You might call Washington’s small-theater scene D.C.’s off-off-Broadway, but Julianne Brienza, executive director of the Capital Fringe Festival, hopes you won’t.
“That’s so lame,” she says. “That’s the whole ‘D.C. wants to be New York’ thing.”
A snapshot of major theater venues in the Washington region
Small theaters in the District are grateful that the city doesn’t have its own version of the Great White Way, because here, nothing has to be “off” anything. Theater is theater.
“I don’t think our audiences think in terms of ‘Tonight I should see a small theater’ or a ‘big theater,’ ” says Michael Dove, artistic director of Forum Theatre. “We have audiences that go to everything.”
Still, much like in New York, Washington’s theater hierarchy is formed by real estate. Although New York’s theater district is clustered around 42nd Street and the District’s has no epicenter, Washington’s scene is determined by who has a space and who doesn’t, and how they make do nevertheless.
Washington has two tiers of small theaters: established theaters that have one or two full-time, paid staff members and the ability to procure stages, and the smaller and scrappy theaters that make their way by doing festivals and scraping together space, costumes and time.
Brienza champions the smaller theaters, many of which got their start in her festival. But for all of the other months of the year, she worries that there isn’t enough performance space for them.
“You may be thinking now, ‘I’d love to do a show in April or May,’ ” said Brienza. “Try to rent a space. It’s going to be a challenge.”
There are a few spaces small theaters can rent: H Street Playhouse, Source, Flashpoint’s Black Box and Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, to name the most popular. DC Space Finder, a Web directory of rentable artistic spaces, lists 50 places, 26 of which are suitable for performances rather than just rehearsals; in comparison, the Web’s PhillySpaceFinder offers several times that. Prices in the D.C. area range from a few hundred dollars per night to the thousands.
When those are all booked, artists have to get creative. Solas Nua, a company that performs works that reflect Irish culture, did nearly its entire 2010-11 season as site-specific works in alternative spaces: “Improbable Frequency” turned a floor of a not-yet-occupied NoMa office building into a speakeasy, password and all; “Swampoodle” was staged in the former Washington Coliseum, now a parking garage.
“Some would argue that this is the future of theater,” said D.C. playwright Gwydion Suilebhan. “It needs to become less place-beholden. It needs to move to where people are. We are going to have to figure out how to make theater more available in nontraditional spaces like malls or office-building lobbies.”
Although space is at a premium, Brienza and Suilebhan think it’s never been a better time to run a small theater. The scene is more innovative every year. He and Brienza cited Taffety Punk (for which Suilebhan is a resident playwright), Constellation, Rorschach, Dizzie Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue, Faction of Fools, No Rules Theatre Company and Pinky Swear Productions.
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