DC Theatre Roundup: Meeting a New Arts Scene

I moved up to DC from Atlanta in late May, right before my hometown’s fringe festival was getting started. It’s hard enough to leave behind Atlanta’s badass arts scene, where we’ve been growing innovative art and incredible artists on a regular basis, but it becomes even harder when you leave right in the middle of an incredible grassroots festival run by some of your favorite people in Atlanta…but I was determined fill that arts and theatre void somehow in DC.

I hit the ground running once I got up here. My first night in my new apartment was spent awkwardly hunched over on an air mattress, alternating between ordering furniture and facebook stalking the insane number of theatres and theatre companies in the DMV. And there’s a lot, y’all. I subscribed to events, I joined mailing lists. I was going to get out there and meet people and see art (a moving pro-tip: It is so much easier not to be an introverted hermit when your apartment has no furniture or books or internet or literally anything for the first three weeks you live in it).

The first show I saw was brought to my attention through a Welcome to DC facebook group I was added to. The show, LiveArtDC’s The Merry Death of Robin Hood, took place at DC Reynolds Bar in Petworth, DC (for Atlanta friends: Petworth is basically the Kirkwood of DC- a place just riding just far enough below the crest of gentrification to still have energy and verve). The show was exactly what I wanted my first DC theatre experience to be- intimate, home-grown, small-scale and raw, just like we make ‘em back home. The audience sat around in the cozy, just-grungy-enough bar as the eyeliner and safty-pin clad britpunk merry men mourned the death of their friend and leader Robin Hood, acting out scenes from his life as they reminisced. The show was fun, rowdy, and intimate, with performers occasionally ousting audience members from their seats to make room for fight scenes and love scenes alike. Everyone was a part of the action (including me- over the course of the show I got married and had a child with one of the merry men).

After the show the director, Jason Schlafstein, came over to me, having overheard me tell one of my fellow meetup attendees that I was getting into playwrighting when I left Atlanta. He introduced me to the rest of the cast, and we chatted about the various theatre companies in DC, and what I should check out coming up.

Among those suggestions was the next show I saw, Mindy Kaling’s Matt and Ben at Flying V (the company of which Schlafstein is Artistic Director). This one was set in a much more traditional theatre setting (one that reminded me a bit of Dad’s Garage’s new space). In the show, two young actresses embody Matt Damon and Ben Affleck from there college years, and what happens one day when the script to Good Will Hunting suddenly falls from the sky and onto their coffee table. The show was light, hilarious, and thoroughly enjoyable, and while the text itself wasn’t terribly substantive, watching two women perform in drag forced a spotlight on all of these weird confusing feelings about gender, how we portray it, and even how we portray gender-bending and drag… but then the play made no attempt to tell the audience what to do with those feelings. It didn’t address them at all. It just left them there, undigested, and my brain is still chewing on them weeks later.

For my third show, I went big budget and full production, managing to charm my way into being the +1 of a theatre critic who was writing a review of Jason Robert Brown’s new musical The Bridges of Madison County at the Kennedy Center. As someone who grew up on Parade, and who is known to belt Songs from A New World in the shower, I’m a reasonably big fan of Jason Robert Brown (he even dated a fellow cast member from the first ever play I was in, so I feel a special weird two-degrees-of-kevin-bacon sort of effect with him). While the Kennedy Center was gorgeous, and I totally fangirled when I found out that Jason Robert Brown himself was conducting the orchestra, the show itself was underwhelming. It was far too sterile for what was meant to be a story of a passionate romance, and the storyline top-heavy and spread thin. That said, the lighting designer, Donald Holder deserves every possible award known to mankind, and his design is worth the cost of going alone (says the girl who got a free ticket, but still).

Last night marks the opening night of Capital Fringe. Seeing a show and knowing no one involved in the process is a foreign feeling for me already (I quite literally grew up in Atlanta theatre- my first show was when I was 9 years old), but trying to navigate an entire three and a half week long, 100+ show festival when I have no working knowledge of the theatre scene is daunting at best. Luckily enough for me- I’ve somehow managed to make friends with three fringe reviewers.

I went with one of them to see Petunia and Chicken by Animal Engine, a charming two-person storytelling team touring the show around the fringe circuit. Being southern, and growing up in the home state of Joel Chandler Harris (father of Brer Rabbit, among other stories), storytelling runs deep in my blood, so this show felt a bit like home, and it brought to mind the rough, bare-bones storytelling teams who used to perform quasi-educational folk stories for us in elementary school. Armed with nothing but a hat, a scarf, and folk songs, the performers (Carrie Brown and Karim Muasher) tell a story of two young lovers in the nebraska prairie at the turn of the century, in a story based on the writings of Willa Cather. The show is well crafted, and it’s nearly impossible not to become deeply invested in the story, which takes you from light-hearted and goofy to a handful of heart-wrenching moments of loss and pain. But the show still feels like a rough draft. Muasher and Brown have some great raw material to work with, but there are moments of tension cut a bit too short, and interesting narrative devices that aren’t quite uniformly used in the show (for example, there is a brilliant use of breath as a way of creating setting and pacing and character used very strongly in the beginning of the show that is quickly and randomly abandoned until one random and jarring moment near the end when it returns). But that’s also the joy of Fringe, right? Seeing plays that are still in the process of growing. I’d love to see where this one is going.

I’m planning on trying to hit at least one fringe show a day over the next few weekends. I’ll try and post my thoughts and observations here as I get to know DC and the theatre scene more, but anyone who’s followed my blogs in the past knows not to trust my promises to update regularly (I say, fully aware that I haven't updated this blog in over a year). But if any of you are ever in DC, I’m happy to grab a drink and share all I’ve learned so far. If you have suggestions of other shows or theatre companies I should check out, let me know in the comments!