Rep Stage, the professional theater-in-residence at Howard Community College, has been a contributor to the arts landscape in Howard County for almost 20 years. This Helen Hayes Award-winning theater company was started 19 years ago to serve as a complement to the Arts and Humanities Division at HCC by Valerie Lash, founding artistic director and now chair of the division.
The company is growing along with the college and the community. With the addition of new producing artistic director Michael Stebbins six seasons ago, Rep Stage has become a pacesetter in offering regional and national premieres of off-Broadway style cutting-edge comedies and dramas, as well as modern classic plays.
Howard County’s location directly between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore allows Rep Stage to give local audiences access to some of the finest professional actors and theater artists in the mid-Atlantic and beyond.
In the first show of the season, Columbia native Jason Odell Williams (“Two by J.M.Barrie: The New Word and The Old Lady Shows Her Medals”) is back in the regional premiere of a recent off-Broadway farce, “Or,” by Liz Duffy Adams. Playing multiple roles, he is joined by his wife, actress Charlotte Cohn (Broadway’s “La Boheme,” Center Stage’s “The Boys from Syracuse, The Murder of Isaac”), who steps into the role of real-life playwright and undercover spy Aphra Behn in this riotous, romantic romp though Restoration England.
Jason Odell Williams and Charlotte Cohn in OR now playing at Rep Stage.
The show is directed by Stebbins, recipient of a Helen Hayes Tribute Award. It will be presented in the in the Peter and Elizabeth Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center.
Area visitors and residents alike will enjoy the Rep Stage four-show subscription season, performed in the Horowitz Center’s intimate Studio Theatre and the renovated Smith Theatre.
New this year for Rep Stage will be “The Salon Series,” a succession of special staged readings and holiday performance events. Presented in the Monteabaro Recital Hall, first up for the series will be a staged reading of Anne Nelson’s “The Guys,” the unsettling, yet healing story of a fire captain struggling to write eulogies for his men lost on 9/11. With so many in the Washington area personally touched by the events of that historic day, this is a commemorative experience not to be missed.
Rep Stage is a member of the Howard County Arts Council and a Howard County Tourism Partner.
Call the Horowitz Center box office, 443-518-1500, for Rep Stage show days and times, or visit Rep Stage at www.repstage.org.
