Signature's 'Giant' Undertaking

Musical Version of the Iconic American Tale Highlights Company's New Season

Texas cattlemen and oil wildcatters will fill Signature Theatre's stage next year in a world premiere production of the musical "Giant." Composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa is one of musical theater's current wunderkinder ("Marie Christine," "The Wild Party" and "The Highest Yellow," premiered by Signature in 2004). Sybille Pearson wrote the script, based on Edna Ferber's 1952 novel.

The recipient of a $50,000 production grant from the Kennedy Center's Fund for New American Plays, "Giant" also is the first show in Signature's American Musical Voices Project, funded by a $1 million grant from the Shen Family Foundation. Composers Ricky Ian Gordon and Joseph Thalken have been commissioned to create future musicals for the project.

Signature Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer says "Giant" is "a really epic musical," in which LaChiusa dramatizes "the relationships with the people, the relationships with the land . . . [between] the generations . . . all of those three worlds really collide." Those not familiar with Ferber's novel may know the 1956 George Stevens film with Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and Rock Hudson.

With a cast of 17, an 18-piece orchestra and a three-act structure, the musical version "is really going to be an event," Schaeffer promises. He will do a month-long workshop of it in New York this summer.

For its 2008-2009 season (see box), Signature will also produce another new musical, "Ace," about a lonely boy in 1950s America who lives with foster parents. The gift of a toy plane helps the boy enter a dream world of wartime flying aces where he learns about his dad. Earlier incarnations of the show were produced in 2006 at Cincinnati Playhouse and St. Louis Rep and in 2007 at San Diego's Old Globe. Book and lyrics for the original piece are by Robert Taylor and Richard Oberacker; music is by Oberacker, who also composed Signature's 2002 premiere "The Gospel According to Fishman."

Schaeffer signed on last year to help revamp "Ace," which producer Tom Smedes plans to take to Broadway after the Signature run, Schaeffer says. Tom Smedes Productions will help to underwrite Signature's staging.

'Doubt' at Olney

"My commute is as long as the show," jokes actress Brigid Cleary of the drive from her Calvert County home to Olney Theatre Center to play the formidable Sister Aloysius in "Doubt: A Parable." John Patrick Shanley's intermissionless drama, running through March 16, clocks in at about 90 minutes, but it's a heckuva ride.

Cleary, who's on leave from a steady gig in the long-running farce "Shear Madness" at the Kennedy Center, says that "I love the opportunity to go out and stretch a few other muscles. So then you go back rejuvenated."

So far, audience reactions to Shanley's play -- about an elementary school principal who suspects the new parish priest of molesting a boy -- have been gratifying. "I've had a couple people say, 'Oh, I went to Catholic school and I know that woman,' " Cleary says. "Nothing is more of a compliment to an actor than to have a character you've created being compared to an actual living, breathing human being."

John Going, who staged "Doubt" and has directed Cleary in a number of plays at Olney, says the actress "can never be false. Everything she does, you completely believe."

Cleary has taken on several weighty roles in the past decade, including the obsessed housewife with the monster monologue in Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul" for Theater J and Woolly Mammoth in 2004, the source of one of her four Helen Hayes Award nominations.

Both Cleary and Going say the Olney's lobby has been buzzing long after the show ends, as patrons debate the guilt or innocence of Father Flynn (played by James Denvil), which Shanley never reveals. "You can feel it shift as it goes along, from line to line sometimes," says Cleary of the play's question mark.

When Going first saw "Doubt" in New York, he felt its central theme was "the danger of moral certitude." He says the show is "not about child abuse. It's about something else. So for the play to work, it really doesn't matter whether the priest is innocent or guilty."

'40 Acres' at Atlas

Playwright Robert Alexander's theatrical debate about the idea of the U.S. government paying reparations to descendants of slaves will receive staged readings Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. Mary Hall Surface will direct. (Call 202-399-7993 or visit http://www.atlasarts.org.)

Alexander has set "40 Acres: The Reparations Play" in a posh Hilton Head, S.C., retirement community, where an elderly African American couple have joined a class-action lawsuit against companies that profited from slavery. Their conservative 50-ish son thinks it is ridiculous; their college-age grandson is attracted to a more radical black nationalism.

"I think slavery is an issue a lot of Americans want to forget about," says Alexander ("The Last Orbit of Billy Mars," "I Ain't Yo' Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin"), who divides his time between the San Francisco area and Washington. He patterned the patriarch, a retired lawyer, in part on his father, a former NAACP attorney.

Alexander doubts reparations will be made: "I can honestly say today we'll probably see a black president before we see payments for reparations."