Whether you regard Synetic as theater or dance or a mix, its experience belies the notion that a company in D.C. cannot contour an original repertory to its own strengths and mold a young retinue of actors and designers who stick around. Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili started Synetic as an offshoot of the now defunct Stanislavsky Theater Studio. Over a decade, they have groomed athletically gifted young actors — some recent graduates of area colleges — and turned them into stalwarts, even stars. Alex Mills, Philip Fletcher, Ben Cunis and Natalie Berk are just a few of the actors who have shown their gifts and staying power, along with designers like Anastasia R. Simes and Colin Bills and composer Konstantine Lortkipanidze.
What Synetic hasn’t located is a potent playwright to make smoother Synetic’s other genre of shows, the spoken-word adaptations directed by Paata and choreographed by wife Irina. Maybe they should follow closely what Theater J’s artistic director, Ari Roth, and literary director, Shirley Serotsky, are rolling out this week: a two-month-long “Locally Grown” play festival seeking to fill a long-standing D.C. void. Not only will the festival offer readings of works by Washington dramatists Jacqueline Lawton, Gwydion Suilebhan and Stephen Spotswood and performance artist Laura Zam. It will also stage performances by local solo artist Jon Spelman, as well as a full run of “The Religion Thing,” a new comedy by Washington-based Renee Calarco, with a cast that includes the fine D.C. actors Kimberly Gilbert and Will Gartshore.
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A snapshot of major theater venues in the Washington region
While the Kennedy Center runs its annual Page-to-Stage readings, The Inkwell commits itself exclusively to plays-in-progress, Source Theatre holds a yearly short-play festival and some small companies like Rorschach Theatre are devoted to new works (some are by its co-artistic director, Randy Baker), Theater J’s new enterprise intensifies the spotlight on playwrights living here in a new way. According to Roth, many of these writers had developed relationships with the company: Spotswood was an intern in the literary department; Zam sat on a post-show panel for a Theater J production.
“We can grow this stuff with writers we care about,” says Roth, a playwright himself. “But are these plays any good? Will people come? Are they up to national standards? Of course, these are the great questions. You have to make the case that growing locally is going to be just as good.”
Roth is sticking his neck out here. That’s not a new posture for an artistic director of a Jewish company who has taken guff for championing plays that examine Israel from challenging perspectives. It’s possible, in fact, that “Locally Grown” will be awfully bumpy. Yet a tolerance for pain must be built into a city’s creative constitution — and the theaters, especially the smaller ones, might want to watch closely at how this festival is received.
For the next logical advance in Washington’s maturation as a theater town seems to be a deeper investment in its native intelligence. A few small troupes are already headed on this path: Groups like banished? productions, with its flirtations with bizarre intersections of language, theater and food service in “A Tactile Dinner”; dog and pony dc, collating ideas about improv, politics and audience participation in plays like “Beertown” are broadening playgoers’ understanding of the riddles theater can unravel.
Unorthodox pieces by fledgling companies may not be the most significant or widely seen work in the city, but they’re vital examples of how theater minds can flow, at every level, into original niches. Let’s see if the big theaters in town can talk more regularly to the small ones. The dramatic landscape will be all the richer for it. If the past 10 years were a decade for building theaters, maybe the next 10 will be remembered for building bridges.
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