By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 23, 2008
"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.
Zinoman seems to believe that Studio is just now coming into its own. The learning curve had been a long one: In the early years, she admits, "I did some bad plays." But these days, there is a belief at Studio that the theater has done enough good work with the plays of enough good dramatists that it has acquired the cachet of a hotbed, and that theatergoers respond in kind. The high demand allows Studio regularly to extend the runs of shows, and its treatments of such plays as Churchill's "Far Away" and "A Number," LaBute's "Fat Pig," Bryony Lavery's "Frozen" and Richard Greenberg's "Take Me Out" have been as fine if not finer than versions in New York.
"One reason I think this has been successful is there's a synchronization between the artistic taste of the institution and the audience's," observes Zinoman, wearing a quilted Mao jacket and with her hair in her trademark salt-and-pepper bob.
The company has grown into a nearly $5 million-a-year enterprise, with a full-time staff of 35 overseeing nine productions a season in Studio's three fixed-seat houses and one raw space at 14th and P streets NW.
"The artistic director's job is to lead, not to follow," she adds. "You have to have that certitude of strength and conviction. And you have to have a certain stubborn sense of taste."
Serge Seiden, Studio's associate artistic director, concurs, explaining that the theater's leadership feels pretty secure. "We talk very little about, 'Is this too much for our audience?' " Seiden says. "I don't know," he adds with a chuckle, "we consider ourselves to be the audience."
Zinoman's formula, of course, mandates a certain level of proficiency as well, and this hasn't always been borne out, particularly when Studio has ventured into the realm of large-scale classics. Some of the theater's productions in recent years of big, older plays, such as "Ivanov" and "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," have been thoroughgoing disappointments. And although her trio of nearly identical 200-seat theaters have successfully served as homes for some sizable pieces, including the Tony Kushner musical "Caroline, or Change" and several Stoppard plays, the hallmark of Studio's achievement is more often an intimate drama of three, four or five characters.
Zinoman, too, has for the most part steered the company away from the sexy-risky terrain of work that has never been seen anywhere else, a decision that has invited questions in the theater world about whether Studio is a little gun-shy. It has, however, scored significant coups of late with fairly early presentations of important new plays: "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" by Rolin Jones was later a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and Studio hosted a run this winter of another highly touted new work, Tyrell Alvin McRaney's "The Brothers Size."
Still, Zinoman is unapologetic about not devoting more capital to original plays at Studio. One issue is the company's concentration, which is directed to education more than play development. Studio runs a theater conservatory, with 600 students coming through the doors each year. Another is the question of limitations on where Washington happens to be on the theatrical map. "In the larger world," she says, "playwrights are interested in that first production of their work. And if you are in a city of playwrights, then you have an opportunity to do work on that level."
Her allegiance is not to novelty. "I never thought contemporary meant new plays," she says. "I thought it meant the best living writers you could possibly get."
And getting them takes an inordinate amount of time and energy, a fact about which the team around the Studio conference table is all too aware. With a stack of scripts in front of them, Zinoman and the men talk and talk and talk, listing merits and demerits for a passel of plays by many writers you've heard of and some you probably haven't.
A commercially successful play by an English writer is mentioned, and the name of a first-rate Washington actor comes up in connection with it. Zinoman considers the combination. "[He] would give me his left testicle to do it," she says. "It's an actor's dream." But she's not yet convinced. "Is it too old for us?" she asks. "Is it too obvious?"
The colloquy goes on and on, and at the unresolved conclusion, Zinoman looks refreshed. After 30 years, she's still ready for the next meeting.
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