RECENT MEDIA COVERAGE

PTP TO NYC

The Washington Post
July 18, 2006

Potomac Theatre Protect, the small summer company devoted to contemporary plays with a political bent, is moving its operation to New York City next year. For the past 20 summers, PRP has performed in the Washington area. For the past 12 years it as been in residence at Olney Theatre Center, where its up-close and personal stagings of Howard Barker's "No end of Blame" and Shelagh Stephenson's "An Experiment With an Air Pump" run through Sunday.

Olney artistic director Jim Petosa founded the shoestring summer troupe in 1977 with Cheryl Faraone and Richard Romagnoli, theatre professors from Middlebury College in Vermont. Called the New York Theatre Studio, it was in New York until 1984. After a break to reorganize, they moved it here as the Potomac Theatre Protect.

At Olney, PTP has operated with its own tiny budget (about $60,000) and offered meaty roles to veteran area actors, including Helen Hedman, Naomi Jacobson, Alan Wade, Paul Morella, and Richard Pilcher.

"If it were only about the quality of the talent, we wouldn't be relocating. It's got nothing to do with that. Faraone says, although one attraction of New York is that many of their former students- and potential cast members-are there. "In many ways, what we came here to do, that void that we came here to fill, other companies are filling. It's a completely different theatrical universe here," she says, "and it may be time for us to catalyze somewhere else."

Petosa, who continues to Amtrak-enabled schedule at Olney and as head of Boston University's theater department will keep up his involvement with PTP when it moves to New York., and likely chances its name again.

"PTP is a kind of company that in order to maintain its own guerrilla theater sensibility, you can't let it get too comfortable," he observes. "This idea has enough challenge to it that I think we're going to find it reinvigorates the nature of the work."