Bethesda Theatre's Lesson in Reality
New Stage Is Exploring Its Audience's Preferences

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Shorter play runs are better, people like 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. shows on Saturdays, and Tuesday nights aren't great. Those are some of the lessons learned this fall and winter by Ray Cullom, executive director (for Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment) of the new Bethesda Theatre.

The renovated 1938 art deco movie house opened in October with a new production of the long-running off-Broadway revue "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." The idea of a commercial theater in a Washington suburb offering middlebrow fare was untried and Cullom, an experienced theater exec, wasn't sure how it would play out.

"My worst nightmare was that we would plunk this theater down in the middle of a community where there's not a steady stream of tourists coming through, where you have a new audience to advertise to every week," Cullom says. "My nightmare was walking in on a Thursday night and seeing 30 people in the audience."

That sometimes happened, but mostly on Tuesdays, so Cullom phased Tuesday night shows out for "I Love You." But Cullom seems convinced the Bethesda Theatre can bring 'em in, if given time.

"We have learned that we were a bit over-optimistic in our projections of how long we could run a show," he explains. Twenty weeks for "I Love You" was too long. "We didn't give people a chance to come back to see another show," Cullom says.

"I Love You" brought in an average of 1,380 people per week -- about 170 fewer than he had projected. Cullom had budgeted the production based on selling at about 40 percent of capacity because it's a new theater, with no subscription base yet. Audiences fluctuated, ranging from a "scary" 31 percent capacity in November up to a more satisfactory 45 percent in December. Cullom cut the run by two weeks, closing the show Feb. 3, to give him time to make repairs and get ready for the Feb. 21-March 23 run of Steve Solomon's widely toured autobiographical solo piece, "My Mother's Italian, My Father's Jewish & I'm in Therapy." Following that will be a new production of "Smokey Joe's Cafe" (April 3-May 11).

With a low overhead -- Cullom has only four full-time staffers -- he feels he has a couple of years to make a go of the Bethesda, "where we can establish ourselves and build from 45 to 50 [percent of capacity] and by year three be up in the 60 to 70 percent range." Next year he will offer "much more of a regular series," with shows doing subscription-friendly five- or six-week runs, says Cullom. He also has talked with Arena's Molly Smith about the possibility of moving a popular Arena show to the Bethesda for an extended run sometime.

The Bethesda's first roster of shows isn't likely to set all critics' hearts aflutter. That doesn't faze Cullom. 'We're not here to do great art," he says. "We're here to do top-notch productions of off-Broadway productions that would not otherwise be produced in this market."

'Fool for Love'

Director Kasi Campbell admits she sort of has "a soft spot for testosterone-driven literature. I can do sensitive and find the heart and all that, but I do enjoy male energy sometimes."

Which is why the director, who won a 2004 Helen Hayes Award for staging Richard Greenberg's gentle, eccentric "The Dazzle" at Rep Stage, is now readying Sam Shepard's exceedingly ungentle western unromance, "Fool for Love."

The show, performed by Spooky Action Theater, a tiny professional company in residence at the Black Box Theatre at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, opens tomorrow -- Valentine's Day -- and will run through March 9. "I feel like I'm a victim of ironic programming here," jokes Campbell -- "a valentine to male testosterone."

Shepard's language "pulses and has a male swagger to it," she observes, and says she's had her young leads, Halsey Varady and Stewart Walker, "desanitize their diction" as the play's onetime lovers May and Eddie. The wall-slamming physical action requires them "to be very bold and willing to take risks . . . and my actors have the bruises to prove it."

Not one to stick slavishly to stage directions in a published script, Campbell says she decided to give Shepard's directions a try. They call for the audience to meet Eddie as he's applying rosin to a "bucking strap" (what cowboys grip as they ride broncos) with a leather glove. "The aural impact of the screeching leather on leather, it sets a level of menace that's really incredible, and I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't actually given it a whirl," Campbell says.

Until recently, all the directing Campbell did was at Rep Stage, the Equity company in residence at Howard Community College, where she is a full-time assistant professor of theater. She is starting to nudge her way into the freelance directing world around Washington. After "Fool for Love," she'll do "In the Heart of America" (May 28-June 29) at Rep Stage, an antiwar piece by Naomi Wallace about the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and then a one-act at the Source Festival.

"In the past I've been very blessed to select a lot of the classics that were on my to-do list," says Campbell. Now, she says, she's hoping to stage new work, too. "I'm keeping my eye out for a project that puts me on the ground floor of getting a new script up and running."

Follow Spots

¿ The Shakespeare Theatre Company will reprise its 2007 "Hamlet," starring Jeffrey Carlson as a coltish Prince of Denmark, for this spring's Free for All at the Carter Barron Amphitheatre, May 22-June 1. Alexander Burns will stage the summer production.

¿ Teller (of magic act Penn & Teller) will chat with director Aaron Posner about their production of "Macbeth" in a Folger Words on Will lecture Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, 212 East Capitol St. NE. The show, which debuted last month at Posner's Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, N.J., comes to the Folger Theatre Feb. 28-April 13. Teller (who will speak!) and Posner will talk about how they used magic to lend horror-film creepiness to "Macbeth." Visit http://www.folger.edu/wordsonwill, or call 202-544-7077. Tickets are $25.