiere play by local Greg Jones Ellis. All Save One is the story, set in the early fifties, of a well-known writer, his actress wife and his longtime Secretary who have arrived in Hollywood, soon to be joined by a handsome and charismatic priest and a film producer who has his own little secret. All Save One got its debut reading at the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival last September. That was the page part; this is the stage part, one year later. Carl Randolph directs; All Save One will run from November 15 to December 9 of this year.
Washington Stage Guild will open the new year with the final part of Arlene Hutton’s three-play Nibroc trilogy about Raleigh and May, who love each other in the face of misfortune in the aftermath of the second war. Like Last Train to Nibroc and See Rock City, Gulf View Drive is a character-driven play, with Raleigh and May now living happily in a sleepy Florida town. But then their mothers show up, and don’t leave. And then Raleigh’s troubled sister shows up. And then worse things happen. “The intimate character-based play ‘Gulf View Drive’…thoroughly satisfies on its own merits,” said L.A. Times critic Philip Brandes. Washington Stage Guild Artistic Director Bill Largess directs this work, which will run from January 17 to February 10, 2019.
After Lucas Hnath decided to write a sequel to A Doll’s House, you knew that all of Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century plays about strong women were due for reexamination, and so it is for Hedda Gabler. In Washington Stage Guild’s final show, Resolving Hedda, Jon Klein’s gives a comic look at the iconic character’s reexamination of her condition from a modern perspective, Hedda quotes Wikipedia, talks on her cell phone, rejects — in vivid language — the 19th-century resolution of her dilemma, and blames the person most responsible for her predicament: Henrik Ibsen. “Klein…delivers laughs at a steady pace,” says Daryl H. Miller of the L.A. Times. Steven Carpenter directs this show, which runs from March 21 through April 14 of next year.
Click here for tickets to Washington Stage Guild’s shows.
Check out the entire DC Area theatre season
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