Martin describes the RSC approach: “We’re not mocking Shakespeare. We’re mocking the way he’s taken so seriously, the way he’s acted badly, all these crazy productions . . . and that’s with the sports show, too. We’re not mocking the sports so much as how it’s presented and how pretentious it is . . . the athletes who are so full of themselves and all the greed and all the corporate sponsorship.”
Tichenor and Martin claim to touch on 3,477.3 sports in under two hours in the show. It’s couched in a supposed broadcast by the Reduced Shakespeare Company Sports Network, covering the “Live Super World Master Series Grand Prix Bowl Sudden-Death Trifectacup Complete Sports Abridge-athon.” There is toe wrestling, English jousting, men’s synchronized swimming in flowery caps, and a sport based on living in Antarctica called “surviving.”
Sports, Tichenor says, “felt like a way to do a topic that was massive and huge, and also popular and ongoing, ever-changing. There’s always a new champion. There’s always a new athlete in trouble. . . . Sports culture, lingo, slang has so permeated everything from politics and reality shows and preschool fundraisers.”
At Rep Stage, history with humor
Michael Stebbins goes hunting off-Broadway for weighty shows on historic subjects that have a comic lilt to them that pleases audiences. Then he puts them on at Rep Stage in Columbia, where he’s been producing artistic director of the Equity company at Howard Community College since November 2005.
For Rep Stage’s 2011-12 season, he’s opening with the play “Or” by Liz Duffy Adams, which ran off-Broadway in 2009. It’s set during the 1660s in England under Charles II, focusing on Aphra Behn, a female playwright of the era, and her dealings with Charles and his mistress, the actress Nell Gwynne.
Plays such as “Or,” says Stebbins, are “a celebration of the theater . . . pieces that accentuate actors and their ability.”
Rep Stage’s 2011-12 season:
l “Or” (Aug. 31-Sept. 18), by Liz Duffy Adams, will be directed by Stebbins and feature actors Jason Odell Williams, Charlotte Cohn and Christine Demuth.
l “Barrymore” (Oct. 26-Nov. 13), by William Luce, is a near-solo piece about the actor John Barrymore near the end of his life. Christopher Plummer won a Tony Award in 1997 for his Broadway turn in the role. Nigel Reed, who played the Hollywood scribe Dalton Trumbo in “Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted” at Rep Stage in 2008, and his director from that show, Steven Carpenter, will re-team on “Barrymore.”
l “Yellowman” (Feb. 8-26, 2012), by Dael Orlandersmith, takes a harsh and poetic look at how young African American lovers are affected by racial attitudes about lighter- and darker-skinned people within their community. Kasi Campbell will direct.
l “Las Meninas” (April 18-May 6, 2012) is an early play by Lynn Nottage. Its title refers to a famous painting of the Spanish royal family by Velasquez, but its subject is the relationship between Marie-Therese, the homesick Spanish queen of Louis XIV of France, and the African dwarf he purchased to entertain her. Eve Muson will direct.
Follow spots
l Theatergoers in the Washington and Baltimore areas saw Lydia R. Diamond’s comedy “Stick Fly,” about an upper-class African American family on Martha’s Vineyard, at Arena Stage in 2010, Everyman Theatre in 2011 and the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va., in 2008. Now it’s going to Broadway and pop star Alicia Keys is a co-producer. Kenny Leon will direct. Previews start Nov. 18 at the Lyceum Theatre, and it opens Dec. 8.
l
Wolf Trap’s summer musicals will begin with a return engagement of “Mamma Mia” (June 30-July 3); “Fiddler on the Roof” (July 15-17); “Sweeney Todd” (July 22), produced by the Wolf Trap Opera Company; “Guys and Dolls” (Aug. 11-14); “Cathy Rigby Is Peter Pan” (Sept. 1-4); and “Sing-A-Long Sound of Music” (Sept. 10).
Horwitz is a freelance writer.
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