By Kathleen McDonough

T

he lyrics from the classic American musical “Hello Dolly” express perfectly the feeling theater lovers are experiencing as they welcome Arena Stage back home to their newly expanded campus near Washington DC’s Southwest waterfront.

And the homecoming becomes official on Saturday, October 23rd when Arena Stage formally opens the new Mead Center for American Theater with a full day of events and launches its 60th season - fittingly to begin with the staging of the first modern American musical, Oklahoma.

After eleven years of planning and two and a half years of construction, the theater that has defined its mission as a celebration of American drama and musical theater settles into space that is itself uniquely American: modern and expansive, yet still warm and inviting, with a serious multitasking side that offers space for performance, education and research, as well as community engagement.

As Arena’s Artistic Director Molly Smith puts it, “We are finally home again and it’s beyond words how it feels to return. For the first time in Arena’s history, all our staff will be under one roof, and to have this historic re-opening happen in the year of our diamond anniversary is all the more sweet.”

When building began on the new campus in January 2008 the company temporarily moved performances to Crystal City in Arlington, VA and the Lincoln Theatre on U St., NW. But Arena’s return to Southwest DC has had an impact that’s more than cultural: the development of the Mead Center has served as a catalyst for community-wide revitalization, with new restaurants and commercial retailers now joining the center’s waterfront neighborhood.

Arena’s two original stages, the historic Fichandler Stage and the Kreeger Theater, have been completely renovated and are now joined by a third, the 200-seat Kogod Cradle, where new plays will be workshopped and talent nurtured.

In addition, the Mead Center features a community engagement classroom and an outdoor stage.

“The Arena Stage as we have it now will be a major center not only for the production and performance of theater, but for the study of theater. It will be a research center, a truly all-purpose theater center,” Smith says. Arena’s Managing Director Edgar Dobie calls it, more simply, “a theatrical utopia”.

With all of Washington anticipating the opening of the Mead Center, it’s only right that President and First Lady Michelle Obama should join the welcoming committee, and will do so by serving as the honorary chairs for Arena’s 2010-2011 season and October 25th black-tie “homecoming” dinner.

After waiting more than a decade for the new Mead Center to become a reality, the Arena family is not viewing its completion as the culmination of the theater’s rich, sixty-year history of contribution to the arts, but instead a new jumping off point for its next – even more exciting – act.

By Kathleen McDonough

A

ctors, directors and theatergoers all know that Washington DC is now the place to experience some of the best that the American stage can offer. Slowly, steadily and without the fanfare that has long heralded Broadway’s productions, local theater companies have been taking high risks but delivering thrilling results, turning DC’s theater scene into something new and, most definitely, exciting.

For many years, the local theater scene was dominated by large venues that presented mostly traditional plays. Few dared to take the risk of producing new or even lesser known works. But then pioneers like Zelda Fichandler (Arena Stage’s founding Artistic Director and for whom the Fichandler Stage is named) and some years later, Eric Schaeffer (co-founder and artistic director of Signature Theatre) had the vision and courage to create professional, regional theaters committed to bold productions of challenging new and established works while also encouraging new playwrights, new plays and new ideas.

Now dozens of producing theaters and presenting theaters operate in the greater DC area. Other independent companies and educational theaters - most notably The nationally-recognized drama program at Catholic University of America also helping to broaden and brighten the region’s cultural landscape and catapult DC’s theatrical productions into the highest ranks.

And these achievements have not gone unnoticed: in 2009 Signature Theatre received the Tony Award for Regional Theater and every year some of the best artists from both the theater and film worlds flock to DC to perform on its stages, attracted by the outstanding quality of its productions.

Perhaps the best indicators that theater in DC has truly “arrived” are the changes taking place in the performance spaces themselves. The past five years have seen the opening of several state-of-the-art performance facilities, including the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall, which joined the Lansburgh Theatre to create the new Harman Center for the Arts (2007), Signature Theatre’s dramatic new home in Shirlington Village in northern Virginia (2007) and this October’s opening of the Arena Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater (see related story in this issue). These and many other venues throughout the area are serving as cultural anchors for their various vibrant urban locations while significantly extending Washington’s appeal as a destination for theater lovers everywhere.

With the new fall season barely under way, eager audiences are driving high box office demand and predicting a season of full houses. Looking back at the excellence of past seasons it is easy to look forward to more great things to come as Washington DC continues to be on the leading edge of American theater.