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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.
Whitworth and Rento were strangers before playwright/director (and Helen Hayes Award-winning actor) Eric Hissom cast them in his comedy Rude Mechanics at the Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, New York earlier this year. But the 20 somethings became fast friends, finding their tastes (macabre) and their ambitions (DIY playmaking) to be simpatico. Today they’re the artistic director and managing director, respectively, of the upstart startup Red Rat Theatre, and co-stars in a play that hasn’t been performed locally in a generation.
Whitworth had already built a varied stage resume in D.C., working at most of the big houses and turning in show stopping performances in risky shows like the now-defunct Forum Theatre’s “Nasty Women Rep” in 2017 and Nathan the Wise at the Folger last year. (She also played Dorothy in 2018’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at Synetic Theatre, where she was a company member for a spell.) She’d begun a relocation to New York and was thinking beyond just being an actor-for-hire.
Rento, who’d graduated from Syracuse University with an acting degree in the spring of 2021, had already directed an outdoor production of The Pitchfork Disney during the darkest days of the pandemic, while theaters were still shuttered just as they’d been closed during plague outbreaks centuries earlier. As it happens, Rob Bundy, who directed that Clinton-era Woolly production, was a professor of Rento’s at Syracuse. (New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised the “disciplined flamboyance” of Bundy’s direction in February 1995, writing, “this production captures a deep cultural ambivalence about sex, disease and violence that is both ageless and particular to our time.”)
Pitchfork centers on Haley and Presley Stray, emotionally scarred twins who’ve isolated themselves in a dingy East London apartment since the deaths of their parents some years earlier. Though they’re 28 years old (just like Woolly’s Pitchfork!) they live like abandoned children, making up elaborate fairy tales for one another and surviving on chocolate bars. Well, mostly on chocolate bars—Presley, Haley’s elder by seven minutes, snarfs down a few cockroaches at one point; elsewhere, he describes frying a snake to death in a pan.
To Whitworth, who has cultivated a taste for “off-kilter, contemporary work,” Pitchfork resonated so powerfully it gave her pause. “I was like, ‘I’m almost too scared to do the show,’” she says. “It’s still kind of raw and unfiltered, not in a Saw-the-Musical kind of way, but in an in-your-face kind of way. I went to bed a little unsettled and woke up thinking I really wanted to do this.”
She and Rento contacted Ridley’s agent in London about securing the rights, and looked into booking space for the show at CHAW in 2024. Then Danny Cackley, the site’s facilities coordinator and theater chair, called Whitworth with the news that another production slated for this summer had been canceled. He couldn’t promise them next year, but he could promise them this one—if they could open in August.
“Our schedule went from nine months to three months,” Whitworth says. Working with scrappy companies like Spooky Action and Flying V had given her some familiarity with the donor base in D.C. that supports DIY, non-Equity companies, so she and Rento found four deep-pocketed “angel donors” and raised an additional $4,090 via the crowdfunding site Seed & Spark to pay the cast (James Finley and Stephen Kime also perform in the show) and designers. Whitworth’s father, who lives in Mount Vernon, Virginia, even pitched in to build the set.
While Rento and Whitworth have been too focused on getting the show on its feet in a tight timeframe, they know they want their collaboration to continue, whether that means restaging The Pitchfork Disney elsewhere or finding another piece. And while they haven’t quite decided yet whether to make D.C. or New York their home base—“Red Rat is wherever the rats are!” Whitworth quips—Rento has more or less ironed out their mission statement: “We’re attracted to shows that not many people have seen and that force people to examine the parts of themselves they don’t normally look at.”
The Pitchfork Disney runs Aug. 10–19 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. chaw.org. Contains a depiction of assault. $25.
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