For Vivienne Shub, the Role of a Lifetime
The Veteran Baltimore Actress Celebrates Her Career in a Play Written by Her Sister

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Actresses about to turn 90 don't have a wide selection of roles, but that doesn't stop Vivienne Shub. She'll open in "Vive la Vivienne!" at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore; it's a solo piece written for her by her little sister, 85-year-old Naomi Greenberg-Slovin.

The show pays tribute to Shub's 72-year career in the theater -- mostly in Baltimore, where the sisters grew up -- and to their father, Sam Slovin, a dentist whose dream of being a writer was squelched by clinical depression and anxiety. But Sam wrote poems and stories for his girls, and gave both inspiration for their careers.

"As far as becoming involved in having a life of theater, he was the one who made it possible," Shub says. Her father, the dreamer, encouraged her to follow her passion. "It's been really everything that I wanted, everything, really from my childhood on," says Shub, who built a career as a character actress, mostly as a founding company member at Center Stage for 20 years, and for the past 14 at Everyman.

With Shub's birthday coming up Oct. 18, her sister says, "it was time to write a tribute to her, a tribute about her that she would present. And also a tribute to my father . . . his poems, his stories . . . his whole influence." Greenberg-Slovin brags that Shub is "truly an icon here in Baltimore. Rarely do we go any place that she doesn't get recognized. She's really a dear woman."

The theater has been her anchor, Shub says, even when life got tough. "Through many difficult situations and difficult experiences," including the deaths of her parents and husband, "working in the theater has been a godsend," she says. "Theater has filled my life."

Finding professional theater work in Baltimore before and during the Depression was impossible. Shub tried New York, hitched up with the Federal Theatre Project for a while, returned to Baltimore and fell in love and married concert pianist Louis Shub.

Washington area theatergoers may have seen Vivienne Shub in 2004 as a sly U.S. president in "The Best Man" at Olney Theatre Center. At Everyman in 2006, she appeared in "The Cone Sister," another solo piece by Greenberg-Slovin, about Baltimore art collector Etta Cone and her sister, Claribel; and in 2001, as an Alzheimer's victim in Kenneth Lonergan's "The Waverly Gallery." She has acted at Washington Stage Guild and Arena Stage and taught theater for 20 years at Towson University.

Greenberg-Slovin spent 30 years in the Netherlands, where her husband taught astrophysics and she worked as a psychotherapist and translator. She returned to Baltimore a few years ago, following the death of her husband, to live with her sister. Everyman Artistic Director Vincent M. Lancisi asked her to be the company's dramaturg. And she writes plays for her sister on the side.

"It's giving me a life and it's expanded hers, because indeed, they're not writing many parts for women her age," Greenberg-Slovin says. "We can do this ourselves and it has created tremendous activity. That's wonderful."

"Vive la Vivienne!" will run Sept. 8-24 on nights when "Doubt, a Parable" is dark.

Follow Spots

· Liv Ullmann will direct and Cate Blanchett will star at the Kennedy Center in fall of next year in a new production of Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire." Before coming here Oct. 29-Nov. 21, 2009, the Australian production will open at Sydney Theatre Company, where Blanchett is co-artistic director. It will move on to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Nov. 27-Dec. 20, 2009).

· Synetic Theater Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili's response to the Russian invasion of his Georgian homeland, a remounting of "Host and Guest," will run Sept. 26-Nov. 9 at the Rosslyn Spectrum. The cautionary tale about ethnic and religious killing is based on an epic poem from Georgia and replaces the originally scheduled "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."