In Ellen Winner’s 1985 book “Invented Worlds. The Psychology of the Arts”, the author explores the artist’s compulsion to conjure worlds. What is it about artists, Winner asks, that motivates them to make visible their dreamscapes, whether on canvas, paper or stage? What drives the deep and ancient desire to communicate and offer catharsis through art? This month’s column looks to world-makers and the worlds they invent for us.
In the Spotlight
Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival
Atlas Performing Arts Center
February 14 – March 15
For 17 years, the Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival has gathered a sampling of the finest performing arts talent under one roof. Over five weeks from mid-February to mid-March, you can enjoy both emerging and established performing artists in the categories of movement, sound and story. With their Festival pass packages, the more you watch, the more money you save, so book your subscription-style Festival passes now at www.atlasarts.org
These are the performances we’re especially looking forward to.
“Moore Contemporary Theatrics:
Beneath the Sun”,February 21, 8 p.m.
Daniel L. Moore founded Moore Contemporary Theatrics to bridge the divide between theater and dance and celebrate Black and African American stories through movement. For the company’s debut performance, nine dancers will reinterpret Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun” by using dance to communicate the principal themes of Hansberry’s work – housing discrimination, ingrained poverty, family dynamics and “The Dream Deferred.” “A Raisin in the Sun” chronicles the Younger family and how a $10,000 life insurance check transforms their lives forever. It was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on a Broadway Stage with a full Black principal cast and Black Director.
“Carly Harvey: The Chrysalis – Blues at the Crossroads”, February 22, 6 p.m.
Carly Harvey is a DC born, Afro-Indigenous musical artist who believes music and dance are medicinal. She was voted “DC Queen of the Blues” in 2016 and comes from a deeply musical and multicultural family. For her performance at the INTERSECTIONS Festival, she’ll be plumbing the depths of her talent to evoke the evolution of the blues, its influence on contemporary music and how the blues can be a modality of spiritual expression and healing. Harvey’s singing will be accompanied by dancer Angela Gladue performing hoop and jingle dances while adorned in richly symbolic regalia.
Upcoming Attraction
“Between Riverside and Crazy,”
1st Stage Theatre
Showing February 19 – March 8
www.1ststage.org
In Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2014 play “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Walter ‘Pops’ Washington is the sun at the center of his own solar system, a cluttered, rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City that he shares with his son Junior, Junior’s girlfriend Lulu and Oswaldo, a recovering drug addict. It’s a world entirely of Pop’s own making, packed to the ceiling with the detritus of a life that’s slowly coming apart, and it’s being threatened by unwelcome outside influences.
The play, being directed for 1st Stage Theatre by José Carrasquillo, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Through the kind of gritty, New York flavored dialogue and characters that Guirgis writes so well, “Between Riverside and Crazy” takes an unflinching look at addiction, gentrification and agoraphobia. It’s a work that Carrasquillo says pushes hyperrealism to the extreme, so finding the right actors to take it on was important. “It’s such a character driven piece. Casting the play took a long time because it had to be genuine. The world we’ve created from a scenic perspective has allowed us to bring so much magic into the play. How we’ve designed Pop’s apartment is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”
Guirgis builds his plays around his favorite actors, a coterie of acclaimed Hollywood stage and screen stars that include Ellen Burstyn, Chris Rock and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Influenced by Tennessee Williams’s probing of the human condition in all its messy complexity, “Between Riverside and Crazy” is alternately darkly comedic and savage. It’s packed with the kind of New York City idiosyncrasies that are characteristic of Guirgis’s work, much of which is set in and around the boroughs he grew up in. “I love Stephen’s work because he creates plays that represent people we don’t usually see, that we don’t know about,” says Carrasquillo. “You experience the worlds he creates, they suck you in. They are tough worlds.”
As New York City embarks on a new chapter of history led by a mayor promising to tackle the injustices on vivid display in “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Guirgis’s play takes on new and contemporary relevance.
On Right Now
“John Doe,” The Keegan Theatre
Showing January 31 – February 22
www.keegantheatre.com
For Angelle Whavers, a 29 NJ based playwright, there’s nothing she loves more than making fantasy worlds come to life. “I’m a nerd!” she laughs. “I love fantasy. I like bringing the fantastical to the stage because I like the challenge of it.” “John Doe” is a new work by Whavers and is her third play produced for the stage, selected as part of The Keegan Theatre’s Boiler Room Series initiative aimed at developing and profiling the work of emerging theatrical playwrights.
The antagonists in “John Doe” (directed by Josh Sticklin) also happen to be lost in worlds of their own making. Zia – played by Ariana Caldwell – really hates people. Her anxiety has only been exacerbated by the tragic death of her brother and to avoid socializing she fabricates a private world that isolates her from friends and family. Doe (Mitchell Alexander) happens to be dead, but his imposed state of isolation has conversely only sharpened his love for humanity. It’s sheer fate that brings these two misfits together, and with the help of a cast of colorful characters both Zia and Doe must piece the missing parts of Doe’s life together.
“It’s a story about dealing with loss, which is something that’s always relevant and important to discuss,” Whavers says. “Doe and Zia are upset about their losses. This is a story about allowing yourself to fully feel and accept those emotions. It’s a good thing to miss someone.”
There’s a beautiful message inherent in the play that perhaps it’s only once we’ve opened our private worlds to others that we can receive the guidance we so desperately need, and maybe not feel so lonely. It’s advice that many of us could use right about now.
