Past Performances
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics by Tim Rice
August 9 – 27
Thurs-Sat at 8PM and Sun at 2PM & 7:30PM
at Round House Theatre
Silver Spring, MD
Sponsored in part by the Dimick Foundation
Low Level Panic, by Clare McIntyre
November 7 - December 3, 2005
1409 Playbill Café, Washington, DC
Three women, one bathtub, not enough men - a glimpse into the private thoughts of women.
The production was directed by Suzanne Richard and featured Selene Faer as Jo, Jessica Lynn Rodriguez as Mary, and K. Clare Johnson as Celia.
About the Play
This classic of modern feminist plays explores our society's fascination with pornography and fantasy and how these things affect three very different women's views of themselves. Contains explicit scenes and language.
The story’s drama comes less from conflict than from contrasts among the characters. This is first brought to light by their readings of excerpts from a pornographic magazine. By casting a woman with a physical disability in one of the roles, Open Circle explores the universality of these self-images in a population that is often assumed to have negligible or very different relationship to mainstream sexuality.
Low Level Panic was commissioned and presented by The Women's Playhouse Trust and was first performed in London in February 1988. Low Level Panic won British playwright Clare McIntyre The Samuel Beckett Theatre Award of 1989.
Download the Show Program:
PDF (2mb) or DOC
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, by Bertolt Brecht
July 2005
Round House Theatre Silver Spring
8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD
OCT's Associate Artistic Director Monique Holt and Grady Weatherford directed the production. The cast featured Suzanne Richard, OCT’s Artistic Director, and Scot McKenzie.
The Caucasian Chalk Circle’s (CCC) two directors brought together the cutting edge experimental work of the DC Metro theatre community and the visual language of deaf culture. Through combining their different views of the world, sharing their mutual ideas about theatre, and utilizing a cast that spanned all cultures; a piece emerged that exposes differences, similarities, universal truths, and how we are all human at our root.
CCC was produced in association with Quest: arts for everyone and sponsored by Audio Description Associates and Sign Language Associates. Open Circle is the first company in the area to bring accessibility to every performance, offering -
* On-demand Audio Description for blind and low vision patrons;
* Use of ASL and gestural communication, providing access to deaf audience members, and
* Accessible seating for people using wheelchairs.
About the Play
The Caucasian Chalk Circle was Bertolt Brecht's last major work, written while he was an exile in the U.S. during World War II. It's a parable; in this instance drawn from the. Biblical tale of the Judgment of Solomon and the old Chinese play "The Circle of Chalk".
The story entails a compromise made to settle a land dispute between two collective farms in Soviet Georgia. To illustrate the ethics of such judgements, a folk singer is invited to re-tell the old tale of the circle of chalk.
In one-half of the play's two-pronged plot, a maid named Grusha, in the wake of a revolution and at great personal sacrifice, brings up the child of a hard-hearted governor's wife who later returns to claim the child. Grusha's claim to the child is tested in an unusual trial, wherein she is ultimately recognized as the "real" mother. The latter part of the play (the second part of the plot) focuses on the story of Azdak, a crude, drunken scoundrel who, through a bizarre twist of fate, becomes the village judge. He settles the conflicting claims on the baby between Gruscha and the Governor's widow by putting the baby in a circle of chalk to see how each supposed mother would pull it out.
While full of song, broad comedy and highly dramatic moments, what we have is Brecht's use of emotional storytelling to set out the subtext of the effects of war on individual lives, personal responsibility, human choices in the face of profound difficulty and the paradoxes of life.
– Courtesy of www.curtainup.com
Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber
September 25 through October 17, 2004
OCT is proud to announce JCS has received 4 Helen Hayes Award nominations:
Rick Foucheux for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Resident Musical,
Rob McQuay for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Resident Musical,
Suzanne Richard for Outstanding Director in Resident Musical,
and Outstanding Resident Musical.
For more information on the Helen Hayes Awards, go to http://www.helenhayes.org/awards/awards.html
Rob McQuay as Jesus and the ensemble at the last supper
More pictures here
Watch the Overture Video:
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Open Circle Theatre had a great run with our Fall 2004 production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. We thank the Washington Shakespeare Company for sharing their space at the Clark Street Playhouse in Arlington, VA.
This riveting show explored the story of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion in a politicized, modernized world with driving rock rhythms and lyric ballads. OCT's Artistic Director, Suzanne Richard, directed the production, with musical direction by Tracy Olivera and choreography by Fred Beam and Stefan Sittig. The cast included Helen Hayes nominee Rob McQuay as Jesus, Lindsay Allen as Mary, Matthew Conner as Judas, Helen Hayes winner Rick Foucheux as Pilate, Helen Hayes nominee Steven Carpenter as Caiaphas, and Shira Grabelsky as Annas, last seen as Helen Keller at Arena Stage.
Part of OCT’s founding philosophy is that people with disabilities can do and be anything. In this performance, audiences had the opportunity to see how disability can enhance a character – from a Jesus in a wheelchair asking disciples to, “Heal yourself!” to a sign language interpreter for a deaf Pharisee.
OCT’s presentation of Jesus Christ Superstar set the play’s main theme in 2004, with Jesus appearing in multi-media settings, including the Internet. What WOULD Jesus do? And more importantly, how would the media – the great demon of the current election – react? It was all there in the Webber libretto!
The Summer of 2003 saw Open Circle Theatre’s first production, Laughing Wild, by Christopher Durang.
The show was presented at the 1409 Playbill Café in Washington, DC in association with Actors Theatre of Washington and was co-directed by Arianna Ross (OCT’s Associate Artistic Director) and Suzanne Richard (OCT’s Artistic Director). Dan Via and Suzanne Richard gave great performances and the show was a great beginning for us! Don’t just take it from us; here’s what the press had to say.
See photos and read more about this show. In particular, we’d like to thank those important people who helped make this first step possible.