Theater Alliance Director Stages Exit

Jeremy Skidmore to Step Down at Season's End

Jeremy Skidmore, the visionary artistic director of Theater Alliance, the small D.C. company with big ideas, will leave at the end of this season to pursue freelance directing and take a break from five years as an arts administrator.

He oversaw 22 Alliance productions. His favorites include "Mary's Wedding" and "Slaughter City," both of which he also directed.

Skidmore, 30, says it's time for him to move on and "refill the well" after expending much energy to open the company's H Street Playhouse venue in 2002 and establish the Theater Alliance there. After stepping down, he will become an artistic associate of the company.

Taking over July 1 as interim artistic director will be Theater Alliance's board president and co-founder (with Adele Robey), Paul-Douglas Michnewicz. (He'll leave the board when he takes over Skidmore's position.) It will be a return engagement for Michnewicz, 44, who served as Theater Alliance's first artistic director from 1993 to 1998. Last August he staged the Alliance's hit "3/4 of a Mass for St. Vivian."

Michnewicz [pronounced mickNEVitch] works with VSA Arts, which is affiliated with the Kennedy Center; is assistant director for opera companies, including Washington National Opera; and also teaches acting. He says he shares with Skidmore a taste for newer or rarely performed works "that challenge the theatrical imagination of the audience."

Other challenges await him, too. "We're still a very tiny company," Michnewicz says. "Even though the art part has taken us to great heights, we still have a lot of work to do on the infrastructure, and that is hopefully what I'm going to be doing in the next 12 to 16 months." He adds that he'll work on "finances, board structure, staffing, all of it."

Skidmore and Michnewicz will choose the 2007-08 season together so that, as Skidmore explains, "the aesthetic, in terms of the plays that Theater Alliance has picked historically, will continue." His taste and Michnewicz's echo each other, notes Skidmore, who expresses a fondness for "nonlinear" narratives and "things that make plays uniquely theater, that would never work as a film."

Skidmore recently guest-directed Lanford Wilson's drama "The Gingham Dog" for African Continuum Theatre Company. At Theater Alliance he staged "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" in August 2005 and will direct "Blue/Orange" there this spring. At the moment he is rehearsing Sarah Kane's "Crave" at Signature Theatre (it runs Jan. 30-April 1). Much of his time, though, is spent producing the Theater Alliance season and scaring up underwriting. That leaves less time to direct.

"I'm just getting to the place where I'm starting to have to turn down jobs that I didn't want to have to be turning down," says Skidmore. Hence his decision to move on.

Sometime next season, says Michnewicz, he and the Theater Alliance board will begin a national search for a permanent artistic director and he will decide whether to throw his own hat into that ring.

More Than Marceau

Mimes don't get no respect these days, no respect at all. In many a bad movie, the poor fellows in whiteface and suspenders try to entertain on street corners and wind up getting the stuffing knocked out of them instead by heroes or villains -- or both. As if pantomime weren't central to the history of film, with masters such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin at the apex of both art forms.

Today, says Washington-based mime and actor Mark Jaster, "there are very few examples of the good stuff, [and] people don't think anymore of the silent film as a mimetic art."