Theater
Little Amal spreading refugee awareness across U.S.
12-foot figure brought to life by three puppeteers
‘Amal Walks Across America’
Sept. 17 and 19
walkwithamal.org
Since the summer of 2021, Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet portraying a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, has roamed far and wide spreading refugee awareness. After walking all over Europe, exploring the streets of New York City and Toronto, she is now trekking across America.
Created by internationally acclaimed artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi in association with Handspring Puppet Company out of South Africa (famed for the brilliant puppetry behind “War Horse”), “Amal Walks Across America” highlights the cross-cultural experiences of the millions of refugee children fleeing war, violence and persecution throughout the globe, each with their own story.
Little Amal was inspired by an unaccompanied minor character who appeared briefly in “The Jungle,” a play created in the former Calais jungle encampment in 2015.
As a sort of honorary ambassador/refugee, the very large puppet has clicked with audiences wherever she goes. And now through early November, Amal is visiting 35 towns and cities from the East Coast to San Diego where thousands of artists and arts organizations creating free public events are slated to show up to welcome her.
On Sept. 17 and 19, Amal will be in D.C. Her program includes stops at Lafayette Square (a high school marching band), Black Lives Matter Plaza (a Muslim children’s choir and shared testimonies), McPherson Square, and Franklin Park where the Washington Performing Arts Children of the Gospel Choir perform, and the park is filled with family art activities such as sidewalk coloring books, an activation of letters to Amal from Planet Word, and fare from Immigrant Food.
Though ostensibly on her own, Amal is brought to life by three puppeteers: one inside her torso walking on stilts, and two operating the arms.
Ashley Winkfield, a multidisciplinary nonbinary artist based in Harlem, New York, handles one of the arms.
“Puppetry is my main art form. I sort of fell into it,” they explain.
As an undergrad at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, they learned puppetry in a workshop of Basil Twist’s “Rite of Spring.” Twist liked what he saw and invited them to follow the production to Lincoln Center where they made their New York debut.
“Puppeteering involves choreography, dance, and movement, and also acting…all the things I love,” says Winkfield, 31. “Through puppeteering I’ve done theater, singing, and travelled the world. I’m fortunate to do this craft.”
Though not part of Little Amal’s original European tour, they joined the walk with three weeks in New York (2022) followed by a shorter stint in Toronto (2023), and now they’re part of the national gig.
When Amal arrives on the scene of an event, her team dresses her and checks mechanisms away from the gathering crowd. But once she stands and walks around the corner, it’s show time. Before swarming her, fans and onlookers react with variations of surprise and excitement. Often local artists will present her with things they’ve made like outsized library cards, books, and flowers.
Winkfield describes the puppet as “beautifully articulated,” especially for her large size: “People want to reach out and touch her beautifully sculpted hands; they’re made from a hard material but still have a caressing ability to them.”
Amal’s message resonates with the puppeteer too.
“She brings the crisis face to face. She’s a symbol of refugee children and all displaced people. Indigenous leaders I’ve met on the road, understand where she’s coming from, and as a Black American, that’s something I understand about my own family history, not knowing where I come from and what that means.”
Winkfield hopes moving forward across the continent, the project will do more events with the queer community.
“As queer people, we very often have chosen family. Amal is discovering her identity on the road. She’s searching for comfort and family.”
Along the route, the project partners with different organizations and artists who help coordinate events. Winkfield rather blithely opines that it’s “a logistical miracle” the way things come together.
“Anything can happen. As puppeteers we don’t have a lot of information about the next event, so just like Amal, we’re experiencing whatever’s ahead with fresh eyes.”
Theater
‘Acting their asses off’ in ‘Exception to the Rule’
Studio production takes place during after-school detention
‘Exception to the Rule’
Through Sunday, October 27
Studio Theatre
1501 14th St. NW, Washington, D.C.
$40-$95
Studiotheatre.org
After-school detention is a bore, but it’s especially tiresome on the last day of classes before a holiday.
In Dave Harris’s provocative new play “Exception to the Rule” (now at Studio Theatre) that’s just the case.
It’s Friday, and the usual suspects are reporting to room 111 for detention before enjoying the long MLK weekend. First on the scene are blaring “bad girl” Mikayla (Khalia Muhammad) and nerdy stoner Tommy (Stephen Taylor Jr.), followed by mercurial player Dayrin (Jacques Jean-Mary), kind Dasani (Shana Lee Hill), and unreadable Abdul (Khouri St.Surin).
The familiar is jaw-droppingly altered by the entrance of “College Bound Erika” (Sabrina Lynne Sawyer), a detention first timer whose bookworm presence elicits jokes from the others: What happened? You fail a test?
Dasani (who’s teased for being named for designer water) dubs Erika “Sweet Pea” and welcomes her to the rule-breaking fold. Together the regulars explain how detention works: The moderator, Mr. Bernie, shows up, signs their slips, and then they go. But today the teacher is tardy.
As they wait, the kids pass the time laughing, trash talking, flirting, and yelling. When not bouncing around the classroom, Dayrin is grooming his hair, while Dasani endlessly reapplies blush and lip gloss. At one point two boys almost come to blows, nearly repeating the cafeteria brawl that landed them in detention in the first place.
It’s loud. It’s confrontational. And it’s funny.
Erika is naively perplexed: “I thought detention was quiet. A place where everyone remembers the mistakes that got them here and then learns how to not make the same mistakes again.”
For room 111, the only connection to the outside world is an increasingly glitchy and creepy intercom system. Announcements (bus passes, the school’s dismal ranking, the impending weekend lockdown, etc.) are spoken by the unseen but unmistakably stentorian-voiced Craig Wallace.
Dave Harris first conceived “Exception to the Rule” in 2014 during his junior year at Yale University. In the program notes, the Black playwright describes “Exception to the Rule” as “a single set / six actors on a stage, just acting their asses off.” It’s true, and they do it well.
Miranda Haymon is reprising their role as director (they finely helmed the play’s 2022 off-Broadway debut at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York). Haymon orchestrates a natural feel to movement in the classroom, and without entirely stilling the action on stage (makeup applying, scribbling, etc.), the out director gives each member of the terrific cast their revelatory moment. In a busy room, we learn that Tommy’s goofiness belies trauma, that Mikayla is admirably resourceful, and most startling, why Erika, the school’s top student, is in detention.
Mr. Bernie is clearly a no-show. And despite his absence, the regulars are bizarrely loath to leave the confines of 111 for fear of catching yet another detention. Of course, it’s emblematic of something bigger. Still, things happen within the room.
While initially treated as a sort of mascot, awkwardly quiet Erika becomes rather direct in her questions and observations. Suddenly, she’s rather stiffly doling out unsolicited advice.
It’s as if an entirely new person has been thrown into the mix.
Not all of her guidance goes unheeded. Take fighting for instance. At Erika’s suggestion, St.Surin’s Abdul refrains from kicking Dayrin’s ass. (Just feet from the audience gathered for a recent matinee in Studio’s intimate Mead Theatre, Abdul’s frustration resulting from anger while yearning for a world of principled order is palpable as evidenced when a single tear rolled down the actor’s right cheek)
Set designer Tony Cisek renders a no-frills classroom with cinder block walls, a high and horizontal row of frosted fixed windows that become eerily prison like when overhead fluorescent lighting is threateningly dimmed.
Still, no matter how dark, beyond the classroom door, a light remains aglow, encouraging the kids to ponder an exit plan.
Theater
Broadening space for gender nonconforming singers
Robin McGinness, a transfemme baritone, featured in ‘Cradle Will Rock’
‘The Cradle Will Rock’
Goldman Theater DCJCC (10/5-13) and
Baltimore Theatre Project (10/18-20)
Inseries.org
Robin McGinness, an accomplished Baltimore-based transfemme baritone, knows a lot about music. Also, as a gender nonconforming performer she’s learned how to navigate and carve out a career in opera.
Currently, she is playing Mr. Mister in the IN Series production of “The Cradle Will Rock,” a 1937 Brechtian allegory of corporate greed written and composed by Marc Blitzstein who was openly gay when that wasn’t an easy thing to be.
IN Series, D.C.’s innovative opera theater, which happens to rank high among McGinness’s favorite companies, infuses its take on a seldom seen classic with new energy, humor, melody, and a thirst for justice. The production features a cast of some the area’s best young vocalists and is helmed by Shanara Gabrielle (stage direction) and Emily Baltzer (musical direction).
Growing up in southern New Hampshire, McGinness started off performing in Waldorf school, followed by Vermont’s progressive Putney boarding school, and then Oberlin College where she focused in vocal performance after having been singled out as a well-rounded baritone.
WASHINGTON BLADE: What drew you to IN Series?
ROBIN MCGINNESS: They [out artistic director Timothy Nelson and other company members] were doing work that didn’t take opera too preciously. No kid gloves. The theater world has large productions collapsed down to smaller audiences. That’s a mode that opera might follow. IN Series was doing things that excited me.
My first show with them was two years ago. I’d just moved back from being a young artist with an opera company in Arizona when IN Series needed someone for “Nightsong of Orpheus.” Truly a wild piece of theater that I loved. Since then, I’ve been talking them up with everyone I meet, and enthusiastically engaging with them when I can.
BLADE: How is it to be transfemme in the opera world?
MCGINNESS: Performing hasn’t always been easy for me. There was a time when my self-image and identity aligned with composing, to produce beautiful complex music behind the scenes and not have to be center of attention.
Coming into my undergrad years, my intention was to pursue music and divorce myself from certain parts of identity including my gender identity that I didn’t think would help my career. But that would change.
I had awareness and had for years but made a choice that being a musician was the most important part of my identity. As I got to the end of undergrad my picture of what success meant had changed and I couldn’t live with this absolutist way of living my life.
BLADE: And how has that worked out?
MCGINNESS: I’ve been trying to break down barriers between the personal and professional sides and try to combine that into something more functional. It can feel dangerous.
Early on when trying to figure out how to present as a female baritone in the opera, the question I got most was won’t that effect your voice? People are more understanding now. And I’m grateful to those who have broadened this space for gender nonconforming singers.
BLADE: Does it take courage?
MCGINNESS: Yes, but I’m not pursuing the same career that I was. I’m interested in performing with IN Series now. I’m not trying to pursue a full-time touring opera career.
It seems that either opera companies wouldn’t want to hire because they feel they couldn’t bring you out to donors or companies would want to hire but for the identity politics of it. Both would be anathema to me.
It’s a ridiculously competitive industry. But I’m building a career in the area where I am now, and it’s going well. With people who know my work and hire me for the work.
BLADE: What can we expect from “The Cradle Will Rock”?
MCGINNESS: If you’re expecting Puccini, it won’t be that. It’s gritty. A lot of spoken dialogue. Closer to spoken theater with some music thrown in than it is an opera.
It pokes out power and dynamics that queer audiences might enjoy seeing be deconstructed, particularly when it’s done in a really smart way.
BLADE: What’s ahead for you?
MCGINNESS: I’m 33. Musically, I’m just hitting my prime so I have some good years of singing ahead of me.
I like my work to be complex, interwoven and layered. In addition to performing, I teach career courses and work in the career office mentoring students at Peabody Institute in Baltimore. All of us who do that here are practicing performers. As long as I have performance work coming in and have money to put bread on the table, I’m happy — way too busy — but happy.
“Something for everyone.” It’s a tired tagline, but in the case of this fall’s DMV theater season, it happens to be pretty much true. And a lot of the work is queer, directly or tangentially. Here’s a sliver of what’s already opened and what’s in store.
Theater J jumps into the new season with “How to Be a Korean Woman” (through Sept. 22), Sun Mee Chomet’s comic and heartfelt telling of searching for her birth family in Seoul, South Korea. edcjcc.org
Woolly Mammoth Theatre opens with “The Comeuppance” (through Oct. 6), the latest work from Tony-winning out playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.
“On the night of their 20th high school reunion, the self-proclaimed “Multi-Ethnic Reject Group” reconnects while they pregame in Prince George’s County, Md. But amid the flow of reminiscing, an otherworldly presence forces these former classmates to face the past head-on and reckon with an unknowable future.” Woollymammoth.net
Signature Theatre kicks off with the D.C. premiere of Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning play “Primary Trust” (through Oct. 20). Booth’s contemporary humor-filled tender tale of self-discovery and connection is followed by Signature’s big musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (Oct. 29-Jan. 12), Stephen Sondheim’s classic Roman-set musical comedy staged by Signature’s out artistic director Matthew Gardiner. Sigtheatre.org
GALA Hispanic Theatre’s season opener, Gustavo Ott’s “The 22+ Weddings of Hugo” (through Sept. 29), is based on a true story. Performed in Spanish with easy-to-follow English surtitles, Ott’s raucous tale seeks to cover the various scenarios immigrants experience through many weddings. The cast features out actors Carlos Castillo as Hugo, a quiet postal clerk, and Victor Salinas who plays Elmar, a gay writer seeking refuge. José Zayas directs. Galatheatre.org.
Mosaic Theater Company at Atlas Performing Arts Center presents “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” (through Oct. 6), a play with music about jazz legend/queer icon Billie Holiday starring Roz White. Mosaic’s out artistic director Reginald L. Douglas directs. Mosaictheater.org
Ford’s Theatre presents “Mister Lincoln” (Sept. 20-Oct. 13), a “witty and revelatory” one-man show starring Scott Bakula (stage and screen actor famous for TV’s “Quantum Leap”). Fords.org
ExPats Theatre (also housed at Atlas) opens with “Marlene” (Sept. 28 through Oct. 20) featuring Karin Rosnizeck as the legendary Dietrich, a great star who famously defied social and gender conventions while dazzling the world with her glamorous career. Expatstheate.com
There’s a lot on offer at George Mason University’s Center for Arts this autumn, not least of all “An Evening with Lea Salonga” (Saturday, Sept. 28).
Tony-winning singer and actress Lea Salonga headlines the 2024 ARTS by George! benefit concert, performing songs from a four-decade career on Broadway and in animated movie hits. Born in the Philippines, Salonga originated the lead role of Kim in Miss Saigon, and she was the first Asian cast member to perform the role of Eponine in Les Misérables on Broadway.
Other promising one-day-only GMU entertainments include Ballet Hispánico (Oct. 5) and Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble (Oct. 19). cfa.gmu.edu
Creative Cauldron in Falls Church presents “Sondheim Tribute Revue” (Oct. 3-27) a celebratory salute to musical giant Stephen Sondheim with eight performers singing 20 titles from the gay composer’s brilliant songbook including “Company,” “Follies,” “Into the Woods,” “A Little Night Music,” “Sweeney Todd,” and the recent Tony Award Winner, “Merrily We Roll Along,” and more. Creativecauldron.org
Olney Theatre explores what makes a president great with “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” Sept. 27-Oct. 20. And for Disney fans, don’t miss “Frozen,” Oct. 24-Jan. 5. Olneytheatre.org
The Kennedy Center offers laughs and nostalgia with “Clue” (Sept.17 through Oct. 6), a whodunit based on the fan-favorite 1985 Paramount movie and inspired by the classic Hasbro board game. Next up is “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” (Oct. 11 – 20).
Other Kennedy Center treats include “An Evening with David Sedaris” (Oct. 15). The gay humorist is slated to share his inimitable brand of satire and hilarious observations, and then it’s out sound healing artist Davin Youngs with “The Reset” (Oct. 28), his take on a “sound bath” including improvisational singing, looping devices, and healing instruments. Kennedy-center.org
Fall is the best time at the beach, so plan a weekend in Rehoboth and visit the phenomenal Clear Space Theatre. “Venus in Fur” runs Sept. 19-29 followed by “Sweeney Todd” Oct. 11-27; and “Shrek” runs Nov. 8-10. Clearspacetheatre.org
Fall cabaret will be in full swing at the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., as soloists share heart-warming stories and songs about their travel adventures (Oct. 19 at 2, 5, and 8 p.m.). And, of course, no holiday season is complete without the Chorus’s annual holiday celebration set for Dec. 7, 14, and 15. Gmcw.org
Folger Theatre presents Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Oct. 1-Nov. 10) staged by inspiring out director Raymond O. Caldwell. A large, versatile cast features Cole Taylor and Caro Rayes Rivera as the star-crossed lovers, and a host of familiar local faces including Luz Nicolas, Deirdra LaWan Starnes, and out actor Fran Tapia as Lady Capulet. folger.edu
Studio Theatre serves up “Summer, 1976,” (opening Nov. 13), a memory play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn (“Proof”). Directed by Vivienne Benesch, the two-hander features longtime D.C. favorites Kate Eastwood Norris and out actor Holly Twyford playing disparate women whose unlikely friendship and ensuing connection changes the course of their lives. Studiotheatre.org
And on Wednesday, Dec. 4, Strathmore in North Bethesda presents “A Swingin’ Little Christmas,” a fun takeoff on kitschy, classic ‘50s and ‘60s holiday specials, featuring out TV star Jane Lynch (“Glee,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) alongside Kate Flannery (“The Office”), Tim Davis (“Glee’s” vocal arranger), and The Tony Guerrero Quintet. Strathmore.org
One year later and no closer to peace
Delaware’s Simpler absent in LGBTQ fights
Supreme Court begins fall term with major gender affirming care case on the docket
‘I don’t want a genocide to be done on queer people’s behalf’
‘Acting their asses off’ in ‘Exception to the Rule’
Is the Washington Post editorial board asleep?
It’s time we talk about trauma
GOP candidate in Del. House race expresses LGBTQ support
Electing Harris is an imperative for LGBTQ community
