By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Signature Theatre will open its next season -- the first for the Arlington-based company in its new venue in Shirlington Village -- with the one-two musical punch of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" (Sept. 5-Oct. 8) and Lerner and Loewe's "My Fair Lady" (Nov. 7-Dec. 10).

Construction delays had kept the company from taking up residence in its new digs at the end of this season, but Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer is optimistic about an August move.

He chose Sondheim's rumination on Grimm's fairy tales to kick off the season so "we could really get kids and families and just everybody in there to see it and see the space." He'll direct "Into the Woods," as he did at Signature 11 years ago.

The company had a time getting the rights for "My Fair Lady," considered by many the pinnacle of the musical theater genre. In keeping with Signature's mission to reimagine shows on a more intimate scale, the production is "not going to be the normal 'My Fair Lady,' " Schaeffer says. "There are certain restrictions that the estate has put on us, so it's little bit tricky." A director is to be announced.

Schaeffer will stage the world premiere of "Saving Aimee" (Jan. 23-Feb. 25), a musical about the checkered life of early-20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. He already has workshopped it with its writer-lyricist, Kathie Lee Gifford. The music is by David Pomeranz and David Friedman.

Under the heading of the Female British Invasion, Signature will present two plays: "Crave" (Oct. 3-Dec. 3, 2006) and "Susanna Cox" (April 3-April 29, 2007). "Susanna Cox," commissioned from British writer Bathsheba Doran, delves into the true story of a Mennonite woman executed for infanticide in 1809 in Pennsylvania. Schaeffer will direct. "Crave" a series of intense monologues about love, longing and loss by the late Sarah Kane, a former classmate of Bathsheba Doran, will be presented in the smaller, 99-seat performance space.

As part of the Shakespeare in Washington festival, Signature will bring in the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv to perform "Hamlet" (March 6-11, 2007) as a special event. The production, in Hebrew with a projected English translation, will be acted on stages placed among the audience, who will sit on swivel chairs.

Actor Martin Moran will perform his Obie-winning one-man show, "The Tricky Part" (April 10-May 6, 2007). In it, he recalls sexual abuse at a Catholic boys camp and his efforts to look back at the experience and his life afterward.

Four cabarets also are planned for the smaller space, including "Singing Shakespeare" (March 7-10, 2007).

Actor Karl Miller has spent the better part of a year researching "Hamlet," from its grand themes to its punctuation. He'll play the title role at Rep Stage in Columbia on Friday through April 9. "I've played a lot of crazy people and neurotic people and evil people in my time . . . this is just very different," he says.

Nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for his performance as a teen killer in "columbinus" at Round House Silver Spring, Miller says he "started out doing naturalism, and it takes a long time to reverse that hard-wiring." His research began with "the biggest and the broadest and the most abstract and thematic studies of the play and then focused even tighter on the actual technique and delivery." He went back to basics, "learning how to say a consonant and a vowel."

He tried to absorb fully the idea that in Shakespeare all you ever need is right there in the text -- not between the lines. "Shakespeare's genius lies in the fact that he was writing in a time when psychology and emotion and thought and speaking were all bound in one activity," Miller says. In modern life, he notes, "very rarely do we directly express how we feel at this moment, and in Shakespeare, that's all that's happening."

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.

"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.

"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."

· 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 .