Jeremy Skidmore recalls all too well the day he blew a bundle. The money was all but in the bag -- a government grant specifically for arts organizations along the H Street corridor.
"There was no way we were not going to get this grant," says Skidmore, who runs a small theater company, Theater Alliance, based in a performance space on H Street NE.
Well, actually, there was. On the day the grant application was due, the set for the company's next show had to be carried into the space, the H Street Playhouse. When one is the head of a theater company that has a staff of two, delegating such a task often amounts to peering into a mirror and saying, "You!" Which is why, on a chilly day last winter, Skidmore was lugging scenery instead of completing paperwork.
"It cost me twenty [expletive] thousand dollars because I have to load this in!" he remembers shouting to the heedless heavens.
Such are the hiccups and headaches in theater life for the young, ambitious and overextended. The moment was an uncharacteristic one for Skidmore. A rising star in the ranks of artistic directors in Washington, the 28-year-old graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts has not missed many opportunities to enhance his troupe's stature since taking the reins of Theater Alliance in late 2001. From a stylish regional premiere of Rebecca Gilman's creepy date play, "Boy Gets Girl," to the recently completed run of the most successful production of Skidmore's tenure, a polished revival of "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde," Theater Alliance has established itself as one of the best little companies in town.
The outfit's expanding reputation runs parallel to the emergence of other tiny, scrappy troupes in other parts of the city, such as Catalyst Theater, which operates out of a black-box space on Capitol Hill, and Rorschach Theatre, which mounts productions in a Methodist church in Columbia Heights. The leaders of these companies form a kind of vanguard of Washington's theater future. With divergent sensibilities and common problems, the three have loosely banded together for the purposes of coordinating schedules and splitting advertising costs. And they have given their coalition a title: the Edge.
In many ways, the real indication of the robustness of a theater community is not in the durability of who's on top but the viability of those striving to get there.
And if anything seems clear in the experiences of Catalyst, Rorschach and Theater Alliance, it's that the challenge of doing good work on a shoestring remains a formidable one. The people who run these troupes look at the bigger, "establishment" theaters -- a majority of which are constructing new spaces -- with a kind of wistfulness. If only we could have higher-price-tag problems!
Or as Scott Fortier, artistic director of four-year-old Catalyst Theater, says: "They're trying to build a $70 million theater. I'm trying to fund my next show."
What distinguishes Catalyst, Rorschach and Theater Alliance from the dozens of other upstart troupes is not only a certain consistency but also the sense that these three companies have broken through. In the choice of projects -- whether an experimental twist on a classic, a resurrection of an obscure, centuries-old play or the first American presentation of a modern work by a foreign writer -- there's a level of daring in their offerings. The nerviness of some selections reflects an effort to challenge as well as to entertain.
The solar system of Washington theater is pretty entrenched. There are the major planets: Shakespeare, Arena Stage, Signature, Studio, Woolly Mammoth, the Kennedy Center. In their orbits are the significant satellites, such as Round House, Theater J, Synetic. And then come the comets, lighting up a season in less predictable ways.
These smaller companies have a vital, gravitational pull all their own. Fortier's Catalyst has made its presence felt over the past few seasons with, among other shows, a solid staging of Caryl Churchill's "Cloud Nine"; a widely admired version of Moliere's "Learned Ladies"; and an inventive adaptation of Orwell's "1984." Rorschach, which has gained respect locally for mounting a range of big plays in tiny quarters, has a hit on its hands at the moment with "The Beard of Avon," Amy Freed's brainy farce for the Bard-obsessed. It has proved so popular that it has just been extended through Dec. 10.
