Gary Tischler • October 6, 2010

Four years ago, two years ago, last year at this time, or even in the spring, if you suggested to anybody that Mayor Adrian Fenty might be behind as much as 13 to 17 percent in the polls in his re-election campaign against City Council Chairman Vincent Gray, they might have brought the guys in the white jackets for you.

This was the same Adrian Fenty who had swept into office with an unprecedented victory over Chairman Linda Cropp, winning every precinct and ward in the city, which surely spelled MANDATE in every respect.

Fenty ran on school reform. “Judge me by what we’ve accomplished there,” he said.

During the campaign, he did not say he was going to go for a mayoral takeover of the school system, which, when Mayor Anthony Williams tried it, he voted against as a Ward 4 councilmember.

But that’s exactly what he did on day one after his inauguration — he introduced legislation that gave him control over the schools, which would be run by a chancellor that he would choose once the legislation was approved.

The legislation made its way through a lengthy but thorough hearing process, shepherded effectively by Vincent Gray, who had won the council chairman race, and fully supported the takeover. At that time the mayor invited the council to be partners with him in his efforts to reform the schools.

Once the legislation was in place, Fenty selected a young, little-known educator named Michelle Rhee to be chancellor, without consulting the council or too many other persons in Washington. It was done in the clumsiest way possible — the Washington Post got the news before Chairman Gray did.

Still, Rhee came highly recommended by national figures, such as the chancellor of the New York school system, which was also in the midst of a major school overhaul. Fenty’s major effort — school reform — was about to take off. Meanwhile, the city was still thriving under his rule and developments moved forward. Under the new Chief of Police Cathy Lanier, another controversial choice, the crime rate and homicides in particular declined dramatically.

Fenty looked politically bulletproof, and in retrospect he sometimes acted like it, especially when he met opposition. He was still a young man in a hurry to get things done, but as late as a year ago Fenty’s re-election prospects looked solid, with a big money lead over any prospective candidate.

His successes and achievement stood, and still do. The school reform movement was moving — test scores were rising, although erratically, the infrastructure improved dramatically and enrollment and graduation rates were improving, although not everywhere. Recreation centers were going up. Parks were improved.

Everything was the same, and yet it wasn’t. While Gray had proved to be an effective, careful, consensus-seeking council chairman, he was no longer in tune with Fenty. He wasn’t even on his speed dial. The partnership with the council as a whole and with Gray in particular never materialized. Gray was angry about the last fall’s school firings and held hearings on them.

Rhee was often at the center of things. With Fenty backing her solidly, she moved decisively to acquire the power to make wholesale personnel decisions, firing principals, closing schools, and in the end firing teachers. She also became a national figure, a poster person for Obama and his Education Department’s reform policies. Her status culminated in a buzzed-about appearance on the cover of Time Magazine with a broom in her hand.

For Fenty there were other signs of trouble. There was a controversial contract squabble over parks and recreation projects that went to Fenty’s friends, a controversy that is still under independent investigation. There was a petty fight with the council over baseball tickets. There was an increasing perception that he wasn’t listening to regular folks in the black, poorer wards in town.

In January, the Washington Post published a startling and extensive poll it had taken which found that Washingtonians across the city were unhappy with Fenty. It was one of the more politically contradictory polls ever found. A majority liked what he had accomplished but was seriously troubled about his style and the way he got things done. They saw him as arrogant, go-it-alone, unwilling to consult with others, petty.

In short, the poll discovered what appeared to be a serious malaise about Fenty’s character and his way of running the city. Plus, a lot of the resentment was coming from the District’s primarily black wards, — 8, 7, 6, 5 and 4 — whose residents felt that Fenty was favoring white residents amid increased gentrification.

What the poll discovered was not a passion for any alternative candidate, including Gray, but a resentment
of Fenty. It was a big alarm bell. After a big win that appeared to unite the city, there was now a city that was dramatically and sharply divided.

When Gray finally announced his campaign — under the banner of “One City” — Fenty didn’t appear to be worried. He had a big advantage in campaign money, he had a record of achievement to run on, and his education centerpiece was flourishing and approved of by most residents.

But things just didn’t quite work out that way. The campaign turned into a classic paradox. People took pride in the new rec centers, the lowered homicide rate, the improved schools, and higher test scores. But the jobless mark stayed high among black residents. Gray appeared to be gaining traction and momentum. His low-key manner, his directness, his ability to achieve consensus, and his dismay at the two teacher firings gained him endorsement from labor and the chamber of commerce both.

The campaign itself became series of media events, candidate forums, blogger buzz, charges and counter-charges. The campaign overshadowed the two city-wide races for the Democratic council at-large and council chairman seats, the latter for which Gray was now ineligible.

The recent poll was a shocker to everyone. It showed that Fenty was trailing among Democratic voters by as much as 13 to 17 percent (among most likely voters), a double-digit number which looms large but is not impossible to overcome.

Fenty has come out swinging. He’s alternating from attacking Gray on his record as Human Services Director under Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, admitting his failures of “not listening, not being inclusive and promising to change,” to pushing his achievements, especially regarding school reform.

It’s hard to count Fenty out. He is, by any measure, a relentless, tireless worker, who loves working the streets and going door to door. It’s how he won his council seat, it’s how he became mayor.

But this is a peculiar campaign. The policy issues are fairly clear: the continuance of school reform with or without Michelle Rhee, who’s inserted herself into the campaign; what to do about the looming budget crisis, which rarely seems to get discussed; how to close the gaps between the haves and have nots in the city; how to create jobs and battle the perennially high jobless rates in the poorer wards; how to forge an inclusive (or not) education reform policy; how to build bridges between the executive and the council; how to maintain and create affordable housing; and where to find additional moneys.

Those are traditional issues about what and what not to do, about money and spending, schools, jobs, crime, and budget matters.

What’s not traditional is the central issue in this campaign, which made Gray a viable candidate. That’s the mayor himself. Nothing seems to excite debate more than the mayor’s style and personality — his governance image, if you will. In a televised debate, he promised to change, to be more inclusive, and to listen more. “If I don’t prevail,” he said, “I’ll have no one to blame but myself.”

A new addition this year, early voting has been going on throughout the city for days now, but the final tale will be told on Sept. 14. That’s when we’ll see what the voters have been hearing, and who they want handling the city’s future.

Gary Tischler •

What can you say about “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)” the latest play by Sarah Ruhl, now at the Woolly Mammoth Theater?

Well, let’s try “aaarrrg”, “yiiiii” “ooohhhhh”, “a – a — a — o”, or “oooohmygddd” with lots of !!!!!!!!.

?Can’t be sure that we’re exactly there, but you are going to hear female and male characters doing symphonic variations loudly on the human soul, heart and other body parts straining for release, with the assistance of an apparently ancient but very effective prop if you go to “In the Next Room”. And you’re likely to feel almost as good as the aforementioned characters do, even without a vibrator.

?You may even think that you know where this play is going. Silly you: this is a Ruhl play, and the rule with Ruhl is that you’re going to get ambushed at every turn with reveries, lyrical side trips, and unexpected behavior by almost all of the characters. Mind you, you do end up where you might wish to have things end up, but the illustration of the climax — all right, conclusion—of the play is a delicious surprise, in the way an unexpected and perfect gift is.

?With Ruhl, you also get a lot to mull over; it’s always almost as if she’s thought through the implication, past, present and future, of every situation and line. Ruhl gets context. This is a play that takes place near the end of the 1900’s, when electricity has just been invented and marketed by Thomas Edison as the harbinger of a new age. ?

We’re in Northeast America somewhere, and Dr. Givings has electricity in his house, which fuels lamps and a dandy little device which he’s more or less invented. The good doctor uses this device — a primitive vibrator — on patients (mostly women) suffering from hysteria, a common malady in the Victorian age. With these corseted women and their sexual feelings, this is done to the point where they must have had trouble breathing.

?Mrs. Givings, a creative chatterbox whose emotional and physical needs haven’t come close to being met by her husband, has had a baby but can’t supply it with sufficient milk. The doctor is busy with patients like Mrs. Daldry, suffering painfully from the effects of too much light. She’s a bundle of nerves accompanied by her husband, a gruff, controlled man with an almost immediate eye for Mrs. Givings. Away, Mrs. Daldry goes into the next room, where Dr. Givings applies his, um, mechanism with the assistance of the implacable Nurse Annie.

?Sure enough, wonders occur after the first application, and even her rigid husband notices that her cheeks have attained a rosy tone, one he has never seen before. The implications of all this are lost on the good doctor himself, who doesn’t know he’s absented himself from his wife or that he’s giving his patients releases and pleasure, as opposed to eliciting a cure. “I ‘m a scientist and a doctor,” he says. “I’m doing good. My patients have to be sick for me to apply the cure.”

?Other things go on in the next room and in the living room, where the new electric lights flicker on and off like fireflies. Mrs. Givings and her husband have decided to hire a wet-nurse for the baby, a black woman whose last child died soon after birth. The artist Leo Irving shows a walking mood swing and personification of the artist who suffers for his art so openly, you want to slap him or seduce him. Mrs. Givings falls a little for the wild-eyed artist. Mrs. Givings insists that her husband apply the vibrator to her. “I have made a mistake,” he moans, for the first time behaving as if he’s paying attention. “This is not for healthy women.” Oh, but it is, it is.

?In some ways the plot is thick and complicated; it seems often like a really smart soap opera. But its real subjects are release, freedom, and yes, love, which are the guardian angels that hover above this play constantly.

?Over the course of the play — which is often inordinately and hilariously funny in a discomfiting way — you can see the future, and you can see how men and women are human beings of gender almost irredeemably separated by a common language, to paraphrase Shaw.

?Ruhl is of course almost something of a supernova among new playwrights — and she’s found a special home at Woolly Mammoth, where her remarkable “The Clean House” was produced five years ago. This play is her most accessible, which is a good thing by my thinking.

?At Woolly, they’ve assembled a terrific cast. None are better than Katie DeBuys as the hungry, seeking, bewitching and wanting to be bewitched Mrs. Givings, around whom everything swirls like a hurricane. She’s sharp, quick, touched to the quick, quirky, seductive, eager, angry, and totally worthy. Kimberly Gilbert as the game Mrs. Daldry adds another touching comedic role to her Woolly repertoire. It’s sometimes a mystery how Gilbert does it — she seems the best kind of actress, performing as if she doesn’t realize she’s in a play.

?Director Aaron Posner, with the critical help of set designer Daniel Conway and costume designer Helen Q. Huang, has created a world for the play to function in. Physically, it moves as fast as the words and recreates a lost world or rather reclaims it for our own times.

?Go see — and hear — what goes on “In the Next Room.” You’ll be enriched.

“In the Next Room” runs through Sept. 19. [gallery ids="99195,103359" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • September 9, 2010

I talked with the actress Marsha Mason in a conference room at the administrative offices of the Shakespeare Theatre Company on Capitol Hill. On the wall were framed black and white photographs of the likes of Stacy Keach and the late Dixie Carter, both of whom had graced STC productions over the years.

Other actors, known for their movie or television work to the general public, have worked here — Kelly McGillis, Elizabeth Ashley, Hal Holbrook and Avery Brooke, among many — and now Mason, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar four times, joins what’s kind of a pantheon here. She will be portraying the Countess Rousillon in Michael Kahn’s production of Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well” which opens the STC season beginning Sept. 7 and running through Oct. 24.

“It’s not a huge part, but it’s a significant one,” Mason said. “Shakespeare wrote a beautiful part for an older woman here, she’s wise, open, a kind of role model for the heroine, Helena.”

“All’s Well” is considered one of Shakespeare’s trickier plays, chronicling a difficult romance between Helena , a radiant, smart, brave heroine who’s way too good for the swain she’s smitten with, the doltish but hunky aristocrat Bertrand. Mason herself is not intimidated.

“I know it’s got that reputation for being ‘difficult,’ but I think Michael has done a terrific job of making the play clear to us today,” she said.

She’s obviously glad to be here, to be working. The issue of women’s roles in movies, television and theater is important to her, which is not surprising given the lasting resonance of her performances, especially the harried, appealing and struggling actress in “The Goodbye Girl” opposite Richard Dreyfuss. Her professional world has changed drastically since she first set out and made her mark in it, shining at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

“Broadway is going through a very alarming phase right now,” she said. “There’s this emphasis on getting movie stars into straight plays, the idea that people won’t come without that. And that may be true — look at what happened to the revival of “‘Brighton Beach Memoirs.’”

Neil Simon’s Tony-winning play has memories and meaning for Mason. She was, after all, married to Simon for a number of years in the 1970s and divorced (amicably) in 1981. “I think everyone in the business was shocked when that closed so quickly and couldn’t be sustained. It said something about theater and Broadway, that’s for sure.”

Mason did some of her best work for Simon, especially “The Goodbye Girl,” which Simon wrote for her, along with “Chapter Two.”

“The scripts Neil wrote, they were gifts, I look at them that way,” she said. “They were certainly gifts for an actress, wonderful parts. She received Oscar nominations for them, and for “Cinderella Liberty” and “Only When I Laugh.”

With “Goodbye Girl” and with “Cinderella Liberty” she took on the mantle of a budding movie star. “I suppose that’s what was happening,” she said. “But I never really thought of myself that way. That’s Hollywood think, it’s not me. I’m an actress, always have been.”

Still, she had a movie star’s appeal: an oval, open face, dark hair, a beauty that managed to have the requisite mystery so that you wouldn’t forget her soon. The beauty and the face are still there, accessible and warm, a little more lived in, but undeniably appealing.

“The business changed,” she said. “I think every woman in Hollywood when she gets older finds the parts beginning to dry up, except maybe Meryl Streep, she can do anything. That’s what happened to me. And it’s only gotten worse, because the powers that be make movies for teenaged boys.”

In 2001, a troubled Mason decided on a major change — she bought a 250-acre farm in New Mexico, created a business, became a biodynamic farmer, while still acting in theater (“Hecuba” in Chicago), parts on television (she had a recurring role in “Frasier”) and movies (a wonderful bit as the gritty Clint Eastwood’s ex in “Heartbreak Ridge”). She wrote a book, she directed, she taught.

“I’ve done a lot of things and been a lot of things,” she said. “But I think it was time to move back east.” She returned to the theater, to New York, where she scored a success recently in a revival of “I Never Sang for My Father.”

“Working in theater is a nurturing, powerful experience,” she said. “I love being here, being part of the process. Most actors revel in the rehearsal process, it’s when you’re really connecting, really alive.”

She stays in the game and on the stage. There’s no saying goodbye for the Goodbye Girl.