Leigh Finnegan


Leisure

Stellar expectations for Tenn Cent Fest

These days at Georgetown, it’s all about Tennessee Williams. A flag proclaiming “A Season Named Desire” has been flying over the Davis Center since the beginning of last semester, mysterious signs for the “Glass Menagerie Project” have popped up all over Red Square, and the Department of Performing Arts is bracing itself for an influx of Williams scholars, actors, and enthusiasts this coming weekend. All this hubbub seems a tad confusing at a school with few theater majors and no affiliation to the playwright. It’s this confusion that Performing Arts Artistic Director Derek Goldman hopes to eradicate with this weekend’s Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival, or Tenn Cent Fest—the climax of the Williams- focused “Season Named Desire,” and the first large-scale festival in the history of Georgetown’s Department of Performing Arts

Leisure

Cupcake warfare

Do you ever walk down M Street and think to yourself, “Wow, I really wish Georgetown had another high-end, overpriced, nationally-famous cupcakery?” Probably not, since the line and television crew outside Georgetown Cupcake are almost as unavoidable as those ubiquitous pink boxes you eye with envy when you see them all over campus. But despite the fact that Georgetown’s overpriced confection market has been very much tapped, today, Sprinkles Cupcakes’s flagship D.C. location will have its grand opening—just a few blocks away from Georgetown Cupcake.

Leisure

Tenn Cent Fest opens with Menagerie

Most are familiar with Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. In honor of this prolific playwright, this March the Davis Performing Arts Center is presenting the Tenn Cent Fest, a month-long celebration and exploration of Williams’ work and legacy. The first component of this festival, The Glass Menagerie—a play that characterizes Williams’s southern-gothic tone—opens this week. It’s a big, complex undertaking, and the Department of Performing Arts manages to pull it off with impressive skill and execution.

Leisure

Sheen and Estevez visit G’town, talk Nixon

On Friday, actors Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez visited Georgetown to discuss their upcoming film The Way, a story about a man traveling the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage in Spain. Interview transcribed by Leigh Finnegan. Did you decide to come to Georgetown because it’s been too long since St. Elmo’s Fire? Estevez: I haven’t been here since then! We got in so early this morning I haven’t gotten a chance to look [around].

Leisure

You won’t need 3D glasses

What’s the difference between “The Birth of Venus” and “David”? The answer seems obvious: one is a painting, the other a sculpture. But to abstract expressionist David Smith, the difference between the two art forms was not so vast. He sees them as separated by just one, easily adjustable distinction: dimension. The manipulation of that difference is the premise of David Smith Invents, a new exhibition open in DuPont Circle’s Phillips Collection through May 15. The exhibit features works of varying media—from clay to canvas to steel—which display Smith’s blurring of the line between two dimensions and three.

Leisure

Improv alumni celebrate 15th anniversary

If you’re an acquaintance of anybody in the Georgetown University Improv Association, you may have noticed a slight change in your Facebook events during the past few days. Suddenly, your invitation to Improvfest this weekend was missing half of its title. Originally, it boldly advertised an extra-special guest headliner: the all-caps-worthy “MIKE BIRBIGLIA.”

Leisure

Activism finds a “voice” at Busboys & Poets

On Sunday night at the K Street Busboys and Poets restaurant, Chris Shaw, an eloquent, friendly-looking, middle-aged man, recalled one of the strangest compliments he had ever heard. “He said to me, ‘You’re a homeless bum talking like Shakespeare, man.’” In a sense, this praise that Shaw, a George Washington University grad school alumnus, received during his years as a homeless man in D.C. could summarize the entire open mic night. It was the first monthly installment of the 2011 Voices of a Movement series, which D.C.-based nonprofit One Common Unity is staging to spread awareness about pressing social problems.

Leisure

Yes puts the fun back in dysfunctional

In a pivotal scene of House of Yes, two reunited former lovers, a little drunk in a room that’s rife with sexual tension, begin a bizarre, morbid, and extremely uncomfortable role-playing session. She’s Jackie O, decked out in an iconic pink suit and pillbox hat, and he’s JFK. A fake gun blast goes off, “JFK” collapses onto the couch in feigned pain, and Jackie rushes next to him for support. Then, they have sex.

Leisure

Theatrical theses thrive

When most people get frustrated with their big writing assignments, they’ll highlight a paragraph or two (three if their paper is really going nowhere) and defiantly smack the “delete” key. Miranda Hall (COL ’11) recently had that experience when she chopped her senior thesis down to a quarter of its length. Except she gave up on 75 pages. “It had been about a hundred pages, but I went a little crazy with it, and now it’s 25 pages,” she said.

Leisure

Warming Glow: Giving them the hook

Every pilot season, we media-consuming Americans find ourselves assailed by an endless blast of magazine ads, billboards, and outright shameless publicity stunts that beg us to watch “the next Mad Men/Friday Night Lights/Modern Family!