Talking About What’s Good

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:

1. James J. Johnson’s series of profiles of African American theater makers on Facebook
2. Eating a bowl of palaak chat at Rasika before seeing a show at Woolly Mammoth
3. Playwrights actually on staff at Arena Stage
4. Theater J’s upcoming Locally Grown festival
5. The Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s “bootleg” productions of Shakespeare
6. Jennifer Mendenhall’s impossibly broad range of unfailingly brilliant performances
7. Being (arguably) the second-largest theater city in the United States
8. The Mead Theatre Lab program of the Cultural Development Corporation
9. The DC Playwrights Group — 200 storytellers, one metropolitan area
10. Having a summer big enough to hold both the Source Festival AND the Capital Fringe Festival
11. The Source Festival
12. The Capital Fringe Festival
13. Having genuinely historic theaters to visit: Ford’s, the Lincoln (let’s not lose it!), and the National
14. Perusing the folios at the Folger during intermission
15. The Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage Festival (may it return again)
16. While I’m on the subject of the Kennedy Center: Gregg Henry
17. HowlRound.com; if you don’t know it, you should
18. 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
19. The talkbacks after every Active Cultures performance
20. The level of commitment of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company to its audiences
21. Wandering Souls and its work with the residents of St. Elizabeths
22. 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
23. Woolly Mammoth’s innovative social media marketing
24. The courage and commitment of Ari Roth
25. Tweeting with Peter Marks
26. Moving out to the suburbs and *still* living close to a theater as bold and good as Forum
27. We have a Hip-Hop Theater Festival
28. The Helen Hayes Awards
29. Emerging new young theater companies like Factory 449 and No Rules and The Hub
30. The fact that we were cool enough to convince Aaron Posner and Erin Weaver to move here
31. Thanks to the TFA’s First Light Festival and The Inkwell, this is becoming a better and better place to develop a new play
32. My expectation that theatreWashington is going to kick DC theater up a notch in the not-too-distant future
33. My memory of one of the best theater experiences of my life: Henry VI (parts 1 and 2) at the Shakespeare Theatre
34. While we’re at it: the Woolly/Theater J co-production of Homebody/Kabul
35. Let’s keep it going: The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? at Arena Stage
36. Asking my wife to marry me in the then-under-renovation Source Theatre
37. The soaring, imposing, but still transparent temple that is the Mead Center for American Theater
38. Scott Suchman’s theater photography
39. Being able to get half-price tickets at Ticketplace
40. Bright Alchemy, Happenstance, and anyone else doing devised work
41. The Capital Talent Agency
42. The #dctheatre hashtag on Twitter
43. 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
44. We have Polly Carl now — seriously, Polly frickin’ Carl
45. Oh, and David Dower! Jeez, Louise!
46. The National New Play Network
47. The fact that the Kennedy Center attracts really amazing touring productions and genuinely gifted actors
48. Wednesdays at Tunnicliff’s, even if Wednesdays at Tunnicliff’s isn’t Wednesdays at Tunnicliff’s any more
49. Chad Bauman and his provocative thinking about theater ticket pricing
50. I’m a parent now, so Imagination Stage AND Adventure Theatre: an embarrassment of children’s theater riches
51. A few other random inspirations: Jason Macintosh and Lolita Clayton and Eric Messner and Jason Lott and Joe Lane
52. Irene Rosenberg Wurtzel, my first teacher and mentor
53. The ceiling in the Gala Hispanic Theatre, which is (I’m guessing) the prettiest space you haven’t seen yet
54. The comparably humbler but nonetheless essential Capitol Hill Arts Workshop and DC/AC — long may they serve
55. Signature Theatre putting its might behind the development of new musicals
56. Kathleen Akerley, who seems to be able to do everything
57. 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
58. Catholic University’s MFA program in playwriting, for all the great storytellers it brings to DC
59. The new agglomeration of theater practitioners living in Silver Spring
60. Jaylee Mead, who makes every notebook I ever used as a young child even more meaningful to me in retrospect
61. The Bethesda Play-in-a-Day
62. I almost forgot Devon Smith, the smartest theater-and-social-media thinker in the city… and probably in other cities, too
63. Kimberly Gilbert’s fearless and smart presence, which improves every play I get to work with her on
64. The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities — specifically, the Larry Neal Award and the Individual Artist Fellowships
65. The signatures on the door in the lobby of the Source Theatre
66. Elisheba Ittoop and Klyph Stanford and Deb Sivigny, just because
67. Consistently high-quality seasons of consistently high-quality plays from Studio Theatre
68. The Dramatists Guild conference at TFA this past year
69. The long dinner I had with my cast at Café Saint-Ex after the closing of my play Abstract Nude
70. 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)
71. The fact that the DC Theatre Scene blog gives Audience Choice Awards
72. The fact that this year, DC Theatre Scene gave an Audience Award, too
73. David Tannous, the much-deserved recipient of said Audience Award, who has seen (I think) everything I’ve done in this city
74. Karen Shod, for her behind-the-scenes tireless work to connect audience members with plays
75. We sort of have, well, you know, a lot of Shakespeare here, if you like that sort of thing — like, a lot of it
76. The amazing collection of thoughtful dramaturgs, well-known and should-be-known, that are enriching our theaters
77. 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!