2012-2013 Davis Center Season
A Season of War
The Georgetown University Theater and Performance Studies Program’s 2012-13 A Season of War and Peace featured three faculty-directed mainstage productions, one presented in partnership with Theater J, and an array of special events including visiting companies and leading professional guest artists, student-written and directed work, and much more.
Far Away
Thursday-Saturday, October 11-13 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, October 14 at 2 p.m.
Wednesday-Saturday, October 17-20 at 8 p.m.
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by Jason Loewith
It’s a quiet night in a charming country house when young Joan peers into the garage and learns a terrible secret – one that propels her, years later, into a world of shifting alliances, deceit, and unimaginable brutality. From the dazzling mind of the woman Tony Kushner calls our “greatest living English-language playwright” comes a shattering “waking dreamscape… where the promise of violence broods in even the coziest corners” (New York Times).
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DEVINE STUDIO THEATRE
FRIDAY/SATURDAY EVENING: $18 GENERAL/$15 FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, SENIOR/$10 STUDENT
ALL OTHER PERFORMANCES: $15 GENERAL/ $12 FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, SENIOR/$8 STUDENT
A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration
Saturday, November 17 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, November 18 at 2 p.m.
Thursday and Friday, November 29 and 30 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, December 1 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Thursday-Saturday, December 6-8 at 8 p.m.
CO-PRODUCED BY THE GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY THEATER & PERFORMANCE STUDIES PROGRAM, MUSIC PROGRAM, AND NOMADIC THEATRE
By Paula Vogel
Music by Daryl Waters
Directed by Professor Nadia Mahdi
Music Direction by Professor Maureen Codelka
Produced by Tenaya Campbell (COL ’13)
Christmas Eve in Washington DC, 1864: a cold night for an embattled nation in the thick of a Civil War. Troops in both Confederate and Union camps prepare for the fighting ahead, President Lincoln embarks on a danger-filled midnight adventure, and a mother and daughter fly from slavery towards an uncertain future in the nation’s capital. In this musical celebration, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel weaves an array of voices and stories into a rich and moving musical drama, inspiring a theatrical holiday event that brings us together to celebrate and reflect on our nation’s history and future.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, GONDA THEATRE
FRI/SAT EVENING: $20 GENERAL / $18 FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, SENIOR /$10 STUDENT
ALL OTHER PERFORMANCES: $18 GENERAL / $15 FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, SENIOR / $8 STUDENT
BOGED: An Enemy of the People
January 12-February 3
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY THEATER & PERFORMANCE STUDIES PROGRAM IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THEATER J
IN ASSOCIATION WITH STREETSIGNS CENTER FOR LITERATURE AND PERFORMANCE
English Language Premiere
By Boaz Gaon and Nir Erez
Based on the play by Henrik Ibsen
Directed by Joseph Megel
Featuring Professors Sarah Marshall and Nadia Mahdi and alumnus Clark Young
A sudden chemical leak in an Israeli industrial park endangers the region’s water supply. The mayor is quick to cover up the scandal, but his brother fights to expose the truth. The family feud quickly turns into a political war with major environmental repercussions. This production is part of Theater J’s Voices from a Changing Middle East Festival: Dialogues in the Desert.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, GONDA THEATRE
$30-$65 general
$25 faculty/staff
$15 students
Trojan Barbie: A Car-Crash encounter with Euripides’ Trojan Women
Thursday-Saturday, April 11-13 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, April 14 at 2 p.m.
Wednesday-Saturday, April 17-20 at 8 p.m.
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY THEATER & PERFORMANCE STUDIES PROGRAM
Area Premiere
By Christine Evans
Directed by Maya E. Roth
Past and present violently collide as the dreams of women and their fierce hunger for life and creativity are played out in the larger context of war. Bristling with wit, theatricality, and profound poetry, this award-winning play by Australian- born Christine Evans, the Theater & Performance Studies newest faculty member, re-envisions Euripides’ ancient classic as a vivid post-modern encounter across cultures, styles, and genres. This inspired and “explosive new work” (Talkin’ Broadway), resonates deeply with our own global dislocations and the complexities of war.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, GONDA THEATRE
FRIDAY/SATURDAY EVENING: $18 GENERAL/$15 FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, SENIOR/ $10 STUDENT
ALL OTHER PERFORMANCES: $15 GENERAL/ $12 FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, SENIOR/ $8 STUDENT
wanderland
Thursday-Saturday, February 14-16 at 8 p.m.
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY THEATER & PERFORMANCE STUDIES PROGRAM SENIOR THESIS PROJECTS
Original works by Alice Cash (COL ‘13) and Swedian Lie (COL ‘13)
Advised by Profs. Derek Goldman and Maya E. Roth
These two original thesis performances, together comprising the evening’s event wanderland, offer bold and inventive explorations of identity along the tightrope between reality and fiction. Golden Shards, an original ensemble work written and directed by Alice Cash, examines the evolution of Charles Dodgson into the eminent author best known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. Confronting his ambiguous relationship with Alice Liddell, the girl who was purported to have inspired the creation of his most famous heroine, the piece explores the contradictions evoked by Carroll’s indelible artistic creations. Swedian Lie’s semi- autobiographical performance Chiaroscuro draws upon the experiences of a Chinese-Indonesian artist living abroad, contending with issues of identity, nationality, society and culture. Written, designed and performed by Lie, this work questions whether the risk of plunging into uncertainty is ultimately worth the freedom found in wandering the grey zone.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DEVINE STUDIO THEATRE
$5 GENERAL
For mature audiences.
Talkbacks will follow each performance.
2012-13 Special Events
Georgetown-Arena Stage Partnership
Now in its seventh year, our unique partnership with Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater highlights our shared commitment to the development of new work, to community engagement, and to deepening dialogue on vital issues in the field through co-productions, festivals, frequent collaborations on developmental workshops and readings, national convenings, residencies, and more. Work developed through the partnership has led to productions such as Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations on Broadway, The Glass Menagerie Project as part of the Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival, and collaboration on festivals celebrating Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, and most recently, Eugene O’Neill through Georgetown’s production of the original work Begotten at Arena Stage. Partnership event highlights in the coming season will include the following. Check performingarts.georgetown.edu for updates.
The Arena Stage-Georgetown partnership is made possible thanks to the generosity of Andrew R. Ammerman and the family of H. Max and Josephine F. Ammerman.
Winter, 2013 (DATES TBA)
Heather Raffo Residency
Acclaimed Iraqi-American playwright/performer Heather Raffo (9 Parts of Desire) returns to Georgetown for her fourth residency, featuring a sustained, student-centered workshop around a major new musical work.
Friday, October 26 at 6 p.m.
Sojourn Theatre Company and The TEAM
Waiting for You on the Corner of (…37th & O)
a work-in-progress showing & conversation
Celebrated director and civic theater artist Michael Rohd returns to Georgetown for a week-long residency (Oct. 21-27) with his award-winning Sojourn Theatre Company (who created The Race around the 2008 presidential election) in collaboration with another one of the country’s most acclaimed devised theater companies, The TEAM, led by Rachel Chavkin. They will show excerpts and discuss their original devised play based on research done around the nation over the last two years, examining how we talk to each other, listen to one another, and survive in a country where the distance between two people is less than a shout but more than a handshake.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, GONDA THEATRE
FREE
February 6-10
Double Edge Theatre
The Grand Parade (of the Twentieth Century)
Georgetown students will collaborate with the cast of this world premiere production at Arena Stage, imagined through the lens of Marc Chagall’s paintings and featuring aerial flight, puppetry, and music.
Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater
Visit www.arenastage.org
INTERSECTIONS: A New America Arts Festival
Two shows involving Georgetown students, faculty, and staff were presented as part of the 2013 INTERSECTIONS festival at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C.:
Saturday, March 2 at 9:30 p.m.
Sunday, March 3 at 2 p.m.
Thursday, March 7 at 7 p.m.
inFATuation
Theater and Performance Studies alumna Allie Villarreal (COL ‘12) reprises her virtuosic solo work inFATuation, which invites audiences to step into the very big shoes of an array of engaging characters, all sharing the common experience of living with fat–and taking it in stride.
Atlas Performing Arts Center, LAB 2
$10/ $5 student, senior
Thursday, February 28 at 7 p.m.
D.C. University Theatre Collective
NextUS
A collaborative ensemble project, spearheaded by Caleen Sinette Jennings, and co-created by theater students with faculty from Georgetown (including Prof. Natsu Onoda Power) and several area universities, including American, Catholic, George Washington, Howard and UDC.
Atlas Performing Arts Center, LAB 2
$5 GENERAL
Festival ran Feb 22 – Mar 9, 2013
at 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC 20002
www.intersectionsdc.org
Monday, September 3 at 4 p.m.
Page-to-Stage Festival at the Kennedy Center
Brother of War
Written by Justin McCarthy (COL ‘12)
Directed by Prof. Maya E. Roth
An elite prep school, enveloped in privilege and staunchly committed to its firmly entrenched ideals. A murder that sends shockwaves through a community and challenges its conceptions of honor, character, and the meaning of manhood. Brother of War tells a story woven by tensile threads of masculine tradition and athletic rituals, united through lacrosse. In the wake of a terrible tragedy, the players must determine the true value of keeping the strings from snapping. This new play by Justin McCarthy was developed in TPST’s Hope Playwriting Seminar, taught by Prof. Karen Zacarías.
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
FREE
The Page-to-Stage Festival also included highlights from alumna Allie Villarreal’s inFATuation, featured in the INTERSECTIONS Festival’s Sneak Preview.
Thursday and Friday, April 25 and 26 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, April 27 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Sunday, April 28 at 2 p.m.
Co-presented by the Georgetown University Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Davis Performing Arts Center
El Retablo Spanish-Language Theater Group
An Evening of Cervantes: Two Entremeses
By Miguel Cervantes
Directed by Prof. Barbara Mujica
Two of Cervantes’s most hilarious entremeses (one-act plays), La Cueva de Salamanca and El retablo de las maravillas, will be performed in Spanish. These zany, fast-moving plays are full of wily wives, gullible husbands, and social satire as relevant today as in the 17th century, when the plays were written.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DEVINE STUDIO THEATRE
$5 general / FREE faculty, student
Friday, September 28 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, September 29 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Davis Performing Arts Center presents
Pig Iron Theatre Company
Zero Cost House
By Toshiki Okada
Directed by Dan Rothenberg
Translated by Aya Ogawa
A dream of radical change, thinks Toshiki Okada, reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden from his home in Tokyo. A beautiful book, but only a dream. But then 3/11 happens—those numbers will, for a generation of Japanese people, stand in for the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima. In Tokyo, “unconfirmed” urban radiation levels are reported and milk is removed from supermarket shelves. In this atmosphere of deadly weirdness an architect who studies the homes of the homeless declares himself Prime Minister of Japan from his artist’s refuge in Kumamoto, far outside the city in Western Japan. For Toshiki, the Walden fantasy is becoming a growing necessity.
Bring Toshiki Okada’s sly, personal, and idiosyncratic writing together with Pig Iron’s raucous performance spirit, and you have Zero Cost House, a time- and space-bending autobiographical production about drastic relocations, rereading Walden, remaking government, and the freedom and heaviness of that moment when what’s impossible becomes concrete.
One of America’s most inventive and successful physical theater companies, Pig Iron is the first English-language company to premiere Okada’s work. Pig Iron’s residency will also include masterclasses and workshops with students.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, GONDA THEATRE
$20 General/ $18 Faculty, staff, senior / $10 Student
Friday and Saturday, May 3 and 4 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, May 5 at 2 p.m.
Co-produced by Word Dance Theater and the Davis Performing Arts Center
Once Wild: Isadora in Russia
Never one to miss a revolution, Isadora Duncan arrived in Russia in 1921, determined to ignite its children’s minds through a new school of dance. Immersed in the spirit of the time, Duncan created some of her most groundbreaking, soul-searing works. Her story, as dramatic as its surrounding history, comes to life in this unique collaboration that weaves Duncan’s own dances with a newly commissioned play, world-premiere choreography, and original score.
DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, GONDA THEATRE
$25 General/$18 Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Senior/$10 Student
Post-performance reception on May 3 and discussion with artists on May 4
Introduction to Art & Peacebuilding