“Cabaret is a great play for right now,” says Molly Smith of the Tony Award–
winning musical set in pre-World War II Berlin, which kicks off the 2006–07 season at Arena Stage on Sept. 8. And while Cabaret’s success has long placed it in the pantheon of established theatrical hits, with a 1972 Hollywood film and two Broadway revivals since it first debuted in New York in 1966, Smith believes its themes are more relevant today than ever: “What’s happening in America right themes are more relevant today than ever: “What’s happening in America right now is that our rights are being eroded, little by little,” she says. “Cabaret shows how this happened in another time, and how people were asleep as it was occurring—and then it was too late.” Smith expects great things from Cabaret, in part because Brad Oscar (who got a career break when he starred as the nutty Nazi sympathizer in The Producers on Broadway, and later took over for Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock) and Washington favorite Meg Gillentine have been cast in the lead roles. To up the artistic ante even more, Smith reveals, “We’re going to decorate the theater like a cabaret, with drinks being served on the floor and in some of the boxes.”
Besides Cabaret and Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (a poignant love story performed on Broadway by Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco), Arena’s new season includes Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire, a drama about the human cost of the war in Iraq; the musical comedy She Loves Me, directed by Kyle Donnelly; the Michael Frayn play Noises Off, which Smith describes as “a laugh-out-loud hysterical farce about crafting the art of theater”; August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean; Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles; and the season-ending D.C. premiere of Peter & Wendy in a production developed in 1996 by the legendary experimental theater troupe Mabou Mines.
The dramatic lineup is characteristic of Molly Smith, who came to Arena Stage from the tiny Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, a company that she’d founded 20 years earlier. In her eight seasons at Arena, Smith has given Washington a challenging roster of plays, from the tried and true to the cutting edge, and in the process, she says, has developed an increasingly high regard for its audiences.
Smith reveals her Washington experience has been both “absolutely what I expected, and nothing like what I expected. Coming from Perseverance Theatre, which is about a tenth the size of Arena Stage, I expected it to be very different. I knew that I’d be dealing with a much larger staff, larger audience, larger everything. But I was surprised at the kind of audience that’s here. It’s the smartest audience I’ve run into in the country.”
She says this is also the reaction of actors who come from other cities to do co-productions with Arena. “They are in shock when they begin doing the same play they’ve done in their own theaters for this audience. They say: ‘Wow, [Washingtonians] are so sensitive’—what they pick up, where they laugh, where they get it. They say it’s a really fun audience to play for.”
Accordingly, Molly Smith doesn’t expect the nudity that is inherent to a play such as Frankie and Johnny to faze her audience. “We’ve had nudity here in recent seasons, such as M. Butterfly, where a young man is naked at the end of the play. No big deal.” She says that they will publicize that fact so people will be warned. “As long as you let audiences know, they are perfectly fine with it. And if they’re not fine with it, they won’t come.” According to Smith, Washington audiences do have more of a problem with strong language. “That doesn’t stop us from doing certain plays, because Arena focuses on American plays in American voices—and language has been strong in the last century.”
Smith says that in addition to learning about Washington, she has also discovered a few things about herself, such as her growing fascination with musicals. “Appreciating musicals is the gift that Washington has given me ... I was a ‘serious’ theater person, and I thought that musicals were not, ah, very compelling. But since I’ve begun directing them I realize they are the most subversive type of entertainment that we have. Information that I would try to get into a straight play would have people running for the doors. But in a musical they’re tapping their feet, and it’s tracking through their brains, and they’re getting it in a whole different way. So now I love the form.”
On the state of theater here, Molly Smith is equally bullish. “It’s thriving, it’s buoyant, it’s diverse.” And you can check it out for yourself: “On October 19, there will be a free night of theater. [Washingtonians] can log on to the League of Washington Theater Web site [www.lowt.org], where theaters are offering free tickets. You can go to a theater you’ve never seen before.”
As positive as she feels about the quality of the playwrights and actors who call Washington home, Smith still believes that the city has not yet come into its own. “Washington is now number two, after New York, in terms of quantity of productions, audiences served and number of Equity actors who live here—and yet it’s virtually an invisible theater city to the rest of the country.”
Why? “Great writers have to come from here before that light is shown really strongly on us, like David Mamet in Chicago, who was writing in the vernacular of the city. Theater companies and acting styles almost formed around him, and it became a Chicago sound. And Sam Shepard in San Francisco, [he] had almost a rock star influence on the theater, which I think then moved into a lot of solo performance artists that San Francisco is really known for.”
“Second, the number of new theaters being built poises the city to become quite far more visible ... I think you can say we are poised on the brink of national visibility.”
And in the meantime? Smith smiles: “Just come to the theater and enjoy.”