Little Edie lives again in Ganymede's 'After the Garden,' with Jeffrey Johnson

It's been a struggle for small nonprofit theater companies since the economy flopped last year, and Ganymede Arts is no exception. Yet as 2009 nears its final curtain, Ganymede has something to celebrate. Artistic Director Jeffrey Johnson will be performing the solo piece "After the Garden: Edith Beale Live at Reno Sweeney" at Joe's Pub in New York on Dec. 29. He'll be the opening act for Sandra Bernhard.

Ganymede did a run of "After the Garden" in Washington last spring and revived the show briefly at its fall arts festival. Prior to the New York performance, Johnson will "test-drive" the show again in Washington on Saturday and Sunday at Cobalt, a club at 1639 R St. NW.

Written by Gerald Duval, "After the Garden" is based on a series of cabaret performances in 1978 by Edith "Little Edie" Beale. Beale and her mother, Edith "Big Edie," were the ladies of "Grey Gardens" fame -- mother and daughter New York aristocrats who lived out much of their lives in squalor as codependent recluses in a Long Island mansion that went famously to seed. They've been the subject of a documentary, a Broadway musical and an HBO docudrama.

In 1978, Little Edie, who had always wanted to be a performer, did a series of cabaret turns at the now-defunct Manhattan club Reno Sweeney to make money to pay her taxes. Johnson, who also plays a popular drag character, Special Agent Galactica, dons Little Edie's costume -- a red silk sheet held together with safety pins and a T-shirt as a head scarf, with plastic leaves wrapped around it.

Duval had been involved with the show in 1978, Johnson says, and has tried to reconstruct it for Ganymede. "What [Duval] wrote was a two-hour monologue . . . and I did research as to what songs she sang." Little Edie wasn't off-key, Johnson says, "but it came out more like braying a lot of the time. So I pick up on that aspect of it." As for the patter between songs, Johnson says Duval told him, "You never knew what she was going to say . . . she would lose her place . . . so we built those nuances in."

In the course of the 70-minute piece, Johnson says, "she talks about her history before. The [1975] documentary is like the focus point of what everybody knows. And she kind of wanders in the time before the documentary . . . about her brothers, growing up with Jackie and Lee Bouvier . . . the period of her mother being sick, leading up to her death."

Ganymede -- formerly called the Actors' Theatre of Washington -- has always catered to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender audiences with theater, music, dance, cabaret and poetry readings. With money tight, Johnson says he centered Ganymede's resources on its fall arts festival and more recently, on "After the Garden," which was relatively easy and inexpensive to produce.

End of Journeymen

At the end of a four-month "producing hiatus" to rethink her small theater company's mission and financial viability, Journeymen Theater Ensemble Artistic Director Deborah Kirby has decided to shut the five-year-old troupe down for good.

"I joke with people that only an insane person would think that they could work a full-time job and run a theater company, and especially with nothing but volunteer staff," Kirby says. "It's hard to demand things from people when they're volunteering. . . . I mean, people just burn out."

Kirby, who is 50, has a relapsing-remitting form of multiple sclerosis, and though she says she is only mildly symptomatic, she felt the stress of running Journeymen and working by day as an executive assistant at a law firm was jeopardizing her health. And there were other factors. Aside from the lagging economy, some Journeymen co-founders and company members moved away and Kirby says she realized, "we were going to have to do a complete re-startup." The idea didn't thrill her.

Journeymen was founded upon the idea of exploring ethical and spiritual questions through the lens of Christianity. Plays such as "Life's a Dream," "After Darwin," "Spinning Into Butter" and "An Experiment With an Air Pump" were produced in spaces such as Clark Street Playhouse and Church Street Theater on an annual budget of only $65,000.

The company is still fundraising to pay off a $1,700 debt.

Follow spots

-- During Keegan Theatre's production of "Rent," which runs at Church Street through Jan. 17, the company will dedicate three performances to raising money for local organizations that combat HIV/AIDS. Ten dollars from every ticket sold at those performances will go to the Whitman-Walker Clinic (Jan. 3 performance), the Cherry Fund (Jan. 14) and Washington Hospital Center (Jan. 15). Visit http://www.keegantheatre.com.

-- The Audible Group, which recently premiered an online audio drama series, "Troublesome Gap," has recorded a new adaptation of O. Henry's short story "The Gift of the Magi." It is available as a free podcast at http://www.DCTheatreScene.com. The cast includes David Emerson Toney, Deirdre LaWan Starnes and KenYatta Rogers.

Horwitz is a freelance writer.