Human connection, touch, intimacy. Everyone craves it. The primal urge to forge bonds with those around us is encoded from birth. This election month column is all about theater that acknowledges the power of physical, human attachment and connection. As we head to the polls, shake your neighbor’s hand, give your mom a hug or have lunch with an old friend. There’s so much more that we have in common than what separates us. Read on for our curated selection.
On Right Now
The Art of Care, Mosaic Theater Company
Showing Oct 31 – Nov 24
www.mosaictheater.org
There’s a popular anecdote often attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead about the mark of a civilized society being its ability to care for its most vulnerable . The Art of Care, a new play conceptualized and directed by Dr. Derek Goldman ( This: The Lesson of Jan Karski) spotlights not only the mutually transformative effects of the act of care but also the importance of dissolving boundaries between the arts and medicine.
Dr. Goldman is artistic, executive director and co-founder of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics (The Lab) at Georgetown University. He’s also Professor of Theater and Performance Studies in the Department of Performing Arts and Professor of Global Performance, Culture and Politics at the Walsh School of Foreign Service. He returns to Mosaic to direct The Art of Care having directed Mosaic’s Unexplored Interior in 2015, so it’s a homecoming of sorts. “At core, the piece is an intimate ethnography of the care experiences of seven artists.” Goldman explains. “They’re sharing their own stories and at times performing each other’s stories. We’re creating a simple, elemental ritual of story sharing around this topic. There’s no person that could come to this performance and not have something to connect to.” An award-winning cast of seven DC actors offer up deeply personal stories of care that are interspersed with similar narratives from those whose job it is to care for others. It’s a deeply moving and personal project that Dr. Goldman says he feels a particular affinity for. “A theme of my work and The Lab’s work is trying to slow down the process of forgetting or attuning ourselves to what we’re living through in the present. The (Covid-19) pandemic only deepened and amplified the intersections of performance and politics, global health and medical humanities. This work has grown organically from living through that time.”
The Art of Care has been created in collaboration with The Global Health Institute, the School of Health, School of Nursing, Medstar Health and the Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University. Music is by DC’s own Jabari Exum, a Hip-Hop Theater artist and percussionist whose work you might recognize from the Black Panther 1 and 2 soundtracks. Dr. Goldman hopes that The Art of Care will facilitate even more discussion about what care means beyond not only this performance but also beyond institutions of healing in DC. Come and prepare to be moved.
In the Spotlight
Summer 1976, Studio Theatre
Showing from Nov 13
www.studiotheatre.org
The Vietnam War has just ended. The Free Love movement is a rosy memory, and America is celebrating 200 years since the g of the Declaration of Independence. At a kid’s playgroup where children frolic under the watchful eye of their parents, Diana and Alice size each other up from across the room. Summer 1976 – by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Auburn – is the story of how an unlikely friendship blossoms between these two women in July of 1976. It’s a deceptively simple tale with a timeless message about the power of companionship that’s never been more relevant.
Auburn’s play is being directed by Vivienne Benesch, artistic director at North Carolina’s PlayMaker’s Repertory Company. She explains that the action takes place in 2003 (25 years after Diana and Alice first meet), thus the seven chapters of Summer 1976 are what Benesch calls a “retrospective” of their complex relationship after it has come to an end. “The roles that women fell into in the mid 70s were particular and this play looks at two of those types. Both stopped their educations to become mothers. What I love about this play is that these two women get deeper than that to help each other know that they are more than that.” Set design by Lee Savage and sound by Kate Marvin form unintrusive mnemonic cues that are the perfect backdrop to this story of how friendships can be a guiding light through life.
Summer 1976 isn’t just for the Boomers either, Benesch says. “I think the play speaks beautifully to a younger audience as well. The struggles are no different. Who we are, what we are allowed to do. Where we are with Roe vs. Wade. All these things are on a precipice again.” The message she’d like you to go home with at the end of the evening? “Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself and keep changing.”
Catch Before Closing
Romeo and Juliet, Folger Theater
Showing Oct 1 – Nov 10
www.folger.edu
Strap yourself in and prepare for a wild ride in director Raymond O. Caldwell’s radical reinterpretation of one of the bard’s most beloved plays. This is Romeo and Juliet on amphetamines. The rival houses of Capulet and Montague – differentiated by shades of red and blue in an overt nod to our own feuding Republicans and Democrats – launch political campaigns via live stream. Romeo swigs heavily on an intoxicating blue liquid and Juliet takes frequent hits from a crucifix around her neck. It’s heady stuff and well worth a visit to see at the newly revamped Folger Shakespeare Library.
At the core of his production, states Caldwell, is the power of human connection in a digitized world. What is it about that most basic desire for skin-to-skin that can drive impetuous young lovers to (spoiler alert!) murder and suicide? Cole Taylor and Caro Reyes Rivera more than adequately impart a 21st century Gen Z flavor to the pair of star-crossed lovers destined for heartbreak; their earnest, dewy youthfulness contrasted against multimedia designer Kelly Colburn’s dazzling bombardment of animated phone screens and Jonathan Dahm Robertson’s brutalist sets. The actors come at you from all four sides of the theater in a deliberate attempt to shatter the fourth wall and implicate the audience in this narrative of the love of power, of excess and of the messy fleshiness that is personhood. There’s a lot crammed into Caldwell’s story. Real-life dialogue from current presidential candidates rendered into iambic pentameter using AI, a reference to a very Trumpian border policing dispute and political innuendos galore. Is it too much? See for yourself to decide.
Scene Stealer: Giovanna Alcântara Drummond and John Floyd revel exuberantly in their roles as Mercutio and Benvolio, the confidants to Romeo and Juliet. Drummond’s deliciously hedonistic tale of the journey of Queen Mab through the dreams of sleepers was a delight to behold and Floyd’s Benvolio (adorned with pearls and wearing an enviable pair of heels) imparted both a sensitivity and contemporaneity to this oft-undervalued character.
