Studio Theatre’s 2019-2020 season will include an appetizer and a main course. The appetizer is a 6-production summer season which the company calls its Showroom; it consists of two full-length plays and four short-run productions, at least two of which will feature you, if you have the will for it. The main course will be a five-production season which will include Studio’s first musical since Grey Gardens in 2008.
Showroom Series:
First things first, though: this summer will feature a reprise performance of Every Brilliant Thing, Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donohoe’s one-actor play which electrified audiences at Olney last year. In that production, Alexander Strain played a man whose suicidal mother inspired him to uncover all the reasons to stay on this planet. “Strain fills the Lab Theatre at Olney with his natural warmth,” wrote DCTS’ Lorraine Treanor here. “He tells this story plainly, in as un-mannered and un-actorly way as possible. When he describes himself at seven, he makes no attempt to impersonate a seven-year-old; when he ages ten years, he does not put on the stomping rebellion of a seventeen-year-old male, but recalls it gently, with understanding and compassion. He radiates sincerity, so that we realize that although this is entirely a work of fiction, every word of it is true.” Strain, an acclaimed actor and a forensic psychologist, will reprise the role, and Olney Artistic Director Jason Loewith will return as the director. From June 19 to July 7, 2019.
Studio will also be producing Drew Droege’s one-actor play about Gerry, the wedding guest from Hell, Bright Colors and Bold Patterns. Gerry, having been invited to the wedding of Josh and Brennan, launches into a critique of gay weddings, then all things gay, then all things human. “Set poolside, this 80-minute evening is essentially an audience with Gerry,” says Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, “who suffers from a serious case of ADHD, throws back cocktails as if they were cleansing juices, possesses a voluminous knowledge of pop culture (who is Shannon Elizabeth, anyway?), wields an acerbic wit that could flay you at 50 paces and has no off button.” Michael Urie, well known to Washington audiences for his appearances in Buyer & Cellar and Hamlet, will direct. From July 9 to August 4 of this year.
The Showroom season will supplement these two productions with short-run shows; two of them will involve you. Spokaoke is a sort of karaoke for speeches; volunteers from the audience read great speeches — Cross of Gold, anyone? — from the Spokaoke machine. Annie Dorsen curates; July 6 (9 PM) and 7 (7 PM). Mortified invites even more audience participation, as you are invited to the stage to remember humiliating incidents from your childhood, and share them with us for our edification. Patterned after the Netflix series Mortified Nation, we get mortified twice on July 13, at 7 and 9:30 PM.
Also on the agenda: two brief cabarets from fearsome divas. On June 28 and 29, Diana Oh will bring selections from Clairvoyance (a spiritual counselor advises her to visit Thailand; she does) and 24 Hour Punk (self-explanatory). Both shows are at 8PM, with Matt Park a/k/a Cute. On July 23, also at 8, Studio will host singer/actor/author Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi in Werk! A Cabaret Celebrating Black Women.
Studio’s main course comes to us with less specificity about dates and directors and cast and stuff, but the company tells us enough to give us a picture.
The Studio Main Series season will start off with a new play by Dominique Morrisseau which evokes a play currently being staged at Mosaic. In Pipeline, Nya teaches at an inner-city school, and what she sees there convinces her to send her son Omari to an expensive private school. But when a teacher there asks him to explain Bigger Thomas’ rage in Native Son, as though it was his secret knowledge as a Black man, he blows up — and is suspended. Nya now must do what she can to save her son from what she fears is his destiny. Morrisseau “confirms her reputation as a playwright of piercing eloquence.” says Ben Brantley of the New York Times. “She bravely and repeatedly dives into the muddled shadows of social issues often presented in cold statistics and cleanly drawn graphs.”
Studio will follow that with another play which touches on race, albeit from a different perspective: White Pearl, from the Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King. This is a story about Clearday, a cosmetics company, which has a dynamic new product — a skin lightener! When the wildly racist first draft of the product’s promotional campaign is leaked on YouTube, the reaction inside the company is — well you can guess what the reaction is. “[T]hey are all exposed in turn as naïve, prejudiced, manipulative and usually unable to stand up for the people being marginalised,” said Polly Allen, reviewing a staged reading for Everything Theatre. “Their jobs are too important, their beliefs too fundamental. Nobody is the hero of the hour…White Pearl can sometimes be hard to watch. However, you shouldn’t look away. ”
John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer-winning Doubt: A Parable follows, a four-hander about a charismatic young Catholic priest and his adversary, a steely old-school nun which hearkens back to the Vatican II days, when Catholicism dropped its policy of clerical distance and paternalism in favor of engagement. Sister Ambrose hates the new approach while Father Flynn embodies it. Here’s the question: is Father Flynn molesting a young boy, as Sister Ambrose accuses? We’ve seen this play done in the DC area over the years. Here’s DCTS’ Roy Mauer’s take on a production at 1st Stage: it is, he says, “a tightly scripted, stirring debate that alternately sings with airy righteousness and reaches deep into suppressed hollows.”
You could be forgiven if, while watching Studio’s next play, Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, you wonder, at first, if you had wandered into a production of Waiting for Godot. Two African-American men, Moses and Kitch, banter aimlessly near a lamppost, making mock calls to room service and ordering mouth-watering meals. Suddenly a cheerful, courtly White stranger appears, immaculately dressed. “Call me Master,” he invites. The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Sheck calls it “a powerfully imaginative drama that will shake up audiences, instantly tagging the playwright as a significant new voice.”
Studio will wrap up its Main Series season with one of its rare musicals: Lisa Kron’s and Jeanine Tesori’s Fun Home, which adapted Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel of the same name. In it, Bechdel peers at her own life and how she came to acknowledge that she is a lesbian while her father tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to hide his own attraction to other men. DCTS’ Jonathan Mandell, who saw the show in New York, called it an “inventive, entertaining, in places exhilarating, and almost inexpressibly heartbreaking show” in this DCTS review.
In addition to its Showroom series and its Main Series season, Studio will have a season of plays for its fourth-floor Studio X, but the company isn’t ready to announce those plays yet.
Tickets for the Showroom Series.
Subscriptions to the Main Season
