Theater
Late Texas guv Ann Richards inspires actress Holland Taylor
Writer took care to make ‘Ann’ ‘go someplace,’ come to life
Holland Taylor
‘Ann’
Through Aug. 11
Arena Stage
1101 Sixth St., S.W.
202-554-9066
$41-95
Out actor Holland Taylor met Texas Gov. Ann Richards at lunch with legendary lesbian gossip columnist Liz Smith at fashionable Le Cirque in New York City.
“When Ann arrived, it was like a rock star had entered the room, and that wasn’t an easily impressed crowd,” Taylor says. “She was incredible and the lunch was great fun, but I didn’t know her.”
So, when Richards died in 2006 at 73, Taylor was surprised at the deep sense of loss she experienced.
“I was really caught off guard,” Taylor says, “And like many creative people, I had to find something to do to get the sadness out. Because I’m a denizen of the theater, I looked toward the stage.”
Taylor’s desire to celebrate Richards indomitable life force spurred a massive endeavor Involving three years of research and two years of exhaustive rewrites.
The result is “Ann,” a comical and inspiring solo play about Richards’ life and work that Taylor wrote and has performed to great acclaim, receiving a Tony Award nomination in 2013. Currently, “Ann” is playing Arena Stage with Jayne Atkinson in the eponymous part.
“My research was about finding a persona and not what she did on a given date,” Taylor says. “By interviewing her children and closest friends and aides who are often the same, I came to know a tough boss who engendered soulful devotion. She was no-nonsense, yet her sense of humor and sense of wit was such a rich ingredient in all of her transactions with people.”
Richards rose to national prominence delivering the keynote speech at the 1988 National Democratic Conventions where she famously described President George H.W. Bush as having been born with a silver foot in his mouth. She was elected governor in 1990 and served one term, yet she remained a larger-than-life presence on the national scene. An ardent feminist, she memorably noted: “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
“The play isn’t political,” she says, “It’s about life. It’s about how to live a purposeful life. Ann was in the zeitgeist. Ann was a person who mattered to me. I liked knowing she was there for all of us, for our country.”
And while Taylor, 76, considers herself a political person, her decision to go public with her relationship with accomplished actor Sarah Paulson (“Carol,” TV’s “American Horror Story”) wasn’t motivated.
“To an extent, the personal is political. It’s a statement of who you and what you stand for,” Taylor says. “But I don’t beat a drum about it because I think we’re all living for the day when no one even thinks about this kind of thing. I remember hearing a French movie star say that in France it’s a question that isn’t asked. Unfortunately, we live in a prurient society and it’s getting more so under the man in the White House.”
Taylor’s upbringing reads idyllic: Reared in Philadelphia, she attended Quaker boarding schools before studying drama at Bennington College, and then went on to New York City for theater.
Famed drama teacher Stella Adler encouraged Taylor (then in her 30s) to do TV sitcom work to create more stage opportunities. Soon Taylor was playing Tom Hanks’ intimidating, sexy boss on “Bosom Buddies,” and subsequently found fame and fortune assaying sophisticated, whip smart women on the big and (mostly) small screen with “The Practice” and “Two and A Half Men.”
While L.A.-based Taylor might wish she’d done more theater early in her career, she’s more about the now. She praises partner Paulson’s work.
“We share the same taste and talk the same language. But we’re very different. She’s very much a chameleon. She has the histrionic ability to act well, but she’s also very changeable with a talent for mimicry; it’s uncanny.”
And Taylor is delighted with the casting of Jayne Atkinson (“House of Cards,” “Criminal Minds”) in Arena’s “Ann.”
“I’ve written a play with a narrative line, and not strung together quotes and historic things. It’s going somewhere; it’s doing something. And it doesn’t require Holland Taylor to do it.”
While Taylor admires women other than Richards, she doesn’t feel compelled to dramatize them.
“Writing ‘Ann’ wasn’t a choice. It was something I had to do. I’d like to write again, but I think the solo show is a one off.”
Theater
National tour of ‘Gatsby’ comes to National Theatre
Out actor Edward Staudenmayer talks playing the show’s gangster
‘The Great Gatsby’
May 12-24
The National Theatre
1321 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
$59-$196
Thenationaldc.com
Often dubbed “The Great American Novel” for its depiction of ambition and self-invention alongside the reversals of success, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” says it all in a fast read.
Set against the excesses and energy of the Roaring Twenties, “The Great Gatsby,” novel and now the same-titled hit Broadway musical with a jazz/pop original score by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, tells the story of Nick Carraway and his friendship with Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic millionaire intent on reuniting with ex-lover, Daisy Buchanan.
It was during a four-month 2025 run in Seoul, South Korea, that out actor Edward Staudenmayer first played the show’s heavy, Meyer Wolfsheim, a gangster who helped Gatsby make his murkily acquired fortune. As Meyer, Staudenmayer opens the second act with, appropriately enough, “Shady.”
Now three months into a year-long North American tour, the show is poised to enjoy a brief run at Washington’s National Theatre (5/12-5/24).
While putting on his eyeliner prior to a recent Wednesday matinee at Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre, the upstate New York-based actor shared about Gatsby and a life in theater.
WASHINGTON BLADE: Despite your good looks and terrific voice, you’re rarely the leading the man. How is that?
EDWARD STAUDENMAYER: I’m definitely a character man. I’ve been painting lines on my face to play old men since I was in high school. I was the youngest freshman in college playing old Uncle Sorin [in Chekhov’s “The Seagull”].
There have been many villains. Some darker than others. Meyer Wolfsheim is a very bad guy, but he doesn’t haunt me once I’m offstage. I play a lot of pickleball.
BLADE: Is it true that like so many of Fitzgerald’s characters, Wolfsheim is famously based on someone the writer encountered in life.
STAUDENMEYER: That’s true, Wolfsheim is pretty much a direct portrayal of real-life mobster and 1919 World Series fixer [Arnold Rothstein].
BLADE: When did the 1925 novel first surface on your radar?
STAUDENMAYER: Like many of us, I was assigned “The Great Gatsby” in high school. It was short, and filled with sex and illicit activities. I thought it was great. Definitely wasn’t a Judy Blume novel.
Interestingly, the book wasn’t originally a huge a success for Fitzgerald, but because it was about war and having the girl at home, they gave it to GIs leaving for WWII. After returning, a lot of those guys went on the GI Bill and became English teachers. They assigned the book to their students.
BLADE The idea that the book’s first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, is gay and enamored with Jay Gatsby is long discussed among readers and scholars. Does the musical touch on that?
STAUDENMAYER: Yes, there’s conjecture about Jay and Nick, and it’s implied in our show. It’s also implied about Jordan Baker, Jay’s fleeting romantic interest. Ultimately, she’s a confirmed bachelor, and a professional golfer who only wears pants.
Our performers are really good. Josh Grasso who plays Nick is fantastic. I’ve had to stop watching him in his last scene; it’s not good for Meyer Wolfsheim to take his curtain call crying. Our Gatsby, Jake David Smith, is good too. He’s gorgeous like Superman and sings like an angel.
BLADE: Do you ever imagine backstory for your characters whose sexuality is undefined?
STAUDENMAYER: I do, but not with Wolfsheim. I don’t see it. I’m trying to be as butch as possible with this ruthless killer.
BLADE: Have you had to do that in your career?
STAUDENMAYER: For a long time, I wore a mask to hide my gayness. I worked hard on being believable, that I was into the girl or that I was a tough guy.
It’s a different world now, and it’s so refreshing to be around the younger actors today; they’re remarkably open and comfortable.
BLADE: What was your coming of age like?
STAUDENMAYER: I played high school football in Palm Springs [he chuckles, alluding to the arid gay mecca], and I was pretty good too. But much to the chagrin of my parents and coaches, I quit the team to act in our senior year play. My super butch dad played semi-pro football and he was an ex-cop. I’m named after him. While I didn’t become my dad, I’ve played him often on stage. He was a true Gaston [the bumptious rival in “Beauty and the Beast”]. And like Gaston, he used antlers in all his interior decorating.
BLADE: Did he live to see your success in theater?
STAUDENMAYER: He did. Life was challenging growing up but the last 10 years of his life we couldn’t get off the phone with each other [his voice catches with emotion]. He accepted me entirely, and we became very close.
BLADE: Looking ahead, is there a part you’d especially like to play?
STAUDENMAYER: Like all baritones I’d love to play Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” I’ve come close but it hasn’t happened yet. There’s still time.
Theater
Diverse cast tackles ‘Aguardiente’ at GALA Hispanic Theatre
Best friends rediscover their Caribbean heritage in new musical
‘Aguardiente: Where Magic Transcends Borders’
Through May 24
GALA Hispanic Theatre
3333 14th St., N.W.
$25–$65
Galatheatre.org
(surtitles in English and Spanish)
With its latest musical offering “Aguardiente: Where Magic Transcends Borders,” GALA Hispanic Theatre has cast its net wide in gathering a blend of talent including the production’s diverse 18-person cast.
Commissioned by GALA, the spanking new musical is about best friends Alberto and Alejandro (two New York writers from Puerto Rico and Colombia respectively). Together, within a short timeline under unrelenting pressure, they struggle to write the project musical of their dreams.
Along the way, the friends rediscover their Caribbean heritage through cumbia, bomba, currulao, and the magical realism of García Márquez.
Offstage, the work has been created by Luis Salgado (book), and Daniel Alejandro Gutiérrez (music), also respectively from Puerto Rico and Colombia. Multiple Helen Hayes Award-winning Salgado is directing and choreographing the GALA production.
In the role of Alejandro, out actor Sebastián Treviño is making his GALA debut opposite Samuel Garnica who plays librettist Alberto. Alejandro is the music composer who doesn’t come from a musical background. He’s simply a lover of Latin music.
Is Alejandro recognizably similar to Gutiérrez?
“Oh yeah,” says Treviño, 36. “Like Gutiérrez, Alejandro doesn’t necessarily follow musical theater rules and etiquette, and it’s his uniqueness that brings a spark to their partnership.
“I got to know him and Luis [Salgado] while touring with ‘On Your Feet!’ in 2022. You really get to know people by spending endless hours together on a bus.”
Language and voice are intertwined for Treviño, and fortunately for the amiable New York-based actor, he enjoys the challenge of a new way of speaking. To play Alejandro, it helps to sound Colombian.
As a native of Monterrey, Mexico, Spanish and Mexican dialects are Treviño’s first languages. He attended American school starting in kindergarten, consequently acquiring flawless English; and because his mother is Colombian, he is familiar with that accent too.
GALA Spanish speaking patrons can be a tough crowd. For instance, when a Mexican actor is playing a Cuban character, they know at once. And while they may embrace the performance and the production, there sometimes remains a niggling dislike for what feels a vocal inaccuracy.
“Since I’ve arrived in D.C., I’ve been practicing my Colombian accent at restaurants and other places. When a Spanish speaking server asks if I’m from Colombia, I know I’m doing something right.”
“Aguardiente” (translates as “Firewater”) is composed of several layers of reality. He explains: “First it’s us creating the show, the work, and all of those pressures and limitations that the industry places on Latino centered projects; and then there’s the fantasy layer.”
A talented tenor, his lengthy bio includes Mexico City (“Wicked,” “Rent”), Off Broadway (“Kowalski”) and North American national tours (“On Your Feet!”).
He says his “Aguardiente” solo specifically feels like ‘80s Latin rock. Also, he enjoys a fun medley number where they’re playing around with “Tropipop” (Colombian pop), classic Broadway sounds, and there’s even a Beatles moment.
In this show, we meet two determined friends, one is holding an American passport because he’s Puerto Rican, while the other, a Colombian, struggles to secure a visa.
“It’s not a stretch for me to relate to that. I’m here on a working visa, so I know all about the stress and costs that comes with that,” says Treviño.
“So much reflects their own story. That includes the setbacks and obstacles faced when trying to build something from very little, and writing about themes that aren’t considered mainstream to white American audiences.”
At just eight years old, Treviño saw “A Chorus Line” at Mont Tecnológico de Monterrey, the same college that he’d later attend. He remembers, “Seated in the second row, the young actors were rock stars to me. When I asked my father who loved the arts if one day I could perform onstage, he said yes, instantly his son’s new dream.”
Looking forward, is there a role he yearns to play? Treviño ponders the trite query with some seriousness before answering “I think it’s yet to be written.”
Theater
World premiere of ‘Everything, Devoured’ oozes queer energy
Nonbinary playwright Katherine Gwynn delivers ferocious ghost story
‘Everything, Devoured’
Through May 10
Nu Sass Productions
Sitar Arts Center
1724 Kalorama Road, N.W.
$25 (general admission)
Nusass.com
As if the world weren’t already hideous enough, Kore, the trans woman protagonist in nonbinary playwright Katherine Gwynn’s “Everything, Devoured,” wants to summon a demon to her humble Chicago apartment. While her friends think it’s just a bit of afterwork fun akin to reading horoscopes or Tarot cards, Kansas born Kore is dead serious.
Nu Sass Productions’ world premiere of Gwynn’s play oozes queer energy. Messages come across as if delivered by blow horn. It’s not afraid of expository dialogue or padding a singular moment of queer joy.
In a truly intimate black box at Sitar Arts Centers in Adams Morgan just down the block from Harris Teeter, scenic designer Simone Schneeberg deftly creates the generic flat whose ordinariness is only overshadowed by some weak attempts at individuality, but that’s all about to change.
Plans have been made, and Kore (June Dickson-Burke) has invited her nearest and dearest to her place.
Her nonbinary lesbian partner Julian (Tristan Evans) has cheap red wine and weed on the ready. Dinner is in the oven. Soon, lively trans masc bestie Dante (Selena Gill) arrives bearing a hostess gift – it’s the specially requested bag of pig blood, integral to the evening’s fun. In little time, the twentysomething friends will have painted a pentagram circled with salt in the middle of the living room floor. Candles are lit. Sacred words are spoken.
Shifts in light and sound by designers Vida Huang and Di Carey, respectively, signal contact with the beyond. Much to the friends’ surprise, they’ve successfully summoned a demon and it’s a real doozy: Ronald Reagan as demon drag queen.
Costumed in a corseted pinstripe suit adorned with a few Gaultier cones, the pronoun-less guest star from the underworld makes quite an entrance – a full-on lip sync to Madonna’s “Vogue” replete with huge flashing eyes, an evil smile and darting tongue.
Spectacularly played by O’Malley Steuerman (“actor, DRAGster, playwright, and producer from Baltimore”) Ronald Reagan as demon drag queen is lewd, taunting, and reads with the kind of sharp wit that puts other queens in the shade.
The entertainment doesn’t stop there. Soon, the demon is juggling provocative props (fleshy dildo, a baby doll, and a copy of Marx) or performing sock puppetry to a 1982 recording of journalist Lester Kinsolving asking about the “gay plague” to which Reagan’s Press Secretary Larry Speakes charmingly replies, “I don’t have it … do you?” That proved a real knee slapper in the pressroom.
Throughout the play’s early scenes, a young man sits unnoticed at Kore’s kitchen counter. Now and then, he comments with a disapproving harrumph or a distinctly gay one-liner. He’s privy to all, but the lady of the house is unaware of him until he joins the party. His name is Michael (Christian Harris). He died in 1989 and has been hanging around ever since.
Wry and undeniably spectral, Michael is the play’s link to queer past. He remembers the hurts and horrors of the AIDS epidemic, but not so much about the emergence of ‘genderqueer’ as an identity label, reflecting a shift toward a broader gender spectrum. That came later.
Without doubt, the uniformly queer cast is committed. They play their queer characters with authenticity, lending a realness to queer people’s valid concerns and fears in the current atmosphere. (For instance, anarchist/barista Dante accuses Julian of hiding out in their safe role of social worker at a nice nonprofit; and Kore speaks about the fear surrounding the Kansas bill making it illegal for transgender people to display their gender on a driver’s license.)
Based in Chicago, Gwynn has written a queer play with a punch; and prior to ever being staged, this new work was prestigiously named both a 2025 O’Neill Semi-Finalist as well as 2025 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist.
Billed as a ferocious queer ghost story, “Everything, Devoured” doesn’t disappoint. In the hands of queer co-directors Tracey Erbacher and Ileana Blustein, Gwynn’s fevered yet thoughtful and quick paced but penetrating piece unfolds compellingly.
Intuitive staging and chemistry among players, especially two hander scenes involving Kore, display a quiet intensity that feels true to life. Other scenes bring out the anger, protectiveness and some divisiveness among the friends. Gwynn’s informed and powerful writing is brought to the fore.
Nu Sass Productions has been uplifting women and marginalized genders in all aspects of theater since 2009. The company’s two-part name stems from “Nu” (Chinese for woman) and “Sass” (sassy).
Its latest offering fits the bill and then some.
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