Image by Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images

By Talya Zax December 5, 2016

Last week, Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage announced a significant new initiative: over the next decade, the theater will commission 25 plays by 25 writers, one for each decade of American history. Playwrights who have already signed on to the project include Eve Ensler, Sarah Ruhl and Aaron Posner.

Fittingly, given that the theater is located within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol, the series will be called “Power Plays.”

“Power and politics are the red meat of Washington, D.C.,” Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith said in a press release, noting “there is no other place in this country where these plays could have such an impact.”

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Ensler, Ruhl and Posner aren’t strangers to politically charged theater. Ensler is best-known for the explicit, vocally feminist “The Vagina Monologues,” Ruhl’s work includes the recent “Scenes From Court Life,” which juxtaposed the reigns of England’s Charles I and Charles II with the governments of George Bush, senior and junior, and Posner recently penned “District Merchants,” a reimagining of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” rooted in America’s black and Jewish communities.

The first performed work in the cycle will be Jacqueline Lawton’s “Intelligence,” which premieres this coming February at Arena Stage.

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