In DC’s remix of street artist and activist Banksy’s “Flower Thrower,” the projectile poised to be hurled through the air at an unseen menace by a masked figure isn’t a bouquet of blooms, but a foot-long salami sub sandwich. This iconic image is of course a uniquely local tribute to ex-DOJ employee Sean Charles Dunn, who infamously lobbed his dinner at a law enforcement officer last month in protest of the takeover of the city by federal forces. “The Sandwich Thrower” reminds us that art is a powerful tool of agitation against censorship, erasure and government overreach. This month’s column looks to art that answers our current moment on the stage. Read on for our curated selection.
In the Spotlight
“Persist!”
Capital City Symphony
Showing Oct. 5
www.atlasarts.org
www.capitalcitysymphony.org
On the morning of January 28, 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich awoke to unpleasant – and terrifying – news. Joseph Stalin had attended a performance of his opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” and the authoritarian leader of the Soviet Union was not pleased. An anonymous article in the newspaper Pravda lambasted Shostakovich’s work as a “Leftist distortion” of good Soviet music and “a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” Petrified for the safety of himself and his family, the composer produced one of the most celebrated pieces of music of his career, a composition that you’ll be able to enjoy as part of the Capital City Symphony’s opening to the 2025-26 season. “I simply had to include Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in this season,” says Victoria Gau, CCS’s artistic director as she explains the program for the new season, titled “Uncommon Times.” “I don’t think it’s that hard for us as Americans to imagine the circumstances under which this symphony was performed.”
“Persist!” is an arrangement of four compositions by classical and contemporary composers that Gau has curated to bring “uncommon joy” to the ear at a time when it’s desperately needed. The lineup aims to delight, Gau explains, but also to educate as we witness the federal government’s increasing control over artistic expression. “The historical through-line is there. Shostakovich started sleeping under the stairwell because he was sure they were coming to take him away during the night.”
Gau has programmed Shostakovich’s Festive Overture alongside the Fifth Symphony. “I included the overture because it’s festive and celebratory. Shostakovich knew how to write celebratory music.” Commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre in 1954 as part of the October Revolution’s 37th anniversary, the overture is vibrant and energetic.
Much like Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, Valerie Coleman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times was written during a period of upheaval, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the culture wars precipitated by the death of George Floyd. Gau selected it because Coleman’s composition takes us on a bracing journey of “joy, grit, fight and energy” that’s pertinent to audiences right now. “There’s nothing about that that isn’t applicable to the experience of being in DC in 2025,” she says.
With a nudge and wink, Gau has also included the overture from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” a rousing introduction to the protagonist, a licentious, powerful and privileged nobleman who is finally held accountable for his manipulation of women. “I programmed this because anyone who’s aware of the morality of the story of ‘Don Giovanni’ will get it,” Gau explains. “It gives you a moment to chuckle about things that aren’t funny in real life.”
Win tickets!
Five lucky readers can win two tickets each by emailing info@capitalcitysymphony.org by noon on Sunday, Oct. 5, and correctly answering the following question: What year did Shostakovich write his Festive Overture? If selected you will be contacted by CCS staff with ticket information.
On Right Now
“The Dragon,” Spooky Action Theater
Showing Sept. 25-Oct. 19
www.spookyaction.org
You know the fairy tale. In a quaint hamlet terrorized by a pervasive evil, the residents desperately await a knight in shining armor who’s brave enough to deliver them a “happily ever after.” This month, Dupont Circle’s Spooky Action Theater offers a contemporary spin on this Brothers Grimm-like folk story through an adaptation of Evgeny Shvarts’s 1944 play “The Dragon.” Director Elizabeth Dinkova says that while she’s honored the original work, she’s also given it a few unexpected tweaks.
Shvarts was a Russian Jewish playwright under Stalin’s authoritarian regime who started writing plays in 1929, finding rich source material in the work of Hans Christian Andersen. He riffed on “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella” and “The Snow Queen,” adapting the characters and storylines to critique the government. Dinkova, Jesse Rasmussen and Yura Kordonsky’s interpretation of “The Dragon” tells the story of what Dinkova describes as “a small community in detention” that “liberates” its imagination and finds coded ways to speak seriously and whimsically about their oppression. In this version of the play, Sir Lancelot must accomplish the dual task of conquering the eponymous dragon while also convincing the oppressed that they deserve freedom.
The cast is composed entirely of immigrants, a decision made to highlight the perspectives and experiences of outsiders in a city often characterized as transient. “One of the things that excited me about being an artistic director in DC was being able to spotlight and celebrate the city’s diversity and the variety of cultures and political perspectives, says Dinkova.
Gabriel Alejandro, Raghad Makhlouf, Ryan Sellers, Fran Tapia and Surasree Das have found their experience as immigrants mirrored by the words and actions of the characters they play. The costume design by Johnna Presby and scenic design by Margarita Syrocheva are critical elements of the play’s constructed reality, a shifting landscape that Dinkova says reflects the incremental psychological change that each character experiences in the story. “We’ve created an interesting blurring of realities that communicates the impulse to see your life differently. The work itself wears a couple different layers,” she adds.
“The Dragon” examines what protest and empowerment can look like through color, light, texture, garb and text. It’s a brave statement to make in DC’s current political climate.
Special Mention
“Julius X: A Re-envisioning of the Tragedy of Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeare”
Folger Theatre
Showing through Oct. 26
www.folger.edu
The theme of politically motivated assassination is dominating social media feeds, news headlines and dinner table conversations across the country. Into this heated discourse, Folger Theatre is introducing playwright, poet and podcast host Al Letson’s “Julius X: A Re-envisioning of the Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.”
You’ll know Letson as the voice and brain behind the award-winning “Reveal” podcast on PRX. “Julius X” is a delicious fusion of his own poetry, the words and writings of civil rights icon Malcolm X and William Shakespeare’s 1599 play “Julius Caesar.” For this production, Folger Theatre’s artistic director Karen Ann Daniels invited Nicole Brewer to direct the play after she worked with the material at Folger’s Reading Room Festival three years ago. “I liked Letson’s concept for the show, not just the merging of ‘Caesar’ with Malcolm X but also the use of spoken word in place of standard monologues and soliloquies found in ‘Caesar.’”
Letson’s script adds what Brewer calls octane to the narrative of one of the most polarizing characters of America’s civil rights movement, a man whose preference for Black nationalism and Black consciousness as tools of revolution set him in opposition to the predominantly peaceful methods advocated at the time by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Julius X” is set in New York’s Harlem in 1965, the same year Malcolm X was gunned down by three members of the Nation of Islam, minutes before an address to the Organization of African American Unity.
For Brewer, the most compelling storyline is unfulfilled needs and what we’re willing to sacrifice to preserve the basic human rights that many have fought so hard to win. “There are still unmet needs in terms of healthcare, safety, policing and freedom to choose,” she says, “the rights that were the ideological stamp of this great experiment called the United States that were preserved for a select few.”
Brandon Carter is the eponymous Julius X, alongside Nikkole Salter as his wife Calpurnia, Lilli Hokama as Addara, Greg Alverez Reid as Brutus, Jay Frisby as Cassius and other top-tier names that round out an exceptional cast for an exceptional play that Brewer says is generating plenty of interest. “People are excited about this. I think it says something about the gap between where we are and what we need.”
