Arena Loses Two Executives
Fundraiser Boland to Signature Theatre, Business Director Richard to Museum

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 2, 2008; C05

Signature Theatre's national search for a managing director has ended just across the Potomac. Maggie Boland will leave Arena Stage after nearly 10 years to start at Arlington-based Signature on May 5.

Before becoming Arena's director of external affairs and manager of its $125 million capital campaign (of which nearly $108 million has been raised), Boland was the company's communications director and marketing director. She came to Arena from Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, where she was director of annual giving. Boland, 37, grew up in Clarks Summit, Pa., and attended Boston College.

In other behind-the-scenes changes at Arena, Stephen Richard, who has run the business side of the company since 1991, will decamp next month to the National Children's Museum as its vice president of external relations. The Arena board is about to launch a national search for his replacement as executive director. Guy Bergquist will serve as interim managing director; he now oversees the construction/renovation of Arena's Southwest Washington campus.

Boland says she was happy at Arena and not thinking of moving until she was approached by Signature's executive search firm. She found Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer's ambition contagious. "It started to feel really appealing to play a big role in helping those plans become a reality," she says.

Rather than hire someone who had been a managing director elsewhere, Schaeffer says he and his board liked the idea of bringing in "someone who was excited and hungry [and aware that] Signature's at the jumping-off point now and who wants to go on that journey with us."

Sam Sweet, Signature's previous managing director, who guided the theater's capital campaign and new building project, left at the end of last year. He is now chief operating officer of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design.

Boland says her first responsibility will be to "capitalize on the momentum that the Broadway transfer of 'Glory Days' is bringing" to Signature, as well as the national notice earned by the company's current Kander & Ebb fest.

"It's really despite my love for Arena," she says of her move. "There's a smidgen of heartbreak in this."

An Emotional 'Wedding'

Federico Garc¿a Lorca's "Blood Wedding" doesn't speak "directly about oppression," says Hugo Medrano, "it perspires it -- it transmits it to the audience." The artistic director of GALA Hispanic Theatre is staging the 1933 drama ("Bodas de Sangre") tomorrow through April 27 at the company's Tivoli space in Columbia Heights ( http://www.galatheatre.org).

The revenge-steeped tragedy about a bride who runs off with a married lover on her wedding night unfolds in Spain's arid Andalusia region among rigidly traditional rural folk. It is full of poetry and fatalism and reflects the repressive fascistic and religious attitudes of that era by simply telling its peasant tale, Medrano says. (Garc¿a Lorca was killed by Spanish nationalists in 1936.) There is no need, he says, for a director to lay on extra symbolism.

"Simplicity is the most important thing" in the play, Medrano says. "Its simplicity is beautiful, but ugly at the same time." Designer Giorgos Tsappas's off-white set is dominated by large wall fragments, a low platform, and a stage floor painted to resemble paving stones. Medrano is adding live flamenco music to enhance transitions between key scenes (including a new setting of a Garc¿a Lorca poem). But he says he's letting the play do most of the work.

Some productions try too hard "with psychological touches excessively pointed out," he notes. "I don't think it's necessary. You have to get it from the heart in order to understand it intellectually."

Medrano directed another in Garc¿a Lorca's tragic rural trilogy, "Yerma," in 2005 and played the title matriarch himself in GALA's 1997 production of "The House of Bernarda Alba." He clearly adores Garc¿a Lorca and "Blood Wedding," whose dialogue changes keys so "swiftly" between poetry and prose: "Suddenly you're submerged in poetry without even noticing," he says.

Follow Spots

¿ The creation of two major prizes for playwriting was announced last week by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. Beginning this year, the trust will present a distinguished-playwright award, with a $200,000 cash prize, to a mid-career American dramatist. Next year the trust will recognize two playwrights early in their careers with awards of $50,000 each. The prizes will be given every two years. A production grant may be given to a nonprofit theater company to stage a new work by one of the winning writers. The awards advisory committee includes artistic directors of theaters in New York, California, Minneapolis, Chicago and Louisville.

¿ Mois¿s Kaufman's "33 Variations," which premiered in August at Arena Stage (co-produced with Kaufman's Tectonic Theater Project), has won the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. Begun in 1977, the award recognizes new plays produced outside New York and includes a $25,000 prize. The association also awarded citations of $7,500 each to dramatists Deborah Zoe Laufer, for "End Days," and Sarah Ruhl, for "Dead Man's Cell Phone."

¿ Signature's Eric Schaeffer says it's now official: The four-man cast -- Steven Booth, Andrew C. Call, Adam Halpin and Jesse JP Johnson -- of the theater's world premiere of the musical "Glory Days" will reprise their roles in the Broadway production at Circle in the Square Theatre. Previews start April 22.