With the Likes of 'Stuff Happens,' Olney Theatre Gets Into an Important Act
By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, August 10, 2008
If you're a serious theatergoer, the kind who wants to catch the latest wave of topical dramas and Pulitzer Prize winners, then know this:
Better get yourself to the suburbs.
Fifteen miles north of the Beltway, Olney Theatre Center is displaying a knack for picking up prestigious plays that major downtown theaters don't always seem willing to produce. The most conspicuous example is the area's just-closed professional premiere of "Stuff Happens," David Hare's hot-button examination of the walk-up to war in Iraq.
Now playing: the area premiere of David Lindsay-Abaire's "Rabbit Hole," a drama of grief by the author of "Fuddy Meers" and "Kimberly Akimbo" that was blessed a rave from the New York Times and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.
This sturdy and sometimes aggressive programming might be a bit of a well-kept secret, even though Olney's affinity for challenge extended to hosting the politically driven Potomac Theatre Project for 10 years, through 2006. The reasons for this lack of attention? History and geography.
Even if you are a serious theatergoer, this handsome campus where upper-middle-class enclaves edge up against farm country might be just too darn far away. Four-fifths of the Olney audience is drawn from the immediate surroundings of Montgomery County, and managing director Amy Marshall says it's not uncommon for people to declare, "I'm not driving out there."
Artistic Director Jim Petosa has coped with this since taking the job in 1994, as the theater was still making the transformation to year-round operations.
"There are still people who think Olney is a community theater . . . ," Petosa says over a lunch alfresco across the street from Olney's bucolic complex. "How can a professional theater be plunked down in the middle of this place? It doesn't make any sense."
He laughs: "And I guess it really doesn't. It makes no sense whatsoever."
More in line with expectations are the bygone days of the summertime straw-hat circuit. For the first 50 of its 70 years, Olney was a summer stock theater, playing host to such touring stars as Tallulah Bankhead and Helen Hayes. Spring was the time that staff chased snakes out of the building to get ready for the short season; peach baskets still serve as lampshades over the audience in the historic Mainstage.
But that quaint structure is now but one of four venues at Olney Theatre Center, where a decade's worth of improvements and expansion were capped three years ago with the opening of a new 429-seat theater. That comfortable modern venue and the smaller Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab have been the best bets for local theatergoers to catch such acclaimed and demanding plays as "Omnium Gatherum" (the post-9/11 dinner party fantasia that was a 2003 Pulitzer finalist) and "Democracy," Michael Frayn's taut study of former West German chancellor Willy Brandt and the communist spy who admired him.
Petosa says of his audience: "They like the complexity of psychological relationships writ inside epic world events; it's the moment when Bush looks into Putin's eyes and says he sees his soul. What is that? Is that hubris? Is that intuition? Whatever it is, it's very human; it's just a person doing something. And yet the planet is impacted by that simple human action. These plays all do that."
And of course, many other plays in the Olney rep -- musicals, farces and assorted chestnuts -- do not. "Peter Pan" will hit the boards as the family-friendly holiday musical this winter, though Marshall -- who makes no bones about being happy it's on the menu -- insists, "It will be the most interesting 'Peter Pan' I've ever seen." The company just scored its biggest commercial success ever with a straight play, and it wasn't for something up-to-the-minute: The smash was Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap."
That is the pickle Petosa finds himself in, though he doesn't really view it as an artistic problem so much as a marketing challenge. Not-for-profit theaters increasingly seek niches -- classic, ethnic, literary, wacky -- the better to brand themselves with the public. Petosa's company sticks to an older model, playing the field and keeping the options broad.
"I guess what we are saying is 'We are you,' " Petosa says. "To be more specialized than that I don't think allows us to be a four-performance venue on a 14-acre campus in the middle of a city-suburban sprawl that literally meets at our front door. And if anything," he adds, noting the rising Asian and Latino populations in the region, "what I'm looking for is further diversification."
A year ago, Petosa was on his way out as artistic director, opting to focus on his job as head of Boston University's drama department (a position he still holds) and other interests. But the board never took a serious look at other candidates, and the working relationship with Marshall seemed so promising that this past spring, Petosa decided to stay.
He and his Potomac Theatre Project confederates have successfully relocated the venture to New York for the past two summers, but Petosa continues to slot tough, conscientious work at Olney, sometimes even fighting against an absence of interest in ripe plays among comparable downtown troupes. Olney waited patiently for "Stuff Happens" and, several years earlier, for "The Laramie Project," Moises Kaufman's chronicle of the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard -- in both cases because rights houses kept hoping for D.C. productions.
Across the Washington area, attendance has flatlined for years, but in the past four years, sales at the Olney have doubled. Marshall offers an instance suggesting that the patrons are ready for anything; last month, she opened a door for a gentleman and asked which show he was coming to see.
"What's playing?" he asked. Marshall was able to offer "Stuff Happens," a young company production of "Big River," and "The Mousetrap." (He took "The Mousetrap.")
Rick Foucheux, a fixture on D.C. stages, played Tevye in Olney's dark (and popular) take on "Fiddler on the Roof" last year, and as he played George W. Bush in "Stuff Happens" he noted that the play ran a bit against the popular grain, with some walkouts at intermission and a few sour faces at the curtain call.
"Later in the run, though," Foucheux says, "we were preaching to the choir."
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