Since “it’s such a woman-centric play,” assembling a team of female designers seemed a “fun” choice, the director said. She is particularly pleased with Williams’s set, which Holdridge thinks will evoke the disorienting quality of a Las Vegas casino, and with Jessica Ford’s costume designs, which adopt period styles but colors and patterns inspired by “pictures of really rich people in the Hamptons,” in Holdridge’s words. (Nancy Schertler is handling lighting, and Veronika Vorel, sound.)
When she was getting her production in place, Holdridge overhauled Centlivre’s original verse prologue and epilogue, which seemed clogged with 18th-century allusions. To correct this problem — and to massage, for modern ears, some of the rhyming couplets that Centlivre had ensconced in the otherwise prose-form script — the director turned to dramatist David Grimm, who has demonstrated a fondness for theater history with works such as his faux-Restoration-comedy “Measure for Pleasure,” which Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company mounted in 2008. “He does rhyming iambic pentameter couplets like no one else,” Holdridge says.
When Grimm read Centlivre’s play, he marveled at its freshness. “It appeals to a contemporary sensibility,” he says. “It actually jumps off the page.” Moreover, he points out, “We’re watching these rich people win millions, and gamble away millions, in a heartbeat” while middle-class characters “really get it in the neck” — a pattern that strikes him as “screamingly relevant” to 21st-century trends.
It’s precisely because of that lightning-rod connection to the present that the Folger is betting on “The Gaming Table.”
“This play makes so much sense for us, because we’re about connecting today with the past,” Griffin says.
Wren is a freelance writer.
“The Gaming Table”
(Tickets $30-$65. “The Gaming Table” Jan. 24–March 4. Folger Theatre,
201 East Capitol St. SE. Washington, DC.
Call 202-544-7077.
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