An audacious season coming for D.C.’s small but mighty Mosaic Theater

Which is how Morisseau’s “Confederates” — a time-bending story of two Black women, one a spy for the Union during the Civil War, the other a modern-day academic — wound up on the 2023-2024 roster of Mosaic, a modest-size theater with a major appetite. Lacking a permanent home or anything close to a sustaining war chest, the company with its $2.1 million yearly budget is building a reputation for bold new voyages, at a time when other arts organizations are trimming their sails.

That newly acquired reach has a lot to do with the leadership of Douglas, who took over as artistic head of Mosaic in 2021, and at 36 is running his first company, after posts at Studio Theatre and other troupes. Given his networking skills, his enthusiasm for the form and a prowess for pursuing artists he loves, it’s safe to say it won’t be his last. This is not even to mention the scale of his upcoming season, which in addition to “Confederates” includes two world premieres: a play about a controversial statue of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., and a hip-hop musical illuminating a community of 400,000 formerly enslaved people who settled in Mexico via the Underground Railroad. The fourth play is the story of an unlikely familial connection uncovered between Pocahontas and Nancy Reagan.

“It’s like the ultimate dream to have these writers say yes to Mosaic. For us to be their home,” Douglas said over breakfast in a cafe near Mount Vernon Square. “All of these playwrights are full of curiosity, not just answers. They’re not didactic. They’re provocative. They make you think more. And that’s what I think theater should be. That’s what makes them exciting to me. They’re full of inquiry and surprise.”

Approaching its 10th anniversary, Mosaic was founded by former artistic director Ari Roth, who was soon joined in the new venture by Serge Seiden, who remains the company’s managing director. As its name implies, it has long sought to produce work that draws on the interests of a wide range of the city’s varied ethnic communities. Its base is the Atlas Performing Arts Center, a renovated movie complex on H Street NE that has become an artistic anchor for the city’s underserved Northeast quadrant.

While that quite vitally means making Mosaic a platform for stories by and about people of color, that is not its singular focus. In January, for example, the company hired actors from D.C., New York and Baltimore for a 10-day workshop of “Max and Willy’s Last Laugh,” a play with music by Jake Broder and Conor Duffy about Jewish prisoners forced to entertain Nazi officers at a transit camp in the Netherlands during the Second World War.

“He understands the intersectionality of many things.” Andy Shallal, a Washington restaurateur and longtime Mosaic board member, said of Douglas. “Not only the racial dynamics, but also tying them to a bigger picture.”

Douglas is in the vanguard of a new generation of artistic directors in Washington, several of them artists of color. Among them are Karen Ann Daniels at Folger Theatre, Raymond O. Caldwell at Theater Alliance and Hana Sharif, who arrives at Arena Stage in August. Of ushering in an ever broader cultural dialogue at his theater, Douglas said: “It’s inherent in my DNA to think about the world very much as a plural place, not an individual place. And I think there’s no more exciting place to think that way than the nation’s capital, where we are a global melting pot.”

Cathy Solomon, president of Mosaic’s 26-member board of directors, says that Douglas took over at a difficult juncture for the theater; it was dealing with the effects of the pandemic as well as the aftershocks of the turbulence surrounding Roth’s resignation. (Roth has since formed a new D.C. company, Voices Festival Productions.) “I had very high expectations for Reg and I would say he has exceeded them, which is saying a lot,” Solomon said. “It was not easy to come on,” she added, pointing to an ambitious project that was already on the theater’s books, a trio of plays about the killing of Emmett Till.

“He inherited the ‘Till Trilogy,’ he did it enthusiastically, and made it his own,” Solomon said.

Now, he categorically “owns” everything on his schedule, one that is loaded with risk. New plays are simply harder to sell, and in an age in which the public’s interest in purchasing subscriptions to entire seasons is waning, the marketing imperatives are that much more demanding. First up on Mosaic’s 2023-2024 agenda is “Monumental Travesties” (Sept. 7-Oct. 1), a world premiere by D.C.-based theater maker Psalmayene 24 that Douglas will direct.

The subject is a statue in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill that has drawn protests over its depiction of Lincoln, an enslaved man and emancipation. In February, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D. C.), arguing that the monument “fails to depict how enslaved African Americans pressed for their own emancipation,” reintroduced a bill calling for its removal to a museum.

Morisseau’s “Confederates” (Oct. 26-Nov. 19) follows, under the direction of Stori Ayers, who also staged it off-Broadway in 2021. Then comes Rhiana Yazzie’s “Nancy,” (March 28-April 21, 2024), a work directed by Ken-Matt Martin in which the histories of the White House and the nation’s Indigenous people intertwine. The main-stage season concludes with “Mexodus” (May 16-June 9, 2024) a musical by and featuring Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, with David Mendizábal directing.

To Douglas, one of the attributes that ties these disparate projects together is that “they’re all naturally, inherently cross-cultural — a play like ‘Nancy’ that puts together the unlikeliest of women, a single Navajo mother fighting for climate change, in conversation with Nancy Reagan, of all people. All because a writer took this historical spark that no one knows about.”

“That’s so audacious, and I have no idea how we’re going to stage it,” Douglas said, laughing. “And that’s what thrills me.”