People can be like empty bottles, holding whatever messages they receive. Repeated enough, those messages—you’re pretty, you’re easy, you’re disposable—fill up the inside, leaving no room for anything new. That is, until you break the bottle. This metaphor is at the center of The Pliant Girls, a Greek-ish drama receiving a nimble and provocative production by Theatre Prometheus in association with Nu Sass Productions through Nov. 9.       

Adapted from Aeschylus’ “The Suppliants” by Meghan Brown, The Pliant Girls tells the plight of 50 sisters who face 50 arranged marriages with 50 brothers through a series of monologues, flashbacks, and choral odes. Brown’s script, infused with a modern spirit and vocabulary, presents a sample size of five sisters, each burdened by a single adjective: Courtney (Emma Wesslund) is the smart one, Leta (Mollie Greenberg) is the funny one, Philomena (Madeline Marie) is the pretty one, Arianna (Caleigh Riordan Davis) is the young one, and Kay (Alex Aspiazu) is the leftover. Or maybe the brave one.  

Each actor brings their role to full, layered life as the characters prove to be more than their labels. Over the course of the play, they are chosen, courted, misunderstood, and abused, until they decide to rewrite the plot with freeing though fatal results. While the story’s timeline isn’t crystal clear—particularly how the ending relates to the beginning—the actors’ performances anchor the production. 

The five representative brothers are deliberately less nuanced, though Seth Rosenke brings a particularly painful smile as the chemical-dependent suitor Alexander. Max Johnson chills as the misogynist wolf Dean.  

As Greek(ish) dramas do, the show raises multiple moral and political dilemmas: gender roles and gender inequality; the sacrifices conformity requires; mental health issues including anxiety and negative self-image; substance abuse; the fraught status of those seeking refuge; and how the needs of one conflict with the needs of the many.  

For the weight of its themes, The Pliant Girls is notably balanced and buoyant. Director Ileana Blustein and her cast find humor and joy throughout the play, from a grotesque five-headed patriarch to the quirky but genuine romance between Leta and Kem (Jordan Brown), an affably nervy overthinker. And Blustein sculpts beautiful stage pictures, arranging her actors with the grace and precision of a marble frieze. Some of the choral moments and transitions are a little stagey—a pitfall in a play with classic theater bones—but the shifts in tone, from tender to terror, from love to loss, are razor-sharp. 

Set designer Simone Schneeberg assembles crates, cushions, and cabinets to create a plinth for each sister, who remain on stage nearly the entire show. Rough planks of wood span the back of the set—are they a wall or a ship, a boundary, or a new beginning? Hailey LaRoe’s moody, atmospheric lights (assisted by Daelyn Funk) and Lex Allenbaugh’s eclectic sound design, full of lapping waves, classical strings, and pealing electric guitars, aid the production’s tonal shifts. Customer Charlie Vankirk dresses the sisters in wedding gowns from across the millennia.     

The Pliant Girls is kin with a recent spate of Greek myths retold from their overlooked women’s point of view. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Madeline Miller, and Natalie Haynes have given voice to silenced wives, witches, and warriors. Signature Theatre’s stunning Penelope in April 2024 showed how Odysseus’ long-suffering wife wasn’t simply sitting around awaiting his return. 

All these retellings urgently expose the dangers of writing someone else’s story or letting someone write your own, as well as the release that comes from letting go of stories that are no longer, or never were, yours.    

Produced by Theatre Prometheus in association with Nu Sass Productions, The Pliant Girls, written by Meghan Brown and directed by Ileana Blustein, runs through Nov. 9 at the Montgomery College Cultural Arts Center. nusass.com. $10–$30, with a Pay What You Can option. Masks are required, but also provided, at every performance.

Washington, D.C., has been called many things over the centuries, from swamp to asylum, from the District of Crime to Dream City. While these descriptions are debatable, there’s one adjective so obvious it might come as a surprise: Shakespearean.   

“We have per capita more Shakespeare in this city than in any other city in the United States,” says Drew Lichtenberg, the associate producer of Shakespeare Theatre Company, the District’s marquee classical theater company. “We could rival Stratford-upon-Avon,” he adds, referencing the Bard’s birthplace. 

Discovering why the District has become William Shakespeare’s American home and how Shakespeare Theatre Company contributed were twin motivations behind Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company, a new book about the company’s history published by the prestigious U.K.-based Bloomsbury in September. Lichtenberg co-authored the book with Deborah C. Payne, a professor of literature at American University and a research consultant for STC from 2000 to 2009. 

“We wanted it to be a scholarly and critical history that was well researched and, at times, evaluative of the successes and the failures of different eras of the company,” Lichtenberg says. Lichtenberg and Payne, both accomplished scholars, pored over history books, articles, reviews, programs, and other sources to uncover a web of cultural, political, and economic forces, as well as civic and artistic leaders, that have shaped the course of theater in America in general and STC specifically. 

From the colonial and Founding eras to today, one particularly strong theme the pair discovered is the cyclical fight over arts funding and the values of the political combatants, from those who champion public subsidies for the arts and those who cut them from budgets. “We go into not just how each political administration sponsors change but specific economic policies,” Payne says.  

When STC began in 1970, it was an impecunious program at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s led the Folger to attempt to close the theater for good, which in turn sparked congressional hearings in what the Folger’s then-artistic producer John Neville-Andrews dubbed the “The War of 1985.” The Folger backstepped, restoring enough funds to hire the New York impresario Michael Kahn in 1986. Six years later, the company split off.   

Kahn was the right man at the right time. Not only was he a gifted director of Shakespeare, he was incredibly skilled at dealing with Washington power brokers, according to Payne. President Bill Clinton’s economic policy, which incentivized private-public partnerships, helped fund STC’s first downtown theater, the Lansburgh Theatre (today the Michael R. Klein Theatre) at 8th and E streets NW. “The city was giving developers huge tax breaks if they dedicated a portion of their building to the arts because the NEA wasn’t handing out much money,” Payne says. In the next decade, the money flowing in and through D.C. from the country’s “War on Terror” helped build STC’s second downtown theater, Harman Hall which opened in 2007 with an $89 million, entirely privately funded price tag. “After 9/11, there’s this rapid period of building these monolithic glass buildings for the arts,” says Payne. “Lots of money was washing through D.C., and Bush’s policies made money really cheap.” 

By the time Kahn retired in 2019, STC had grown into one of the premier classical theaters in the country, with a $16 million annual budget and a star-studded and hit-filled production history, and, according to Lichtenberg, a bipartisan subscriber base that included Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel Alito. 

To celebrate the book’s publication, STC will host a conversation featuring the co-authors, Kahn, and his successor, the British director Simon Godwin, on Oct. 15. The event will be moderated by the New York Times’ political and pop culture columnist Maureen Dowd. 

Beyond the stage, Payne and Lichtenberg see other ways D.C. earns its Shakespearean bona fides, including how frequently his name and works appear in discussions of politics. “Washington is a city of desire, of incredible power shifts, and Shakespeare writes about these, fulfilled and unfilled, better than any playwright,” Payne says. “He gives you a language, a lens, to describe what is almost indescribable.”  

“Shakespeare is a great forum,” Lichtenberg concurs. “His plays are great opportunities to stage a conversation about ideas that might be challenging to people in power. We saw that with STC’s recent productions of Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth. There’s a sense that Shakespeare, who wrote about the human condition, has a lot to say about the problems that our country is going through now.” 

As for STC’s next act, both authors point to Godwin’s ambitions to make the company not just a regional or national company, but an international one. After 2020’s Save Our Stages Act, the largest federal funding of the arts since the New Deal, helped keep the theater’s doors open, Godwin is reinventing the model of what a classical theater can be, complete with Broadway-level production values and possible commercial transfers. The Britney Spears musical Once Upon a One More Time played at STC in 2021 before opening on Broadway two years later. What a brave new world, baby. 

The book talk with Drew Lichtenberg, Deborah C. Payne, Michael Kahn, and Simon Godwin, moderated by Maureen Dowd, starts at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 15 at Klein Theatre. shakespearetheatre.org. $25.

In the elevator to the upstairs cocktail hour, a retired general meets a Supreme Court Justice. Make that an actor who has played a Supreme Court Justice. Before dinner, a troupe of young actors in fancy dress swan by a local politician looking for flesh to press. Later, a scholar breaks bread with an economist and a journalist, while a lawyer and a consultant share center stage. Such scenes—such strange but interesting bedfellows—could only happen in D.C., and likely only at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s annual gala, which took place on April 15 at the Anthem. Make that the Ides of April. 

Titled “All the World’s a Stage: Celebrating the US/UK Relationship,” the gala mixed artists, politicians, and supporters to raise funds for what STC’s artistic director Simon Godwin believes can become “the best classical theater in America,” he told the audience. Over a lively four hours, the company highlighted its educational offerings and honored a trio of stars—Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), two-time Tony and three-time Emmy Award winner Judith Light, and John Lithgow (Dexter, Third Rock from the Sun)—as well as Sen. Amy Klobuchar. 

The evening’s theme was clear in large and small choices, from emcee Katty Kay, a British-born journalist who covers U.S. policies for the BBC, to the fish-and-chips appetizers. In her opening remarks, Kay mused on the similarities between the Bard’s body of work and the United States, calling both “generous” and “inclusive,” and able to accommodate multiple points of view. 

Lit by hundreds of tabletop candles and low-hanging chandeliers, the Anthem, with its ground floor and surrounding galleries, evoked the Globe and Blackfriars, William Shakespeare’s original venues. The stage was washed in dramatic red and purple lighting as a small band played. Banners bearing portraits of well-known Shakespearean actors flew high above the stage. An army of chefs, servers, technicians, and staff kept the food, wine, and program on a steady course. (The caterer’s prep tables ran more than 20 yards.) 

The highlights of the evening were the honorees speeches. After receiving the Shakespeare Theatre Company Lifetime Achievement Award, Light took a moment to recognize her presenter and Doubt co-star Laverne Cox, saying to the artist and activist, “You are the epitome of Shakespeare’s words, ‘To thine own self be true.’” Light thanked longtime STC artistic director Michael Kahn, who directed her in the company’s 2001 production of Hedda Gabler, for his support and friendship. “Life is not about what you get, but what you give,” Light said.

Sen. Klobuchar received STC’s inaugural Sea Change Award in honor of her work stewarding the Save Our Stages bill, alongside Texas Sen. John Cornyn. The act, signed into law in December 2020, sent more than $15 billion to performing arts venues during the COVID shutdown. Klobuchar credits the bill with saving more than 12,000 venues of all sizes across the country. While the audience applauded the bipartisanship effort, D.C.’s own Audrey Fix Schaefer went unmentioned. Schaefer—the communications director for I.M.P., which runs numerous venues around town including the Anthem, and board vice president of National Independent Venue Association—was instrumental in getting the idea off the ground. 

Varma, who’s currently starring as Lady M in STC’s production of Macbeth, received the Will Shakespeare Award for Classical Acting, presented to her by her co-star Ralph Fiennes. Upon receiving the award, the British actor confessed to previously turning down many great Shakespearean roles for fear of failing to play them “correctly.” But when Godwin approached her to play the murderous would-be queen, she decided to take the character’s own advice: “Screw your courage to the sticking place/ And [you’ll] not fail.” 

In a funny and touching speech, STC Lifetime Achievement honoree Lithgow admitted to “betraying [his] birthright.” His father, Arthur Lithgow, was a pioneer of the regional theater movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The younger Lithgow grew up playing small roles (with “one-syllable names” like Pinch) at his father’s Shakespeare festivals, before turning down stage opportunities to pursue television and film. Although he went on to earn great acclaim for his portrayal of King Lear at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park in 2014, there is one role Lithgow would love another crack at—the fairy Mustardseed in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. He jokingly suggested Godwin direct an age-swapped version of the play, with children in the leads and “mature” actors—perhaps himself, Varma, Light, and Fiennes—as the fairies.

No truly Shakespearean event would be complete without a song. Nova Y. Payton, backed by members of the Howard University choir, performed “There’s a Place for Us” from West Side Story, the American musical based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Payton’s stirring rendition brought the audience to their feet and made leaving the event such sweet sorrow. 

Why did the Devil break into the church? To turn on the lightboard. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone involved in Rorschach Theatre’s 2003 production of The Master and Margarita. When the sexton never arrived to open the sanctuary doors, the Prince of Darkness took matters into his own claws. The church in question was the now-derelict Calvary Casa United Methodist Church in Columbia Heights. The Devil was, of course, a character played by company member Tim Getman. He may or may not have needed an arc welder to get in. 

This fiendish break-in is just one of hundreds of beguiling moments in Rorschach’s 25-year history. Founded in 1999 by a group of 20-something Gen X artists interested in putting a new spin on theater making, the company is known for creating visceral productions of thought-provoking plays in “found spaces”—locations they had to transform into performance venues through imagination and grit. Two and half decades later, “expected” and “easy” have never been part of Rorschach’s plans or mission.     

“What did we know 25 years ago?” Randy Baker, 49, says from a chair in the company’s current home, a former Rochester Big & Tall store on Connecticut Avenue NW. “We were just a bunch of friends getting together to make theater.” One of those friends, Baker’s co-artistic director and fellow founder, Jenny McConnell Frederick, 47, sits behind a laptop nearby, preparing for the night’s rehearsal. “But what’s actually funny is we continue to aspire to a lot of the early, lofty goals we set in our early 20s,” says Baker.

When Baker and McConnell Frederick moved to D.C. in 1997 (the latter having grown up in Northern Virginia, the former mostly overseas), they quickly discovered their options for working in theater were “limited to musicals, Shakespeare, and garden variety dramas and comedies,” according to McConnell Frederick. Hungry for darker, wilder, and more challenging productions, the two new friends (along with designer Jordana Adelman and director Jason Gots) launched Rorschach Theatre in July 1999 with a production of Eugene O’Neill’s expressionistic classic The Hairy Ape. The program’s opening line simply stated: “People are bored.” 

To create the play’s clanking, claustrophobic setting—a ship’s coal rooms—the company crammed actors and audiences side-by-side on the stage of Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center’s Theater J (where Baker and McConnell Frederick worked at the time). In her review for City Paper, Jessica Dawson dryly advised bringing a raincoat to protect from the actors’ sweat.   

“The best work Rorschach does is when it’s transforming a found space,” shares Scott McCormick, who has appeared in 14 shows with the company, and previously ran its marketing and communications. Although his last show was in 2015, he’s still affiliated with Rorschach. “This is why we’re different from everybody else.”

Looking through the list of Rorschach’s past performance spaces is like peeling back layers of D.C.’s 21st-century development: Dupont’s EDCJCC, just two years after being shut for nearly three decades; the Millennium Arts Center (today’s Rubell Museum in Southwest); a greenhouse at a former home improvement store that is now home to Tenleytown’s Target; a pre-Civil War stable turned art gallery in Blagden Alley when the area was still a low-rent haven for artists; Calvary Baptist Church in the “pre-Target” Columbia Heights, says McConnell Frederick, who remembers only being able to suggest 7-Eleven for a preshow bite because of the lack of options). Rorschach also did stints at the performing arts centers at Georgetown University and H Street’s Atlas Performing Arts Center, as well as the Great Lawn at Walter Reed, less than a year after the space opened to the public in late 2020. Today it’s situated in that aforementioned former retail storefront in the Golden Triangle neighborhood.   

The choice to transform spaces rather than find existing theaters came from “a lack of resources and the freedom to not be confined by what was normal,” says McConnell Frederick. While she admits to occasionally considering a permanent home, she saw the difficulties of finding, renovating, and maintaining a venue when she worked for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company during their search in the early 2000s. 

That freedom proved fruitful in other measures of success as well. Most of Rorschach’s contemporaries did not survive long enough to find such hard-won stability. In a Post article from 2000, writer Lloyd Rose surveys the field of small D.C. theaters at the turn of the millennium. Of the nine companies profiled, only Rorschach remains. Many others have come and gone over the same quarter century.  

Baker and McConnell Frederick attribute Rorschach’s durability, in part, to their shared leadership model. “If either one of us had been the only leader, it would have been easier to find a point in life where it became too much,” says McConnell Frederick. “We’ve been able to have a balance, live our lives. Randy went to graduate school. I had a kid. Whether for the practical purposes of accomplishing things or for mental health reasons, having a partner has really added to our longevity.”    

That’s not to say the duo don’t have their share of disagreements, but they have developed their way of working together. “People sometimes think good collaboration is always agreeing,” Baker says. “But the challenging of each other often breeds not just compromise but also new ideas. I have this idea. You have this idea. Maybe neither of us is right. Maybe it’s the third idea.”  

Myth, magic, and mayhem are frequent elements in Rorschach’s repertoire. European avant-garde plays mix with stage adaptations of classic novels and beloved B-movies. The company also regularly produces works by a diverse cadre of contemporary writers, including Tony Kushner, Sheila Callaghan, Qui Nguyen, Neil Gaiman, José Rivera, and Alexandra Petri. Steve Yockey, best known for developing the HBO Max series The Flight Attendant, contributed to the company’s current Psychogeographies Project, a narrativized self-tour of D.C.’s hidden history told through monthly chapters mailed to participants. Its latest installment, the cultish and cryptozoological Eldritch Investigations, is available now. 

“The script needs to surprise you,” Baker says, explaining how the artistic directors select projects. “The story can’t be entirely expected.”  

“We don’t want you to see the ending coming,” adds McConnell Frederick. “You read enough scripts, it becomes harder and harder to find ones that surprise. But they’re still out there.”

Getting scripts that offer those surprises often present another challenge that Rorschach has come to expect: “The playwrights Rorschach gravitates toward always write one impossible thing into their script that we have to figure out how we’re going to stage,” says McCormick.

Part of Rorschach’s allure has been their ability to stage those “impossible” moments with relatively shallow pockets. Early on, budgets were “scant,” to use McConnell Frederick’s word. While outside artists were paid, the company’s leaders and company members volunteered their time, usually while holding full time jobs at other theaters. Props and other scenic elements were begged, built, borrowed, or found. Everyone pitched in onstage, backstage, and front-of-house.    

“In many ways, we turned that scarcity mentality into an asset,” says McConnell Frederick. “We empowered ourselves to think a little bit differently because we were unable to go to a store to buy something.” 

Such resourcefulness led critics to praise the company for regularly whipping up theatrical magic. In her Washington Post review of the company’s 2001 production of The Illusion, Dolores Whiskeyman called the production “an inspired work—proof that limited resources do not stymie great talents, any more than big budgets can squeeze works of genius from mediocre minds.” 

That’s not to say there weren’t missteps—productions that drew negative reviews or kept patrons away. But the company knows they cannot achieve success by ensuring against failure. “Rorschach takes a risk on every play we do, with the idea that we’re going to find an audience,” McCormick says. “If we don’t find an audience for it, we’re going to go through some lean times. But every now and then we’re going to make a hit. I think to myself, how boring it is not to take a risk.”

Through busts and booms, the company’s financial picture has improved over time. Company members began drawing pay in the mid-2000s, though today Rorschach does not have a standing company. Each production is individually staffed. More recently, Baker and McConnell Frederick were able to fulfill another of their early aspirations—working at Rorschach, and only Rorschach, full time. “I went full time in 2018, and Randy in 2022,” says McConnell Frederick. They are joined by a full-time general manager John Ralls and a part-time production manager, Germar Townsend. 

With more resources, the company has expanded the scope of their work while keeping true to their founding vision of intimate and immediate theater. Last summer’s hit Angel Number Nine, following the trials of an indie band on tour, seated the audience in a meticulously crafted two-level dive bar (complete with drinks and merch for sale), while the story and original musical numbers, written by Shawn Northrip, happened all around them. The space also featured listening booths with playlists curated by local music mavens and an exhibit covering the sounds of D.C., from hardcore to go-go.  

“Now that we have a little more stability, we sometimes have to remind each other we don’t have to scavenge,” McConnell Frederick says. 

Now among the city’s seasoned theater professionals, McConnell Frederick and Baker are working to provide opportunities for the next generation of disruptive artists. Rorschach’s annual Klecksography initiative commissions early and emerging artists of all ages to create and stage new works based on visual art in just 10 days. The event both helps Rorschach stock its own roster of possible collaborators and exposes new local talent to representatives of other area theaters. Applications for the 2024 installment, which will take place in early February, closed in December. 

When asked about Rorschach’s next 25 years, McConnell Frederick says: “Thinking forward, it’s hard to say what’s going to come. It’s not that we’re not strategic, but we’re nimble enough to follow our instincts and explore an opportunity when it strikes. We are unafraid to look into the future and whatever it becomes.”