Today’s Theatre in Community interview is part one of our conversation with three of the founding members of Washington Stage Guild: Bill Largess, Ann Norton, and Laura Giannarelli. In part one, Bill, Ann, and Laura discuss the theatre’s origin. All three are graduates of the Catholic University of America, where they had the opportunity to study under the legendary Father Hartke. A production of Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw at Bart Whiteman’s Source Theatre galvanized their union. They go on to discuss the theatre’s founding and the constellation of the Stage Guild’s unique brand of, quote, “smart theater for a smart town.”
Part two focuses on Washington Stage Guild’s 40-year history in five different theaters, with each space bringing with it its own aesthetic challenges and opportunities. A quick note to listeners: On each episode of our Theatre in Community series, we include a glossary of theater terms and names referenced in the interview.
Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Theatre in Community Interview Series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.
Ann: And I’m Michael Oliver.
Elizabeth: And our guests today are Ann Norton, Laura Giannarelli, and Bill Largess, all founders of the Washington Stage Guild.
Ann Norton is Treasurer and member of Washington Stage Guild’s Board of Directors. She’s been involved in theater since she came home from playing in the park to announce that she had been cast as the miller’s daughter inRumpelstiltskin at age six. Her parents, also in the biz, were relieved that she had, quote, “found her own way” without any influence from them. Many years older, she received her degree in drama from Catholic University. She is the Stage Guild’s founding executive director, 1986 to 2019, 33 years. She was long the president of [00:01:00] the League of Washington Theatres and has served in a leadership and consultant capacity to numerous theaters and organizations and is currently the Performance Manager of the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University.
Laura Giannarelli, an actor and narrator based in DC. Laura has narrated over 1,200 books to date for the Library of Congress, including the award-winning Little House on the Prairie series. She’s traveled throughout the US giving workshops and lectures for the Library of Congress. As an actor, Laura played major roles at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, Olney, Theater J, The Kennedy Center, and Washington Stage Guild. Currently the president of the Washington Stage Guild’s board, Laura is a founding company member. She has appeared in more than 40 plays since 1986. Laura is a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA, and formerly chair of the local AEA [00:02:00] Liaison Committee.
Bill Largess, a founding member of the Washington Stage Guild, he was one of its dramaturges since 1986, artistic director since 2008, he’s acted in, directed, adapted, or designed plays at many DC area theaters, as well as others across the country. His work has been nominated five times for Helen Hayes Awards, and he received the Theatre Lobby’s Mary Goldwater Award twice. A lifelong Washingtonian and graduate of Catholic University’s drama department, he’s taught at Howard Community College, UMBC, and George Washington University. He holds leadership positions for Actors’ Equity Association and Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archives.
Washington Stage Guild is a 37-year-old theater organization founded in 1986 by an ensemble of professional theatre artists. As noted on their website, Washington [00:03:00] Stage Guild is known for its quote, “acclaimed repertoire of neglected classics, unfamiliar works by familiar playwrights, and stimulating new plays from around the world […] presented in a style that is the Guild’s own–direct and clear, with a strong commitment to adhering to the author’s intent.” Welcome, Ann, Laura, and Bill.
Michael: Each of you must have your own origin story about how you got into theater. If each of you could just share a little bit about those initial discoveries of theater, and your love for theater, and maybe even connect that to your coming to DC and establishing yourself as a DC artist?
Bill: I, of course I did grow up here in Washington, and I went to grade school down at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, and they did a talent show every year. And in the second grade, my teacher gave me a solo to sing—
Elizabeth: Oh, my.
Bill: —in the talent [00:04:00] show, which was “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. And so, I did that every year. Just sang it.
And then I got to, when I got to high school, like so many people, I started doing high school plays with the drama clubs. And pretty much at that point felt, okay, this is where I’m going to spend my life. And one of my teachers, who directed several of the shows I was in, had gone to Catholic U, was a graduate of the drama department. And he was very much of an influence, and I went there to Catholic U, and began majoring in drama. Father Hartke was still teaching then. I was one of the last actual students Father Hartke had. Went through that. Basically, more and more committed to it.
When I got out of school, one of the things that’s changed in the Washington theater is that there used to be this enormous network of dinner theaters in the suburbs, which were a great place to get early career experience because they were constantly trying to find new people. It wasn’t Equity. It was all non-Equity work. [00:05:00] So I did that for about five years. Lots of very conventional top ten musicals and things like that. Little by little started becoming more interested in auditioning for things in town at some of the smaller theaters which were really burgeoning in—this was now by the early 80s—and then a story, which will get more elaborate, coalesced together with a bunch of people that I knew at Catholic U in a production that led to the founding of the Washington Stage Guild, and been there ever since. Working at other theaters, everybody at the Stage Guild does also freelance other places, but really just that’s become the home, and that’s kept me busy ever since. Sometimes maybe too busy.
Michael: And let me just, Father Hartke is such a legendary figure in the establishment, I think, of, sort of, DC theater and you had him as a teacher. What was he like as a teacher?
Bill: He was delightful. Again, this was the last class he ever taught. He stayed around for a while as a [00:06:00] fundraiser. But he had gotten to a point—there was a lot of anecdotes in those, it was a voice and speech class. And, of course, we learned a lot. But there was an awful lot of telling stories of the famous people he knew and the things he had done, which was great. That was a wonderful kind of education as well. Very supportive. He remembered everybody. If you came back to the department five years after you graduated, he would know your name, he would remember what you had done. And so, just a, a very wonderful character and very much of a character.
Laura: A very wonderful man, a very wonderful man.
Elizabeth: So, Ann, how about you?
Ann: As you mentioned in my bio, my parents were in the biz and in various and sundry capacities, and we moved around a lot when I was a kid. But my father had done theater in Woodstock, Illinois, summer-stock, one week summer-stock, if you can imagine that hell. And then they were in television. My mother was a writer.
And then I, just, so I was always—in the seventh grade we had a theater in Sonoma, California. I played Rebecca in Our Town. I did props, I did concessions, I ushered, I still know the alphabet better backwards than forwards from going down the aisle.
And then, college, I was in theater. In high school I was, I did theater, I was Ado Annie in Oklahoma! And then I went to Catholic University. We moved to DC my senior year of college ‘cause my father was working for the Kennedy Center, my mother with the American College Theater Festival, the American College Jazz Festival. My father was the one who got the original funding for those projects. So anyway, and I ended up at Catholic University where I can trump Bill: I was Father Hartke’s driver.
Elizabeth: Oh, my. Wow!
Ann: And had many a meal at Duke Zeibert’s. And I’ll say, Father Hartke was, if anything, looking back on it all now, the most amazing producer.
Elizabeth: Okay.
Ann: He built that theater. And the man could walk into Duke Ziebert’s [00:08:00] and these high-powered businessmen would come in and he’d go, “This is one of my children, I need some money from you.” And these guys would pull out of their wallet and hand him 500 bucks.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Ann: And that was just, that was such a different time, such a different space.
Michael: And I think he was instrumental on even, with the Kennedy Center and everything.
Ann: Oh, the Kennedy Center, the reopening of Ford’s, and the desegregation of the National. Theater then was so totally different. And, of course, Catholic University, its program there was a major professional theater in the DC area. I worked with Geraldine Fitzgerald. I worked with Mercedes McCambridge. I worked with… The Exorcist… Jason—
Bill: We’ll get it eventually.
Ann: Anyway, and then he became a playwright. Anyway—
Laura: Jason Miller?
Ann: Yes, Jason Miller.
Michael: There we go.
Ann: So, there we go. I thought it was Miller. Anyway, I am not the name person, Bill is that. So that’s how all that happened. And then afterwards I got a job at Folger Theatre Group running their box. I worked at [00:09:00] Olney all my summers. At CU, I was their box office manager. And eventually I was at the Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts and then when the Smithsonian in their infinite wisdom disbanded the Division of Performing Arts—that’s a whole saga—my late husband, John MacDonald, who is our founding artistic director, and I, he was saying, “Let’s see where we can get a workaround here.” And then this goes on.
Elizabeth: The rest is history.
Ann: Yes.
Elizabeth: Laura, what about you? What was your earliest memory?
Laura: I, my mother loved opera and the theater. She grew up in New York City. And when I was a child, my dad was in the Air Force and among my earliest memories, we were, he was stationed in Japan, in Tokyo. And I can remember my mother playing, like, playing theater with us. Giving us toys and we would play like theater-type games. I’m sure she didn’t think of it that way, but I can remember being out in the backyard, [00:10:00] and we had just watched Babes in Toyland, and I organized all the other kids and we put it on. We did it for ourselves, as a game.
I was the third Good Fairy in Sleeping Beauty in the third grade, which was my introduction to the tragedy of theater, because I thought I was going to be Sleeping Beauty and instead, I was not the first Good Fairy, not the second Good Fairy, I was the third Good Fairy, and then I got either the measles or the mumps, and I couldn’t be in the play after all. So, it was a rude awakening.
I had a wonderful music teacher in the sixth grade at North Forestville Elementary School in Prince George’s County. And she and one of the English teachers would write these little plays for the—and it was an elementary school! —for us to put on. And the sixth graders would play the parts, and the younger kids would be in the chorus. And the play was, when I was in the sixth [00:11:00] grade, about Martians coming from outer space but the songs—what’s it called? “What’s the Matter with Kids Today?” from Bye Bye Birdie. And me and the boy who played my brother sang “Whenever I Feel Afraid” from The King and I, and they put all these other songs in, and it launched me on my way.
I did plays in high school. And my high school drama teacher was the one who suggested to me that I had enough incipient talent to possibly do this for a living.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Laura: So I chose to go to Catholic U. My mom had a stroke when I was a junior and so she wanted me to stay close to home, so Catholic U seemed like the logical choice of a school that had a good drama program. And I met Bill when I was there. I knew of Ann, but I didn’t really know Ann until we all coalesced later to [00:12:00] form the Stage Guild. But my Father Hartke story is that the beginning of my sophomore year, my mother died. She had a massive stroke, and she died the first week of classes. And I was away for two weeks, and when I came back—and I’d, been a freshman there, so Father Hartke theoretically knew of me, although I didn’t interact with him a great deal, I wasn’t his driver—but I came back to school and when I went to each of my classes someone came up to me and said, Father Hartke came to class and said you would be out and asked me to take notes so that you could catch up when you got back. And this was not drama classes. This was, like, my biology class.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Laura: My, my French class. And he did that personally.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Laura: Because this kid that—he called all the students his kids. And he really treated it that way. And he, that always touched me that he went out of [00:13:00] his way to have somebody take notes for me so that I wouldn’t fall behind.
Elizabeth: Yeah, these are amazing stories of really discovering—
Ann: We’re full of ‘em!
Elizabeth: But discovering your life passion at an early age, this is really, we are all the better for that. And then, obviously, you all come together and found Washington Stage Guild. As mentioned on its website, Washington Stage Guild quickly established itself as a, quote, “indispensable component of the DC area theater scene.” It was “recognized as early as the end of the first season in 1987 by The Washington Post.” And having since attracted international attention for its distinctive plays and strong ensemble, the company was praised again in 2010 by the Washington Post. Who was part of the founding team, and how did you all come together to start a theater? [00:14:00]
Ann: John MacDonald, who was my husband and was our founding artistic director and he, he got his MFA, also from Catholic University, which is where we met. And he’d been out for two, three years and taught at a high school and worked at Arena Stage as a house manager and stuff like that there. And he said, what should we do? We talked about do we want to move to New York? He was from Yonkers. He said, “No, I have no desire to do theater in New York. Absolutely not.” And so we went, he went down to Source Theater, then run by Bart Whiteman, and said to Bart, “I would like to direct.” And Bart Whiteman, he did, he referred to Source as the McDonald’s of theater, that you can come in and throw your project down, and he’d put it up there, and if it failed, you were done, and if it ran. So he went in. And Bart very logically said you have to work your way up. So we did a stage reading of some play that was terribly written about the Depression and then, [00:15:00] but it went well enough that John was offered to go through the scripts for—they used to have a new play festival every August. And John went through some scripts and he found this script that he really liked called…
Laura: Eddie’s People.
Ann: Thank you. Betty’s People. I was trying to remember.
Laura: Eddie’s People.
Ann: Eddie’s People. Eddie’s People. And he and the playwright hit it off. And it was actually a very good little script. And we did it. And it ended up, and I was stage managing, and I’m, I am still an Equity stage manager. And we did it, and it was just this one act, and it was the hit of the festival. It won best production or something like that. And if you were one of the top two shows of the festival, you got a slot doing it in the main season, if you will. You started the season. So we did Eddie’s People for a month there. And that gave John enough street cred, if you will, with Bart, that Bart said, “What do you want to do in the main season?” And John said, I want to do George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. [00:16:00] And Bart said, “That’s good because I have a board member who really likes Shaw.”
So, we were given the green light. We set up auditions, and the way Source worked is that if you were in the play or on the crew or involved at all, you got a cut of the box office. Period. Zip. That was the pay. And people came to audition, and among the people who walked in the door happened to be Laura Giannarelli, Bill Largess, John Lesko, Lynn Steinmetz, who had all gone to Catholic University, and others. And I remember at that, signing people up for auditions saying, “Let me explain the pay.” And also saying, “There are so many people in this cast that your cut will be so small that you will be lucky if it covers gas at the end of all this.” So we were very upfront about the fact that this was not going to make you big bucks.
So we did Heartbreak House. [00:17:00] And let us just say tactfully that the rehearsal process vis-à-vis Source was difficult. We opened and it got a rave review from The Washington Post. “Heartbreak House of Fire,” as I recall.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Ann: And I remember… I stage managed, Bob Davis from WGMS walked into—and this was in the—
Elizabeth: Was this Robert Aubry Davis?
Ann: No. No.
Elizabeth: Okay.
Ann: There’s a Bob Davis who reviewed WGMS and he went to everything. And he walked in, and this was the original Source building, and I just happened to be behind him because the only way to get backstage was to walk through the audience and then through the set and I was calling the show from the back of the house, so I was walking through—I should tell you someday the story of the police on the roof—
Laura: Yes!
Ann: —because the whorehouse [00:18:00] was going to be busted across the street. This was 14th Street.
Elizabeth: Yes, this is 14th Street.
Bill: In the 1980s.
Elizabeth: In the 1980s. I know. Epic.
Laura: I forgot my line that night. I heard a noise, and I went, “Oh, that’s the cops. What was I saying?”
Ann: Yeah, it was divine. Anyway, I, Bob Davis walked in, and I was behind him, and he looked at the set and he went, “My God, they managed to get it in here.” And I thought, okay, we’re surprising someone and we hadn’t even started the show! So, we got these rave reviews, and it ran and ran and ran and ran because Bart didn’t want to close it because it was making him money. And our Hesione was pregnant, and she was getting to the point where she was like seven months or something like that and we were like—
Laura: She was wearing a very attractive muumuu.
Ann: And we were like, “We gotta close this, Bart.” And he was just like, “You can’t! Think of the money you’re making!” And that’s when we revealed to him that we had yet to receive any money. A penny! And we had been running for six weeks. So then suddenly we got a check. [00:19:00] And what, for a hundred bucks, I think it was?
Laura: Then the cast, we had a company meeting and we said we would run it for another week or two weeks or whatever if he paid us more and he wouldn’t do that, so we were like, “Okay, then Sunday’s the last show.”
Ann: But from this experience, and from my already theater management experience because that has been, besides stage management, I’ve been box office managing and general manager, for a while at the Division of the Performing Arts and all this kind of stuff. It was just like, let’s find some place to do this on our own and let’s agree that when we do it, we’re going to be pleasant with one another. And then Bill said—
Bill: “My godfather is the pastor of St. Patrick’s Parish and they just closed their school and they have a big auditorium!” And I have to say it was my mother who suggested, “Why don’t you go down and talk to Monsignor Arthur?” And so we did.
And I, let me parenthetically say that [00:20:00] this was mostly a group of people who had in some way known each other at Catholic U, although maybe had not seen each other for 10 years in some cases. So, we had come together. It was very, it was a very good experience from that standpoint. As we had begun talking during the run that “We could do this.” And do a more, perhaps a more collegial sort of atmosphere. We wanted, we basically had the idea of let’s explore doing it ourselves.
So we heard about this auditorium space. That was now vacant down on G Street across from the Martin Luther King Library. And I went down and talked to a rather forbidding Monsignor Arthur. He was my godfather. And the rest of the school building that had closed was being used by what was called the Paul VI Institute for the Arts, which was the Archdiocesan Arts Institute. And that was being run by a different priest. named Monsignor Farina. And so, we met with the two [00:21:00] of them and put our proposal before them. “We’d like to start producing plays and we’re looking for a place.” And the fact that we had all gone to Catholic University—
Elizabeth: Oh, right!
Bill: —was the absolute selling point. They were like, okay. They knew, they both knew Father Hartke. They’d been seeing shows at Catholic U all these years. And so, you know, they were very, especially on Senior Farina, lots of advice for us about incorporating—
Ann: Tell them—
Bill: Yes, no, of course. So we said, and so we were talking, and I think it was actually John who brought up, “Now, we’d love to do this, is do you have any kind of limitations? Is there something that you would prefer that we not do?” And without having thought about it Monsignor Arthur is the one who said, We would rather you didn’t do anything that embarrassed the parish… like… Hair?”
Bill: We sat there, the three of us, and we went, “We will never do Hair.” And we have stuck to that all these years!
Ann: [00:22:00] We will never do Hair!
Elizabeth: This is, just to tell our listeners, this is a musical that was very 1960s. It had nudity, it had free love, all kinds of stuff.
Bill: It would not have gone over big at St. Patrick’s.
Laura: I will interject that over the years, very occasionally, we’ve come across a script that interests us. When we were at Carroll Hall, we would come across a script that interested us and say, “This is I like this play, but it’s probably better that we don’t do it in Carroll Hall.” But it didn’t really cramp our style. There would just be plays that we were like, “That’s an interesting play, but not for us.”
Ann: And what was interesting is that it was Monsignor Farina, who was with the Paul VI Institute, who, when he first met us, the first thing he said was, “Go out and incorporate.” He was the one who said, “You can’t just be this loose, ‘Let’s put on a play.’ You have to become an entity, you have [00:23:00] to have your corporate structure.” All that kind of management stuff. And it was just like, okay. And, that’s the one, when young people come to me, as they do occasionally, and say, “I want to start a theater, what advice do you give?” The first advice I give is, “Go work at other theaters and see how they lose money and come up with another way. Don’t make the same mistakes.” And the second thing I say is, “You don’t just start a theater to put on a play. You start a theater to put on a body of work to communicate to people.”
Michael: And that leads right into my next question, looking at your vision statement, I was particularly struck by the phrase, so what, “smart theater for a smart town.” Which, for me, theater, the relationship between community and theater is so intimate and so close. And in many ways with that statement, you’re defining both the audience you want to attract as well as the theater you’re going to produce to attract that audience. So, if you could maybe just speak to that particular aspect of [00:24:00] your theater, the theater’s vision, and what kind of shows evolved out of that.
Bill: Well one of the things that is so funny to think about now is when we started, when we incorporated, we went around town and talked to everybody and said, “Advice?” So we talked to Howard, we talked to people all over the place, people from Olney and saying, “What advice can you give us?” And what we heard over and over again, “You have to have some reason for there to be another theater company because after all we already have twelve theaters.”
Elizabeth: Oh and now there’s something like forty five or something!
Bill: So it’s, so we came up with, because we had started with Heartbreak House—it wasn’t a Stage Guild production yet, it was Source, but the idea of that kind of literate, intelligent play with a lot of ideas behind it is something that we began to focus on. Over those years at Carroll Hall, and subsequently, lots of Shaw and Wilde and things like that. But also—
Ann: T. S. Eliot.
Bill: T. S. Eliot. Yes, we’ve done all of T. S. Eliot.
Ann: We’ve done all of T. S. Eliot!
Bill: We’re probably the only theater in the world that’s done all of T. S. Eliot’s plays. [00:25:00] And Brian Friel—
Ann: And packed them in!
Bill: Yes, exactly. Turned people away from Murder in the Cathedral.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Ann: Oh, yes. And Cocktail Party.
Bill: Began that, and little by little, that phrase, which we’ve become adopting as our motto, I suppose you’d say, was something that we more or less observed. Because more and more people who either came to see our shows or worked with us, who had worked elsewhere, were talking about the fact that, Other cities might not support a theater like this. And I’ll give the strongest example whatsoever is when we did The Cocktail Party—
Ann: I was thinking the same.
Bill: —by T. S. Eliot. The director was Lee Mikeska Gardner. And she at that point was also assistant directing JoAnne Akalaitis.
Elizabeth: Oh, wow.
Bill: Who was doing the dance, she was doing the Dance of Death at Arena Stage, and Lee invited her to come see The Cocktail Party. And it was fortunately a packed house, and we were there and afterwards Lee said, “What [00:26:00] did you think?” And what JoAnne Akalaitis said was, “That play is really not my cup of tea. But I was fascinated by the audience. Because they were listening so hard.” And JoAnne Akalaitis said, “You’d never get that in New York.” And it’s, oh, okay.
So the notion that this is a city, it’s a well-educated city with people from around the world because of the diplomatic corps and things like that, and there is an audience, a market for that kind of really challenging, sometimes, but intelligent—and they’re not all dramas, we’ve done plenty of comedies, but they’re intelligent comedies, we like to think. And that might not sell other places. That’s where we come up with the idea of smart theater for a smart town.
Laura: And it also, it dovetails with the number of us in the core company who went to Catholic U where, particularly in our era, in the ‘70s and, for younger members of the [00:27:00] company who had a CU connection up into the ‘80s, there was a focus, a really strong focus on the verbal component. We had lots and lots of vocal training, and we still find now the challenge when we do a Shaw play, or a Wilde play, or even some of the newer plays that we do that are very dexterous verbally, people come to auditions and you’d be surprised at the lovely, wonderful actors who can’t handle that language. They just are flummoxed by the ideas and the density of the thoughts in some of these plays that we do.
Michael: Yeah, because those plays only work if you can articulate them.
Ann: John MacDonald once came from, this is the second week of rehearsal of a play, and I’m not going to give the name or the actor, but he just said, “Next time they audition, I don’t want to see their [00:28:00] photos. I don’t want to see their resumes. I want to see their SAT scores.” Because he was just having the hardest time with the actor, trying to get him—but I want to get back to the community point because I think that’s what makes regional theater such an important component of keeping theater alive in the United States. Is, everyone thinks theater is Broadway is theater, and that’s it. And I’m, I think we, I acknowledge the founding fathers of regional theater here in our city. Arena Stage.
Bill: Founding mothers.
Ann: Founding mothers, yes. Founding mother and fathers. Because it was Tom—
Elizabeth: This is Fichandler. Arena Stage.
Ann: Yeah, who said, “We’re going to be nonprofit.” That was a revolutionary concept back then!
Elizabeth: This is the ‘50s. Founding, Zelda and Tom Fichandler.
Ann: Broadway is for profit. And that’s the difference.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Let me expand on this in terms of your [00:29:00] repertoire and your kind of artistic vision because the company is committed to producing, quote, both “neglected classics, unfamiliar works by familiar playwrights,” as we said, “and stimulating new plays from around the world presented in a style that is the Stage Guild’s own—direct and clear, with a strong commitment to adhering to the author’s intent.” So, can, you’ve been talking about the intelligence and the density of the thoughts, can you tell us how that aesthetic evolved over time?
Bill: I think it touches on what Laura mentioned, which is that when we founded—and again we’re being told why should you have, why should you start another theater company—is we really began trying to think of what is it that we can do that maybe other theaters in town are not doing? And because of the verbal training from Catholic U, we knew that we could do these very verbal plays and things like that. The other aspect of the Catholic University training from the ‘70s maybe into the ‘80s and certainly before is that [00:30:00] it was very academic as well. It was a strong focus on the history of dramatic literature and not just the standard repertoire. That you had to read and analyze plays from all kinds of periods. So our awareness that there’s a lot of really great plays that just are not being done.
And so, we set out to look at some of those. And perhaps a good example are those T. S. Eliot plays, where, if you look them up it’ll say they’re beautiful poetry, but they don’t work on stage. And we’ve done all of them. So, we’ve proved them wrong. Yeah, we, in fact, a playwright who did one of our, who wrote one of our most recent plays, came to see it and said, “You all did Murder in the Cathedral?” And I said, “Yeah, and we had to turn people away.” Because it’s, the conventional wisdom is it’s great poetry but it doesn’t really work as a play, but we made it work. As did [00:31:00] we with the others. So there’s that.
There’s also, with all this sort of theoretical stuff about, yes, they’re intellectual and yes, they’re verbal, this is also stuff that we really love. We love these plays. And so, the notion of doing a play like, and it’s interesting because it’s now not so unfamiliar, but in our early seasons, we did An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. And that was pretty unheard of. That people did The Importance of Being Earnest. And the rest of his plays were totally neglected. It’s a wonderful play. With some problems, but it’s a wonderful play. And that was a huge hit in our early years. And of course, then the National Theatre in London brought it to Broadway, and it became standard repertoire again.But it wasn’t when we did it first. And things like that were very appealing to us.
Ann: And I think what’s interesting, and I meant to ask you to do this math work, that everyone thinks the Washington Stage Guild, they do classics is what sometimes gets—but the reality of it is that at least half of our productions [00:32:00] have been area premieres.
Elizabeth: Aha. Okay. We should talk about that.
Ann: And we’ve gotten Helen Hayes nominations for world premieres. Oni Faida Lampley’s play Mixed Babies, its world premiere at Stage Guild.
Elizabeth: Local actress and playwright. Very well known.
Ann: Yeah. Yeah. And, Michael Hollinger’s work.
Laura: Well, that, that phrase, neglected classics, the lesser-known works of famous playwrights, and new plays of merit was cleverly crafted so that we can basically do whatever we want and call it a Stage Guild play. Because as Ann says, we’ve done a lot of new plays. I mean, this season, we’re doing three plays by female playwrights, female American playwrights, two are area premieres and one is a world premiere. And it isn’t—and last season we did Memoirs of a Forgotten Man by a local playwright. We don’t just do old plays. I’ve always found it fascinating when people that I come across [00:33:00] like when I’m in a show at another theater or people that I meet at a party say, “Oh, I have a play that would be a Stage Guild play and they give me the name of some moldy old melodrama from the 19th century. And it’s okay, that’s an old play, that playwright may be a contemporary of Shaw’s, or a contemporary of Wilde’s, but that’s not a Stage Guild play.
Elizabeth: How do you get your new plays that come to you? Either the world premieres, do they—
Bill: It’s non-stop looking. And that gets into, I’m sure we’ll talk about this a little, bit the notion of the collaborative quality of the company. Everyone’s always looking for plays. And so, reading reviews from other cities or, there is this thing, the New Play Exchange where, which is where we found a couple of the plays for this season. And networking and asking people, “Have you heard of anything? Do you know of anything?”
Ann: Directors who wanna work with us. Casey Campbell has brought us three Lucia Mad scripts that we’re like, “Yeah, we’re doing this.”
Elizabeth: Okay.
Ann: I [00:34:00] mean they’re like, mixed babies and Lucia Mad, when John read those scripts, he just put it down, “So, yeah, we’re doing that play.” It was that simple of a decision. All of us that read it and were and had to agree, right? We always have had kind of that kind of aesthetic, but—
Laura: Because we’re a small company and we’ve remained a small company. So, everybody who’s part of the core has to roll up their sleeves and work like hell. And unless you love what you’re doing—
Ann: It’s so much work to put on a play.
Laura: We’re not making enough money to work like hell if we don’t love the thing that we’re working on.
Ann: If it’s not on the page.
Michael: I’d love to hear what the first play was, and what was the process of arriving at that? Because you’re giving birth to a theater, and obviously, “What play should we open with?” I would love to hear what that experience was.
Ann: It was actually picking the first season. And picking a season is a different thing than picking a [00:35:00] play. Because you have to look at how you’re going to balance that season, if you have core company, how you’re going to serve them, and of course the fiscal side of it, which, that’s a whole other podcast that these two shouldn’t, don’t want to be at, ‘cause that’s me. And many of these decision processes, I would say, I’m just here for the, to give the fiscal side of it. I left the artistic to John and everyone else because I had enough weight in the conversation already to discuss it. But, that first season—
Bill: One of the company members brought in a play, Chekhov in Yalta by John Driver and Jeffrey Haddow, a play about Anton Chekhov and Stanislavski at the point at which Chekhov had just written Three Sisters. And, a big cast, probably a bigger cast than we should have done for a season.
Laura: Mistakes. Mistakes.
Bill: We were thinking this, how do we, and again, this fit our mission, but, how do we market this? How do we sell it? And what we ended up doing, [00:36:00] and we did this a couple of times over the course of the years, is basically, although it wasn’t repertory, we paired it with something. So we opened with Uncle Vanya. That was our first show. Followed by Chekhov in Yalta. So first a play by Chekhov, then a play about Chekhov. And that was very rewarding. And the thing that’s interesting, the thing that, again, in terms of learning curve, we chose to play Uncle Vanya without a Vanya. No idea who would play that role.
Ann: And interestingly, and we ran an ad in The Washington Post. We did this for like our first four years saying, “Auditions. Open auditions. Come on down.” And I was manning the door, and the doorbell rang, and I let in this man and he was the perfect age for Uncle Vanya, and he handed me his picture and resume. And I noticed he went to Catholic University, and he taught at GW, and he went, and he auditioned, and he came out, and that’s when I remembered that he had been a grad student at GW—
Laura: At Catholic.
Ann: At Catholic, when I had been an undergrad, and he left and [00:37:00] John walked out of the theater and he held up his picture to me and said, “Uncle Vanya just left the building.”
Elizabeth: Wow.
Ann: And it was Alan Wade.
Elizabeth: Oh, okay. Okay.
Ann: And that’s how Alan Wade came to do his first show with us.
Bill: And he’s worked with us as actor and director frequently ever since.
Laura: And he’s also the author of our company policy of doing a company bow rather than individual bows at the curtain call.
Elizabeth: Oh, nice.
Ann: We do not, we never do individual bios on a curtain call.
Elizabeth: Yeah, we want to talk to you about the ensemble aspect, but before we do that, there’s, I understand that in your early days, maybe I’ve got this wrong, that you staged more than 80 productions in five different homes?.
Ann: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Can you talk about that?
Ann: Well, that’s across our history. That’s across our history.
Elizabeth: Oh, okay.
Bill: That’s what we’ve done within the whole time.
Elizabeth: Okay.
Bill: And we’ve been in five different places.
Elizabeth: Five different places.
Bill: So we started at Carroll Hall, which was down at St. Patrick’s on G Street. And then—
Elizabeth: Oh, “homes” as in theater homes, not individual homes.
Bill: No.
Elizabeth: Okay!
Bill: So we were at Carroll Hall for 13 years. Then the Archdiocese of [00:38:00] Washington decided to turn that building into the headquarters of Catholic Charities, which we couldn’t very well object to. So we moved to Source Theatre, where we were in residence there in collaboration with Source for three years. Then we moved to the little building that Arena Stage owned at the corner of 14th and T.
Ann: It had been Living Stage.
Elizabeth: Oh, Living Stage, yes.
Bill: And we were there for five years. And then, because of Arena doing their big project down in Southwest, they had to move the costume shop there. So after five years we had to leave. So for a couple of years, we only did stage readings at Flashpoint.
Elizabeth: Oh, I remember Flashpoint, yeah.
Bill: On G Street, right across from Carroll Hall.
Elizabeth: Also right across from the MLK Library, yeah.
Bill: We did one show, because we were hosting, co-hosting, the International Shaw Symposium, we did one show at Catholic U in the Callan Theater. We did an evening of Shaw one-acts there. And [00:39:00] then we happened to cross the Undercroft which is the theater where we are now. And that was 2010. They had, the church there, the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, had thoroughly renovated the whole building, including turning what had been a very bare bones basement auditorium into this lovely little proscenium theater. And they were looking for people to use it, but what they were finding was, people were coming to them and saying, “Can we use it for a weekend?” “Can we do a show there?” And they had nobody on staff who was managing the space. So along we came and said, “Could we have it for a season? From September to May?” and they were like, “Yes, please, take it!”
Ann: Well, and not only that but we were able to say, and we had been at St. Patrick’s, which was two blocks away, so that they knew we were used to being—
Elizabeth: In a church, yeah.
Ann: We knew that we couldn’t make loud sounds on Easter Sunday morning, that kind of thing.
Bill: And we very quickly offered, and they were very grateful, we did things like install a lighting grid and upgrade all of the [00:40:00] technical—
Ann: In a snowstorm.
Bill: Yes, exactly. So, this is now the beginning of our 14th season there, which means this will have been our longest home.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah.
Bill: Starting this season. And interestingly, because they’re very friendly with us, they’ve put no constraints on us about what we might do.
Elizabeth: Oh, content wise. Yeah.
Bill: Content wise. So, we’ve done some things with stronger language there than we might have done. But we still are self-policing. It’s like, we’re not going to embarrass them in any way.
Laura: We’re aware that our roommates might object if we did something really risqué and out there. And there are so many plays that won’t offend them that we’re excited to do that there’s no need to go out of our way to offend our landlord.
Michael: Let’s move away from the language aspect of theater and let’s talk about the physical space. Because you’ve been in all these different physical spaces, and I [00:41:00] myself am a director and I’ve always been just fascinated by when you put on the production, you adopt it to the sort of the space and to the strengths or the weaknesses of the space.
Laura: One of the challenges of the Undercroft is that the proscenium’s, that it’s a proscenium stage with fixed seating and it’s got a, it doesn’t have a lot of headroom and it’s very wide and fairly narrow.
Michael: And it’s got all those aisles.
Laura: And when we were considering whether or not we’re going to take the plunge and get a lease on this space, we were like, “Oh, but you know way back in Carroll Hall we could do anything. We would do it in alley, we would do it in the round, sometimes we would use the proscenium stage, and it was so flexible.” But we made the compromise, and you know, for 13 years we’ve made it work for us. We have occasionally come out from the proscenium and tried to be creative and [00:42:00] sometimes people enter from the back of the theater or we use the little sort of walkway that’s along the side of the seating auditorium and an actor will be over there and our lighting designer, Marianne, will shine a spotlight on them and people will have to look over to the right to see that person just to add a little new touch or something. But we are… constrained, so to speak, by the shape of the stage, but that just makes us be more creative.
Ann: But what’s interesting is that in each space, looking back over our history, I think, one of the plays that we did that I absolutely adored was Terra Nova. I can’t imagine doing Terra Nova except in Carroll Hall. It’s about the Scott exhibition to the South Pole, and they literally drag a sled around on stage. So, we had that space to be able to give that sense of distance being traveled and all that kind of stuff. And I can’t, in a strange way, [00:43:00] I can’t imagine doing Murder in the Cathedral except in Carroll Hall, because that space had these cathedral sized ceilings, and it was this wood, and you just had this feel of, in a sense, the space was the set.
Michael: So do you think, when you’re selecting a season, and you know what space, does that, is there a relationship—?
Bill: It has to a little bit at least.
Ann: It has to—and another play that I always think was so perfect for 14th and T, because it was, 14th and T was so compact, it was just, it was a platform and the audience around it, and that was it.
Bill: Yeah, and that affected the choice of plays in terms of cast size too, it was so small.
Ann: Yeah, it was so small. And yet, Michael Hollinger’s plays—
Laura: Opus.
Ann: Opus. And Incorruptible. Which is a play set in the Middle Ages about priests digging up bones and making relics out of them. And it’s a hysterically funny farce, which has this glorious, beautiful, miraculous ending. And I do think we could maybe pull that off at Undercroft. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. We could do that in Undercroft. [00:44:00] I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. But anyway, and this is the beginning of how a season is picked. “Do you think we could do that?” “Do you think we could do this?” It was Bill who called me when we were in Undercroft and said the most ridiculous thing that’s ever come out of his mouth, which was—
Bill: What? “Do you think we should do Murder in the Cathedral?”
Ann: No. No. Back to the—
Bill: That was not Undercroft.
Ann: You’re right.
Bill: That was at Carroll Hall. No, that was, it was, again, we do Shaw pretty much every year. We’ve gone through a lot we’ve gone through all of the sort of standard repertoire repertory Shaw plays, and I did talk to Ann and say, “What about Back to Methuselah?” Which is this huge, sprawling cycle that he wrote about human history, and it goes from Adam and Eve in the first part to 35,000 years in the future—
Elizabeth: Oh, wow.
Bill: —in the fifth part. And it would take three years to do it. Unless you had, the money to do it in rep, which would have been fun. And again, it was like, “Do you think we could do this?” And, Ann [00:45:00] basically said, “I think we should try.”
Ann: And when we’re reading plays, we’re mindful of the space that we’re in. When we exchange emails about, “So I just read this great play, but it’s got this production challenge. You read it and tell me if you think we can pull it off.” And sometimes we just say, “We better not touch that one.” Because we don’t have—
Laura: We want to serve the play.
Ann: And if you have to fly in a helicopter, we can’t do that. So we can’t do that. play. We can’t do Miss Saigon.
Elizabeth: At the Undercroft, do you have any kind of costuming, set-making—you must have dressing rooms and such, but do you have any kind of—
Ann: They’re teeny tiny little dressing rooms
Bill: Little dressing rooms. We don’t really have set building or costume building capability there, which is, again, something we did have at Carroll Hall, because the building was so big. Which is why the fact that we have so many times partnered with GW has been a huge advantage because, especially the [00:46:00] costume designer these days, is the costume professor, so there’s access to the costume stock from GW and things like that. Frequently—
Ann: And we have donated mightily to that stock.
Bill: Yeah, we have. Sometimes sets have been built at GW, if not elsewhere. Recently we have figured out ways to build at the Undercroft. But we have to work around rehearsals then, so that becomes a challenge. It’s a, it’s not easy. The first show we did, Uncle Vanya, which was at Carroll Hall, we still hadn’t quite figured out how to use that space, so we built that set in my garage.
Elizabeth: One of the things that came up just a minute ago was this concept of Stage Guild as an ensemble. You are an ensemble company. Could you elaborate on what distinguishes an ensemble company from, for example, a company based on the, quote, “star system”?
Laura: As an ensemble, and we’re by no means the only ensemble in the DC [00:47:00] area, but we’re perhaps one of the older ones in the smaller theater world, the small professional theater. But many of us have worked with one another at this point for decades. So there’s, as artistically, there’s a wonderful sort of shorthand that, one another, you’ve worked with one another. Bill and I have played husband and wife numerous times. So, if cast as a couple, we feel that sort of comfort level going in. It’s not being cast in something where you meet your partner for the first time.
Years ago, I did The Long Christmas Ride Home at Studio Theatre and this wonderful actor, Paul Nolan, from Philly, was cast as my husband. And we read together at the audition. And Serge Seiden was directing, and he told me afterwards that “I turned to Joe and I said, ‘The two of them, the two of them.’” Because we read so well together. But we didn’t know one another at all. So [00:48:00] the rehearsal process was a period of getting to know you, and figuring out how to mesh in that storytelling together. Whereas when you’ve worked with people over time, you have that working method that you share.
And there are always new people at the Stage Guild. Virtually every show that we do, there’s someone who’s never worked at the Stage Guild before. Occasionally it can be frustrating when actor friends will say, “I never get hired at the Stage Guild. You all, you have your group of people that you use, and it’s always the same ones.” And it’s, no, it actually isn’t. It actually isn’t always the same ones.
Bill: Yeah, I was, I will also say that there, in terms of the ensemble aspect of it, there’s also just a certain amount of… the initial planning of a season is with people in mind that we know we can rely on, which is not always [00:49:00] officially, so to speak, members of the company. We have greater members of the company, I suppose you could say. But the idea that as we are reading plays and looking for things, we’ll come across something and say, “This is a great role for so and so.” And, it’s not, occasionally someone comes in with, “This is a great role for me.” But it’s more often the case where somebody will bring in a play and say, “This is a play that, Laura should do.” Or “This is a play that Lynn should do.” Or Jewel should do, or somebody like that. And the idea of just that kind of mindfulness about the people who are apt to be working on it is a big part of it.
Ann: And plus, you have to remember that the ensemble is also working for the company in terms of, okay, you may not be in this play like, perfect example is Lynn Steinmetz who will be in the play and working on costumes at the same time backstage because she is also a costume designer. And there she is with a sewing machine while learning her lines while getting ready. So it’s part of where kind [00:50:00] of the idea came from was way back in the day, Arena Stage had a resident company and in its high point those people were, those actors were on payroll 50 weeks of the year, even if they were not on stage! And that’s the dream of theater. The ultimate dream. And of course, it couldn’t be maintained or sustained.
And it’s very interesting with all this Me Too and wanting this change that’s coming down and being projected in theater right now is this is, yes, those are fabulous ideas. And I agree with every single one of them! But then you get to the reality of the fiscal side, it’s just…
Laura: One of the things that goes back to our Catholic U training in terms of the ensemble that we’ve created, because most of the core company at this point are Catholic U grads, at Catholic U as students, even [00:51:00] as acting students, you had to do a set crew credit, a costume crew credit, a lighting crew credit. You had to do all those things. You had to work on a show as something other than an actor. And so, we all got that sense of how to do other things that, in the early days when we were all young and had lots of energy, we all built the sets. We built Uncle Vanya in Bill’s backyard, and I helped paint it. Now our building supervisor, Matty Griffiths, hires a crew of young, strong people who we pay to come in and build the set.
Bill: Yes, I used to say my one regret in the entire history of the Stage Guild was learning how to use power tools. As soon as I learned how to use them, I had to use them all the time.
Elizabeth: Yeah, right, it’s like learning to type.
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