Political Clout: Georgetown Graces the Stage

Now in preview performances at Arena Stage, “The City of Conversation” — Anthony Giardina’s play about a powerful Georgetown hostess and her friends, allies and family members at three critical moments in American politics — will no doubt spark conversations among audience members, especially Georgetown residents.

But it’s not like Washington and its politics and politicians haven’t been hot-button subjects for any number of books, biographies, memoirs, novels, movies, television series (hello, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and such. Writers are forever taking the pulse of Washington, its palaces of politics and the neighborhoods that thrive in its spotlight.

Only recently, an episode of “Madame Secretary,” which stars the gifted Téa Leoni in the title role of Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord, saw her professor and intelligence-agent husband battling his Georgetown neighbors over the exhaust fumes from the idling cars of her Secret Service details.

Gore Vidal’s historical novels about Washington (the city, not the Founding Father) resonate mightily, as do other less literary efforts, television shows such as “The First Family” and “Veep” and the increasingly show-buzz-like political debates in this Trumped-up age.

Movies abound: “Advice and Consent,” “The Best Man,” “Fail Safe,” “The Contender.” The stage is no stranger, either; it was a play, “First Monday in October,” after all, which gave us the first female justice of the Supreme Court, Judge Ruth Loomis, played by Jane Alexander. Also starring Henry Fonda, the show previewed at the Kennedy Center in 1977 (a few years before Sandra Day O’Connor got the nod).

Or take a look at New York recently: Bryan Cranston as LBJ and the hip-hop hit musical “Hamilton,” which portrays the man killed by the main character in Vidal’s first big historical novel, “Burr.”

Playwright Giardina remembers being inspired after reading “The Ruins of Georgetown,” a elegiac 1996 New Yorker essay by high-profile Washington player (and key advisor to the Clintons) Sidney Blumenthal. “It was about the Kennedys, and the dinner parties hosted by influential journalist Joe Alsop and his brother Stewart, or by the Grahams. It seemed like a magical time, where history was being made over table talk and in drawing rooms. And I thought, when I read it, that there had to be a play in there somewhere.”

The voluble and personable Giardina, Massachusetts-raised with an abiding interest in American politics, is one of those people who talk in sentences and paragraphs. “There was always the drama of politics, even its kind of heroic aspects — the battles between the liberal Republicans and Nelson Rockefeller against Barry Goldwater, LBJ and the Kennedys, Vietnam. There was always conflict, but I don’t think it was the kind of conflict that exists now, which seems so irreconcilable. People talked to each other before — and in this play, I wanted to show that world, but also where the roots of how the divide began to appear in a serious and personal way.”

We chatted in a conference room at Arena Stage when the company first began rehearsals for “The City of Conversations.” For Giardina, this was “kind of old-home week.” Arena produced one of his early plays in the Old Vat Room as part of its In the Process series. “I also did a commissioned adaptation of ‘An American Tragedy’ and ‘The Child.’ It was wonderful to work here then — the great Zelda [Fichandler] was so inspiring to work with. It was an electric, innovative atmosphere.”

The play actually came together after Giardina — known for writing plays based on his own experiences and a well-regarded novelist — decided to take on something at a little more distance. “Doug Hughes suggested I try something a little more out of my comfort zone, something that required me to imagine people I had no personal experience of.

“The City of Conversation” had its world premiere in 2014 at Lincoln Center Theater in New York, where it turned out to be a much-talked-about hit — not only with the locals but with visitors from Washington.

“Ralph Neas, who was the head of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights during the Bork fight came. [The Bork nomination battle is a key element in the play.] So did Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and her husband. Washingtonians did take an interest. Ironically, Sidney Blumenthal wrote to tell me he couldn’t get in — the play was sold out.”

The play also impressed Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. “Over the past 18 years, I have searched fiercely for D.C.’s voice in theater, and I’ve become convinced that our unique voice is political,” she said. “We are the city that loves to talk politics from the first moment of waking up to when our heads hit the pillow. I saw the play in New York, and the moment the play was over I contacted Anthony. I knew his play needed to be produced at Arena. This spring is the optimal time to highlight a political work, as we are all abuzz with the primaries, politicians and sound bites.”

Politics and Washington and even Georgetown have often figured strongly in the theater, but there probably hasn’t been a play quite as intimately and piercingly located in Georgetown. In “The City of Conversation,” the set — over three acts and 30 years — remains the same throughout.

“Lights come up on a living room in Georgetown. The room is well appointed, not extravagant. There should be very small signs of eccentric taste. On a credenza, an array of small framed photographs. Large windows open onto the top of a garden. Doors stage right open onto a kitchen (unseen); there is an entrance to the dining room at lower stage right. Stairs lead to a bedroom upstairs.”

That’s the description of the set in the opening scene of “The City of Conversation.” It prepares you to enter into a small place that will become a microcosm, as places like this at certain times do.

Hughes has directed a number of plays by Giardina, “Scenes from La Vie de Boheme” and “Black Forest” among them. The two have known each other for 30 years or so. “I’d say we are close friends, and we understand each other’s work as artists and friends,” said Giardina.

“You know, some people have called this a play of ideas,” Hughes told us, prior to gathering the company. “That’s a nice description, but it’s a little abstract, to think of it that way only. To me it’s a play about a family, with a very charismatic woman, the Georgetown hostess Hester Ferris, who is the center of the play, a strong woman who doesn’t just host dinners, but is part of it all, taking part. A very political person. And it takes places at critical times: on the eve of Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech, during the heated battles over the Robert Bork nomination, during which we find the family splintered, with her son’s wife a rising Republican operative taking on her mother-in-law, and then the final act, the day of the inauguration of Barack Obama.

“It’s not so much a play of ideas, as it is a play about a clash of ideas. I think that it will really resonate here, of course, but it’s a moving play, a play perhaps about who wins and loses, but also the personal cost of these kinds of conflicts.”

“The City of Conversation” is also the kind of play that reads like a novel, in the sense that it’s a page-turner; the dialogue is sharp, funny, smart, witty and knowing. You don’t have to be a wonk — or, God forbid, the new “in” job title of campaign strategist — to get what’s happening on stage. Punches are given and taken, hearts are cracked, moves are calculated in a small room in the town where the locals often think of themselves as living in the light at the center of the world, a locus that engenders mixed feelings — like living inside a global chat room with your nearest and dearest.

“Is Hester based on a particular woman in Georgetown?” Giardina pondered. “I suppose it’s more of an amalgam. There are a number of influential women, and men, who took on those roles: Katharine Graham certainly, Sally Quinn, Pamela Harriman, Evangeline Bruce. But it’s not just about Hester. I like to think it’s about us,” he said.

“The larger thing, for me, is to ask the question: how important are these things to us? Do we assume that the social change we want to see happen is only going to happen through the sacrifices of other people?”

We’ll find out. “The City of Conversation” runs through March 6. The production stars Margaret Colin (who was Eleanor Waldorf in “Gossip Girl” and portrayed Katharine Graham in the docudrama “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers”) and features Michael Simpson, who plays both Colin and Ethan Ferris.