The Shakespeare Theatre Company season ...

... looks like it'll include a Norman Allen play and something starring René Auberjonois.  At least that's what Tboy's guessing, 'cause they're milling about the Lansburgh lobby.  The announce happens shortly.

Also on hand: Ethan McSweeny, Franchelle Stewart Dorn, the Rorschach troops, Rebecca Bayla Taichman (sitting next to Avery Brooks), Keith Baxter, Gale Edwards, Patrick Page, and some dance folk. (They're announcing the first season in the Harman, remember? Mixed bill and all.)

More as it happens ... including, Tboy has heard rumors,* something to do with a Marlowe fest.

MK is up, prepping the crowd for what he says will be "maybe the most momentous day in 20 years of milestones." There's a new house to open Oct. 1 (tour to come in an hour or so), the 775-seat Sidney Harman Hall ... "a national destination theater and a classical theater serving Washington and ... the nation as a whole."

8 mainstage plays -- 2 series in rotating rep ... 20,000 $10 tickets

Harman, up to say a few words, talks not about next season but about the Titus that's forthcoming shortly from Gale Edwards, his seatmate at last night's Will Awards gala: "You will, I have every confidence, experience an expression of Titus that is stunningly relevant ... made possible by a director who understands the sociology of the theater... and the language."

And now the season, as they announce it:

Taichman will do the Shrew to open the season. Said she re-read the play last night, and now she remembers why people look at her suspiciously when she says she wants to direct "this incredibly cranky, incredibly funny play." Her strategy: to let it be "as erotic ... as eerie ... as it wants to be." And more along those lines. She says she's got an untamed beast inside her, too, which makes people chuckle, just the slightest bit uneasily.

To open the Harman Center, MK announces, two plays by Christopher Marlowe. Extraordinary writer, he says, "unjustly unproduced," and besides what better way to get a little attention for the opening of an expensive Shakespeare repertory house than to produce a couple of plays by the man's greatest contemporary rival. MK will direct Tamburlaine the Great, the two parts in one evening. No evidence, MK indicates, that Tamburlaine has ever been done in D.C.  This of course is the Avery Brooks play -- the character never leaves the stage, and at one point he drives a chariot pulled by three kings of Asia, so who else? "Daunting," says Brooks. "Everything I've ever done with Michael is daunting." He's wearing the flashiest snakeskin cowboy boots. Python? Rattlesnake? Must ask. "The task is always challenging; the task is always filled with discovery and joy and ... questions. And so I'm thrilled to be back here again."

Fran Dorn cries a bit when MK introduces her; she'll be coming back to do the Tamburlaine. (What part? Tboy doesn't know the play...)

Gale Edwards will do Edward II, the other play in the Marlowe rep. (Dorn just cracked a minute ago that she played Mortimer in a grad-school production, and she'd be available if anybody wants.) Edwards goes on a bit about how much she likes working here, says she committed to do one of the Harman openers before MK told her which play. Then a little about Marlowe, including the queer bit, the spy bit, the maybe-he-faked-his-death-and-wrote-Shakespeare bit, all of which she sounds distinctly dubious about. Now a little about Edward, and it sounds like she'll be working hard to harmonize the play's politics and its homoerotics -- both of which she seems intensely interested in.

MK back-announces one bit Edwards left out: Wally Acton will be back to play Edward. (He was Edwards' Richard III, remember ... )

The Rorschach twosome -- Jenny McConnell Frederick and Randy Baker -- are up now to announce what they're doing here: The School of Night, which sounds like a kind of Beard of Avon-style backstage story with Marlowe instead of Shakespeare; also possibly Marlowe's Eye, a Naomi Iizuka play that somehow juliennes the Waco apocalypse, the death of an Italian filmmaker, and Marlowe's death together, "all in one language bonanza," Randy says.

Plus Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Jew of Malta in readings, and a Spy Museum whosiwhat on the spy legend.  (Shades of a mini-"Shakespeare in Washington" festival: MK is clearly wanting to keep some buzz going.)

Oh, goody -- Mary Zimmerman is coming to town again. Argonautica, her Jason-and-the-Argonauts adaptation, in a four-city tour. (STC is signaling, remember, that it wants Harman Hall to be a booking house and a destination theater.) Zimmerman on video, talking about her attraction to the "latent theatricality" in epic tales, and noodling a bit about the Jason story as a prelude to Medea. Also: sea monsters and harpies and battles, oh my, which she likes the challenge of staging ... Talk talk talk... Loved being in Washington, walking her dog on the Mall and on Capitol Hill, encouraging it "to do its business on the lawn of the Senate." She's sweet, if a bit dithery, and genuinely seems to like the city.

Ethan McSweeny will do Major Barbara, the first proscenium show in the Harman space. (The Marlowes will be done in thrust or open-stage.) McS is a native, you'll remember, and got his start here. His moms is on hand, as usual, with the Honorable Dad. He riffs on Zimmerman's recently developed affection for Washington, and cracks on the way the neighborhood's changed: "She shoulda been here in the 80s -- you wouldn't have wanted to ride your bike on 7th Street. And you would've needed a really big dog." He goes on to be silly about how nice it is to live in a world where Major Barbara's polemics aren't necessary -- now that there's no worries about military-industrial complex, wealth of the many/poverty of the few, etc. -- and how much fun it's going to be "to dust off this old chestnut and see if it has anything left to say to us."  Also:  A Norman Allen commission for the STC's first-ever series of family programming, based on a Persian folk tale. Free Wednesday-lunchtime performance events in the Harman Hall lobby...

A David Muse Julius Caesar (his first project on the STC mainstage) ... paired with Kahn's Antony and Cleopatra, with Patrick Page as the Antony in both. (Antony's young in one, aging in the other, remember?)

Page, at the lectern, on the stage, is talking about how MK works, and he just said the name of the Scottish Play. Much jitteriness onstage. Tboy now feels less bad about having done it. As with McS and the Shaw, more talk about "present, tangible" expressions of urgent, contemporary political impulses.

More from Muse on Shakespeare's fascination with Rome (he wrote four Roman plays, of which Muse has directed two already) ... Julius Caesar "a play about the disillusionment of ideals, and about how malleable public opinion is in skilled hands ... and it's just full of opportunities for directorial fun. I get triumphal processions, a rioting mob, a night when fire is dropping from the sky..."

MK confessing, re Antony, that his Folger production, lo these many years ago, "I don't think I got it very right." (He's always saying this lately, which Tboy finds endearing. Said it about Hedda and Othello and the Scottish Play, too, if Tboy remembers correctly.) Anyway, re the Folger Antony, you remember: Wading pool, battle of Acteon, A & C kicking about in the water, interns with towels frantically mopping up the mess. "Most of the critics, after they got through talking about Fran Dorn's performance, talked about the towels."

The season wraps with The Imaginary Invalid, directed by Keith Baxter, who's confessing that 15 years ago he dodged MK's phone calls for weeks when MK was trying to rope him in for Measure for Measure. Now he's confessing (rather proudly) that he introduced Gale Edwards to MK.

Now he's going on about the first time he met the delightful young woman who starred in his Country Wife a couple of years back: "She looked like a hooker. She was wearing a skirt that went where no one should really go." She was Tessa Auberjonois, you'll recall, and Baxter says he finds her ravishing, which is how René Auberjonois got hooked up with Malade Imaginaire. As the Argan, of course.

Crankiness from Baxter now, about wretched translations/adaptations. "Cow poop. ... You bimbo of Beelzebub." He'll do the Molière in a serious translation and in the closest thing he can manage to la gloire, the dazzling excess of early 18th-century court theater. (There goes the STC budget.)

Auberjonois now, also in cowboy boots, hamming it up with a big sneeze and "I don't know if I can go on." But only for a minute, and now very serious and respectful.  Tboy didn't know this: His first job out of college was at Arena Stage, and he was in the company for 3 years before going to San Francisco and ACT.

Reminiscing about being in on the founding of the Juilliard drama program with MK, about his work in various regional ensembles over the decades, the point of all of which turns out to be:  He was envious, he said, to see Tessa working in D.C., "because what Michael has created here and what the audience has embraced is really the dream for any serious actor. And I thought it was gone."

And we're done now, off to do the hard-hat. (Amusing photos of which in a minute.)

* OK, possibly shoulda read the Post this morning, but who has time when you're trying to get to a 9:30 breakfast announcement?

Comments

[Randy Baker]

I can't believe I said Bonanza.

[Lucky Spinster]

I can. ;)