Women in moral crisis

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Getting one Wendy Wasserstein world premiere is coup enough, but two new plays from the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning writer is a whole lotta Wendy.

Theater J is the lucky recipient of this Wasserstein windfall, hosting the premiere of "Welcome to My Rash" and "Third" currently at the Goldman Theater at the Washington Jewish Community Center through Feb. 15.

The plays have had an association with Washington since 2002, when Miss Wasserstein participated in a reading at Arena Stage's Old Vat Room as part of a new works program run by Wendy Goldberg, who happens to be good buddies with the young director of "Rash" and "Third," Michael Barakiva.

"I was immediately struck by its candor, its fragility," says Theater J's artistic director, Ari Roth, of "Welcome to My Rash." After the reading, he approached Miss Wasserstein with the idea of doing a lab production of the play. "She checked us out, came down for our Association for Jewish Theatre conference in March of 2003, and soon after gave us permission to produce the world premiere," Mr. Roth continues.

So taken was Miss Wasserstein by the notion of being away from the snooping, pressure-cooker environment of New York theater that she wrote a companion piece to "Rash" titled "Third." The two hour-long plays are intimate portraits of middle-aged women: a writer and a teacher (both portrayed by Obie Award-winning actress Kathryn Grody), who trust their brains, but when it comes to moral struggles they find themselves surprisingly vulnerable.

"They both reflect one another, are different sides of a person," says Mr. Barakiva, who directed both the reading at Arena and the premieres at Theater J. "And the plays are like Wendy -- very warm and wise."

In "Welcome to My Rash," Flora Berman (Miss Grody) is a fiction writer battling a host of phantom medical maladies. She forms an offbeat friendship with her doctor, Varajan Kipling (Bill Grimmette, an Arena Stage veteran) while undergoing a series of highly experimental treatments. The doctor visits are interspersed with whacked-out Demerol-induced dream sequences.

The play is quasi-autobiographical, based on the experiences of Miss Wasserstein's sister, who died of cancer; and the playwright herself who has had an assortment of ills, including the neurological ailment Bell's palsy since the birth of her daughter a few years ago.

"'Rash' is certainly not about Bell'spalsy or cancer, but more about dealing with physical and psychological dilemmas that hit you out of the blue," says Miss Grody, who is the wife of actor Mandy Patinkin. "There is a delicious ambiguity to this play that I like -- it has a real-life ending to all the medical stuff, not a happy ending or a tragic ending."

"Third" features an old friend of Flora's, professor Laurie Jameson, who teaches at a smugly liberal college. Laurie's preconceived notions and hidden biases are exposed when one of her students, an ultraconservative jock named Woodson, writes a sensitive essay. She simply cannot believe Woodson capable of writing something so full of insight, and accuses him of plagiarism. The two clash over politics, Shakespeare, and campus culture.

"This is a midlife crisis where the main character reinvents herself and lets go of bitterness, a scenario that is very common with male characters but rarely seen in female roles," Mr. Barakiva notes.

It has taken 20 years for Miss Grody to work with the playwright, with whom she is casual friends. "I met her more than two decades ago when she was working on 'Uncommon Women and Others' at the O'Neill Theatre Conference," she says. "We said we wanted to work together some day, but I didn't think it would take this long."

It was worth the wait. "Just playing not one -- but two -- middle-aged women on the stage is a rare event," Miss Grody says. "Middle-aged women are the largest demographic in the country, and no one feels the need to pay attention to them. It's a real pet peeve of mine, and in fact, the two characters in the play talk about how concerned they are about disappearing. Both of them say, 'I don't want to become invisible' as they face the aging process."

There is a hot-flash dream sequence in "Rash," Mr. Barakiva points out. "When have you ever seen that onstage? Wendy writes plays for the women who often feel left out of pop culture. Seeing a strong, formidable woman like Flora compromised by illness is a powerful experience, but not a sad or pathetic one. Both plays are about regeneration and renewal."

Miss Grody, a baby boomer in her 40s, believes that "our culture denies turning 50. It is shocking and hard that the world just wants you to go away once you're out of your 40s, you have a life and a sense of humor after 50, even though the culture won't tell you that. I spoke at a plastic surgery convention last year -- I am anti-plastic surgery -- and I looked like a completely different species. I was the only person there with facial expressions. Everyone else was Botox-ed to blandness."

Aside from aging and facing invisibility, the two women characters "have this evening of talking about the rest of their lives and what are they going to do with the time they have left," says Miss Grody. "Should they start over? Can they start over? The plays are all about letting go of regrets and disappointments and seeing what is new."

While both "Rash" and "Third" deal with age, Miss Grody did not have a problem being one of the company's elder stateswomen. "I am really enjoying being older in this company, I feel like I have a certain gravitas that I have earned. Being older means that I have less defenses, less garbage to get to the work."

Gravitas aside, Miss Grody says she identifies more with the Flora Berman character. "She is more profoundly unsure and insecure than Laurie, who has never had an unconfident moment in her life," she says. "But both women experience trouble with connecting emotionally and resistance to change. In that way, they echo each other, which is fun to play."