Hartford Stage Associate Artistic Director Elizabeth Williamson has had a busy few months. She has been shuttling overseas to serve as a dramaturg on two different shows that she’s been involved with for years that happen to be getting produced at the same time. In London, Williamson has been working on “The Inheritance” by Matthew Lopez, which was a success at the Young Vic theater this past winter and is now in the West End. The play, which was originally commissioned by Hartford Stage, features Vanessa Redgrave and is inspired by the E.M. Forster novel “Howard’s End.”
The other show is Bess Wohl’s “Make Believe,” which is opening the Hartford Stage season, where it runs through Sept. 30. It’s another Hartford Stage commission. When she was associate artistic director of the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 2008-2012, Williamson oversaw Bess Wohl’s first two professionally produced plays, “Touch(ed)” and “In.”
“Make Believe” is the fifth play Williamson and Wohl have worked on together, and “The Inheritance” is the fifth she’s done with Lopez (who’s best known in Connecticut for “The Whipping Man, “Somewhere” and “The Legend of Georgia McBride”). “You develop that level of trust,” Williamson says.
The overlapping gigs meant Williamson would spend a week or two at rehearsals in London, then hop a plane and spend some time in Hartford, then fly back and forth until both shows were up. “It’s difficult to be a dramaturg,” she says, “without being in the room.” To add to her already full plate, Williamson is directing the next Hartford Stage show of this new season, Shakespeare’s “Henry V” Oct. 11 through Nov. 11.
Long Wharf, Westport Casting
Mark Lamos’ Westport Country Playhouse production of “Man of La Mancha” will star Philip Hernandez as Don Quixote, with Tony Manna as his sidekick Sancho Panza. Also in the cast: Gisela Adisa as Aldonza/Dulcinea, Ceasar F. Barajas as Pedro, Carlos Encinias as Padre, Michael Scott Gomez as Paco/Guard/Horse, Paola Hernandez as Antonia, Michael Mendez as Innkeeper/Tenorio, Ian Paget as Captain/Anselmo, Lulu Picart as Maria/Housekeeper, David Sattler as Governor, Jermaine Rowe as Juan/Guard/Horse, Clay Singer as Duke/Carrasco and Esteban Suero as Barber/José.
Hernandez has the distinction of being the only actor to play both Jean Valjean and Javert in “Les Miserables” on Broadway. Manna is a Yale School of Drama grad whom Mark Lamos directed in his all-male “Taming of the Shrew” at Yale Rep in 2003, and also appeared at the Rep in “These Paper Bullets!” and “Cymbeline.” Adisa was with the national tour of “Sister Act” when it played the Bushnell in 2013.
“Man of La Mancha” has numerous Connecticut connections. It premiered at the Goodspeed Opera House 53 years ago, one of that theater’s first major successes. Composer Mitch Leigh studied music at Yale. Dale Wasserman, who adapted the musical from his own TV screenplay “I, Don Quixote,” was a founding member of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford.
New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre had its own scaled-down “Man of La Mancha” in 2007, a production that began at Chicago’s Court Theatre.
The Long Wharf “Man of La Mancha” had a cast of 11. Westport’s has 14. The original 1965 Broadway production (as well as the most Broadway revival, in 2003), had 23. Details at westport.org.
Long Wharf Theatre’s season-opener, “The Roommate,” will star Tasha Lawrence and Linda Powell.
“The Roommate” is by Jen Silverman, whose “The Moors” premiered at Yale Rep in 2016 and whose “That Poor Girl and How He Killed Her” was at Connecticut Repertory Theatre last year. “The Roommate” is directed by Mike Donahue, a Yale School of Drama grad who directed the play’s 2014 premiere at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville and directed it again for the Williamstown Theatre Festival just last year.
Powell was in the Long Wharf productions of “Our Town” and “A Doll’s House.” Lawrence was in a reading of Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Great Wilderness” at the O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference in 2013. Both Lawrence and Powell were in the Broadway show “Wilder, Wilder, Wilder,” a compendium of one-acts by Thornton Wilder. Details at longwharf.org.
#TheatreToo Issue
American Theatre Magazine devoted much of its September issue to the theme #TheatreToo, exploring “abuse, harassment and sexism in the the theatre.” American Theatre is published by Theatre Communications Group, a national organization to which most major regional theaters — including Hartford Stage, Long Wharf and Yale Rep — belong. The Long Wharf figures prominently in an article by Diep Tran: “When Damage Is Done: How three large U.S. theaters have dealt with allegations of sexual misconduct, abuse and/or sexist cultures.” While most of the reporting on the Long Wharf’s dismissal of longtime artistic director Gordon Edelstein in January mirrors what has been reported in the Courant, the story’s summation argues that much work remains to be done: “Even when culprits are eliminated and lines of communication officially opened, the culture of silence can be formidable. Former actor Nicole Lowrance, who said she endured harassment and unwanted physical contact at the hands of Long Wharf’s Edelstein, knows people who are still afraid to tell their stories about him, even though he’s gone and the company has taken steps to restructure their human resources. … Some survivors clearly still feel that to speak out would put their livelihoods on the line.”
Another story in the magazine, “Theatre’s Silence Breakers,” profiled “six people who came forward with stories of harassment at the theater, and where they are now.” Among them: Kim Rubinstein, whose allegations of sexual assault were a major part of the New York Times story which led to his dismissal, and Emily Trask, a Yale School of Drama grad who made allegations against Greg Boyd of Houston’s Alley Theatre.
Top High School Musicals
Last month, the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) revealed its 80th annual list of the most produced plays and musicals at American high schools. Four thousand schools were surveyed. While the top 10 plays include such classics as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (#3), “Our Town” (#5), “12 Angry Jurors” (#6), “The Crucible” (#7) and “Arsenic and Old Lace” (#8) and various adaptations of “Alice in Wonderland” (#4) and “A Christmas Carol” (#9), the top musicals nearly all got written in the past 30 years: “Beauty and the Beast” (#1, displacing the top musical of the previous three years, “The Addams Family,” now #2), “The Little Mermaid” (#3), “Into the Woods” (#4), “Shrek” (#6), “Seussical” (#7), “Little Shop of Horrors” (#8) and “Annie” (#10). The updated version of “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” is #5, and various “The Wizard of Oz” scripts are #9.
More contemporary works on the plays list are “Almost, Maine” (#1), “Peter and the Starcatcher” (#3) and a welcome suprise at #10: D.W. Gregory’s historical drama “Radium Girls.”
The EdTA also lists the top short plays high schools are doing. Two are by Jonathan Rand (“Check Please” and “Check Please Two”), two are by David Ives (“All in the Timing” and “A Sure Thing”), a couple are plays about being in a play (“The Actor’s Nightmare” and “15 Reasons Not to Be in a Play”), one is about being in school (“This is a Test”), and the others are “Aladdin,” “The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet” and “10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.” All are comedies.
