When Perisphere Theater puts on a show, it looks back to the past as a way to wrestle with the present and consider the future. The Montgomery County-based company was founded by director Heather Benjamin in 2015 in Washington, D.C., and now performs in Bethesda.
Benjamin’s goal: Produce “plays that examine personal and collective history and the notion of history itself. We strive for a theater experience that gives audiences a greater appreciation of history and of those who are often left out of its retelling.”
In 2024, theater creatives Lizzi Albert and Gerrad Alex Taylor took the helm of the small company as co-artistic directors proposing to build on the theater’s foundational mission while leaning into new productions aimed at Montgomery County’s diverse and educated constituency. In 2023, The Washington Post included Perisphere on its list of small theaters worth watching, declaring it a “thought-provoking company.”
The company, which relocated to Silver Spring in 2019, manages with a skin-tight budget that hovers at about $50,000 annually. But its directors say they’re still able to tackle big issues and present regional premieres of recent works. “Perisphere Theater produces plays and high-quality theater that ask questions about history, interrogate history and look at the historical landscape of our world,” said Taylor, a Baltimore-based theater-maker and an assistant professor in the theater department at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
“We investigate which voices and stories may have been left out of history,” he added, “and what we can do as theater artists to create space for all types of stories and historical perspectives.”
In previous seasons productions have ranged from “Tartuffe,” Moliere’s 17th-century satire on religious fanaticism, to “Oleanna,” David Mamet’s two-hander about a professor accused of sexual harassment by a female student, and “Copenhagen,” Michael Frayn’s take on the consequential 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
Connecting to MoCo’s Constituents
Under a joint directorship model, Perisphere’s newly ensconced leadership team continues the focus on illuminating history while also seeking out new voices from the dramatic canon. Albert explained: “Because we’re located in such a rich landscape of theaters [in the greater Washington, D.C., region], it’s important to have something that sets us apart to convince people they should see our work as opposed to the many other live theater opportunities they have available.”
“Both Gerrard and I have a long history of productions that specifically focus on Black stories, an all-Black cast and Black playwrights,” Albert said about expanding Perisphere’s canon, “but I also think it’s a little reductive to say everyone only wants to see themselves on stage.” Perisphere is a theater for all, she asserted, and Taylor agreed.
He continued, “Our vision is to create theater and theatrical-adjacent events that have a concentration in respect, diversity, antiracism, and artistic excellence.” Two productions — the first produced under Taylor and Albert’s curatorial direction — open this month and forthcoming in June. “This year, in our first season, our goal is basically to ground Perisphere Theater more definitively in Montgomery County,” Taylor said.
That means exploring what Taylor identified as important issues facing both the region and the nation. “We hope to push our mission and values forward in this new era of producing art,” he continued. “We’ve just come out of a huge pandemic, [though] we are still in one in many ways,” he explained. “We’re slowly moving into a new generation when it comes to politics and technology and social climate.” These defining 21st-century issues are ones the creative community as a whole continues to grapple with. The challenge of how to engage a new generation of patrons raised with a bevy of technological devices that can replace face-to-face social engagement and community-based entertainment has been one that Taylor is committed to. As well, he said, “We need to be thinking about respect and intimacy and boundaries and language in ways that maybe we weren’t thinking about 20 years ago.”
Building a Partnership in Bethesda
Perisphere recently forged a partnership with the Writer’s Center in Bethesda as the organization’s resident theater company. “Now we can really start developing a relationship with Bethesda and Montgomery County,” Taylor said. “I’m interested in what people of the global majority — Black and Brown people, African Americans, people of color — are
facing when they step out of their homes every day in Montgomery County. How can Perisphere … make people’s lives better or at least give them images, sensory information, to maybe go and make their lives better through their own doing.”
Telling stories and representing people of color and minorities is not only for Black, Brown, LGBTQ and other minority audiences, according to Taylor. “Stories about Black people are sometimes even more valuable to white people, because for Black culture, we know our stories … I think it’s white communities that need to hear them. I would even say: sometimes creating space for Black people involves doing our stories for white people to open up their lens.”
American and French: Two Plays, Two Histories
On stage this month, “The America Play,” by Pulitzer Prize for Drama recipient Suzan-Lori Parks, has been described as a “provocative theater piece ruminating on black identity, theater and American history.” Both absurdist and trenchant, it is set in a theme park called the Great Hole of History, where a Black man continuously reenacts the assassination of Abraham Lincoln while visitors deal with how their theme park experience affects them.
Taylor calls it “very complicated but such a rich story about history on stage …. Suzan Lori-Parks is such a beautiful playwright — there’s always something to discover in her writing and the different ways in the same scene her words create this metaphor [to] take with us through history.”
Crossing the Atlantic and reaching further back in history, Albert selected and directs “Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh,” which runs in June. On the eve of the French Revolution, playwright Joel Gross imagines a love triangle with Marie Antoinette, her portrait painter Elisabeth Vigée le Brun and the fictional Count Alexis de Ligne, who is intrigued by the not-yet-independent American colonies. Albert called the play an entertaining conversation starter. “It’s sort of a good old-fashioned romantic story,” she noted, “but I’m really interested in the character of the female artist and the discussions about the way she chooses to represent Marie, and how that affects the public’s sense of who Marie Antoinette was as an Austrian princess and foreigner” in France.
“The Color of Flesh” tells a tale germane to today’s theater goers.
Albert said: “I think the questions that provoked the French Revolution feel relevant to where we’re existing in American society today, especially the income inequality that we’re grappling with and the public anger over that.”
When Perisphere Theater was founded a decade ago, Benjamin was seeking a name that was unusual, even abstract enough, that the company could develop its unique identity, rather than a straightforward name representing a locale or idea that might go out of fashion. Perisphere was one of a pair of architectural structures built for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. “Heather was really struck by the imagery of [the Perisphere structure] and its prominence at the World’s Fair,” said Albert, “which is kind of an anachronism now, but then it was such an incredible event and an opportunity for people to see and imagine what kind of world could be possible with scientific, cultural and scholarly exhibits.”
Now, Albert and Taylor are intent on leading Perisphere to what can be imagined for its future five, 10 or 20 years from now. “We are looking to expand the type of stories that you see on stage,” Albert said. “What theater can offer, as we move into a future where there’re so many opportunities to perfectly curate your media consumption to exactly what your taste already is, is the desire of audiences to be in the room with other people experiencing something that’s happening live in front of your eyes. That is a fundamental human desire. Our job is to create offerings compelling enough to get people off the couch, take out their wallets, and spend an hour or two hours in community with other people from their community seeing something where they can’t predict every twist, turn or moment.”
“The America Play,” by Suzan-Lori Parks, runs at Perisphere Theater in residence at the Writer’s Center January 31 to February 15. “Marie Antoinette: The Color of Flesh,” by Joel Gross, runs June 6 to 21. For more information, visit perispheretheater.com.
