Richard Schiff returns to Washington to star in the Shakespeare’s ‘Hughie’

Richard Schiff is having a Toby Ziegler moment.

“There are so many stories,” murmurs Schiff, who played angst-riddled White House communications director Ziegler on the game-changing TV series “The West Wing.” He’s stymied: Which one to tell?

(Marvin Joseph/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Richard Schiff is starring in Eugene O'Neill's \"Hughie\" at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre.

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He’s talking about the time he upbraided campaign strategist Steve Schmidt for helping bring Sarah Palin on board as then-presidential candidate John McCain’s 2008 running mate. But he pauses.

Maybe first he should go into his Bill Clinton story. The one when Bubba confided to Schiff his view on picking VPs.

And then there are the Joe Biden stories, none of which has anything to do with why Schiff – 57, skinnier than you’d guess from TV, and sporting frayed jeans and a hipster’s leather hat – is chatting in a Penn Quarter health food cafe in the first place. (Explaining that leads to an Al Pacino story.) He’s in Washington to, well, of course, to hobnob and pop up on CNN doing a quick take during the inaugural events.

But for the next six weeks Schiff is really here to star in ”Hughie” for the Shakespeare Theatre Company. “Hughie” is a two-character, hour-long drama from Eugene O’Neill’s late period, written after the introspective masterpieces “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “The Iceman Cometh.” Schiff plays Erie Smith, a small-time hustler who does virtually all the play’s talking as he rambles to a night clerk.

“He’s one of those two-bit semi-hustlers hanging around the joints,” says Schiff, who had read the play informally with Pacino in an L.A. hotel room when Pacino was preparing his own version back in the 1990s. “When I was a kid he was one of the many guys you’d see at the OTB parlor, or hanging out at Times Square.”

How it came about was simple. Schiff was participating in a Will on the Hill benefit for the Shakespeare Theatre — “It was the cutest that elected officials will ever look,” the actor says of the politicos in costume to act in a classical play — and outside he noticed a poster for O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude.” When a staffer asked if he’d be interested in working with the troupe, Schiff mentioned “Hughie.”

He also suggested director Doug Hughes; the two had talked about collaborating before, but “Hughie” is the first time it’s working out. Schiff calls O’Neill’s focused bit of portraiture “a Rembrandt,” while Hughes says of Schiff, “He has a gift for the hardscrabble lyricism of O’Neill.”

The director talks about the “mordant intellect” Schiff flashed on “West Wing,” and says, “I always felt there was a tragic view of life there. But Toby Ziegler is a very, very different being from Erie Smith.”

“The West Wing” ended its seven-year run in 2006, and while Schiff has stayed busy on screens small and large (he’ll be in the new Superman picture “Man of Steel” this summer), he’s also found his way back on stage. In the past few years he’s done theater in New Jersey and in London, and he just finished a three-month run on Broadway with Pacino in the hot-ticket revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

The theater work, he says, has been his effort to “cleanse” himself from a string of unsatisfying guest spots on TV, but on some level the entertainer’s life may always be an odd fit for Schiff. Even his start in acting was clouded with doubt. He tells a funny story of how a friend set him up for an audition with a three-year post-grad program at City College of New York. One of the auditors asked why Schiff was so nervous, and he said it was because he’d never been in that position before.