Politics Moves From World Stage to a More Intimate Space

On the bare floor of a performance space on H Street NE, with a few chairs as props and some headlines as grist, a small, avid collection of actors and writers was in search of a new way to play with politics.

The five original sketch-length works presented over the weekend by the unit calling itself Extreme Exchange tried hard not to be satiric knockoffs of "Saturday Night Live" or parodying echoes of the Capitol Steps. The playlets took on topics of denser textures -- China's expanding power, the implications of stem-cell research -- even as they sardonically invoked at times the players (Dick Cheney, John McCain) of Washington's own around-the-clock reality programming.

Extreme Exchange was formed, in the group's own words, "to tackle national issues that are on our minds but not our stages." As such, the company is a wholly welcome experiment for a city that's too often resistant to the types of theater that critique its preoccupations, its peculiar ways and means.

It's certainly true that a lot of what passes for topical theater in this country is shallow, and designed to capitalize on audiences' ingrained partisan leanings more than to provoke deeper thinking. And maybe anything smacking of overt agitprop can be inordinately offensive in a town that likes to think of itself as forever engaged in a policy discourse on a more nuanced plane.

Yet judging from the articulate responses Saturday night in a talk-back session after the show at H Street Playhouse, you got the feeling there is an appetite in Washington for more theater with an agenda.

As one member of the audience suggested, the shared knowledge of the city's politics-and-government class -- its understanding, for instance, of the appropriations process -- can be turned into more of a theatrical asset. Why couldn't theater here be, in a sense, more cleverly reflective of that authentic example of regional character: wonkiness?

Extreme Exchange was formed in New York in 2004 to coincide with the Republican National Convention there that year. Founder Benjamin Fishman, who had previously been involved in Washington theater, said the impetus had been to stage readings of extant plays on provocative subjects. The focus shifted to spontaneous, original work after Fishman returned to Washington and brought the project with him. The idea became to get actors and writers and directors together to create theater pieces that tugged on a political thread of the moment -- plays that some in the group call "disposable," pieces that might only be viable for as long as an issue was relevant.

Over the past two years, the group has been staging what it calls "X-plays," evenings of political one-acts and skits all inspired by a central theme. One such program was called "Adopt-a-Candidate," for which actors and writers broke into smaller groups and over several days assembled plays about the contenders for the presidential nominations.

Saturday's performance was a sampling of playlets from several previous X-play evenings. (The presentation was part of a new-play festival running through next weekend at H Street and organized by the Inkwell, a new company devoted to emerging work.)

The works were predictably left-leaning but not in a self-congratulatory way. And though the pieces remained reflections of the rough-draft process in which they were conceived, some of them gave off promising sparks. Others provided a showcase for an interesting character -- or actor. In Llewellyn Hinkes's "A Political Menagerie," for example, the playful idea was put forth of an inside-the-Beltway type -- maybe an aide from Capitol Hill -- who cannot grasp the point of the street theatrics of a pair of antiwar activists. In Patrick Bussink's "Ceasefire Chow Mein," a couple of Army men of the near future are holed up at Fort Hood in Texas amid a siege by the hegemonic military superpower, China.

A movement piece called "Untitled" illustrated just how disposable the plays' media-inspired conceits could be: In one sequence, a pair of Americans glanced with mild interest at a newspaper as another actor looming behind them assumed one of the emblematic postures of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. Perhaps the most imaginative of the sketches was Kathleen Akerley's "This Play's Title Is Too Long to Fit on a Bumper Sticker," in which press-friendly Sen. McCain begins to conflate an interview by a TV newsman with an interrogation during his years of captivity in North Vietnam.

Tautly rolled out in just over an hour at H Street for a capacity crowd, the playlets, in all their rawness, managed to feel like something authentically of this particular time -- and place. The intriguing question arises of whether the process and material could be developed further -- or whether it best remains entirely of the instant.

The work of a Chicago company, the Neo-Futurists, which just ended a successful -- and funny -- run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, might provide a template. The troupe, in its signature hour-long "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," offers up a revolving array of 30 comic playlets in 60 minutes on topics ranging from the self-conscious coolness of a bike messenger to the dysfunctions in transit systems to the compassion of Republicanism. (This last idea is conveyed as a split second on a silent, empty stage.) Is it possible something as impertinent -- or disposable -- could be born around here?