Making 'Sistahs' Sing: It's All Relative

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Composer William Hubbard and writer-lyricist-director Thomas W. Jones II also work as performers and so they know how to put their music where their mouths are. "That's the power of their collaboration to me," says actress-singer Crystal Fox. "Because they're actors . . . I think they have a sort of character about the music as well."

Fox, Felicia Curry and Bernardine Mitchell play the contentious adult siblings in "Three Sistahs," the Hubbard-Jones show based on a story by Janet Pryce and inspired in part by Chekhov's "Three Sisters," revisiting MetroStage in Alexandria through Sept. 9.

"The beauty of this piece is that the music makes sense," observes Curry, who plays the youngest sister, Irene, a college girl with a 'fro who agitates against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. "There's never a moment when these women open their mouths to sing a song that doesn't make sense in the story they're trying to tell," she says.

Fox plays Marsha, the unhappily married middle sister, and Mitchell plays the eldest, Olive, a college professor. The three have gathered at their childhood home, circa 1969, after the funeral of their brother, a casualty of the Vietnam War.

One of the goals in shaping the musical was to make the songs "a part of the conversation in a living room, rather than stopping and doing a big song and dance," Jones says. He just writes dialogue and when characters seem compelled to rise from prose into poetry, "I can hear that progression. I can hear them go from spoken to sung text." Hubbard then finds the music to express the lyrics.

Curry calls Hubbard a "genius," but the composer says he doesn't know "if that's particularly genius or just something that feels right and you go with it."

Jones finds Hubbard's creative process fascinating. "It's so internal. He'll stop playing for a minute. He'll either tap on the keyboard or tap on his chest. He goes back to the piano," Jones says, "and all of a sudden this thing comes out."

What comes out in "Three Sistahs," Hubbard says, are "gospel influences, there are certainly R&B influences, there are a little bit of standard, old standard jazz things. It . . . runs the gamut . . . some of it is just a song -- it doesn't have to be categorized." Hubbard, who plays keyboard live from the sound booth at the performances, got his love of music in all its forms listening to the jukebox in his grandmother's restaurant in Alexandria, where he grew up and still lives. He also remembers her radio in the back, tuned to gospel stations.

He and Jones have reached a point of trust, Hubbard says, so that if a song works, fine, and if not, "we're not locked in and the song police are not going to come and arrest me. . . . It is really a wonderful atmosphere that Tom and I have created, and to me, it's essential to what we do and how we work."

Since MetroStage first presented "Three Sistahs" in 2002, Jones has discarded subplots and tightened the story. And he sees new parallels in it. "Four years ago, it was a nostalgia piece . . . three women, three different generations, trying to find their way back to each other," he observes. "The last four years, Iraq and Afghanistan have really made the thing resonate in different ways."

Battle Theater

Unwinding at a Silver Spring pub after performances of "Evita" and "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" in the summers of 2005 and 2006, Open Circle Theatre company members met soldiers from nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Seeing the wounded Iraq war veterans coping with their new disabilities, Artistic Director Suzanne Richard began to consider what the troupe could do that the soldiers would want to see.

As a key part of its mission, Open Circle ( http://www.opencircletheatre.org) casts disabled and regularly abled actors in all its shows, and offers audiences sign interpretation, assisted listening and audio description. So to Richard, creating a piece about soldiers in the Iraq conflict seemed natural.

The result is "Songs for a New World," the company's reinterpretation of composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown's 1995 song cycle. It will run tomorrow through Aug. 26 at Round House Theatre Silver Spring. Military folks with ID can purchase 2-for-1 tickets.

Richard has taken Brown's variously dramatic, romantic, comedic, searching and spiritual songs about people on the brink of cosmic life shifts and with his permission infused the revue with a story about the emotional struggles of two soldiers going to Iraq, and of their families. With no dialogue, the saga will unfold through "a lot of acting choices, transition choices," says Richard, who is directing.

One song, "The Flagmaker, 1775," presumably about Betsy Ross, will surely hit home with its lyric "One more star, one more stripe, as you pray your child's not dead." Among the other songs in the "New World" cycle, "Stars and the Moon" has been covered by Audra McDonald and others.

"It took some doing in this town to get Jason Robert Brown's e-mail!" exclaims Richard, who says she got the sense that the contact info for the Tony-winning composer of "Parade" and "The Last Five Years" was classified. Then she asked Signature Theatre's well-connected Eric Schaeffer, who happily supplied the address.

Richard, who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, is 4 feet tall and uses crutches, says she always tells her variously abled actors to "take care of each other" onstage -- not unlike soldiers in battle.

Follow Spots

· Theater J will reprise its recent well-reviewed production of "Pangs of the Messiah" Aug. 28-Sept. 16. Set in the future, Israeli dramatist Motti Lerner's play is about a family of Jewish settlers forced to leave the West Bank under a new peace agreement. Visit http://www.theaterj.org.

· Taffety Punk Theatre Company will present "The Devil in His Own Words," a study of Satan excerpted from many sources and performed by Marcus Kyd, directed by Lise Bruneau, with music written and sung by Kathy Cashel. It will run Friday through Aug. 26 at Flashpoint's Mead Theatre Lab, 916 G St. NW. Visit http://www.taffetypunk.com.

· Longacre Lea, the professional non-Equity troupe that performs only in summer, will do Harold Pinter's "The Hothouse" Aug. 15-Sept. 9 at Callan Theatre at Catholic University. Kathleen Akerley will stage the play, which takes place in a mental hospital. Visit http://www.longacrelea.org.