Theater
Studio’s Muse
New artistic director first to succeed founder Zinoman
David Muse, the new artistic director of the Studio Theatre. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
He has been labeled a “wunderkind,” but no one would mistake this young man who has taken the helm of the Studio Theatre as a “wild child,” a Rimbaud on the rampage, scary, impudent, a feral genius in a state of artistic nature.
For with David Muse, who became at age 36 Studio’s second artistic director when founder Joy Zinoman passed him the reins last September, the clearest impression is of a young man with artistic time and motion studies on his mind, with a bookkeeper’s talent for cutting costs or adding a new line to the budget — either way, it’s the temperament of a manager.
But that would be the wrong impression also.
The best explanation about what makes David Muse run — as an artist himself, Yale-educated twice over, as well as the new manager of Studio Theatre — may come from Zinoman, who says, “David’s story is the classic, American story of a smart, talented kid from a small town who finds his passion, pursues it with dedication and intensity, and manages to win friends and admirers by virtue of his charm, sensitivity and intelligence.”
She has also said of the preternaturally calm and highly cerebral Muse, a vegan, a cyclist and a fitness buff, that “he’s very seductive and charming,” and Susan Butler, Studio’s board chairman, told the Washington Post that “I hope he likes to raise money.” That’s a handy charm in that rarefied realm of courting wealthy patrons, coaxing those birds from their tall trees and out of their mansions, just another talent for Muse to demonstrate.
Muse must use persuasion to find new patrons just as he has also found old patrons, key sponsors like Zinoman of course but also Michael Kahn at the Shakespeare Theatre Company who plucked Muse from New York City to return to Washington in 2004 to become his artistic aide-de-camp. His talent is in having talent and in inspiring others more senior also with talent to appreciate and invest in his own talent. Which is sizable.
Consider that he has amassed a glittering resume as a director — including staging an all-male version of “Romeo and Juliet” — since arriving in D.C. in 1996 to teach calculus to kids at Eastern High School, when he was soon drawn to theater at Studio’s own acting conservatory, where first he was a student and then began to dabble part-time as a “juvenile,” the theatrical term for a male newcomer, enchanted by the stage, focusing on acting at the beginning, one time even dressing as an ostrich in size-13 high heels. He later tackled directing also.
Today he is filling even bigger shoes, succeeding the trail-blazing Zinoman in command of about 60 staff in four stages seating 900 in three buildings with about 60,000 square feet set in the heart of D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood, anchoring in a former auto showroom at 14th and P Streets. With its more than $5 million annual budget, Studio is a major force on the local theater scene, mounting major productions every year and with its new and impressive 2011-2012 season just announced. And of course he is also in charge, with Joy Zinoman still as its lead faculty member, of the Studio Theatre Acting Company, where his serious career in theater began.
Born in Appleton, Wis., he spent most of his childhood in Fulton, Mo., a small town (11,000). In high school he threw himself into theater and graduated valedictorian. In 1992 he left Fulton, the first student from his high school to attend an Ivy League school, for New Haven and Yale University where he studied ethics, politics and economics. Upon graduation, Muse joined Teach for America and headed for D.C., teaching math and also leading Outward Bound wilderness programs for troubled youths during the summer. But he also found his way to Studio’s acting school, to hone his passion for drama, and in 2000 he returned to Yale, this time to its drama school, to earn a master’s in directing.
Next he moved to New York City, but then he soon came back to D.C. when summoned by Kahn to become his second in command as associate artistic director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he helped grow the company from its single theater at the Lansburgh with the addition of the new Harman Hall. He also was primary liaison for all the talent. He also began to direct plays at Studio’s smaller and edgier 2nd Stage.
The next year, 2006, also at Studio, he directed Bryony Lavery’s critically lauded “Frozen.” Then, last year, while also directing an electrifying version of Neil LaBute’s “Reasons To Be Pretty” there, he also threw his hat into the ring to replace Zinoman. After a scrupulous nationwide search lasting a year, he pulled that rabbit from out of that hat, emerging from half a dozen finalists to step into her shoes there officially last September.
Asked about his artistic vision, he demures at first, saying that he finds it “challenging to say the least” to define such an overview “when the work here is so purposefully eclectic, with so broad a range of theatrical offerings.” He also offers what he calls “another disclaimer” to having any “broad vision,” in that “you need to leave room,” he insists, for the thespian Holy Spirit, “for what feels right, this year, or at any other moment.”
Besides, Muse says, Studio “is not a place that needed someone to come in, to save or reinvent it.” But that said, he has even so his own vision of course, which is why in addition to his managerial mindset he was chosen for this job.
“The challenge,” he says, is “to balance all the historic strengths of this place with some new energy, and that’s what I aim to do.”
Those strengths, he says, include that it stages what he rightly boasts are “plays of real literary and theatrical merit.” He intends, he says, to build on that Studio strong deck of cards by pulling out some new ones — by “going in a little less familiar direction,” in part by bringing in more international productions but especially by “working with living writers, and working with them on the creation of new work,” not generally seen as a strong card at Studio in the past.
“We want to welcome these writers into the building as active collaborators,” he says, pointing to two world premieres slated for Studio in its just-announced 2011-2012 season.
This year, meanwhile, has included a season of superb performances in productions like the gay-themed “Marcus; or the Science of Sweet” (though Muse is straight and has a girlfriend), a season that has been the result of his collaboration with Zinoman, which will also later feature Anna K. Jacob’s “Pop!” a new musical about Andy Warhol. Muses also draws attention to “The History of Kisses,” set for this summer as an example of collaboration with its author, David Cale, someone Muse calls “an electrifying solo performer, returning to D.C. after a long history here, but having been away for about 10 years.”
But it is with next year’s slate of 11 offerings that Muse lets his own muse come to the fore. First out of the gate, Sept. 7-Oct. 16, comes a new play in its U.S. premiere, directed by Muse, “The Habit of Art,” by Alan Bennett, the English author of “The History Boys,” whose career began decades ago as a member of the Oxford-Cambridge troupe of performers, “Beyond The Fringe.”
Starring the great D.C. actor Ted van Griethuysen as the gay poet W.H. Auden, it is set deep in the bowels of London’s National Theatre as rehearsals for a new play go on and the famed composer Benjamin Britten, also gay, and Auden’s former lover, now troubled at work on a new opera, seeks out the poet after a 25-year separation, to collaborate again, this time artistically. Between visits by Auden’s rent-boy and a biographer — briefly mistaken for the rent-boy — these two aging artists must wrestle with long-buried desire and current jealousy and seek to understand all the reasons their erstwhile friendship fell apart.
Called both wistful and “filthily funny,” the play is what Muse calls “an imaginary meeting” between the two great artists, when after a quarter century Auden comes to talk about collaborating again, but the rent-boy keeps returning” as the play progresses.
David Muse (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
Looking to the new season, Muse also points to two world premieres — one in the Lab Series Sept. 28-Oct. 16 — “Lungs,” by Duncan Macmillan,” the chamber drama of a couple trying to face their future in a time of global anxiety over terrorism and erratic weather. The other world premiere comes next February and March in Studio’s 2nd Stage, in a new play, “Astro Boy and the God of Comics,” by Georgetown University theater professor Natsu Onoda Power, who also directs.
Muse says she has been invited to come to Studio “to conceive of this new play” there. It takes on Japanese Manga in a highly visual performance that he calls “a retro and sci-fi, multi-media extravaganza” about the 1960s animation series “Astro Boy,” a crime-fighting boy robot, and the life of his creator Osamu Tezuka.
Another play, set for November-December, is written and performed by former “Daily Show” correspondent Lauren Weedman, who has been called “a female Robin Williams.” This one-woman show, “Bust” is based on her experiences working as a volunteer advocate in a Southern California prison for women. In her solo performance she plays dozens of characters, switching from prostitute to parole officer, addict to editor with what Muse calls “nuance and empathy.”
Other plays will also startle and stir audiences, he predicts, including “The Golden Dragon” by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, in its U.S. premiere in November-December. Called both “poetic” and “brutal,” it is set in the cramped kitchen of an Asian restaurant where four cooks pull the tooth of a Chinese co-worker. His tooth ends up in the Thai soup of a flight attendant, and that’s just the beginning of unexpected linkages connected to the young Chinese man sans tooth. Muse calls it “fierce and vicious” but also “a kaleidoscopic look at a globalized world,” where five actors “cross age, race and gender” to play 15 characters showing “how intertwined our lives really are.”
Also certain to draw attention, Muse predicts, will be another of the 2nd Stage productions, coming in the summer of 2012, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” by Alex Timbers, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman.
“American history has never been this sexy,” Muse says, “in this rowdy and irreverent musical,” a scathing satire that re-imagines President Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson as a rock star.
Theater
Reggie White explores the many definitions of home in ‘Fremont Ave.’
‘Music and humor set against the rhythm of a cutthroat game of spades’
‘Fremont Ave.’
Through Nov. 23
Arena Stage
1101 Sixth St., S.W.
Tickets start at $49
Arenastage.org
For Reggie D. White, growing up Black and queer in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, there wasn’t a lot of vocabulary for his experience outside of the AIDS crisis. Despite being surrounded by family who loved him, White felt isolated in his own home; there was a sort of membrane that prevented him from being present.
With his new play “Fremont Ave.,” now running at Arena Stage, White has written a work about home and the many definitions of that idea specifically relating to three generations of Black men.
Set in a house on a street in a Southern California suburb (similar to where White grew up), “Fremont Ave.” explores the ways a lack of belonging can be passed down generationally. The first act is boy meets girl and creating a home; and the second watches the next generation struggling to achieve something different.
“The third act’s storyline is deeply queer,” White explains. “Boyfriends Joseph and Damon have been together for years yet can’t figure out what it means to make a home. We don’t totally see the relationship solved, but there’s a glimmer of hope that it just might make it.”
The playwright notes, it’s not all about familial angst and alienation: “Much of the play is music and humor set against the rhythm of a cutthroat game of spades.”
Playwright, actor, and educator, White “does all the things.” Currently, he holds the title of Arena’s senior director of artistic strategy & impact, a role focused on artistic vision and growth. Superbly energetic, White splits his time between Arena and his prized rent-stabilized residence in Brooklyn’s desirable Park Slope neighborhood. He’s already told his landlord that he’s never leaving.
At seven, he came close to landing the part of young Simba in the pre-Broadway “Lion King.” Soured by the near miss, White turned his attention to sports and studies. In his freshman year at college in the Bay Area, he took a musical theater class for the heck of it, and soon gave up law school ambitions to focus on show biz. He went on to appear in Matthew López’s Broadway success “The Inheritance” until the pandemic hit.
Winning the Colman Domingo Award in 2021 gave White the flexibility to write “Fremont Ave.” (The award is given to a Black male or male-identifying theater artist and includes a cash stipend and development opportunities.)
“It can be scary to make a career in the arts. I ran from it for a long time. Then one morning I just woke up very grateful for the accumulation of accidental circumstances that landed me in this moment.”
WASHINGTON BLADE: Is queerness your secret to success?
REGGIE D. WHITE: I’m not saying that being queer is my mutant super power, but I do think there is an element of living my life on the margins trying to find a place for myself that I’ve been able to observe relationships and how people engage and interact with each other that gives me a real objective eye on how to render a world that I didn’t live in.
BLADE: What’s queer about your work?
WHITE: There’s this thing that James Baldwin said a lot, it’s about being on the outside of an experience, being able to observe more astutely. With “Fremont Ave.” it felt important to me that the actor leading us through is played by a queer actor. I wanted that authenticity and that experience of having felt isolation.
It’s unique that the central man in each story, the grandfather, stepson, and grandson are played by the same queer actor Bradley Gibson, that amazing TV star with the big muscles.
It’s also interesting to watch a single body traverse over generations in the same house (altered over time by appliance and art updates).
BLADE: Premiering your play as part of Arena’s 75th anniversary season must be a thrill.
WHITE: Sometimes I ask myself, how is this happening? And I didn’t even have to sleep with anybody. But seriously, I’m lucky. Arena excels at taking great care of world premieres, and the production’s director Lili-Anne Brown has a visceral sense of how to create community and life on stage.
BLADE: What else is unique about “Fremont Ave.”?
WHITE: Men aren’t a particularly emotionally literate species, so there haven’t been a lot of plays exploring the emotional condition of men and what it means to learn to love.
For men, love looks like silence. I wanted to explore what it looks like when there’s a deep curiosity about the people we’ve known and loved.
BLADE: Was risk involved?
WHITE: I wrote a deeply personal play. That’s scary. So, to see everyone involved invest their own love into what’s my play, that’s incredible, and a great confirmation of “specificity is the key to universality.” People seeing themselves in the characters has been both beautiful and surprising.
Theater
Set designer August Henney puts new spin on Mary Shelley’s life
‘So Late Into the Night’ an ideal fall show at Rorschach
‘So Late Into the Night’
Through Nov. 2
Rorschach Theatre
The Stacks @ Buzzard Point
101 V St., S.W.
Spooky Action Theater
Washington, D.C.
Tickets start at $74
Rorshachtheatre.com
We’ve all been to that scary party or two. But ordinarily, it’s not by choice.
But with playwright Shawn Northrip’s So Late Into the Night, the spookiness is planned, executed, and fun. Northrip lays out the story of novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, famed author of the gothic masterpiece Frankenstein, and in gathering her Romantic poet friends and lovers, investigates their afterlife.
What’s more, the new play, which also features a rock séance, is performed in the Stacks at D.C.’s Buzzard Point neighborhood, a unique neighborhood positioned where the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers meet, just south of Audi Field.
At the Stacks, Rorschach is activating a high-ceilinged corner retail that serves as the company’s fall home base. Inside the cavernous space, the production’s set designer August Henney is putting a new spin on Newstead Abbey, the grand home of Lord Byron, a friend of Shelley. Included in the new look are a Victorian dining table (33 by 12 feet), grand drapes, and modern rock and roll posters. Audience members can sit at the table or the risers on the perimeter.
Henney, who identifies as a trans gay man, is a Bay Area transplant who arrived in D.C. three years ago to study scenic design at the University of Maryland. The experience has been transformational.
WASHINGTON BLADE: How do you pursue concept before realizing a set?
AUGUST HENNEY: At first, I go through the script and take out words that spark inspiration. I’m very much a words person – I find words and then relatable images. Next, I create a collage and present it to the director.
BLADE: Along the way, does the director exert control?
HENNEY: Oh yes. It’s hopefully conversation, but they have the final say about everything. If it’s very important to me or I think it’s very important to the show, I’ll fight for it.
BLADE: When the show kicks off does your vision typically come to fruition.
HENNEY: That depends entirely on the technical director. I do the drafting and present it to the tech director. Lays out how to do that. Like an engineer and architect. This is how I want the façade to look but I don’t care so much about the insides. Comes down to what we can and can’t do. Usually comes down to cost.
BLADE: How much was learned in life and now much at school?
HENNEY: At school, I came in not knowing much. UMD cleverly matched us up with a cohort who has different skills from you. They do that well. So, there were endless hours in the hallways of the grad school where we’d build models until 3 a.m. working and blasting music. I also learned from my father who is adept at wood working, and jobs in prop shops.
BLADE: How was your coming out as a trans gay man?
Henney: Well grad school really helped with that. I believe the universe puts people in places. And with UMD, it put me in the right place. At undergrad, I got another degree in human physiology and thought I wanted to be a doctor for a second. My path would have been very different.
Scenic design placed me in range of the right people who helped me realize things about myself that I didn’t have to keep hiding. Theater is such an inclusive community already and I feel safe here while the world is so unsafe.
BLADE: This morning, I heard the administration was blaming the government shutdown on trans people. Does that kind of madness get you angry?
HENNEY: Angry, frustrated, and despondent. I get through the days by focusing on the good bits, and the people who make me feel like myself. That’s all you can really hope for in a world that’s falling apart.
BLADE: Yet, the show goes on.
HENNEY: Oh yes, and So Late Into the Night is a wonderful show. It pairs with some of the best things in the world like spooky ghost stories and dramatic rock music in autumn, the perfect season. It’s a show where audience members can feasibly be seated next to Mary Shelley and friends at a big dining table on Halloween night. How great is that?
Theater
‘The Dragon’ a powerfully subversive play once banned in Russia
Relevantly set in immigrant detention center acted out by detainees
The Dragon
Spooky Action Theater
1810 16th St., NW
$23-$43
Spookyaction.org
Weird and abusive, yet still inexplicably tolerated by the populace. That describes the titular ruler in “The Dragon,” the story of how a 400-year-old authoritarian regime endures, now running at Spooky Action Theater.
Originally written by Evgeny Shvarts in the 1940s, “The Dragon” has the feel of a fairytale yet it’s a powerfully subversive play written (and banned) in Stalinist Russia.
And now adapted by Jesse Rasmussen and Yura Kordonsky for Spooky’s new production, the reworked play is relevantly and disturbingly set in an immigrant detention center with the tale acted out by the detainees. Their reality mixes with the story.
The new work is staged by the company’s artistic director Elizabeth Dinkova and performed by a five-person cast (including immigrants from South America, Syria, and Bangladesh) in Spooky’s black box theater on 16th street in the Dupont Circle neighborhood.
Included among the players are Helen Hayes Award-winning actor Fran Tapia and talented actor Gabriel Alejandro, two residents of Columbia Heights, a diverse and currently heavily policed neighborhood in Northwest. While Tapia is working with a visa for those with extraordinary ability and Alejandro is a U.S. citizen, the vibe remains extremely worrying for much of the area’s population.
Tapia, who self describes as “Chilean, Latina, queer and a proud immigrant,” says “The Dragon” resonates to her core: “Despite the stress, you keep going while everything around remains strange; you can’t be your authentic self. You’re thinking twice about what you’re saying and posting, and where and what time you go anywhere. Danger is there as much as we try to pretend it’s not.”
“The Dragon’s” actors are cast in multiple roles, Tapia plays Lancelot, the hero who comes to save the day; Sophia, a journalist who comes to report on detention center conditions; and a beautiful cat.
“As Lancelot, I’m a bit of an outsider. He’s used to fixing things and helping people in distress. In this town the people are unaware that they need help.”
And regarding real life, Tapia says, “Immigration has become topsy turvy. It’s not unusual to see people being detained in broad daylight. It’s not unusual to have five police cars parked on the corner in the afternoon. It makes us think about how people respond to authority and absurd behavior.”
Similarly, Alejandro plays multiple roles including Henry, the son of the mayor (played by Ryan Sellers) and Officer Luis, a guard in the detention center. “Luis is comparatively a nice guy,” Alejandro explains, “Yet, he accepts what’s bad about the regime he serves.”
As a Latino, Alejandro is exploring his identity through the play. “In my daily routine I’m more anxious. I present in a way that I could be a target for the government even though I’m a U.S. citizen.”
What’s happening on the streets isn’t entirely alien to what’s happening in the play, he adds. “In the play, I have some power over people who look like me. I could be in the detention center, and that’s not altogether different from what’s going on in the real world.”
Alejandro who identifies as pansexual moved from his native Puerto Rico to D.C. six years ago. After acting in just one show the pandemic hit and work dried up. Next, he attended the Shakespeare Theatre’s MFA in Classical Acting program at George Washington University, and since graduating in 2023, he’s been consistently working as an actor, something he calls “a joy and privilege.”
And as pansexual, he has an openness to people, says Alejandro. “That’s how I approach my characters. I find a way to love them. Even if they’re bad guys, I find a way to figure them out. That’s what I do here.”
“The Dragon” is satirical, and funny. Still, we know what we’re referring to in the real world, which is very scary and painful. And yet, audiences are given permission to laugh without losing the gravity of the work.
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