Washington Theater Review

The big bang you hear on October 1st will be the sound of DC’s theater universe expanding yet again. The Harman Center for the Arts, the brightest new star in the exploding constellation of DC theaters, bursts onto the scene with an inaugural season packed with pageantry, rarely staged plays, huge casts, and a stellar talent lineup, including the long-awaited return of a favorite DC actor.

The Harman Center, comprising the current Lansburgh Theatre and the new 775-seat Sidney Harman Hall, will be home to the Shakespeare Theatre Company and a venue for local performing arts companies and presenters. With its grand marquee and dramatic glass façade, Sidney Harman Hall will make a dazzling first impression on Penn Quarter visitors. Inside, the flexible seating, sprung floor, and acoustically engineered space make it the perfect mid-size venue for the various dance, music, and even opera companies that will share the space. Hopes are high that the Harman, built in partnership with the City of Washington, will also become a “cultural destination” for tourists seeking a capital experience beyond the monuments.

But for DC theaterati, it’s all about the shows. With the addition of a second performing space, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC) season expands from five to eight productions and opens up a whole range of new possibilities to directors and designers. Best of all, the Harman Hall has been designed so that the configuration can be changed from thrust, proscenium, or arena stage in a matter of hours, making it possible to run three productions simultaneously in the two theaters.

The idea of opening up extends to STC programming, too. In the inaugural season lineup, five of the eight plays are by playwrights other than Shakespeare, and plans are to continue to produce works in a broader range of the classical canon.

Lights Up on Michael Kahn
Seated in the stately Lansburgh lobby on a summer afternoon is the prime mover behind the Harman Center, STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn. Now in his 21st year at the STC helm, Kahn has guided the company through a period of phenomenal artistic and organizational growth. Over the past five years he has spearheaded a $77 million capital campaign and toiled alongside architects and engineers to overcome construction and design obstacles.

Today Kahn’s animated face is tinged with fatigue, his soft voice barely audible above the drone of a distant vacuum cleaner. But when he begins to describe the Harman Center inaugural season, the lights go on in his eyes. One gets the feeling that he’s anxious to leave the world of architects and engineers behind, for the ribbons to be cut and the speeches made, so he can get down to the creative business of making theater.

First up in the new Harman Hall are Marlowe’s rarely staged Tamburlaine and Edward II playing in rotating repertory. Why open with Marlowe, not exactly a household name, instead of, say, Shakespeare? “I wanted to do a celebratory thing and Tamburlaine is a big splashy show,” Kahn begins, then interrupts himself as a distant memory dawns. “You know, I think Tamburlaine was the show that opened the National Theatre,” he recalls. “I think I saw it with Albert Finney.” (A fact check reveals that Kahn’s memory is accurate. Finney starred in the 1976 National Theatre production in London that inaugurated the Olivier Theatre.) “So you see, I’m not so crazy!”

With Kahn directing Tamburlaine and, in the spring, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, that leaves slots open for six guest directors. Kahn describes the distinguished roster he has assembled as “theatrical directors who work well with actors, with a real appreciation for classical text, but also great appreciation for physical life on stage and design.”

In choosing Australian director Gale Edwards for Marlowe’s Edward II, Kahn cites her “ability to take a hard classical text and make it really alive.” In the next breath, he confesses to an ulterior motive: luring back the talented Wallace Acton, who had worked with Edwards in Hamlet and Richard III before going on an extendedacting hiatus.“I knew if anyone would be able to get him back it would be Gale,” he says. “And we all wanted to get Wally back in theater.” Acton will play the title role of the weak, love-obsessed monarch in Marlowe’s last play, known for its magnificent language and homoerotic themes.

Kahn then tapped his protégé Ethan McSweeney to direct Shaw’s Major Barbara, which will be the first show to try out the Harman Hall’s fly system and ingenious retractable proscenium arch. Meanwhile, back at the Lansburgh, the illustrious Keith Baxter will direct The Imaginary Invalid starring René Auberjonois in his STC debut. “I thought what Keith had done with Restoration (in STC’s The Country Wife) would be great to bring to Molière,” remarks Kahn. Mary Zimmerman, back after her Pericles directorial triumph, will tackle the area premiere of Argonautika, a new take on the tale of Jason and the Argonauts first staged by Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company.

Rounding out Kahn’s roster are “up and coming directors” Rebecca Bayla Taichman and David Muse, both making their STC directorial debuts. “I like giving young directors the same opportunity I was given by Joe Papp,” said Kahn, “who gave me my first Shakespeare when I was in my 20s.”

Though Taichman has no Shakespeare on her professional résumé, she directed The Taming of the Shrew as a Yale School of Drama grad student and has wanted to revisit it ever since. She approached Kahn with the idea nearly two years ago after he complimented her luminous production of The Clean House at Woolly Mammoth. When Kahn decided he wanted a woman’s take on Shrew, he called Taichman.

“I’m utterly delighted,” crowed Taichman of her Shrew opportunity. She envisions a contemporary Commedia dell’Arte production with Petrucchio and the servants as dark clowns. “We’re really going to push the limits of the romance and violence,” she said, adding that she spent a day auditioning acrobats and aerialists. “It will be hilariously fun,” she promised, “and quite cranky.”

A name that is becoming familiar to DC audiences is David Muse, the young director with a growing reputation for critically acclaimed regional productions, most notably Frozen at Studio Theatre. As STC Associate Director since 2005, Muse has done a lot of assistant directing, but Julius Caesar, running in the spring “Roman Repertory” with Antony and Cleopatra, will be his first STC mainstage production. This season Muse is moving up to Associate Artistic Director, with responsibilities that include overseeing an expanded artistic staff, casting, and institutional planning. Other than knowing he’ll have “a lot of actors on stage” (some 38, according to an STC publicist) he’s had little time to develop concepts for his own show due to the “enormous undertaking” of planning the Harman Center opening.

“We’re not only opening a new theatre, but we’re also performing huge plays in revolving repertory. Twice!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been focusing a lot on how to increase the sophistication of our casting apparatus to handle the number of large productions on our horizon.”

Rotating Repertory: Director’s Dream, Logistical Nightmare
Muse went on to describe how the Roman Repertory will work. “We know that almost all of the actors will be in both plays,” he explained, “and that the same actor will play any character who appears in both.” For example, Patrick Page has been cast as the young Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, then takes on the title role as the aging ruler in Antony and Cleopatra. “We know that we’ll rehearse both plays simultaneously over a seven-week period, with alternating ‘priority days.’”

By all accounts, it takes a company with extraordinary resources to take on the complex logistics of rotating repertory, but the rewards are often worth the effort. Repertory can deepen the theater experience for audiences by showing a playwright’s growth from early to late career stages. DC audiences will recall the spectacularly successful 2002 Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration that garnered raves for the other Michael K (Kaiser), President of the Kennedy Center.

Later this season Arena Stage will tackle repertory for the first time in many years with two Arthur Miller dramas playing in rotation. According to Arena dramaturg Mark Bly, the Miller festival will help position Arena as “a theater for American voices.” He is planning a series of events that will illuminate and contextualize Miller’s work. If audience response is positive, Bly predicts Arena will produce more repertory in subsequent seasons.

“It’s the dream of all artistic directors to do repertory,” declared Kahn. “Of course for the actors it’s much more fun. They get to play one character in the afternoon and another in the evening. It’s fun for audiences, too, who enjoy seeing actors switch roles.”

Quick Change Artist
Another of the young theater artists on Kahn’s up-and-coming list is Lee Savage, the designer with the awesome assignment of creating sets for both Marlowe plays in the opening rotation. Savage, who worked with Kahn on last season’s electrifying Richard III, is challenged with creating sets that not only work artistically, but must also conform to the quick turnaround demands of the rotating repertory schedule. The goal is to perform one show at the matinee and switch to the other for the evening performance.

As Savage explained, Tamburlaine will be staged with an end-stage configuration, while Edward II will be in thrust, with the audience on three sides. “Most times when an audience sees shows in repertory they share a common set,” said Savage. “Not in this case. These are very different plays and each has its own space and vocabulary. In Tamburlaine, we’re striving for barbaric splendor, accentuating the pageantry of it all. Edward II is a straightforward play; we’ll find the spectacle within it and accentuate each scene.”

All of this technical wizardry will transpire while STC is working out the kinks that inevitably crop up in an untested venue. “We’re going to learn a lot from these first two plays,” admits Kahn. “There are all kinds of things in Tamburlaine—chariots and cages and tents—but not built scenery. I’m interested in beginning to understand just how the room can be used, and then what other elements can be brought in. When we get to Major Barbara at the end of the season, then we’ll have a proscenium and a built set.”

Though the Harman Hall is being touted as a flexible space, it’s interesting that no one is calling it a black box, a term which connotes a blank canvas. Savage insists that the Harman is anything but blank, describing it instead as having “a lot of character, airy and filled with wood. The ceiling is high, so it feels like a three-dimensional space,” he explained. “In the Harman, nothing separates you from the spectacle, it’s immediate.”

And though the Harman seats nearly double the audience of the Lansburgh, Kahn claims it will retain the intimate feel of the older theater. “No seat is further away than the last row here at the Lansburgh,” he said. “The connection to the actor is the same.”

A chameleon stage, an expanded season, spectacular intimacy (or is that intimate spectacle?) It all adds up to what Kahn calls “a theatre of possibilities” at the new Harman Center.

Charlotte Sommers is an arts journalist whose knowledge is grounded in experience as an actor, choreographer, and arts administrator.

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The Grand Opening Celebration of the Harman Center for the Arts is on October 1. The Taming of the Shrew opens Sept. 25 in the Lansburgh Theatre. Edward II opens on Oct. 27 and runs in repertory with Tamburlaine, opening Oct. 28, in Sidney Harman Hall.