“This is a bit of a surprise,” marveled David Muse, artistic director of Studio Theatre, accepting the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Play during a ceremony held at the Lincoln Theatre Monday, April 6. His company’s 2014 production of Cock, Mike Bartlett’s drama about a gay man contemplating leaving his longtime same-sex partner for a woman, was an upset winner in the crown-jewel category that also included Studio’s most successful production ever, Bad Jews. Cock also defeated Olney Theatre’s Colossal, about the struggles of a gay college football player. Still, Olney’s production took home four awards, including Outstanding Original new play or musical.
Technically, Cock was one of two works crowned Outstanding Play at the 31st annual awards ceremony, presented by Theatre Washington to honor works that opened in 2014. For the first time, the Helen Hayes honored two people or productions in most of its leading categories, nearly doubling the number of awards in a slightly confusing process. Essentially, there are “Hayes” nominees, including Cock, or productions distinguished by a higher ratio of Actors’ Equity members to non-union contractors, and then there are “Helen” nominees, with fewer union members, often associated with smaller or newer companies. Most significant among the smaller “Helen” companies was Theater Alliance, which won seven awards, more than any other company. (Kennedy Center was second best, with five.)
Alliance’s wins included 2014’s other Outstanding Play, The Wonderful World of Dissocia, and Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity, one of three Outstanding Musicals honored. The other two were the result of a tie in the Hayes category: Kennedy Center’s Side Showand Signature Theatre’s Sunday in the Park with George. Side Show also won for its ensemble and costume designer Paul Tazewell, while Sunday won for its director, Matthew Gardiner, and lead actress, Brynn O’Malley.
Other winning highlights at the 31st annual ceremony: Erin Weaver, who won for her supporting work in the musical Ordinary Days at Round House Theatre and Mother Courage and Her Children at Arena Stage; Sam Ludwig as lead Hayes actor in Olney’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Barbara Walsh for her scarily good portrayal of the deranged fundamentalist mother in Studio Theatre’s 2ndStage Helen show Carrie: The Musical; Nanna Ingvarsson for her astounding performance in the one-woman tour-de-force The Amish Project, a Helen production from Rick Hammerly’s fledgling theater collective Factory 449; and e’marcus Harper-Short, honored for his musical direction of Theater Allance’s Black Nativity.
A true trailblazer in post-Reconstruction America, Anna Julia Cooper wanted her students at D.C.'s historic M Street School, a prep school for Black youth, to dream bigger for themselves than prior generations could ever have fathomed.
As depicted in Kia Corthron's Tempestuous Elements at Arena Stage, Anna Cooper, principal at M Street, fought to teach Black students a classical curriculum at a time when revered educators like Booker T. Washington advocated instead for learning a trade. While Washington preached uplift through industry, Cooper, like her contemporary W.E.B. DuBois, espoused the ideal of uplifting the race through education and civic engagement.
Any and every one us in the audience for Alan Paul's penetrating production of Next to Normal at Round House might know a woman like the show's Diana Goodman. Maybe you're related to her, or see her in the mirror.
You can see the truth of her embodied in the brilliant performance of Tracy Lynn Olivera, a D.C. theater treasure making her Round House debut as the suburban wife and mom struggling against grief, depression, and mental illness to find even some semblance of stability.
Soldiering by Diana's side, and soaring alongside her through the Tony-winning score by composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey, is her husband Dan, devoted yet often conflicted, portrayed by the equally esteemed Kevin S. McAllister.
For Ken Ludwig, it was almost an inevitability that he would one day take his hit farce Lend Me a Tenor, which had its debut in London's West End in 1986 and on Broadway in 1989, and deploy a gender swap.
"Over the past few years, I've made a real effort to have more female leads in my plays," says the Tony Award-winning playwright from his Northwest D.C. home one recent brisk, sunny morning.
"For example, when I wrote an adaptation of The Three Musketeers, I decided to give D'Artagnan a sister named Sabine who comes to Paris with him. She ends up being the heroine…because she's a great swordsman. At first you think, 'Oh, she's the little sister tagging along,' but she proves to be a real powerhouse."
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