In just 10 short years, Washington’s theaters have undergone a transformation unlike any in the city’s history. Gleaming new palaces of drama have sprung up or been spruced up all over the region, to the tune of more than $350 million. Companies once operating out of garages or ill-fitting nooks and crannies have settled into sophisticated new digs, and some groups with deeper pockets have erected edifices that have added immensely to the city’s architectural luster.
Start-up troupes continue to start up in spite of the trying financial and marketing odds. Established institutions are broadening their offerings, reaching out more aggressively to younger and more diverse audiences. An expanding appetite for invention is nourishing playwrights via new workshop-oriented companies and writer-residency programs. The city welcomed an edgy annual fringe festival, as well as a revitalized nonprofit group to promote the industry. The 2010 and 2011Pulitzer Prize winners for drama, “Next to Normal” and “Clybourne Park,” had pivotal early productions in the District. Shows honed here are moving with a bit more frequency to Broadway, which, for the first time since the 1970s awarded its coveted regional Tony Award to a company from the Washington area.
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A snapshot of major theater venues in the Washington region
All in all, the past decade in Washington — building on the serious playgoing tradition set in motion by Zelda Fichandler and her colleagues at Arena Stage back in the early ’50s — has been characterized by extremely encouraging results.
So now what?
This amorphous question is not posed presumptuously, nor to suggest that simple answers exist about how further to refine the gestalt of a city perpetually engaged by the performing arts. It’s asked at this moment of theatrical vitality as a way of advancing a conversation about what still might be on the collective to-do list, what else might be done to nourish theater artists and, as a result, reap even more enrichment and local pride for play and musical-goers, who buy upwards of 2 million tickets a year to 80-odd companies large and small — from the behemoth Kennedy Center to the tiny dog & pony dc — that have colonized Washington’s theater planet.
Versions of this question seem to be on the minds of institutions all over town, whether at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, which recently signed up a variety of designers, directors and even a playwright as full-fledged company members, or at Signature Theatre, where the current season is heavily laced with world premieres, or at Shakespeare Theatre Company, which has added a musicals-in-concert series to its season. What more might be achieved as a result of this eager human base and wow-inducing physical infrastructure?
The investment reflected by the impressive new facades and stages mandates a continuingly dynamic artistic environment. But while it’s clear that theater is on a roll — with the mix of productions staged in 2011 prompting a rumination from this observer over when it might ever have been better — the city’s ambitions as a theater town of bona fide national distinction remain somewhat under-realized.
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