Dear friends,
I am writing to share my feeling of excited expectation and deep satisfaction, a sense of falling in love again – with Theater. Looking ahead to our Reopening 2021-22 Season fills me with a hundred sensations springing back to life. I step into our performance space, and there are the 12-foot-tall silver birch trees so carefully crafted by our theater artisans for The Realistic Joneses, standing like sentinels watching over a set gone silent for over a year. But silent no more!
Actors and production teams are returning now, first to film Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, which we will offer online in August, then New Works in Action virtual plays for September as we start rehearsal to open for a live audience. Our cast will reclaim their grove of silver birches and launch our Reopening 2021-22 Season with The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno on October 7, 2021, a play that declares the power of hope in the face of illness and a challenging future. In December, after more than two years, our theater space will again be transformed to receive a family-friendly new production, Man Covets Bird by critically acclaimed Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer, where the ability to expand our minds and hearts beyond ourselves takes flight in a magically simple tale. And in February 2022, Maple and Vine by Jordan Harrison will treat us to the seductions and dangers of attempting to live in a dream of a seemingly kinder, simpler past.
This week, standing alone in our lobby at the entrance to the church where we perform, I sampled the gentle breeze created by the original fresh air ventilation system designed and built nearly 100 years ago, a system we recently upgraded and restored. The upgrade in ventilation is part of heightened safety measures to accommodate our audience’s return. Standing and feeling that gentle fresh breeze, it felt like a breath from a century past, from the present, and a whispered promise for the future all at the same time. I can only say it felt like falling in love.
This Reopening 2021-22 Season, please join us at Spooky Action and fall in love with Theater all over again!
Cheers!
Richard Henrich,
Artistic Director
I am writing to share my feeling of excited expectation and deep satisfaction, a sense of falling in love again – with Theater. Looking ahead to our Reopening 2021-22 Season fills me with a hundred sensations springing back to life. I step into our performance space, and there are the 12-foot-tall silver birch trees so carefully crafted by our theater artisans for The Realistic Joneses, standing like sentinels watching over a set gone silent for over a year. But silent no more!
Actors and production teams are returning now, first to film Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, which we will offer online in August, then New Works in Action virtual plays for September as we start rehearsal to open for a live audience. Our cast will reclaim their grove of silver birches and launch our Reopening 2021-22 Season with The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno on October 7, 2021, a play that declares the power of hope in the face of illness and a challenging future. In December, after more than two years, our theater space will again be transformed to receive a family-friendly new production, Man Covets Bird by critically acclaimed Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer, where the ability to expand our minds and hearts beyond ourselves takes flight in a magically simple tale. And in February 2022, Maple and Vine by Jordan Harrison will treat us to the seductions and dangers of attempting to live in a dream of a seemingly kinder, simpler past.
This week, standing alone in our lobby at the entrance to the church where we perform, I sampled the gentle breeze created by the original fresh air ventilation system designed and built nearly 100 years ago, a system we recently upgraded and restored. The upgrade in ventilation is part of heightened safety measures to accommodate our audience’s return. Standing and feeling that gentle fresh breeze, it felt like a breath from a century past, from the present, and a whispered promise for the future all at the same time. I can only say it felt like falling in love.
This Reopening 2021-22 Season, please join us at Spooky Action and fall in love with Theater all over again!
Cheers!
Richard Henrich,
Artistic Director
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THE REALISTIC JONESES
by Will Eno directed by Gillian Drake Oct 7-24, 2021 Our 2021-2022 season begins with the return of The Realistic Joneses, by critically acclaimed playwright Will Eno, directed by Gillian Drake, Spooky Action Theater’s New Works in Action Program Director. The show was presented for a couple of weeks back in March 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Washington DC. In this "humane, literate and slyly hilarious" play (New York Times), two couples find they share a lot more than their last names. Ever stumbling towards meaningful relationships, humor caps their encounter with an unsettling truth that lies just below the surface. |
Image by Andy Ellis
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MAN COVETS BIRD
by Finegan Kruckemeyer directed by Shanara Gabrielle Dec 2-19, 2021 From critically acclaimed Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer, comes Man Covets Bird, an enveloping world of pearly prose, lustrous live music, melancholia and sunshine. A boy wakes to finds he has grown. He recognizes the stranger in the mirror, but his parents, his town do not. Outside his childhood bedroom he finds a bird that cannot fly and together the strangers embark on adventures. This is the story about their journey to the big city, what they find there, what they join in and what they make themselves. A story about flying from nests, birdsong and growing up. |
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MAPLE AND VINE
by Jordan Harrison directed by Stevie Zimmerman Feb 10-March 6, 2022 Spooky Action's 2021-2022 ends with Maple and Vine, by Jordan Harrison, directed by Stevie Zimmerman. Big City dwellers Katha and Ryu have become disenchanted with their 21st-century lives. The harder they try to figure out what happiness looks like, the more elusive it becomes. Then they meet Dean, from a idealistic community that exists in a permanent state of 1955. They forsake cell phones and sushi for cigarettes and Chicken a la King, taking on new identities that challenge who they thought they were and who they might become. How far will they go -- how far would you go to alter your life in the pursuit of happiness? |
