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Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
HEY, ISN’T THAT . . . ?
Ludacris lunching Tuesday at Ben’s
Chili Bowl with Big Tigger — sitting at the same back table occupied last week
by Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni-
Sarkozy, and talking about the 2010 Census. No, really: The rapper was in town (with his young daughter on her spring break) as celebspokesman to urge urbanites to mail in their census forms. After a stint on Tig’s WPGC-FM show, the group surfaced at Ben’s. Two chili dogs for Luda, two hot dogs for the radio host.
Ludacris: Mail it in.
Kissinger, left, and Powell.
THIS JUST IN
Movie night at the White House —
if you like your flicks really serious. President Obama hosted a screening Tuesday of the documentary “Nuclear Tipping Point”; expected guests
included narrator Michael Douglas, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, Sam Nunn and Colin Powell.
Reggie Love is a happy Blue Devil
The happiest man at the White
House on Tuesday was presidential aide Reggie Love, who won bragging rights when his beloved Duke won the NCAA men’s basketball crown Monday night. An “ecstatic” Love, who played on the school’s championship team in 2001, showed up at work in his winner’s cap from that year and a Final Four T-shirt sent by Robert Gibbs’s mother, who works at Duke. No gloating (Gibbs noted that Love was being “weirdly humble”) despite the fact President Obama predicted that the Blue Devils wouldn’t even make it to the Final Four — but the winning team’s traditional White House visit should be fun to watch.
Battling over the clothes off Simpson’s back
T
The clothes Simpson (with F. Lee Bailey, left, and Johnnie Cochran) wore at his verdict are headed to the Newseum.
he clothes O.J. Simpson wore the day he was acquitted of murder in 1995 were rejected by the Smithsonian but will still find awelcoming home in Washington — with the permanent collection of the Newseum. “It makes perfect sense for us,” said
BOB JORDAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Reggie Love was No. 42 when he played on the Duke squad in 2001.
Carrie Christoffersen, the
Newseum’s curator of collections. The Simpson verdict was viewed live on TV by millions of people; his photo ran on almost every front page in the United States. Eventually, she said, the clothes could join an exhibit with other trial artifacts — press passes, cartoons, news-gathering technology from that dawn-of-the-Web era. “There’s just no denying this was one
of the trials of the century,” she said. For more than a decade, the tan Armani suit, white shirt and gold tie were at the center of a legal battle
between Mike Gilbert, Simpson’s
former manager, and Fred Goldman, father of the man Simpson was charged with killing. Goldman later won a civil suit against the ex-NFL pro. The clothes were valuable, if bizarre, bits of memorabilia — among the items Simpson was seeking in the Las Vegas heist-gone-awry that now has him in prison for at least nine years, and ones the Goldman family did not want to see turn a profit for anyone.
When Gilbert and Goldman resolved their differences by agreeing
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2010
LOVE, ETC.
Married: Terrence McNally and
to donate the clothes to a museum, they opened a new quandary: Which museum? The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History quickly rejected the suit last month because it didn’t strongly “represent” the historic moment, officials said, skirting questions of any ewww factor.
Both the Newseum and downtown’s National Museum of Crime and Punishment raised their hands. On Tuesday, the Newseum announced it had prevailed. Gilbert did not return our calls; he told the Associated Press that he would hand- deliver the outfit next week and that he hopes it “will help people ponder the legal system and celebrity.”
MYUNG J. CHUN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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BACKSTAGE
An ‘old stage horse’ who’s back in the saddle
by Jane Horwitz
“Of course I will always do anything
the Mighty Kahn asks me to do,” Eliza- beth Ashley jokes in that husky drawl of hers. The Broadway veteran will take on the title role in “Mrs. Warren’s Profes- sion” for Michael Kahn’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, where the George Ber- nard Shaw play runs June 8-July 11. Dixie Carter, who was originally cast in the role, is recovering from surgery and can’t be ready for rehearsals in May. “Old stage horses” is how Ashley de- scribes herself and Carter. She seems philosophical about having reached 70. “I’m always grateful when I can get verti- cal,” she jokes. Ashley lives a quiet life in Manhattan now. “When I do a play, I lit- erally cannot do anything else. I sort of stay in my bed and go to work and that’s it.” No more high life. “I served my time for four decades as a night-stalking sav- age. I don’t have to do it anymore.” Ashley worked plenty during her sav-
age years. She originated the bride’s role (opposite Robert Redford) in “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963, starred in the 1974 Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” directed by Kahn, and played Cle- opatra to Rex Harrison’s Caesar in Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” in 1977. Most re- cently she appeared in “Dividing the Es- tate” and “August: Osage County” on Broadway. After “Mrs. Warren,” she’ll do Edward Albee’s new “Me, Myself & I” in New York. At the Shakespeare, she starred in “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1998) and “The Little Foxes” (2002). Shaw’s heroine Mrs. Warren is an up- scale madam who has raised her daugh- ter in privilege and kept her clueless as to Mummy’s line of work. “I like that she’s very smart,” Ashley says of Mrs. Warren. “She’s had to live her life in a man’s world, in disguise, and with slyness and cleverness and deception. And she has done that with principle and ethics.” Mrs. Warren learns her child has grown into a rather priggish young woman. Ashley identifies. “Being an old whore is not that different from being an ac- tress. . . . We’re very, very similar and in- variably our Waterloos come with moth- erhood . . . because it’s almost impossible to do both and have your children like you.” And, she adds, “even if they like you, they usually don’t approve of you.”
Artzberger’s ‘Reasons’
Ryan Artzberger defends his charac-
ter, the sweet-natured but clueless Greg in Neil LaBute’s “Reasons to Be Pretty.” In Studio Theatre’s production (running
Rosita. The play’s message remains relevant,
1998 PHOTO BY CAROL ROSEGG
RETURN FLIGHT:Elizabeth Ashley, with Michael Hayden in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” is onstage again in D.C.
MICHAEL K. WILKINSON
DOUBLE TAKE:Belen Oyala-Rebaza, Angel Torres and one of the puppets featured in GALA’s production of Lorca’s “El Retablillo de Don Cristobal.”
through May 16), the lights come up on Greg fending off an epically profane ti- rade from his girlfriend Steph (Margot White). His sin? He was overheard de- scribing Steph’s face as just “regular” when compared with a “hot” co-worker’s. It was his colleague Kent (Thom Miller) who brought up the subject, and it was Kent’s wife, Carly (Teresa Stephenson), who overheard and snitched to Steph. Greg, maintains Artzberger, was just
saying “a loving thing. He was saying, ‘She’s just normal-looking, but I wouldn’t trade her for anything.’ ” Steph, however, doesn’t see it that way, and therein hangs the relationship roller coaster that is “Reasons to Be Pretty.” Artzberger, who played the title role in
“Pericles” at the Shakespeare for director Mary Zimmerman in 2004, likens play- ing the highly contemporary LaBute to acting the Bard. “I’ve compared playing Shakespeare to riding a surfboard,” he explains. “You just get on and let it play you, and so, if you are receptive and re- laxed enough to go where it takes you, then you can surf. But if you’re not ready to turn on a dime, as it will do, it betrays you and you’re in the water. The same
thing is true of this play. . . . You have to be ready to shift gears in a split second.”
Political puppets
A puppet play with roots in Spanish peasant culture, Italian commedia dell’arte and Spanish theater’s golden age opens Thursday at GALA Hispanic
Theatre. And don’t assume it’s for kids. One female puppet will briefly lift her petticoats to reveal anatomical (if not po- litical) correctness. Federico García Lorca’s “El Retablillo de Don Cristobal/The Farce of Don Cris- tobal and the Maiden Rosita” will run through May 2 at GALA’s Tivoli Square venue in Columbia Heights. The play was written and performed in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War to entertain Republican (i.e., anti-Franco, anti-fascist) forces and the Abraham Lin- coln Brigade of American volunteers who fought with them. The villain of the piece, the horny old landowner Don Cris- tobal (a cousin to the buffoonish comme- dia villain Pantalone), represents the forces of dictatorship, says co-director Adhemar Bianchi. The object of Don Cristobal’s lust is the immodest young
says Bianchi, and the piece remains more art than agitprop. With GALA’s Artistic Director Hugo Medrano translating, Bianchi says, “there are characters in our world right now that respond to fascism and exploitation.” His daughter and co- director, Ximena, also co-designed the puppets. “It has to do a lot with the concept of popular peasant people,” says Ximena, referring to the “style of knocking, run- ning around, punching” that the puppets engage in. Her father interjects that the style “is taken from the old rural farces” inspired by Italian players who toured Spain centuries ago. Father and daughter Bianchi run a
large populist theater troupe, Grupo de Teatro Catalinas Sur, in Buenos Aires. The company grew out of a working- class neighborhood during the early 1980s, in part as a response to Argenti- na’s dictatorship at the time. The group uses, Adhemar says, “many, many differ- ent expressions, like puppetry, acting, music, circus techniques,” as well as street theater, and remains rooted in the neighborhood as a community organiza- tion. Ximena demonstrated for Backstage the three types of puppets in the show, all to be manipulated and voiced by actors. They include traditional hand puppets, larger “table” puppets and nearly hu- man-size stand-up puppets. “It’s very funny,” adds Medrano, “because some- times you see Rosita as a glove puppet, and then [she] just disappears and reap- pears onstage as a big puppet.”
style@washpost.com
Horwitz is a freelance writer.
Tom Kirdahy Tuesday in Washington. The Tony-winning playwright, 71, and lawyer, 46, tied the knot on the banks of the Potomac near the Kennedy Center, which is running a series of McNally’s plays. The couple had a civil union in Vermont seven years ago but wanted a marriage. The Rev. George Walker of the Peoples Congregational United Church of Christ performed the ceremony — Kirdahy read a scene from McNally’s play “Corpus Christi” — and actress Tyne Daly served as a witness. The couple live in New York City.
Split: Jim Carrey, 48, and Jenny
McCarthy, 37, after five years together — they jointly announced via Twitter. He tweeted, “I’m grateful 4 the many blessings we’ve shared and I wish her the very best! S’okay!”; she said she would “always keep Jim as a leading man in my heart.”
McNally, left, and Kirdahy, right, tied the knot, with help from Walker.
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
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