Northwood News ♦ October 2011

Silver Spring Stage:  A Little Theater with Big Ideas

By Karen Devitt

Driving by the Woodmoor Shopping Center in Four Corners, you might miss the entrance to Silver Spring Stage next to the CVS.  The unassuming entrance opens onto the staircase that leads downstairs to a low stage with seating on two sides.

The Stage took over the former bowling alley more than 40 years ago (the stage itself and refreshment stand are made from the bowling lanes) to make a cozy performance space, bringing theater up close and personal.  Run by all volunteers, the Stage has created what critics have called a community of artists dedicated “to the craft of live theater.”

The Stage’s Project Underground showcases its most challenging offerings, productions that few community theaters will take on, but ones they feel will excite and stimulate.  The entire 2011–2012 season is outlined below.

The Stage’s season opens with the offbeat, hilarious, and bittersweet romantic comedy Based on a Totally True Story by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (16 September-9 October 2011).  Inspired by the author himself, a 20-something comic book writer in New York gets the opportunity of a lifetime to have one of his plays made into a movie. It’s a quirky love letter to dreams, relationships, and learning life lessons.

Their first Project Underground offering follows, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis (28 October-19 November 2011).  Set in a darkly comic world between heaven and hell, a court case examines the plight and fate of the New Testament’s most infamous and unexplained sinner.  With raw language, imaginary flashbacks, and testimony from Mother Teresa, Sigmund Freud, and Satan, this is a play to be experienced.

For the holidays, the Stage returns to a hit from last season:  Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, adapted by Michael Hardwick (9–18 December 2011).  The holiday classic of Ebenezer Scrooge visited by the Ghosts of Christmas to reveal his past, present, and future if he continues miserly ways.  This short version of the family favorite will delight audiences of all ages!

The new year starts with a big bang of laughter with Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl (13 January-4 February 2012).  An inspired and zany comedy when a guy drops dead at a diner table, his cell phone rings and the stranger at the next table answers it.  The stranger, to her astonishment and excitement, discovers that being the voice on the other end of the dead man’s calls involves her in his life.

Theater-goers told the Stage the playwright whose work they most want to see is Tom Stoppard, so they’re offering an early Stoppard gem, Hapgood (24 February-17 March 2012), a breathtaking, funny, and brain-teasing espionage thriller about stolen secret research set in the Cold War.  Stoppard wrote:  “If there’s a central idea in the play, it is the proposition that in each of the characters is the working majority of a dual personality, part of which is always there in a submerged state.”

What better way to welcome spring then with Enchanted April by Matthew Barber, from the novel by Elizabeth von Arnim (13-29 April 2012)!  A breezy, engaging, and witty comedy of two frustrated London housewives who decide to rent a villa in Italy for a holiday away from their bleak marriages, joined by two very different English women to share their month away.  Among the wisteria blossoms, all four bloom again, rediscovering themselves in ways that they — and we — could never have expected.

The second Project Underground show is up next with The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh (18 May-9 June 2012).  The darkly comic tale, set in the Irish countryside, of a plain and lonely woman in her forties who has her first and possibly final chance at love when her manipulative mother sets in motion a train of events that leads inexorably towards the play’s terrifying conclusion.

The Stage’s 45th season concludes with Stop Kiss by Diana Son (29 June-21 July 2012), a striking, provocative, and powerful story of two women whose first kiss prompts a violent attack that transforms their lives in a way they could never anticipate.  Emotions, preconceptions, and relations are explored and tested, speaking to human nature and compassion.

Check out the Silver Spring Stage website at www.ssstage.org for subscription offers (a whole season for the price of a Kennedy Center ticket), the Project Underground series special, and other information about this fantastic local theater.  See you “downstairs”!   ■