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The Roach Eaters: The Pitchfork Disney Returns to D.C.

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The play under construction in Capitol Hill Arts Workshop’s 50-set black box space is a one-act that when it opens, two weeks after this rehearsal, should take about 90 minutes to perform. But actor/director Jack Rento and his scene partner, Em Whitworth, have spent the better part of an hour working out just the first four pages. 

Whitworth looks like she’s dressed for a workout; Rento, for a cookout. Neither player is quite off-book yet. Whitworth, whose marked-up paperback edition of the script is always within arm’s reach, occasionally calls to stage manager Caroline Joy Johnson, watching silently with her laptop open from a corner of the room, for a line. Rento’s copy is on his phone. Through repetition, their dialogue quickly lodges itself even in an observer’s untrained ear. But the rewards of being allowed to eavesdrop on a scene as it’s being workshopped like this, if you’re any kind of a theater person, are the questions and suggestions the collaborators lob to one another when they break character.

Rento: “I can see you setting the trap here. And I don’t want to see you set the trap.”

Whitworth: “It’d be nice if she’s weirdly strong.”

Their shared enterprise is Philip Ridley’s gnarly 1990 psychodrama The Pitchfork Disney, the show credited with inaugurating the in-yer-face-theatre movement—a boomlet primarily in 1990s England wherein naturalistic acting and sociopolitical themes took a backseat to surrealism, provocation, and raw exploration of humanity’s darker nature. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company staged the play’s American debut in 1995, but no local company has revived it since. The talented Mr. Ridley’s many subsequent plays have gotten minimal attention in the region, though Signature Theatre did a memorable production of his NSFW two-hander Tender Napalm nine years ago. 



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