Two photo captions with the Backstage column in the March 21 Style section contained errors. One caption identified Carolee Carmello, pictured in a workshop production of "Saving Aimee" in New York, as the star of Signature Theatre's 2007 production; that role has not yet been cast. A second caption misidentified the bewigged John Morogiello as Lori Boyd in "Irish Authors Held Hostage."
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Next Season's Signature, Underlined With a Flourish
Miller says the work is consuming: "It's an inexhaustible part, but it's built to be that way."
Director Kasi Campbell cast Miller in lead roles in her Rep Stage productions of "The Seagull" and "Arcadia" and wanted to direct him in "Hamlet" because he's in his twenties -- close in age to the character. The cerebral young actor "gets things faster than anyone else . . . even his director," she jokes, and adds that the three decades separating them have made their plumbing of the play at rehearsals fascinating.
  Carolee Carmello will star as the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Signature's premiere of "Saving Aimee." (By Joan Marcus) |
"When you start approaching that intersection where will and fate collide, that intersection looks different from generations spread that far apart. A young person is more likely to take arms and an older person is more likely to bear the slings and arrows. So some of our most interesting philosophical discussions on the play . . . come out of the fact that we're at different points on life's continuum," Campbell says.
Held Hostage
"I woke up one morning with the idea of, what if Oscar Wilde were being held by Islamic radicals?" says John Morogiello. "So I wrote a sketch and I thought it was very funny and I showed it to my director, Martin Blanco, and he encouraged me to come up with a whole bunch of different Irish writers [each] with a different terrorist."
The resulting compendium of comic quick cuts, "Irish Authors Held Hostage," runs at the Warehouse Theater Second Stage on Thursday through April 15.
In 2001, Morogiello, now a playwright-in-residence at the Maryland State Arts Council, was finishing a play about George Bernard Shaw ("Engaging Shaw," which will premiere in August at Oldcastle Theatre in Bennington, Vt.). After 9/11, however, his agent could not interest anyone in the Shaw play or much else.
Then came Morogiello's brainstorm. The play premiered in a shorter version at Source's Washington Theatre Festival in 2003 and then at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
"We are not trying to offend anyone, certainly," he says of the piece. A quick perusal of the script shows a couple of Islamist terrorists, true, but Shaw is held by a Colombian narco-terrorist, W.B. Yeats by Irish radical feminist actress Maud Gonne, James Joyce by a Texas white supremacist and Sean O'Casey by a North Korean. The Irish writers drive their captors a little bonkers, too.
One thing he learned while expanding his play, Morogiello says: "There's no shortage of great Irish authors, but we ran out of terrorists."
Follow Spots
· Catalyst Theater will hold a pay-what-you-can reading Monday at 7:30 p.m. of "Novel," a new play by Anna Ziegler, at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (545 Seventh St. SE; 202-494-3776).
· Trumpet Vine Theatre Company is presenting the world premiere of Paul Donnelly's "Whole Against the Sky," about the familial and romantic relationships of a gay man, Thursday through April 15 at Theater on the Run in Arlington; call 703-912-1649 or e-mail trumpetvinetc@yahoo.com .
