How He Got That Story

Round House Lessons

"I believe really strongly that theater is not an end in itself," says Round House Theatre Artistic Director Blake Robison. Hence his decision to launch the company's first mainstage show of the season, "A Lesson Before Dying," with a week of panel discussions, starting tonight and culminating with a post-matinee symposium Sunday titled "Race and the Justice System."

The play, which runs through Oct. 14 at Round House's Bethesda stage, was based by Romulus Linney on Ernest J. Gaines's 1993 novel about the revelatory relationship between an African American teacher (played by KenYatta Rogers) in 1940s rural Louisiana and a young black man (Shane Taylor) sentenced to die for a murder he didn't commit.

Robison has made literary adaptations, including "Camille" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany," a Round House specialty. Gaines's book is in the Montgomery County school curriculum and Robison hopes students who see the stage adaptation will get hooked on theater. "Seeing the story in a theatrical context instead of reading it in your living room -- it's a different experience," he says. The outreach aspect of the production extends to ticket prices -- an anonymous underwriter has made it possible for the theater to offer a block of $10 seats at every performance.

Guest director Timothy Douglas believes the story transcends race. He's philosophical about the fact that, though his credits range from Shakespeare to modern Irish writers, people will assume that because he is an African American he views the play as race-centered.

"I don't approach this as a play about race," he says. The play "leaves a lot of room for the allegory of the challenge of understanding the relationship between the races . . . how we still are not doing the most honorable things toward each other as humans," Douglas says, but it also asks, "How are you going to live your life and where will you be when you face death?" It starts with the specific, then offers "a way into a bigger, more existential story."

A former actor who began his directing career in Washington with a 1995 production of "Richard III" at the Folger, Douglas recently directed "Insurrection: Holding History" at Theater Alliance. He was associate artistic director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville from 2001 to 2004.

"If we've done our job, by the end, everyone is in the same place about human dignity . . . about when do I speak out about injustice," Douglas says of "A Lesson Before Dying."

"That's how I approach any play. You can look at a script and go, oh, I know what this is, but . . . if you look closer, inside of it, there are many, many possibilities."

Follow Spots

¿ Synetic Theater will offer a late-night ghost story for grown-ups, "Last Tango With Rosie," written and directed by Ben Cunis, as an aperitif on Thursday through Saturday nights after its new adaptation of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (Sept. 22-Oct. 31) at the Rosslyn Spectrum. Visit http://www.synetictheater.org or call 703-824-8060.

¿ VSA arts, which enlists teens to create plays about disability, will present the world premiere of "Izzy Icarus Fell Off the World" on Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Center. The Playwright Discovery Award winning play, by 15-year-old Aliza Goldstein of Jacksonville, Fla., is about a teenager with autism and the young photographer who befriends him. Visit http://www.kennedy-center.org/tickets.