By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 29, 2007; C05

Washington Stage Guild will mark the end of its five-year residency at 1901 14th St. NW with the remounting of its spring success, Michael Hollinger's dramedy "Opus" (Sept. 6-30).

Arena Stage, which owns the building at 14th and T that once housed Living Stage, its former urban outreach wing, has need of the entire building again. It has rented the tiny first-floor performance space to Stage Guild since rising rates forced the troupe from the financially struggling Source Theatre down the street.

"It's been a very good, symbiotic relationship and I'll be grateful to the end of my days to Arena for letting us hang out there," says Stage Guild Executive Director Ann Norton.

The small company, known for its frequently Old World theatrical fare -- lots of starched collars and wine decanters onstage, George Bernard Shaw's repartee lolloping through the air -- plans to move into its own new space next spring. The office building at 505 Ninth St. NW developed by Boston Properties will include a venue for the theater, which must raise about $6 million to outfit the interior. In the interim, the company will spend six months at the Flashpoint arts incubator at 916 G St. NW.

The intimacy of the 14th and T space (people in the front rows sit barely three feet from the actors) felt limiting at first, but after 22 productions (if you include the coming reprise of "Opus" and a similar encore of "The Underpants"), Norton and Artistic Director John MacDonald have changed their minds.

"It's one of the things that we're trying to preserve in the new space -- that feeling of intense intimacy," Norton says. "Because . . . when you open the doors to let the [audience] in, I hear people gasp and say, 'Look how close we'll be!' "

Stage Guild signed the lease for its new space in spring 2006, giving the company precious little time to raise the millions of dollars for the "build-out" of the theater. But after a series of new theater projects that fell through, MacDonald says, this "was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we would have been fools to pass it up."

A playwright -- especially one who lives and works in Israel -- should swim against the current of consensus, argues Motti Lerner. In a 2006 lecture at Los Andes National University in Bogota, Colombia, the Israeli dramatist said a playwright "must offer a different view of reality, a view that negates continuation of war."

Lerner's controversial and emotionally fraught "Pangs of the Messiah," set in the near future, portrays a family of devout Jewish West Bank settlers whose world collapses when they realize their enclave will be dismantled as part of a new peace agreement.

Theater J ( http://www.theaterj.org), which had a critical and popular hit with the play earlier this summer, is reprising it with the same cast now through Sept. 16.

In "Pangs of the Messiah," Lerner writes in an e-mail, he meant to explore the "very deep Messianic urge" among leaders of the Israeli settlements that "motivates them to continue their struggle over the land, in spite of the fact that many Israelis have given up the idea of continuing the occupation." The play concludes "that this urge contains a self-destructive element -- which, if the Israeli society is not going to deal with it, will destroy it completely."

An earlier version was performed in Israel 20 years ago, "before the first Intifada, before the Oslo agreement, before Rabin's assassination, before the second Intifada and before the disengagement," Lerner writes. His view that the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza will doom Israel morally and politically was not widespread. "At that time," he writes, "too many Israelis could ignore the warning and regard it as the figment of the writer's imagination." He hopes the new version will be onstage in Israel within a year.

American Jews who support Israel have had strong, at times "quite defensive," reactions to his play at Theater J, Lerner notes. It dramatizes "a danger which they were not aware of. The play is a warning play. It is rather scary."

Lerner's "The Murder of Isaac," which reenacts the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist as a theater piece performed by patients in a psychiatric ward (Center Stage did it last year), also dramatizes what Lerner sees as the seeds of self-destruction. Both plays "serve as a warning for the Israeli society to confront these forces and eliminate them or at least tame them," he writes.

The 58-year-old writer worries that "most Israeli playwrights have given up the political and moved to more personal" or indirectly political plays. He blames the absence of a "strong radical political opposition in Israel, to inspire writers with strong radical political ideas."

In that Bogota lecture, Lerner revealed his own uncertainty about the "ability of playwrights to change the political reality, and certainly not in wartime. Every day I awaken to new doubts, and every day I am compelled to go on fighting them in order to again believe that the playwright's influence is not only an illusion."

The national tour of "Chicago" won't be coming to the Warner Theatre Sept. 25-Oct. 7 as advertised. The musical will close in San Diego Sept. 9 "due to casting and scheduling conflicts," according to the theater. For refund information, visit http://www.warnertheatre.com/calendar.asp and scroll down to the "Chicago" cancellation notice.