In his first year and a half as artistic director and producer of Rep Stage, Michael Stebbins has made an impression by paying attention to what is on the stage and who is in the seats.
Efforts including backstage tours for community groups, talking up the theater at a booth at the Columbia City Fair and starting an advisory board of community members to promote the theater and raise funds have been part of Rep Stage's recent outreach efforts as the professional theater in residence at Howard Community College begins its 15th year.
"We're getting to know the people," Stebbins said.
What he calls a "concentrated grass-roots effort" seems to be working as attendance has risen and the organization has gotten its finances into the black.
At a time when more people are giving Rep Stage a look, Stebbins and managing director Brett Ashley Crawford have put together a longer season for 2007-2008 that reflects the theater's tradition of offering contemporary and lesser-known works.
The schedule, which begins Aug. 22 and runs through June 29, offers six shows for the first time and includes three Washington-Baltimore-area premieres. They are Mrs. Farnsworth by A.R. Gurney, Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno and In the Heart of America by Naomi Wallace.
George Bernard Shaw's classic play Mrs. Warren's Profession will be the first Shaw work at Rep Stage. Barbara Lebow's A Shayna Maidel and a return engagement of the holiday comedy The Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris round out the season.
"I think Rep Stage provides a variety of voices to the community," Crawford said. "We are offering things that are not done a lot."
She added: "The audience wants to be intellectually engaged. They want to be challenged by new work. ... They want to have a little bit of everything."
Looking at the season as a whole, Stebbins, who will direct The Santaland Diaries and star in Thom Pain (based on nothing), said there are some themes that emerge. One is the role of strong female characters, such as the woman who tells a college writing class about her past with an influential man in Mrs. Farnsworth and the mother and daughter that deal with the elder woman's past as a prostitute in Mrs. Warren's Profession.
Another theme is issues of war and politics, which are particularly important in A Shayna Maidel, in which a family adjusts to life in America in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and In the Heart of America, which Rep Stage describes as "an anti-war love play written in reaction to the Gulf War of 1991."
