My Twitter friend Travis Bedard has been trying to start a new meme: Talk About What’s Good. The idea, which you might intuit, is simply to tweet or blog or share stuff you think is awesome, and the meta-idea (or the idea behind the idea) is that if we we do that, we’ll be less snarky and miserable and mean to each other. Also, by accentuating the positive, we’ll encourage things we like. Pretty simple, no?
Honestly, at first I struggled with it a bit. Okay, not just a bit: a lot. There’s so much I want to argue *against* that I felt like I was betraying myself by turning my attention away from it all. In time, though, I realized that, well, just because it was difficult didn’t make it wrong. I had something to learn, and the only way I could learn, I realized, was to practice, and so I did.
Which brings me to this post. Having devoted so much energy here to analysis and rabble-rousing and fomenting revolution and agent provocateur-ing, I thought it was high time I used my little platform here to, you know, basically praise a bunch of stuff. And so, with no further ado, my list of 77* things I love about theater in DC — some of them well-known, some of them esoteric, and some of them hidden gems:
- James J. Johnson’s series of profiles of African American theater makers on Facebook
- Eating a bowl of palaak chat at Rasika before seeing a show at Woolly Mammoth
- Playwrights actually on staff at Arena Stage
- Theater J’s upcoming Locally Grown festival
- The Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s “bootleg” productions of Shakespeare
- Jennifer Mendenhall’s impossibly broad range of unfailingly brilliant performances
- Being (arguably) the second-largest theater city in the United States
- The Mead Theatre Lab program of the Cultural Development Corporation
- The DC Playwrights Group — 200 storytellers, one metropolitan area
- Having a summer big enough to hold both the Source Festival AND the Capital Fringe Festival
- The Source Festival
- The Capital Fringe Festival
- Having genuinely historic theaters to visit: Ford’s, the Lincoln (let’s not lose it!), and the National
- Perusing the folios at the Folger during intermission
- The Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival (may it return again)
- While I’m on the subject of the Kennedy Center: Gregg Henry
- HowlRound.com; if you don’t know it, you should
- Alexander Strain, Nancy Robinette, Naomi Jacobson, Holly Twyford, Veronica del Cerro, Rick Foucheaux, and everyone else whose mere presence in a cast can make me excited to see a particular show
- The talkbacks after every Active Cultures performance
- The level of commitment of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company to its audiences
- Wandering Souls and its work with the residents of St. Elizabeths
- Being able to call, say, John Lescault and Tonya Beckman Ross and ask them to read a play for me so I can hear it
- Woolly Mammoth’s innovative social media marketing
- The courage and commitment of Ari Roth
- Tweeting with Peter Marks
- Moving out to the suburbs and *still* living close to a theater as bold and good as Forum
- We have a Hip-Hop Theater Festival
- The Helen Hayes Awards
- Emerging new young theater companies like Factory 449 and No Rules and The Hub
- The fact that we were cool enough to convince Aaron Posner and Erin Weaver to move here
- Thanks to the TFA’s First Light Festival and The Inkwell, this is becoming a better and better place to develop a new play
- My expectation that theatreWashington is going to kick DC theater up a notch in the not-too-distant future
- My memory of one of the best theater experiences of my life: Henry VI (parts 1 and 2) at the Shakespeare Theatre
- While we’re at it: the Woolly/Theater J co-production of Homebody/Kabul
- Let’s keep it going: The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? at Arena Stage
- Asking my wife to marry me in the then-under-renovation Source Theatre
- The soaring, imposing, but still transparent temple that is the Mead Center for American Theater
- Scott Suchman’s theater photography
- Being able to get half-price tickets at Ticketplace
- Bright Alchemy, Happenstance, and anyone else doing devised work
- The Capital Talent Agency
- The #dctheatre hashtag on Twitter
- Speaking of Twitter: Chelsey Christensen (who talks about what’s good all the time!), Jason McCool, Karen Lange, Stephen Spotswood, Allyson Harkey, Michael Dove, and everyone else I hang out with there
- We have Polly Carl now — seriously, Polly frickin’ Carl
- Oh, and David Dower! Jeez, Louise!
- The National New Play Network
- The fact that the Kennedy Center attracts really amazing touring productions and genuinely gifted actors
- Wednesdays at Tunnicliff’s, even if Wednesdays at Tunnicliff’s isn’t Wednesdays at Tunnicliff’s any more
- Chad Bauman and his provocative thinking about theater ticket pricing
- I’m a parent now, so Imagination Stage AND Adventure Theatre: an embarrassment of children’s theater riches
- A few other random inspirations: Jason Macintosh and Lolita Clayton and Eric Messner and Jason Lott and Joe Lane
- Irene Rosenberg Wurtzel, my first teacher and mentor
- The ceiling in the Gala Hispanic Theatre, which is (I’m guessing) the prettiest space you haven’t seen yet
- The comparably humbler but nonetheless essential Capitol Hill Arts Workshop and DC/AC — long may they serve
- Signature Theatre putting its might behind the development of new musicals
- Kathleen Akerley, who seems to be able to do everything
- Holding my two week-old son on my lap while I watched my wife/his mom in a benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues for Silver Spring Stage
- Catholic University’s MFA program in playwriting, for all the great storytellers it brings to DC
- The new agglomeration of theater practitioners living in Silver Spring
- Jaylee Mead, who makes every notebook I ever used as a young child even more meaningful to me in retrospect
- The Bethesda Play-in-a-Day
- I almost forgot Devon Smith, the smartest theater-and-social-media thinker in the city… and probably in other cities, too
- Kimberly Gilbert’s fearless and smart presence, which improves every play I get to work with her on
- The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities — specifically, the Larry Neal Award and the Individual Artist Fellowships
- The signatures on the door in the lobby of the Source Theatre
- Elisheba Ittoop and Klyph Stanford and Deb Sivigny, just because
- Consistently high-quality seasons of consistently high-quality plays from Studio Theatre
- The Dramatists Guild conference at TFA this past year
- The long dinner I had with my cast at Café Saint-Ex after the closing of my play Abstract Nude
- Jeremy Skidmore and Shirley Serotsky — two good friends who I hope will direct my work one day (and who also hope, I believe, the same thing)
- The fact that the DC Theatre Scene blog gives Audience Choice Awards
- The fact that this year, DC Theatre Scene gave an Audience Award, too
- David Tannous, the much-deserved recipient of said Audience Award, who has seen (I think) everything I’ve done in this city
- Karen Shod, for her behind-the-scenes tireless work to connect audience members with plays
- We sort of have, well, you know, a lot of Shakespeare here, if you like that sort of thing — like, a lot of it
- The amazing collection of thoughtful dramaturgs, well-known and should-be-known, that are enriching our theaters
- The bewildering and inspiring notion that the same metropolitan area can be home to the audiences for both Oklahoma at Arena Stage and Fat Men in Skirts at Molotov Theatre Group — what a city we live in!
YES and so many more reasons.
I know! After a while, it was hard to stop!
Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey of the Harvard Graduate School of Education call it “The language of ongoing regard,” in which “direct, specific, and nonattributive communications empower both the receiver and the giver.” In other words, speak kind words directly to people and the speaker and listener will be happier and more productive.
Yes. That’s a lovely idea. I’m grateful you shared it. “The language of ongoing regard.” It’s the $35 way of saying “talk about what’s good.” It’s a demanding practice to sustain, but I’m going to try to sustain it. I have a hunch it will prove to be personally important.
Awesome post. Happens to be very in line with my current mind/body health & spiritual focus. Trying to balance rabble-rousing/fighting the good fight – with the theory that focusing on the things that are going well & the things we want actually helps create more of those good things in our lives/the world. It’s been a good exercise for me lately, so thanks for putting that inspiring focus on DC theater today!
Chip and Dan Heath (in their book SWITCH) taught me to find the bright spots and clone them. It’s really important wisdom!
Fantastic, Gwydion!
Thanks!
Actually, I am going to try it. I urged folks in my neck of the words to accentuate the positive and dump the snarky in a post a year or so ago, but this is a nice meme. Time to resurrect as sometimes happens … serendipity and all that. Travis is cool and so are you.
Yay! Can’t wait to peruse it!
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Yes! I hope, I do!
Yay! Yes! Yay!
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So honored to be mentioned here:) And, on behalf of Forum, she says she’s happy to be so near such bold audiences
LOL — awesome