A Leading Lady of D.C. Theater

"I hate that [expletive] first act!"

The thought escapes the uncensored lips of Joy Zinoman as she banters with five guys seated with her at a conference table in the industrially chic, bullpen-style office space of Studio Theatre. The men are Zinoman's floating brain trust, longtime colleagues and shorter-term employees with whom Studio's founding artistic director frequently bats around ideas.

On this occasion, they're gathered for the latest round of the company's sacred annual rite, The Picking of Next Season's Plays. Zinoman takes the temperature of everyone at the table, but it is clear she's first among equals, and at the moment she is thinking out loud about a musical and how she might do it -- a recent musical, mind you, that's already been Broadway-tested and won a Tony or two.

"So I have an idea," she says, surveying the table. "If they'll rewrite the first act . . ."

Some of the faces stare back at her in wonderment. The notion is improbable, outrageous even: Rewrite a Broadway musical? For Studio? And yet the fact that Zinoman could contemplate such an overture is a sign of how Studio has come up in the world, an indicator of the evolution of a company that once upon a time had to struggle to persuade major agents and writers even to consider letting it stage their work.

Zinoman feels empowered to assert herself so boldly because of the company's burgeoning reputation. Her theater can stake a claim now as the city's preeminent destination -- and one of the major homes on the East Coast -- for many of the most important contemporary playwrights of the day, from Tom Stoppard and Neil LaBute to Conor McPherson and Caryl Churchill.

To those quizzical looks about her musical-rewrite scheme, Zinoman responds with a revealing snippet of her brash management philosophy: "Why not?" she asks. Why not, indeed: "Why not?" is, in effect, how the entire enterprise has reached this juncture. This is Zinoman's -- and Studio's -- 30th year of putting on dramas in Washington, a milestone that reaffirms her position as the dean of the region's first-rank artistic directors, and one achieved by a combination of savvy, patience and the nerve to ask, "Why not?"

This week, Studio unveils another of Zinoman's nervy undertakings, the regional premiere of "The History Boys," Alan Bennett's charming portrait of bright and raucous lads at a Northern England grammar school seeking entry to the halls of Cambridge. In this instance, the challenge for Zinoman, who's directing, lies in the size of the piece -- 12 characters, including eight dialect-capable young males -- as well as in competing with memories of a well-nigh perfect Broadway version.

At virtually the same moment, Zinoman is embarking on what might be her most ambitious foray to date into experimental forms of theater, with the arrival next week in another of Studio's spaces of rainpan 43, a neo-vaudevillian troupe. Among the pieces it will perform here is one titled "machines machines machines machines machines machines machines." (It reportedly has something to do with, er, machines.)

Two months later, the Civilians, a seven-year-old New York company, will import its newly created work "This Beautiful City," about evangelical Christianity, based on interviews the troupe conducted in the movement's spiritual home town, Colorado Springs. Meantime, Studio will be readying its area premieres of "The Internationalist," a comedy by Anne Washburn, yet another up-and-coming playwright, as well as Studio 2ndStage's rendering of "Jerry Springer: The Opera," the bilious musical satire that made a huge splash in London.

The range and the volume of the work -- the aforementioned roster amounts to barely a half-season for Studio -- reflect the tastes and the intensity of the driven woman who runs Studio, a theater whose identity is inextricably entwined with its founder.

Washington has its share of theaters at which the longtime leader and the company are as one: Howard Shalwitz, for instance, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre; Eric Schaeffer at Signature. It's safe to say that Zinoman's stamp on her institution is at least as powerful. And it is a measure of how deep is her imprint that when the question is broached of who might one day succeed her, even some high-up people in the organization decline to speculate.