NEA Teams With Arena Stage to Launch New Plays

Ireland is in the midst of a literary golden age, she believes, sparked by the country's new high-tech industry and affluence. "Everything that Irish people have ever based their identity on has shifted in the last 10 or 15 years," Murray says. "Any environment like that is going to make creative people feel the need to comment upon it."

"Trad" is Solas Nua's 11th production since Murray, 31, and Brick, 32 and a Maryland native, launched the company in 2005. The couple -- they married in October -- take no salaries so they can pay guest artists. They've garnered some impressive reviews for such a young company, for shows such as Owen McCafferty's "Scenes From the Big Picture."

That 2007 hit aside, Murray says, "my benchmark is, would I be embarrassed to take this work back to Ireland." If the answer is no, "I'm happy."

Readings at Stage Guild

Washington Stage Guild's Ann Norton hopes the company will be able to move into its space in the new office building at 505 Ninth St. NW in the fall. "I can stand in the box office window already," she says. "It's very exciting."

Since losing its temporary home at 14th and T streets NW this year (Arena Stage, which owns the building, needed it while its Southwest campus undergoes renovation), Stage Guild is presenting a series of readings at Flashpoint's Mead Theatre Lab. The next, Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., will be Hugh Whitemore's "The Best of Friends," a glimpse at the epistolary friendship among George Bernard Shaw, a Dominican abbess and a museum curator. Alan Wade is directing.

Future offerings are: Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell" (Feb. 26); "The Rising of the Moon" and "Spreading the News" (March 2 and 4), comic one-acts about Irish life by Abbey Theatre co-founder Lady Gregory, penned in the early 20th century; "Widowers' Houses" (March 18), Shaw's very first play; "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" (March 25), adapted by company member Bill Largess from an Oscar Wilde story; "Dangerous Corner" (April 29) by J.B. Priestley; and "The War With the Newts" (May 6), Karel Capek's sci-fi social satire adapted by Emily Solomon.

After years in low-ceilinged rented spaces, Artistic Director John MacDonald looks forward to doing shows "that require some more production values." With the help of an ongoing $6 million capital campaign, he and Norton, who are married and have run the literary-minded Stage Guild on a shoestring since 1986, plan to hire production and box office managers for the new venue.

"Mom and Pop are not going to be running the candy store by themselves anymore," MacDonald says.