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Church Street Theater
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A homecoming has come full circle with the announcement that the Keegan Theatre will become the full-time resident theater company at the Church Street Theatre in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. Suddenly, things on the short street running between 17th and 18th Streets NW will have that special feeling they had back in May of 1997 when the billboard on the brick front of the theater read “The Keegan Theatre presents ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’” The names of the plays will change, but the company in residence will be the Keegan.
That first production of “Cat” was put on at Church Street because, as founding member and current artistic director Mark Rhea said, they felt they needed to introduce themselves to the greater Washington theater community with a production downtown in order to gain the attention they needed.
Keegan may have started out at Church Street, but its incubation period really took place in the incredibly arts-friendly Arlington County under the auspices of the county government’s Cultural Affairs Division and its well named “Arts Incubator” program. The program provided assistance with sets, properties, costumes and venues, while the company grew from fledgling to a real player in the Washington theater community.
The theater company was the dream of Mark Rhea, Eric Lucas, Sheri Herren and Donald Wright way back in 1996. They wanted to create a theater company that would have the feeling of an Irish theater troupe because of their own heritage and strong identity with things Irish. Indeed, the name itself was an affirmation of both faith in the future and the innate Irishness of the group. The full name of the company was “The Andrew Keegan Theatre,” picked because it sounded Irish and because it combined the names of the sons of two of the founders, Mark Rhea’s son Andrew and Eric Lucas’ son Keegan.
For me, the Keegan story really begins in a small basement room of a church, the Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington, where Keegan mounted its second production. I never saw the “Cat” they did at Church Street, but I was assigned to cover their next outing, an intriguing piece of Irish history by Brian Friel called “Translations.” For this production, Keegan’s set designer, George Lucas, took one corner of the church’s cinderblock and linoleum recreation room and created a replica of the barn of a small Irish farm where a teacher broke the law of the occupying British forces by teaching the Irish to read their own language. Before the first word of the play was spoken, I suspected something special was happening. When the play got underway, I learned I was right.
That production earned Keegan their first of the seven Helen Hayes Award nominations they have had over the years. It went to Mark Rhea for outstanding director of a play. It was also my introduction to the work of George Lucas, whose sets have been a hallmark of the company’s dedication to quality over the years. Joining the company for that production were a fine lighting designer, Dan Martin, and a sensitive and inventive sound designer, Tony Angelini. Both have made great contributions to the work of the Keegan in Arlington and at the Church Street Theatre.
After performing in that church in Arlington, as well as at other Arlington venues and a converted movie house in Alexandria, the company returned part-time to Church Street in 2005 with John Millington Synge’s very Irish “The Playboy of the Western World,” again directed by Rhea. Since then, they have been just one of the companies producing at Church Street. Most recently, they have staged their major, full scale productions at Church Street but offered smaller, more intimate productions in Arlington’s Theatre On The Run under the auspices of the company’s “New Island Project” headed by co-founding member, director, actor and author Eric Lucas and his wife, actress Kerry Waters Lucas.
Now they will consolidate all their productions in Church Street, a charming 125-seat house in a brick building built in the mid-19th century as the gymnasium for the Holton Arms School. It was converted to a theater in 1975 and housed the New Playwrights Theater Company from 1975 to 1989. Since then it has been a part-time home to many companies. The Moonlight Theater Company mounted the premiere of Norman Allen’s “Waiting in Tobolsk: The Children of the Last Tsar” there and walked away with a nomination for the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play. The Stanislavsky Theater Studio productions there brought Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili to prominence, setting the stage for the incredible success of their Synetic Theater.
The interior of the house is all exposed brick with a stage built at one end of what had been the gymnasium and the audience on raised seating. Not long ago, the seating was upgraded with better chairs and more legroom with volunteers from Keegan and the rest of the theater community doing the work for free. The legroom is still nothing to write home about, but one doesn’t sink down below the seat frame anymore.
Starting this fall, Keegan will frequently have two shows playing at the same time in Church Street in order to maximize the use of the facility. Their full scale productions will normally perform Thursday through Saturday evenings and Sunday matinees, while the smaller New Island Project shows will run Sunday through Wednesday evenings. The company will even try to keep the dark weeks of rehearsal time to a minimum with ever shorter breaks once they open in November.
Between their first show, a revival of “Of Mice And Men,” and their second, a new production of the rock musical “Rent,” there will be a fairly lengthy three-week break. Then the breaks get ever tighter between such shows as the world premiere of “Girl from Gdansk” by Liam Heylin, a revival of Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” which they previously produced in Arlington, the stage version of Terry Johnson’s iconic movie “The Graduate,” a delicate Irish musical by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, “A Man of No Importance,” and one of the great farces written in the past half-century, Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off.”
The New Island Project series of Sunday–Wednesday offerings include the regional premiere of Ronan Noone’s “The Atheist,” the American premiere of Kevin Barry’s “There Are Little Kingdoms” and two world premieres: “Fair Emma“ by the project’s co-director Eric Lucas and “Stella Morgan” by Belfast writer Rosemary Jenkinson.
Tickets are going to run in the $20-$40 range with New Island Project shows $20-$25, larger plays $25-$30 and musicals $30-$40. Season packages will go on sale soon. Log on to www.keegantheatre.com or call 703-892-0202. |
