Mosaic Theater’s Reginald L. Douglas is Leading with Joy

metroweekly.com:

Monumental Travesties, written by playwright-in-residence Psalmayene 24.“My thought was we would go to the rehearsal room, show you that,” he says, leading me through a maze of hallways, and up a stairway to the second floor. “And then meet Psalm and everybody, and then we could sneak peek into the theater.”Douglas is directing Monumental Travesties, a sharp, D.C.-set comedy centered around a Black performance artist’s radical response to the Emancipation Memorial, that statue of Lincoln lording over a formerly enslaved man on his knees erected nearly 150 years ago in Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park.Featuring Renee Elizabeth Wilson, Jonathan Feuer, and Louis E.

Davis, as the artist, Chance, who removes Lincoln’s head and leaves it in his neighbor’s bushes, the play marks the beginning of Douglas’ second full season helming Mosaic alongside managing director and co-founder Serge Seiden.One of the few Black gay artistic directors in the nation stewarding a professional regional company, Douglas admits he isn’t immune to pressure, but his overriding sense of excitement and enthusiasm permeates the building.“Produce from a place of peace,” he says. “I find us theater people, sometimes it’s like, it always has to be crazy and frantic.

I was like, actually we can just be organized and efficient and kind. So that’s our spirit.”In that spirit, Douglas has been producing and directing since he was a third-grader staging an originally devised puppet production of Winnie the Pooh with a cast of Beanie Babies.“I was a theater kid, arts kid my whole life and I went to Sister Circle, a theater camp with Miss Elaine,” he recalls.