Evelyn Sandground And Bill Perkins To Be Honored At Theater J's 2022 Benefit Next Week

Theater J will honor Evelyn Sandground and Bill Perkins at their annual benefit on Tuesday, November 15, at 8:00 PM in Washington, DC. Sandground and Perkins are longtime advocates of Theater J and the arts throughout the Washington area. Sandground has served for over a decade on the Theater J Council and previously served as a co-chair.

"Evelyn and Bill have done so much for Theater J and many other theaters in Washington over the years," says Managing Director David Lloyd Olson. "This year's Theater J benefit will be a celebration of these pillars of our vibrant DC theater community".

In addition to honoring Sandground and Perkins, the Theater J benefit will mark the awarding of the 2022 Patty Abramson and Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prizes. Alicia Louzoun-Heisler will receive the Patty Abramson New Jewish Play Prize for her play Bashert, and Itamar Moses will receive the Trish Vradenburg New Jewish Play Prize for his play The Ally. Bashert will receive a reading produced by Theater J with professional actors at a date to be announced.

Tickets for the benefit start at $350 and can be purchased at TheaterJ.org/Benefit or by calling Theater J's development office at 202.777.3225.

Evelyn has been a fan, subscriber and supporter of Theater J for nearly 20 years, ever since she and Bill received a subscription from Michele and Allan Berman as a wedding gift in 2003. She joined the Council in 2006 and has served as co-chair of the Council and co-chair of the Nominating Committee. As a native New Yorker, Evelyn has felt a love for theater for as long as she can remember. Her parents took her to musicals at a young age, and her father loved to serenade her on the piano with show tunes. One of her earliest memories is entertaining her parents' friends by singing "Getting to Know You" from The King and I. Her parents were born in Austria and in 1939 fled the country for Shanghai and eventually New York. Evelyn was born there and grew up on Central Park West. After graduating from Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Evelyn worked in the Time-Life photo lab in New York. She then lived in New Haven and New Jersey - where she had two wonderful sons, Eric and Peter - before moving to Washington. Evelyn went back to school in her 40s and earned a law degree from George Mason University. She practiced Family Law in Fairfax, Virginia and served on the 5th District Disciplinary Committee of the Virginia Bar. During that time, she took additional training in the field of mediation. After she retired from practicing law she became a mediator at the Women's Center in Vienna, Virginia until she retired in 2008. In addition to her involvement with Theater J, she is on the board of The Defiant Requiem, which honors the bravery of the prisoners who defied their captors at Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. She is also active in Compassion and Choices, which advocates for medical aid in dying. Her main love besides her husband Bill and her sons and daughters-in-law are her two granddaughters, Janie and Eve, who light up her life.

Bill says he has spent most of his life in the dark, because of his love for movies and theater. He got hooked on movies in Dallas, at a drive-in theater where his mother worked and where he could go for free. And after a high school teacher took students to a local production of an English comedy, he was fascinated by theater. Dallas didn't offer much on stage, but Bill took advantage of all that he could, including the Dallas Summer Musicals and Paul Baker's landmark Dallas Theatre Center. From his earliest years, his ambition had always been to be a journalist. He hoped to combine these obsessions and become a theater critic. He worked his way through North Texas State University by working for local newspapers - for two years, The Dallas Times Herald - and focusing on articles about theater. He then went to Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, which got him to New York, and specialized in critical writing under Judith Crist. He was awarded the Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing. After graduating, Bill became realistic and went into public affairs - for a government agency, trade associations, and then for 40 years, his own firm that specialized in energy and environmental issues. But he never lost his itch for theater, movies and writing about them. For years, as a sideline, he wrote culture articles and book reviews for the Dow-Jones weekly newspaper, The National Observer. He's been on the board of Avant Bard Theatre in Virginia, formerly the Washington Shakespeare Company, for nearly 20 years. He served two terms as a judge for the Helen Hayes Awards. And he actually got to speak to Stephen Sondheim. Bill thanks Theater J for this honor, and Evelyn for being the person he most wants to sit in the dark with.

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