A 'Spamalot' Sidekick's Moment to Shine
Jeff Dumas Sees (and Sings) 'The Bright Side of Life'

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Sure, he wants to sell tickets, but when Jeff Dumas says Washington audiences are awesome, he sounds like he means it. The actor won a Helen Hayes Award as a supporting performer for his 2006 appearance in "Monty Python's Spamalot" at the National Theatre -- a house he loves for being the antithesis of newer, enormous venues.

"It's such an intimate theater," he says. "The audience is pretty much right on top of you. The audiences were insane. For many a city after that, we'd all kind of get this wistful look in our eyes and go, 'Remember D.C.?' "

Dumas and the rest of the "Spamalot" touring cast return to the National Dec. 11 through Jan. 6. The musical is based on the British comedy troupe's 1975 film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Python alum Eric Idle wrote the book and collaborated on music and lyrics with John Du Prez. Mike Nichols directed.

Idle persuaded Nichols to include the tune "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," which hails from the crucifixion scene in the Pythons' 1979 New Testament sendup, "Life of Brian." In his role as Patsy, King Arthur's dogsbody, Dumas (DOOM-ahs, with the "s" pronounced) gets to sing the number to buck Arthur up.

"I am King Arthur's squire-slash-horse," explains the slight, 36-year-old actor, who plays the horse by clapping coconut halves together -- a cheap laugh inspired by the original film's low budget. Dumas says Patsy "makes sure his boss doesn't fall off the edge of a cliff. He's there to pick him up a little bit when he's down."

Patsy is "one of those characters I think a lot of people can relate to -- that guy who maybe did a lot of work in the office that day and didn't get any credit," says Dumas, adding, "That's okay. I've made a career out of playing sidekicks."

These have included Nicely-Nicely Johnson in "Guys and Dolls" and Sancho Panza in "Man of La Mancha" in his home town of Chicago, where Dumas has been a busy actor for years. He was appearing in "Wicked" there when Chicago tryouts for the national company of "Spamalot" were held.

"When I first heard that they were doing a musical version of 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't initially thinking, oh boy, this could go south really quick," Dumas says. He told the producers he didn't want to audition, but did hire on as a reader -- covering various roles so auditioning actors had someone to play off. The casting folks urged Dumas to try out for Patsy, he says, and he wound up in New York to get Nichols's stamp of approval.

Dumas praises the ensemble work and chemistry among his fellow cast members and quotes Idle as telling them early on, "There are no 'stars' on this tour. When we [the Pythons] first got together, we were just a bunch of guys from Oxford and Cambridge who thought we had some material that was funny. We weren't stars. The material was the star."

Tough Girls Go 'Boom'

The speech and gestures of the girl gangbangers in Kia Corthron's "Breath, Boom," having its Washington premiere at Studio Theatre 2ndStage Dec. 13-Jan. 6, seem torn from the casebook of many a social worker.

"Some of it just came from my imagination," Corthron says, "but I've also spent some time here and there teaching playwriting in prisons," including a week-long seminar for high school girls in juvenile detention on New York City's Rikers Island. It was, she says, "a very positive experience, almost like a TV movie."

Her play, which was commissioned by London's Royal Court Theatre and premiered there in 2000 and was done in New York in 2001, is no after-school special, however. The girls in "Breath, Boom" are tough. They commit drive-by shootings, beat disobedient "sisters," ignore a cellmate committing suicide. And the toughest among them is Prix. Sexually abused as a child by her mother's live-in boyfriend and hardened on the streets of the Bronx, Prix manifests tender feelings only in her love of colorful fireworks.

"There is so much more violence done from adults to children than from the other way around. And if we start looking where the violence starts . . . that was the important thing in this play for me," Corthron explains. "Violence does not come in a vacuum. I don't believe that children are just born bad. . . . It has to do with society and the world you've laid out for them."

Corthron, who grew up in Cumberland, Md., and attended the University of Maryland at College Park before grad school at Columbia University, doesn't feel her play is without hope for Prix, who ages from 16 to 30 and seems poised to thaw from inhumane to humane, as Corthron puts it, by play's end.

Hope is essential if you want audiences to act on what they learn, Corthron says. If the audience files out feeling "all they can do is throw up their hands in despair, then there will be no action . . . but if you provide a little hope, that can actually provide some sort of impetus for them to do something," she says.

The busy and oft-commissioned playwright makes no bones about her zest for digging into political issues in her plays. She has tackled tense police-community relations ("Force Continuum"), craven journalism ("Moot the Messenger") and pollution ("Splash Hatch on the E Going Down") and is working on pieces about the politics of water around the world and on colonial and modern Liberia.

Follow Spots

¿ The age of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I will be the centerpiece of this year's Christmas Revels, a theater piece with music celebrating the winter solstice and encouraging audience participation in carol-singing at Lisner Auditorium Dec. 8, 9 and 14-16. Visit http://www.revelsdc.org or call 800-595-4849.

¿ American Century Theater will do an old-style radio version of "A Christmas Carol" as a free hour-long teleconference Dec. 16 at 8 p.m. Callers can access the performance by calling 866-212-0875, then entering the passcode 4930306# before 8 p.m. Visit http://www.americancentury.org or check the theater's message line at 703-998-4555.

¿ The Helen Hayes Awards organization is offering holiday gift certificates. The $20 Theatre TixCertificates, accepted at more than 40 area theaters, are available at http://www.helenhayes.org or 202-337-4572.