What's going around in 'Full Circle' at Woolly Mammoth

The large cast of "Full Circle" danced and sang "Everlasting Love" atop a long, high table in the lobby of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company during a rehearsal on Friday. The table then split down the middle, with some actors changing costumes on it as the scene shifted.

Director Michael Rohd and set/multimedia designer Shannon Scrofano have staged "Full Circle" not just in the theater, but rather all over Woolly's brutalist downtown space. Eight "guides" (young actors in or just graduated from college) will help audience members move from spot to spot during the play, which begins previews this week and runs through Nov. 29. Woolly's actual theater has been reconfigured in the round, with risers and rows of seats on what is usually the stage.

Charles Mee's ambitious play, first done in 1998 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, riffs on the idea of morality amid revolution, and draws inspiration from an ancient Chinese play, "The Chalk Circle," which itself inspired Bertolt Brecht's "The Caucasian Chalk Circle," among other works. Mee sets the action in Berlin at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Woolly Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz plays revered German playwright and director Heiner Müller ("Hamletmachine") -- a highly fictionalized version of him, says Shalwitz -- who staged plays under the East German regime, and became at one point artistic director of the fabled Berliner Ensemble founded by Brecht.

"Müller's issues in the play are preserving his theater in a volatile political climate, and I can so identify with that," Shalwitz observed during a break in the rehearsal. It is a question, he said, of "how you find the right line" between artistic expression, provocative subject matter and "trying to attract an audience." Playwright Mee, Shalwitz added, is "dealing broadly with the role of the artist in society and whether art influences the course of history or it doesn't."

Director Rohd is also helping Woolly organize a Nov. 14 conference on the role of theater in society, keyed to "Full Circle." He called the play's staging as conceived by him and Scrofano a "performance journey."

And despite the peripatetic nature of the show and all the video and audio woven through it, Rohd said, "these performers are so damn good, nobody's going to have a hard time remembering their characters. . . . They do such a good job as storytellers."

'Sleeping and Waking'

Ten-year-old Charter Theater nurtures and performs new plays on a shoestring, many of them written by its company members. It has always performed in tiny venues -- currently Theatre on the Run in Arlington. (Charter's first show of their season, "Lie With Me" by Artistic Director Keith Bridges, runs through Nov. 22. http://www.chartertheater.org.)

But now, a play that Charter premiered in 2007, "Sleeping and Waking" by Charter-ite Chris Stezin, has been made into an independent film, cast almost entirely with Washington actors and directed by locally based theater and opera director Joe Banno, also a Post freelancer.

Though it was shot in high-definition video around Washington, the locales in "Sleeping and Waking" are not identifiable. Set in the near future, it's about Sullivan Daniels (played by Jeff Allin), who tells us in a voice-over prologue that when he learned his torso was riddled with cancer, he agreed to an experimental body transplant. All that remains of Sullivan's original corporeal self are his head and neck. Yet the sci-fi aspect takes a back seat to a post-transplant crisis of the soul.

Spirituality, says Stezin, "wasn't my main thrust in writing the play, but certainly one of the things I wanted to do was write about normal people grappling with normal day-to-day issues [who] happen to have a serious outlook about their spirituality." Banno says he nudged Stezin, who also wrote the screenplay, toward having Sullivan become more of an agnostic. "I found it a more interesting journey in the film to embrace the doubt," says Banno.

An art professor and artist who made Christianity-themed woodcuts (those in the film are by Stezin's late father) before the transplant, Sullivan feels estranged from his faith, his art, his wife (Hope Lambert), his mother (Helen Hedman) and his best friend (Ray Ficca), who keeps urging him to come back to church. Then he takes up with a student (Elizabeth Jernigan).

"He knows himself in a certain way and everything about him in his world changes," Allin says. The story is "kind of like a midlife crisis in a way. . . . I like the idea of, how does that affect your art? How does that affect your faith, your marriage?"

There'll be a sneak preview of "Sleeping and Waking" on Friday at the Slayton House Theatre in Columbia to benefit the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. Producer Jeffrey A. Koeppel of Tontine Films tells Backstage he is in the process of booking the movie into theaters and will seek cable TV and other showcases after that.

Follow spots

-- Scena is offering an Edgar Allan Poe double feature: "The Fall of the House of Usher" (adapted by Steven Berkoff) and "The Tell-Tale Heart." The Poe plays run through Nov. 29 at H Street Playhouse, with special performances on Halloween (Saturday). http://www.scenatheater.org or 703-683-2824.

-- The Georgetown Theatre Company is doing "Dracula: A Family Musical" in the Shops at Georgetown Park (on the food-court level) on weekends through Nov. 8, and its annual "Halloween in Georgetown" event at 7 p.m. on Friday at Grace Church, with readings from the works of Poe. The company also has an audio play, "The Haunted Theatre," online at http://www.georgetowntheatre.org.

Horwitz is a freelance writer.