Puppet theater has long enjoyed popularity in Washington. The region has often generated a vibrant children’s theater scene offering a multiplicity of styles for a variety of audiences. One particularly effervescent strand in the tapestry of Washington puppetry began to be woven in 1967 when Bob and Judy Brown arrived from New York. Bob Braunschweiger, […]
Black Theatre: Jennifer L Nelson reflects on African Continuum Theatre Company
In his 1996 speech, “The Ground On Which I Stand,” acclaimed playwright August Wilson charged the American theatre industry to take seriously the funding and producing of Black theatre. This includes not casting Black actors in roles originally written for white actors (condemning “colorblind” casting), but rather to program plays by Black playwrights, hire Black […]
1973: After Wounded Knee, Washington Theatre Club presents Chief Dan George in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
Chief Dan George commanded attention when he stepped onto a Washington stage in May, 1973. He did so despite plentiful distractions. Just a few hours after his DC debut, Congress launched the Watergate Hearings that eventuated a year later in President Nixon’s resignation. People nonetheless paid attention. Celebrity no doubt played a role. Chief Dan […]
1962: DC police shut down Tennessee Williams’ play at Washington Theatre Club
Wednesday, July 25, 1962 was rather pleasant for a Washington summer’s eve, with the temperature hovering around 70 (though humidity lingered near 80%). Excited theatergoers were piling into the Washington Theatre Club’s carriage house theater to catch a performance of Tennessee Williams’ racy farce Period of Adjustment, then in its eighth straight week packing in […]
How Indian Ink connected Tom Stoppard and Joy Zinoman to their lives in Asia
Perhaps a bit long and convoluted – with a plot that switches back and forth between the 1930s and 1980s – Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink collected generally favorable reviews in early stagings in London and San Francisco. Once Joy Zinoman gave the play its East Coast premiere in 2000, it garnered rave reviews, enthusiastic audiences, […]
1949: Howard University Players’ first in the nation Scandinavian tour earned standing ovations.
On August 31, 1949, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt made her way to the SS Stavergerfjord to see off twenty-one Howard University students and faculty leaving on a European sojourn. All members of the Howard University Players, the group was embarking on a lengthy tour of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany that would earn them […]
Samuel Beckett’s literary agent tried to close Joy Zinoman’s 1998 Waiting for Godot. How she prevailed.
1998 was promising to be a banner year for Joy Zinoman and her Studio Theatre. Already settled into a stunning new building which opened the previous year that shone with what Washington Post architectural critic Benjamin Forgey called an “inner glow,” the company was winning kudos for its positive impact on a long-derelict neighborhood, and […]
Director Alan Schneider. Beckett and others trusted him with their world premieres.
One summer evening in 1941, a young graduate student home visiting his parents from Cornell University, attended a performance at Catholic University directed by Walter Kerr. Schneider was so taken with Kerr’s work that he went backstage and told him that he had never before seen anything of such high quality. Alan Schneider had been […]
Father Gilbert Hartke. The unlikely story of a Catholic University priest and James Cagney
Gilbert “Gib” Hartke was the son of an interdenominational love match that transcended the social norms of late-nineteenth-century Chicago. His father, Emil, the offspring of a prominent first-generation German and Lutheran household, left medical school at the University of Illinois to marry his mother, Lillian Ward, a first-generation Irish Catholic. Emil converted to Catholicism over […]
1984. A “spiritual happening” when Morgan Freeman preached The Gospel at Colonus at Arena Stage
Editor’s note: The mix of cultures has always provided a rich stew for theater, showing us both the universality of human longing and the diverse ways in which it can be expressed. So, for example, the Classical Theatre of Harlem presented King Lear in an African setting with the great André DeShields in the title […]
How 1970’s culture clashes played out on two Washington DC stages
By 1970, Washington, DC had long been a major college town; home to tens of thousands of young people who were trying to define their generation in opposition to the dominant values of their parents. Eventually known as “Boomers,” this postwar generation struggled to delimit what it meant to be part of the dominant culture—and […]
Robert Hooks and the pioneering DC Black Repertory Company
— This season, audiences have the chance to see plays about the African-American experience, written both by a new generation of writers and distinguished playwrights from the 20th century, on numerous stages. Invariably, the audiences are often predominantly white. One man had a grander vision, and for a time here in Washington, DC that vision […]
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