By Rachel Beckman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 4, 2008

Over the past decade, teenagers all over the world have clutched their pillows and fantasized about pop star Justin Timberlake swooping into their lives. A character named Janice lives the dream in "Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)," a play that starts performances this week at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Justin flies in through her window, kisses her and tells her that she is "the prettiest girl in the contiguous sixth grade."

Janice's mother, meanwhile, is cuddling with Harrison Ford in the next room of their apartment. Oh, and that apartment, a 19th-century mansion in disrepair? It's trying to kill them. It already offed Janice's father last Christmas.

Brooklyn-based playwright Sheila Callaghan, 35, wrote "Crumble" in 2000. A small Greenwich Village theater asked her if she'd contribute one of the three plays for a bill called "XXX-mas."

"So I said, 'Okay, I'll write a racy Christmas play,' " she says. "I ended up writing this poetic, funny, whatever you would call this weird play I wrote."

More than homicidal living spaces or sexual fantasies, "Crumble" is about grief. Since father died, mother tends to hyperventilate, daughter retreats to her dolls and neither of them talks to the other about the loss. Catalyst Theater Company's production of "Crumble," starring Elizabeth Richards (actual teenage crush: Harrison Ford as Han Solo), opens Wednesday.

"There is no impossible reaction to death," Richards says. "People say, 'I would never do that. I would never ignore my child.' Well, yeah, you might. You really don't know until you're in that situation."

Callaghan chose the characters' celebrity fixations -- Ford and Timberlake -- because they seemed the most likely heartthrobs in 2000. With Timberlake's successful solo career and Ford's new "Indiana Jones" movie coming out later this month, "Crumble" has aged better than it could have. "Crumble (Lay Me Down, Lance Bass)"?

A Queens native, Callaghan (teenage crush: Jon Bon Jovi) lived in a decrepit Chelsea apartment while writing "Crumble." The radiator clanged. The view out her window was a brick wall. She tried to put up shelves once, but they crashed down, taking part of the wall with them. Her surroundings seeped into the play. (The Apartment is played by Jason Stiles.)

During "Crumble" rewrites, Callaghan moved to an enormous brownstone with high ceilings and big doorways. The anthropomorphic apartment character evolved into a cranky aristocrat. During the play, Stiles portrays the floor, the window sill, wallpaper, a closet and more. (Oh, and there's a sex scene with a radiator.) As the ceiling, speaking to the mother of the house, he says:

"Look up . . . What does it resemble? A vein? A tributary? A tree branch? Or just a plain old crack? Have you any idea how disgusting I am becoming?"

Callaghan wrote her first play as a student at the College of New Jersey. She describes it as "abysmal and derivative." Still, it was more fun to write plays and have her friends stage them than to write brooding short stories that might not be read outside of a class workshop. Catalyst also staged her "We Are Not These Hands" in February 2007. In June 2009, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company will premiere Callaghan's "Fever/Dream," about a corporate drone who is literally chained to his desk.

Callaghan is a member of New York playwrights collective 13P, along with other dynamic mid-career dramatists such as Sarah Ruhl ("Dead Man's Cell Phone").

She has yet to quit her day job and still freelances as a graphic designer. Money is tight enough that toward the end of the month, she'll only take cellphone calls after 9 p.m. when her unlimited minutes kick in. She is six months pregnant with her first child, a boy. Daddy is a composer and still in school.

She hopes to sell screenplays to Hollywood or write for a TV series. HBO's late "Six Feet Under" would have been a perfect fit, she says.

Striking use of language is one of Callaghan's hallmarks as a playwright. In "We Are Not These Hands," the two main characters, Moth and Belly, live in an unspecified Third World country and speak a slangy, pidgin English. In "Crumble," the language varies between broken-up dialogue (Short phrases. How short? Real short. Like these.) to poetic monologues. Characters refer to laughter "like little bursting soap bubbles" and bad breath "like rotting fruit and stomach acid, as though she swallowed a pear months ago but can't digest it."

Poetry elevates critical moments in the play, much as arias do in opera or song-and-dance sequences in traditional musical theater, Callaghan says.

Director Shirley Serotsky (crush: Andrew McCarthy, circa "Pretty in Pink") has added a few unscripted song-and-dance sequences to "Crumble." Eric Messner (crush: Erin Gray in "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century"), who portrays Timberlake, has been taking hip-hop dance classes at Joy of Motion for the past two months and worked with a choreographer to prepare for his role.

Though a Timberlake hip-hop sequence isn't scripted, Callaghan does have a dance background herself.

As a young(er) playwright in New York, Callaghan worked as a club dancer, shaking it in cages and on pillars.

"It's good to have an eclectic work background as a writer," she says, laughing. "I'll just leave it at that."