Woolly Mammoth’s 40th year marks the inaugural first season selected by its second Artistic Director, Marìa Manuela Goyanes, and for this year’s slate she has selected shows with significant political implications, many involving race and gender.
The six-show docket will start off with Jackie Sibblies Drury’s deconstructionist, fourth-wall-bending, 2019 Pulitzer-Prize winning Fairview, which begins as a prototypical “Black family drama” in which it’s grandma’s birthday, and Beverley wants everything to be perfect for her, and it’s not — but suddenly morphs when four White commentators muscle in on the action with their analyses. Sounds like a great show for critics! Featuring Shannon Dorsey, Kimberly Gilbert and Laura Harris and directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, this show will run from September 9 to October 6 of this year.
Excuse the extended quote, but the New Yorker’s Hilton Als (another Pulitzer winner) said this remarkable thing about Fairview:
“Drury…rejected the urge to make character and plot converge and add up. It was as if, in the fashion of other downtown theatre artists, she was embarrassed by the idea of payoff and considered satisfaction cheap. A true child of Brecht, she’s militant about pleasure. What she also has in common with a number of her contemporaries is that she doesn’t do intimacy. She seems to view that kind of vulnerability onstage as antique…”
Goyanes agrees that Fairview is a challenging work. “Fairview is a game-changing original work about race, challenging us as much as it entertains, and ultimately shattering the lenses with which we see each other. There is no better way to announce my ambitions than to produce a play as exciting and thorny as Fairview,” she asserts.
Woolly’s second show will be Movement Theatre Company’s What to Send Up When It Goes Down, Aleshea Harris’ choreopoem about murderous racist violence done against Black people. “It’s as though Harris had taken her artistic forebear’s Ntozake Shange’s loose-woven theatrical fabric and stretched into something tighter and crisper, capable of resounding like a struck drumhead,” says Helen Shaw of Time Out New York. Whitney White directs this show, as she did the New York production. Woolly has not announced dates for this production, but notes that the Movement Theatre Company will perform it at other venues in the area before it comes to Woolly.
For the holidays, Woolly will gift us with something familiar — the Second City’s She the People. DCTS’ Meaghan Hannah Davant, reviewing last year’s production, called it “a raucous, racy, often irreverent sketch comedy show about the trials and tribulations of being a woman in America” and the 2019 production –subtitled The Resistance Continues — promises to go further. “This is a dynamic experiment for Woolly and The Second City, to create innovative material and play with the continuity of beloved characters with this comedy troupe in a way unique to Woolly, DC, and the country,” says Goyanes. From December 2, 2019 to January 5, 2020; Carly Heffernan will direct.
Anne Washburn, who once imagined a post-apocalypse America in which our creation myth was an episode of The Simpsons, (Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,) will return to start of 2020 for Woolly with apre-apocalypse play: Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017. This is actually kinda a play about 2016, and what happened then (you know what happened then). But it’s set in 2017, just after the firing of James Comey, when eight old friends have come to dinner in a farmhouse, and wring their hands. And wring them some more. And then conjure up their personal devil. You know who he is. “It’s unwieldy, and inelegant, but boy, is there no one out there like Anne Washburn,” says Connor Campbell of The Upcoming. Woolly is doing this play in association with The Public Theater, where Goyanes used to ply her craft; Saheem Ali directs, and the cast includes Jon Hudson Odom, Tom Story, Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan and James Whalen. From February 10 to March 8 of next year.
In April, Woolly will present the world premiere There’s Always the Hudson, a Philip Seymour Hoffman-award finalist by Paolo Lázaro. T and Lola, both abuse survivors, decide to do the bad things to those who did ill to them. Lázaro herself will play Lola. Lázaro’s “characters leap off the page with tremendous energy, authenticity, and depth,” Goyanes says. From April 6 to May 3, 2020; no director has been announced.
Woolly will wrap up its 2019-2020 with Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick, which is not about what you’re thinking. Instead, it is about a young man named Richard Gloucester, who has cerebral palsy and decides to use his political wiles and manipulative skills to become senior class president. If it makes you think of Richard III, you’re welcome. Barbara Schuler of Newsday called it “brilliantly imaginative”. Moritz von Steulpnagel, who directed this play at New York’s Public Theater, will direct this production. From June 1 to 28, 2020.
For Woolly Mammoth 2019-2020 season packages, click here.
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