'The Director,' Tackling Conflict

A New Play Again Places Elia Kazan in the Harsh Glare of the Spotlight

Rick Foucheux portrays Kazan, inset, in the solo piece at Round House Theatre in Silver Spring. The show explores Kazan's conflict over cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee. (By Justin Thomas -- Round House Theatre)

In "The Director: The Third Act of Elia Kazan," playwright Leslie A. Kobylinski and actor Rick Foucheux place the legendary stage and film director in mental hell and let him try to argue his way out. The hour-long solo piece, which Kobylinski is also staging, runs at Round House Theatre's Silver Spring venue tomorrow night through May 13.

Kazan directed such seminal films as "On the Waterfront," "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Gentleman's Agreement" and the iconic Broadway productions of "Streetcar" and "Death of a Salesman" among many, many others. In 1952 he earned the lasting enmity of many showbiz colleagues by naming to the House Un-American Activities Committee fellow members in the Communist Party, to which he belonged for two years during the Depression.

"He's sort of justifying himself to himself, defending himself to himself," says Foucheux of Kobylinski's stream-of-consciousness script. "Leslie has not taken a stand one way or the other. . . . I fully expect people to leave the theater arguing about whether he was right or wrong to give up those names," the actor says.

"The play really is a purgatory of the mind," says Kobylinski. Kazan "is still constantly caught between the two sides of himself."

A former broadcast news researcher and reporter, Kobylinski says that while she pays "great attention" to the facts of Kazan's life, his complex and often contradictory persona dictated her more abstract -- and, she hopes, provocative -- style, which she calls "a fictionalized internal dialogue."

Kobylinski met Foucheux in 2003 when she was Kyle Donnelly's assistant director on "Shakespeare in Hollywood" at Arena Stage. Working with Foucheux on the Kazan piece during its three years of development has been "like getting a Porsche Carrera for your birthday," she says.

As a director, "I have been trying every shift that car has to drive," Kobylinski says Foucheux says that includes letting his often expressive hand gestures idle a bit, in keeping with the spare, dreamlike, "metaphysical" nature of the piece.

"What we're trying to go for is more the essence of a human being caught in a terrible dilemma, that dilemma being his pursuit of his own sense of the truth and how that got him in trouble at every turn," says Foucheux. While "marvelous for his movies," he says, it "sure made things messy in his personal life and when the HUAC thing came along."

Follow Spots

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· Flashpoint, the arts incubator at Ninth and G streets NW, will present a workshop production of a hip-hop musical titled "Hidden Pages," tomorrow night through Saturday. Written by Q. Terah Jackson, with music by Daren Joseph, the "political science fiction"-themed work is directed by Brandon White and choreographed by Holly Bass. Call 202-315-1340 or visit http://www.hiddenpages.org.

· A memorial tribute to actor Mark Hammer will take place May 7 at 6 p.m. at Catholic University's Hartke Theatre. Hammer, who died Feb. 15 at age 69, was an essential character man at Arena Stage from 1973 to 1991. He also taught at Catholic. For details call Gene Morrill at 301-933-3211 or e-mail genemorrill@aol.com.