Intelligence: An Arena Stage Power Play

4/9/2017

Well, folks, this is it! After a week-long extension, some worthy critical praise, and nightly sold out performances, the world premiere production of Intelligence at Arena Stage is coming to a close. It's been such a remarkable and rewarding experience, and I found myself pushed harder as a playwright than ever before.

I'm so deeply appreciative to Molly Smith, Edgar Dobie, Khady Kamara, Greta Hayes, Amelia Powell, Daniella Topol, Jocelyn Clarke, Paul Adolphsen, the cast, crew and production team, and everyone at Arena Stage. We had an amazing time telling this surprisingly relevant and deeply urgent story of truth, power, and accountability. I'm also forever thankful to my dear friends, family, and colleagues who came out in support of the show.

Over the next two weeks, I'm going to finish revisions of the post production draft and send the script off to a handful of interested theatres! After that, I'll get started researching and writing my next new play commission, Among These Wild Things, which explores the intersection of human rights and genetics. This play will receive a public reading at PlayMakers Repertory Company in the Spring of 2018. Click here to learn more.

In the meantime, please enjoy this post, which includes the promotional video, several interviews, never-before-seen rehearsal production photos, and so much more.

Intelligence: Power Playwright

Lawton’s new play, Intelligence—having a world premiere at Arena Stage February 24 through April 9—is a fictional account of Valerie Plame, whose identity as a CIA operative was leaked in 2003 after her husband publicly disputed George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had nuke-ready uranium.

Matching Lawton with Plame—or with a series anchored by a Pulitzer Prize–winning chronicler of power like Wright—may seem an unlikely choice. Lawton, now 39, arrived in the District in 2006 and over time became known for plays about the African-American experience, including adaptations of Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina that put African-American women at their center. The Hampton Years, her highest-profile production, told of artists at a historically black college. Last fall, she produced a set of ten-minute plays to accompany the Phillips Collection’s exhibition of paintings by Jacob Lawrence, chronicler of the “great migration” of African-Americans from the rural South.

Yet Smith—who has long sought to find a voice that defined DC the way that, say, David Mamet’s streetwise style epitomizes Chicago theater—came to realize, after Wright’s and Strand’s successes, that what defined Washington was a topic, not a dramatic style. “It isn’t a single voice but a multiplicity of voices, writing about power and politics,” she says

Click here to read the rest of the interview!

Disputed Intelligence

“It’s so intense what’s happening right now,” said playwright Jacqueline E. Lawton in a recent interview. She could be talking, with some understatement, about the political garbage fire currently raging in Washington, D.C., and in a sense she is—but she also means it more specifically. Her new play Intelligence, running at D.C.’s Arena Stage Feb. 24-April 9, is about politically motivated leaks, disputed intelligence, and the string-pulling influence of what we now routinely hear called “the deep state” in matters of national security. But in her case, Lawton has gone back to not-quite-ancient history to tell a lightly fictionalized version of the 2003 story of diplomat Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA agent outed to the press by forces close to the White House for her husband’s inconvenient dissent regarding the case for war in Iraq. That story’s direct resonances with—as well as some photonegative reflections of—one of the most headline-wrenching scandals roiling the still-young Trump Administration hardly need to be pointed out, not least because some of the same agencies and branches of government are involved.

Click here to read the rest of the interview!

Why Lawton Was Uniquely Qualified to Write Intelligence

The hottest theater ticket in DC right now isn’t to a blockbuster musical, a star-studded Shakespearean play, or a big-time production already contracted to hit Broadway. The ticket everyone is clamoring for is Intelligence at Arena Stage, a world premiere political thriller which has already sold out and extended its run, even before it has opened.

JACQUELINE LAWTON: When I got the call for the commission, we knew it would be about DC politics and power [which is part of the series]. I knew that I wanted a woman at the center of the play. A woman whose experience influenced the political landscape and shaped the conversations that we have. There’s so many people who that could be.

One important thing that I brought to the play was my family experience: my father and grandfather were both in military intelligence. So I’ve always been transfixed by the CIA and the world of intelligence. When you look at intelligence, it’s all about gathering information so that a decision can be made. But the thing is, those decisions are based on the shape of the intelligence as it is presented. What gets dangerous is when intelligence is influenced by ideology. That’s exactly what happened in 2003 when Bush took us into Iraq.

Click here to read the rest of the interview!

What Inspired Lawton to Write Intelligence

Click the image to listen to playwright Jacqueline E. Lawton's interview with Josephine Reed for the National Endowment of the Arts' Art Work Blog.

Truthful Intelligence: A Play about Power and Politics

Exactly eight days after Donald Trump was elected president, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth”—defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”—as 2016’s international word of the year, citing a 2000 percent increase in usage compared with 2015.

However, those of us who followed the second Bush administration closely became familiar with what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness” much earlier. The sixteen words George W. Bush used in the 2003 State of the Union address, for example, claiming that Saddam Hussein had sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” could have been called a lie, but, given that Bush says he believed they were true when he spoke them, they have instead gone down in history as “contested.” As playwright Jacqueline E. Lawton explores in her new play Intelligence, the ensuing Plamegate scandal—involving the outing of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame—was full of its own deep truths not just about American politics but also about life in America at the time.

Click here to read the rest of the interview!