Andy White playing with dolls in ‘Gas Station’ with Rachel Viele.
Andrew White is currently part of Performing Knowledge Project’s production of Legal Tender, which starts performances this Saturday evening at Capital Fringe. He started in DC theatre back in the day when 14th street was an area you did not necessarily want to go to. He worked a lot at Source Theatre under Bart Whiteman and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company back when they were just starting out with actors like Rick Foucheux. He has now been performing off and on for thirty years. He left acting for a while to raise a family with his wife Laura (son Ian) and concentrate on writing and teaching. Andrew made a triumphant return to the stage two years ago with a tour de force performance of Enoch Arden at Capital Fringe. This is where we first met. Taking what some call dry material and turn it into something engaging for the audience is not easy but Andrew made the piece soar. With Legal Tender he is playing multiple roles which shows off his range as a performer. He has taught at many area colleges and currently teaches history and literature at Stratford University. Here is a case where the old adage “you can go home again” really applies. Andrew started as an actor, left for a while and is now back doing what he loves. Lucky for us it worked out like that.
You were a working actor in DC back in the day when places like Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company were just getting started. You also worked under the founder of Source Theatre, Bart Whiteman. What do you remember most about the early days of DC theatre?
Besides all the wonderful plays, probably just how seedy and dangerous 14th Street was at the time. A lot of us got our start working with Bart in the heart of the riot district along 14th St., where all the car dealerships used to be before the Martin Luther King riots in 1968. The dealers left, and both Bart and Joy Zinoman (Studio Theatre’s founder) ended up with these huge former show-rooms, complete with massive elevators big enough to haul a Cadillac—that people quickly converted into scene shops. Upstairs was storage and rehearsal space, downstairs was whatever performance space we could scavenge from old movie houses and scrap lumber from nearby construction projects.
Bart insisted on us being hyper-active, involved with multiple projects simultaneously, and he arranged for lessons in dance/movement, voice, etc. to improve our skills. A lot of the lessons took years to percolate into my system, so to speak, but he set a huge example for all of us. He was also mercurial in temperament, which was what led to his banishment from his own theatre in later years, which was tragic; I prefer to remember the gifts he left us.
Arena Stage still had a resident company in those days, so I also have great memories of the summer I spent there with the Halo Wines, Stanley Anderson and the late Mark Hammer. For 3 weeks straight we were bombarded with one idea after another, lessons I simply could not put into action until much later in my career. Halo was the queen of Improv, for example, and it was completely beyond me.
We had our share of hits and absolute stinkers, and Bart was in some way responsible for all of them, good and bad. The energy of those days is still here, and he was the first Artistic Director to create a Fringe Festival in DC, back in the early 80s. Then as now it was a place where theatre impresarios could see rising talent, and we usually got invited to auditions as a result.
We first worked together at Capital Fringe two years ago with your one man show called Enoch Arden which is based on a work by Tennyson. What gave you the idea to Enoch Arden into a solo piece?
“Enoch” was a personal project for me. My wife Laura had been offered a teaching assistanceship at the University of Illinois, and so we had to leave the DC area just at the time I felt my career would really take off. So here I was, alone in Urbana, and the coffee shop I adopted had a short stack of Dover poetry editions; picked up the Tennyson, and the story of Enoch stood out; he’s a sailor who finds himself shipwrecked and alone on an island for some 10-12 years. There was something about his isolation that really hit home for me, and from that moment I knew that at some point I’d have to turn it into a performance.
Tennyson gets a bad rap for his English, but to me it’s more readable than Shakespeare, where you have to have a lexicon just to get past the first monologue! And the story, whether it’s true or not, has such a huge resonance for people who find themselves in complete isolation, trying desperately to make sense of what has happened.
Andy White as the Dad in ‘The Gutter,’ in Legal Tender.
How do you best describe your current production Legal Tender and can you tell us about some of your characters in the show?
Michael Oliver and Elizabeth Bruce have given me a huge opportunity to stretch myself and try out multiple characters—a dude sacked-out on qualudes, a cocky, frustrated 11-year-old, an emasculated alcoholic longing for his glory days, you name it. I’ve always considered myself a character actor, and the chance to shift from one role to the next on a dime is what performers like me live for.
Heck, I even get to play with dolls!
You stopped performing for a while to write and teach. What were the initial reasons why you took a hiatus from performing and when you did it were you sure you would be back on the stage eventually?
The dirty little secret is I’ve always had a bookish, geeky side, and I’d dramaturged for early 90s WSC-Avant-Bard productions of “Julius Caesar” and the Scottish Tragedy. So in Illinois, living one block away from their Theatre Dept., I found myself earning a Masters in Theatre History, and I was told to get my Ph.D. elsewhere. (Teaching can support your acting habits, you see).
When I got to College Park, my advisor sent me off to cover a huge, 1,000-year gap in theatre history—the Byzantine Empire, where all the Greeks congregated and preserved our tragedies and comedies for future generations. It’s been a fascinating journey, and I’ve had the chance to ask myself and my colleagues a lot of questions about what happens to theatre and drama down through the ages; a lot of the answers are surprising!
You recently found out that a book you have been working on is going to be published. Can you please tell us something about that?
My dissertation at the University of Maryland was a comparison of theatre and ritual in Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, which was also the heart of the Orthodox Christian world. It turns out that a lot of the assumptions we make about theatre and ritual (they’re both the same, or they both work together symbiotically, or all ritual is drama, etc.) just don’t apply in Byzantium. If you’ve ever been to a Greek Orthodox Church for services it’s easy to mistake their liturgy for theatre; but it’s actually a very sophisticated intellectual exercise that tries hard to avoid traditional theatrical tricks.
Because I’m not Greek, and my spirituality is highly un-Orthodox, I’ve had to rely on the better judgment of people who have spent their lives in that tradition. It’s been a fruitful collaboration, and I now have colleagues and friends in Europe who I regularly work with, and hope to work with again.
Oh yeah, and I can’t wait to find another excuse to get back on the stage, too!
