Fiery Reentry: Howard Shalwitz Returns to the Stage in The Arsonists

Gwydion Suilebhan, the playwright who by day is Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's marketing chief, knows how to tailor a pitch. He hooked me on the idea of doing a feature about Woolly co-founder Howard Shalwitz's return to acting after almost a decade away by suggesting that Shalwitz is DC theatre's answer to John Cazale. I took him so literally that I had a couple of paragraphs to that effect that my first draft:

Gwydion Suilebhan, Woolly’s Director of Brand and Marketing but also an oft-produced playwright, likens Shalwitz to John Cazale, an actor now remembered mainly by pub-quiz champs and committed cinephiles. Before he died of cancer in 1978, Cazale appeared in only five feature films, but every one earned a Best Picture nomination. Three of them won; all remain revered. Probably most famous for his role as the hapless Fredo Corleone in the Godfather pictures, Cazale set a never-to-be-surpassed standard for quality control.

It’s an imperfect comparison. Part of the Cazale legend was its compression: He made five towering films in six years, and then he died. Shalwitz’s performances have been parceled out over decades. And though Shalwitz himself has usually been praised, reception to the shows overall has been more mixed-positive than universal adoration. (With the exception of Full Circle, his entire body of work as an actor predates my own tenure as a critic.) The Arsonists is only the third time he’s performed in Woolly’s airy, modern, Penn Quarter playhouse since the company moved into its permanent home a dozen years ago.

It was still a good idea for a story, so here's the story. Thanks, Gwydion, and Howard, and everyone who talked to me or tried to get in touch with me for it, whether your comments ended up in the piece or not.

Deleted Scene: Howard & Jen & Lenny & Lou & The Wheelbarrow Walk

Howard Shalwitz and Jennifer Mendenhall in Ian Cohen's Lenny & Lou, directed by Tom Prewitt, 2004. Thanks to Gwydion Suilebhan and Lexi Dever at Woolly for digging up the photo.

It pains me to report that when my Washington City Paper story about Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Founding Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz's career as an actor hits tomorrow it'll be absent one filthy anecdote from his Lenny & Lou co-star Jennifer Mendenhall that had to be sacrificed for space considerations. (Newsprint doesn't grow on tr—you know what, never mind).

Anyway, here's the bit. My apologies to Ms. Mendenhall's spouse Michael Kramer, who gave me some less salacious but still insightful comments about directing Shalwitz in a 1990 production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly that also hit the cutting room floor.

Mendenhall had been a little intimidated, she recalls, when she’d had to share a long kiss with Shalwitz—an actor she hadn’t met before—in Savage in Limbo. But when Prewitt put the two actors together again in Lenny & Lou, 17 years later, that kiss felt like mere foreplay.

Or five-or-six-play, if chief Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks is to be believed.

“It’s not pornographic exactly,” Marks wrote in his admiring 2004 review of Lenny & Lou, “though one scene of acrobatic rutting is so well-choreographed it would make a decent novelty act in an X-rated Cirque du Soleil.”

Woolly was without a regular address at that time (the show was performed at Theatre J which makes that filthy sequence all the more fun to try to imagine), and Mendenhall recalls rehearsals taking place in offices borrowed from Theatre J. Mendenhall kept urging Prewitt and fight director John Gurski—sex scenes have fight directors—to let the encounter be more absurdly explicit.

“I said, ‘We need a wheelbarrow walk.’ Howard said, ‘What’s a wheelbarrow walk?’ I said, ‘I’ll show you!’” Mendenhall recalls, laughing. She says Shalwitz’s one job during their carnal melee was to hold her skirt down so it she wouldn’t moon the audience. But he’d sometimes forget. The night her parents were in the audience was one of the nights when he forgot.

“It was insane,” she says. “It was so fun.”

Storm Front: Baby Screams Miracle, reviewed.

Kate Eastwood Norris and Cody Nickell pray together. (Scott Suchman/Woolly Mammoth)

On Baby Screams Miracle, a 2013 play by Clare Barron at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, directed by Woolly founder Howard Shalwitz.

In the Flesh: Zombie: The American and NSFW, reviewed.

Sean Meehan, James Seol, and Tim Getman in Zombie: The American (Stan Barouh).

Two satires, each alike in indignation. My reviews of Robert O'Hara's world premiere Zombie: The American at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Lucy Kirkwood's 2012 NSFW at Round House Theatre are in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away gratis.

Our Pottymouthed Year: 2013 on the DC Stage, Assessed.

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Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré in Studio's The Motherfucker with the Hat. (Teddy Wolff)

We're wrapping up a highly rewarding and admirably trend-resistant year on DC's stages, as I aver in this week's Washington City Paper.

It Takes a Lotta Gull: Stupid Fucking Bird, reviewed

The A-List: Cody Nickell, Kate Eastwood Norris, Kimberly Gilbert and Rick Foucheux in Stupid Fucking Bird.

Of the stage productions that've moved me most in the five years or so that I've been semi-professionally paying attention to theatre in DC, a suspiciously high percentage of those have been directed by Aaron Posner. (His 2009 version of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Folger Theatre remains my favorite thing that I've ever seen in a playhouse.)

Posner is the playwright, not the director, of Stupid Fucking Bird, his-flippant-but-faithful rejiggering of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, which opened at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company this weekend. (Woolly Mammoth founder Howard Shalwitz is its director.) The result is pretty goddamn delightful, as I aver in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.