2013 Billboard Music Awards

Platt leaving as artistic director of Olney Theatre Center

By Jessica Goldstein,
Jessica Goldstein
Dec 11, 2012 10:49 PM EST
The Washington Post
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After less than seven months in the job, Olney Theatre Center’s artistic director Martin Platt is leaving. Alan Wade, a member of the theater’s board of directors, is serving as interim artistic director while Olney undergoes a search for a permanent replacement.

According to board president Jennifer Kneeland, Platt “wished to pursue his work with Perry Street Theatricals in New York.” She described the decision for Platt to leave as “mutual.”

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Kneeland said there are no plans to amend the 2013 season, although“anything is possible.” She said, “We think Martin did an excellent job selecting titles for Olney, so we’re going to do all that we can in order to maintain the season.”

Platt began his role as artistic director in late May. His predecessor, Jim Petosa, had led Olney since 1994 and left citing his desire for Olney to “return to a more aggressive artistic presence in its seasons,” as he told The Post in January 2012.

At the beginning of his tenure, Platt echoed those sentiments, telling The Post that “I think [Olney’s] slipped a bit. Programming has gotten very conservative. I think part of my initiative is to really return Olney to being a real player in that area . . . both with the kinds of plays we like to do [and] the artists we bring down there.”

Kneeland said Olney hopes to find a permanent artistic director within the first quarter of the year. “We did an extensive search last year to find Martin,” she said. “So through that, we were able to see what’s out there as far as talent in the area.”

Though that search didn’t yield a perfect match, Kneeland said she “can’t say we would have done it differently. . . . We’re sorry that it didn’t work out. We’re looking forward to the future.”

SCENA celebrates a silver anniversary

The SCENA 25th Anniversary Gala is a one-two punch of a celebration. Not only is it recognizing a quarter-century’s worth of international-themed work by the Washington-based company, but it will be also doing so with great specificity: The event will be held 25 years to the day after SCENA’s first performance, which was the Washington premiere of “Help Wanted,” by Franz Xaver Kroetz.

It’s a homecoming of sorts for SCENA, as the site of the Gala, the Warehouse Theatre, was SCENA’s home from 1997 to 2008.

Artistic director Robert McNamara wants to pay tribute to SCENA’s past, though with a bit more brevity than at the 20th anniversary. “In 2008 we did 20 plays in 20 minutes covering 20 years of the theater — which was a lie,” he said. “It took two and a half hours.”

This year, he promised, “We’re only going to do lines from three plays: the first, ‘Help Wanted;’ a play from the middle; . . . and the very last line of the very last play, from ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ which we just closed in November.”

Another highlight: “We may read some of the worst reviews we’ve ever gotten for our productions,” said McNamara. A complimentary champagne toast should help those slings and arrows go down smoothly. (There’s a cash bar, too, in case the reviews are especially brutal.)