![]() Camp David was really important, because Jimmy Carter came to see it, and I went out to interview both he and Rosalynn Carter, which was absolutely amazing. You probably know the Justice Scalia play, The Originalist, set in 1990. But I was most interested in the decades. People within the organization wanted to package it as: These are the president plays, these are the women’s plays. Yes, every decade of American history from 1776 to 2010. I didn’t realize it was doing the decade-by-decade thing, like August Wilson. It started as a smaller commissioning program, then it moved into a 25-play cycle. But it will be something that will look through American history, with touchstones in different decades, to give us an understanding of who we are as Americans. So once I was into those two plays, I then moved into this larger idea of, What if we do every decade of American history? We’re going to hit some presidents, as we have. Then I spoke to Larry Wright about the idea of Camp Davidin terms of President Carter. and Lizzy K., about Mary Tyrone and Elizabeth Keckley, with a tangential guest part for President Lincoln. The way I started on this is, I was commissioning people for president’s plays. That is a throughline of American history. What’s fascinating about the play is that Kia was commissioned probably four or five years ago, and here we are, in this moment in time where there’s now a desire to keep white students ignorant about what happened in the past, in terms of African American history-let’s keep them naïve so they don’t understand the country’s history. While she was doing so, there was a real push for the African American students to be studying in the trades as opposed to academics, which is something she mightily fought. ![]() It takes place here in Washington, D.C., at a very famous school called the M Street School, which she ended up running. The 1890s, and she’s focused on Anna Julia Cooper, an educator, a scholar, a feminist, African American. ![]() Which part of history is she looking at in that play? You mentioned the Power Play, Kia Corthron’s Tempestuous Elements. So it has a sense of following a 25-year history, but doing it dynamically, so that the season rocks and rolls, starting out with something like Cambodian Rock Band, then a couple of commercial projects, a Power Play-it’s a robust season. The coming season is: bread crumbs for the new artistic year. And I do think that it has shifted into: Go bold or go home.ĭoes the 2023-24 season you’ve chosen have an overarching theme or themes? I know other people will choose seasons with ideas in mind, but that doesn’t work for me. And if you actually are reflecting your hometown where the theatre is, then you’ve done your job-because that throughline will be about what’s happening in that city in one way or another. One figures out what the throughline of a season is after the season has been chosen. When you put your seasons together, did you feel pressure to make everything a stand-alone event, or to curate shows as a group with a connecting theme? That seems to be the thing that’s drawing people out of their pajamas right now.Ī lot of theatres are announcing their upcoming seasons right now, even as subscription numbers have plunged. And then there were two other shows that were good shows-but they weren’t events. Either you have something like Ride the Cyclone that just did gangbusters, and extended by a couple of weeks American Prophet did the same. It’s either a boffo hit, with tons and tons of people, or it’s small audiences. What are the indications you’ve seen at Arena Stage? Now one thing that’s on everyone’s minds is what percentage of audiences you’re all getting back compared to pre-pandemic. ROB WEINERT-KENDT: We spoke last fall when you announced you were leaving. As she related in a recent interview, this emphasis was not a given when she started out. Among her signature achievements at Arena was the building of the new Mead Center for American Theatre and the Power Plays commissioning program, both of which cemented her main focus on new plays by American writers. Smith’s background-as a leader of Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, who had turned that remote venue into an unlikely new-play mecca-seemed to give her the frontier grit to stake her own claim on the Arena legacy. ![]() She was only the third artistic director to lead the venerable institution since its founding in 1950 by Zelda Fichandler, who was succeeded by Douglas Wager. theatre when Molly Smith took the helm in 1998, but the argument could be made that after 25 years in the position, she has not only maintained the theatre’s preeminence but bolstered it.
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