This article, from this week's print edition, expands and updates a blog post from last week.

The email came just a few weeks ago. The header said “A Huge Favor.” For Gaurav Gopalan, Heather Haney would probably have done two. She was that fond of him. Many, many people were.

They had met in the spring of 2006, soon after Gopalan left a phone message asking if Haney wanted to try out for an upcoming production of Macbeth.

“There was this incredibly beautiful voice,” she remembers, “asking me to audition for the Scottish Play.” She’d realize when she met him that Gopalan was beautiful in person, too.

Not just handsome, though he was certainly that. He was joyful, kind, sweet, generous, his friends say. And what made him beautiful was “an insatiable appetite for life,” Haney says. He was “always looking to learn more, about himself, about others, about theater. He was always discovering something.”

Gopalan, 35, was discovered unconscious on the street in the early hours of Sept. 10, two blocks from his home in Columbia Heights. He died not long after, in what the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has ruled a homicide. His car keys were missing. The vehicle itself, according to sources who’ve spoken to detectives investigating the case, was moved after his body was found. Police eventually found it on Girard Street NW.

Without his ID, dressed as he was, Gopalan was just enough unlike himself that it would take police three days to discover his name.

—

Gaurav Gopalan moved to D.C. from India, where he’d gotten a solid education at what Studio Theatre co-founder Joy Zinoman—who’d eventually teach him in a directing class, and who’d sit talking with him about Sanskrit epics and Eastern spirituality and Chekhov—calls “good British colonial private schools.” His family, now in Kathmandu, Nepal, was well-to-do. And he had a passion for Shakespeare.

“He told me once that his mother told him that everything he needed to know about Western culture, you can learn from reading Shakespeare and the King James Bible,” remembers Christopher Henley, who worked often with Gopalan at what was then Washington Shakespeare Company. (The outfit now bills itself as WSC Avant Bard.) “But she said that most of the good things in the King James are also in Shakespeare, so he could just read that.”

Gopalan practically threw himself at Henley’s company.

“He just out of the blue contacted the theater, and said ‘I love Shakespeare, I’ll do anything,’” Henley remembered. He worked first on a production of Richard II, and proved focused and diligent enough that the troupe would soon ask him to be its resident assistant director.

Kathleen Akerley, who appeared in that Richard, remembers a collaborator who was “unbelievably loyal” to director Robert McNamara, whose style and choices were causing some confusion among the cast. Gopalan cast himself as a translator, Akerley remembers, firmly defending the director’s vision and patiently helping the cast toward an understanding of why what McNamara wanted was going to work.

“And then he gave the same devotion to Jose [Carrasquillo] on the Scottish Play,” Akerley says. “How could he serve, was the philosophy he brought into the room.”

—

Gopalan—by day an aerospace engineer with a specialty in helicopter rotors and the noise they make—brought a scientist’s rigor to the theater, Haney says. He could quote Shakespeare verbatim, and he had an analytical bent when it came to the text.

“That was a benefit,” Haney says. “We artist types can get lost in the weeds of emotion.”

He’d dialed back his theater commitments in the last couple of years, wanting to focus on his career. He did consult with Haney and the cast of Constellation Theatre’s The Ramayana, though, talking them through the epic’s broad ideas about the dharma and illuminating other aspects of Hindu spirituality.

“It was such a gift,” says Haney, who played the female lead in the show. “He’d tell us that there’s meaning in everything we do—and that none of it matters.” He taught them, she says, that the divine is in everything, even if it’s hard to discern.

Haney liked to tease Gopalan about how he explained his all-embracing affection for that all-pervasive divine. He said, as she recalls it: “I love this table as much as I love Heather Haney, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love Heather Haney.”

—

And so when that e-mail came—the one asking for “A Huge Favor”—Haney responded as you might expect, with an enthusiastic “of course.” Of course she would meet him before the opening-night party. Of course she would keep him company as he got ready.

Of course she would help him get his makeup right.

He turned up with a department-store counter’s worth of products, Haney says. “He’d snagged everything he might possibly need. That was Gaurav in a nutshell; he always overprepared.”

And so it was that on the evening of Aug. 29, at the premiere of WSC Avant Bard’s Happy Days, Gaurav Gopalan surprised and delighted many of his colleagues by presenting himself as Gigi. The name was a hat-tip in the direction of his oldest friends, who’d long used his initials as a fond nickname.

He may have deceived a few people that night, playfully, at least for a little: Christopher Henley remembers him chic, in sunglasses, talking to acquaintances who didn’t seem to recognize Gaurav in Gigi, not giving away the game.

It seemed to be an announcement, of a sort. But Gopalan wasn’t unveiling what he thought of as a transgender identity. His friends say he was clear on that.

“It was something he was exploring,” Haney says. In a way that might have been connected with his spirituality, “he saw himself as male and female—everyone possesses male and female, he believed. They’re both important. I think it was a small part, the newest part” of his sense of self.

It’s true he was a little nervous, Haney and Henley say. He wanted to be sure his look was perfect. He wondered what people would say, how they’d talk about his new incarnation—his new “avatar,” to use his word.

“He looked fabulous,” Henley says. “I said to him, ‘You’re like a character in a Godard film.’”

“He was so happy,” Haney says.

—

Gopalan was happy, it seemed, though it wasn’t an uncomplicated happiness. As some friends suspected—few knew for sure, and fewer are comfortable discussing it now—he was bipolar, says Bob Shaeffer, his partner of nearly five years. There had been rough times, including one particular low last November.

He had struggled to balance his passion for theater and his devotion to Washington and to Shaeffer—they’d met on match.com, connected over a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Kennedy Center, and built a relationship that many of Gopalan’s D.C. friends viewed with something like awe—with the very serious demands of his career.

“He was a very talented person, very, very good theoretically,” says Gopalan’s mentor and former professor, Fred Schmitz. A California-based aeroacoustics researcher associated with the University of Maryland research lab where Gopalan worked, Schmitz stresses that there’s “a very small population of people doing this [work],” and that when Gopalan was “in the zone,” he was entirely capable of advancing the state of the art.

“He could have been very successful,” Schmitz says, “but he wanted to stay in the Washington area, and the opportunities in aerospace there are somewhat limited.”

In May and June of this year, according to his partner, Gopalan began taking his medications erratically.

“He was just up and down on this roller-coaster recently,” says Shaeffer. Gopalan had been eating less, sleeping less. And for someone who had a reputation as a lightweight at the bar, he had been drinking more.

“He was drinking here [at home] every night,” Shaeffer says. “I told him I was worried about him....I said, ‘You take antidepressants; they tell you not to drink when you’re taking antidepressants.’”

A long conversation on the night before Gopalan’s death, though, left Shaeffer feeling better.

“Friday, we had the best talk of our relationship, before he went out,” Shaeffer says. “We started talking on the porch, across from each other; then we started sitting next to each other, then we came in here to the couch. We talked for about two hours.”

Shaeffer acknowledges voicing some perplexity about Gigi.

“I said I was uncomfortable with him dressing that way,” he says. “But I supported him, and I loved him, and it didn’t change—the person inside was still the same.”
“We went through a lot in five years,” Shaeffer says. “We thought we might get married in the spring.”

—

Reports from the last week of Gopalan’s life are impressionistic still. Over the Labor Day weekend, he gathered in New York with old friends—classmates from his undergraduate days at the Indian Institute of Technology campus in Kanpur—to paint the town and celebrate a birthday. Siddhartha Sinha came in from Chicago, Pawan Mishra from Rhode Island. They stayed with Rishabh Misra, another classmate.

That Friday, Misra and Gopalan took in a performance of Sleep No More, a site-specific Macbeth adaptation that’s been one of the theatrical sensations of the New York year. Later, Gopalan entertained the whole gang with a solo “director’s cut” of the play in Misra’s living room. On Saturday evening, he called an acquaintance and commandeered a table for eight—no reservations—at Amma, an intimate, well-regarded Indian restaurant in Midtown.

Misra says he’d never seen Gopalan happier. He had taken a hiatus from his job. He’d bought a ticket for Kathmandu, planning a stay of three to four months to spend some quality time with his parents.

“I have absolutely no doubt that he went out on a high,” Misra writes in a fiercely loving remembrance being circulated by friends. “Never born, never died,” it says, comparing him to the Indian mystic Osho. “Only visited.”

The foursome parted ways that Wednesday. Two of them would gather again in Washington 10 days later — with another of Gopalan's classmates, Sumit Singh of Dallas — asking questions of anyone they thought might have answers.

—

On Thursday, Sept. 8, back in D.C., Gopalan left Christopher Henley a long voicemail message, “full of ideas.” He might want to pitch WSC Avant Bard on a production of Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, or perhaps a Sanskrit epic that he particularly liked. Or he might produce something for Capital Fringe. Maybe what he ought to do was form a company of his own, concentrating on world classics.

On Friday afternoon, he set out as Gigi, heading south in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. He stopped in at the Source theater on 14th Street NW, looking for Constellation’s Allison Stockman. He picked up a bottle—an expensive one—at the Cork Market wine shop. Around 3 p.m., he paid a call at Studio Theatre, where he asked after Joy Zinoman, with whom he’d worked on 2007’s The Pillowman.

He was animated. He wanted to talk to Zinoman about this new persona, this new expression of his feminine side. Zinoman wasn’t in. He caught up with a couple of her colleagues instead. He left the wine as a gift.

Then there was a mani-pedi at Salon Blu, and a sweet martini at 1409 Playbill Café once it opened at 4 p.m. Sitting at the bar, Gopalan told proprietor Elsayed Mansour about another idea he’d had: He wanted to play Cleopatra.

Back at home, there was that conversation on the porch with Shaeffer. Around 10 p.m., Gopalan set out again, into a city that had been plagued of late by a string of assaults on transgender women. He was headed, he told his partner, for the straight clubs on U Street NW. He told Shaeffer not to worry if he stayed out late.

Oct. 1 would have been their fifth anniversary.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Zombie Ceiling: WaPo profiles Jason Zinoman, son of Studio Theatre's Joy Zinoman and the author of Shock Treatment, a history of the horror filmmakers who in the '60s and '70s brought new depths to the genre. (Washington City Paper reviewed the book last month.) Naturally, one WaPo commenter blames big government: "I call them dumbing down of America and waste of good money. We should be building talents with the media not making freaks. I object to any of my taxpayer money funding junk." Au contraire, Tea Partiers! George Romero's may be generally interpreted as critiques of capitalism, but they're also damn good survivalist guides. When the zombies come, you'll be glad you have your guns!

Shake Shake Shake Shake Shake Shake: Brightest Young Things pimps hard for local disco duo Big/Bright, a task I'm glad includes so many animated gifs.

Today on Arts Desk: Indie/artie separated at birth.

Dance Place's Carla Perlo

When the House Appropriations Committee published the list of federal program cuts in the continuing budget resolution that averted a government shutdown earlier this month, one small cut sent a shockwave across Washington. You probably read about it.

Another got less attention.

The bill keeping the federal government open through the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year slashed nearly 70 percent from the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs’ grants, a tiny program that supports the District’s cultural scene in a big way. As Washington City Paper reported last week, the cuts will have a miniscule impact on some of the city’s biggest arts organizations—but a devastating effect on its tinier ones.

Established in 1985 to support cultural institutions that don’t line the National Mall, the creation of the NCACA program is one of the few acts of congressional meddling in D.C. that has done some good. Its budget rose steadily through last year, when 24 organizations ranging in size and notability qualified for grants totaling $9.5 million in federal dollars. Under the continuing resolution, that figure was reduced to $3 million for 2011.

But funding cuts aren’t the only things that have some NCACA beneficiaries worrying about the program’s future. If the White House has its way, in fiscal year 2012 the grant-making process would be transferred from the federal Commission of Fine Arts to the District’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities. President Barack Obama’s proposed 2012 budget says the change in venue would “result in grants being awarded more reliably.”

“The current NCACA funds are provided based on a 25-year-old formula that does not address performance factors or the actual needs of an organization,” says Meg Reilly, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget. “In fact, the formula provides the largest amount of funds to those recipients with the highest annual income. A competitive proposal and review process, along with post-award reviews, will enhance the quality and performance of grant recipients by holding them accountable for the funds they receive.”

Currently, the federally appointed Commission of Fine Arts distributes NCACA funds based on a strict formula, not financial need or critical merit. The first 70 percent of NCACA’s total funding is divided evenly among the recipient groups—in last year’s case each grant had a base of $277,083. The remaining 30 percent is parceled out based on each organization’s operating income as a percentage of the combined operating income of all beneficiaries. The Kennedy Center received an NCACA grant last year of $650,000—the largest in raw dollar terms, but barely a sliver of its operating income of $94 million.

Then there are groups like Dance Place, which took in just a hair over $1.1 million last year. The Brookland studio is the smallest and newest NCACA beneficiary. The $290,779 it received was the least doled out by the federal program but accounted for a full quarter of its budget. For a group like Dance Place, the federal grant quite literally keeps the lights on, pays the rent, and hires performers and instructors to fill the calendar.

Shrinking the pot will favor even more the moneyed heavyweights; the Kennedy Center and Washington National Opera only received $650,000 each because of a ceiling on the grants. A smaller fund doesn’t necessarily mean fewer awards, but it does certainly mean fewer opportunities for groups like Dance Place. Under the current formula, each recipient organization would receive a base amount of $87,500 after the cuts.

“We have put an absolute freeze on all hiring and raises,” Dance Place founder Carla Perlo says. Perlo has a full-time staff of 15 in addition to a couple dozen instructors who teach part-time. She is also planning to scale back some of her larger performances like Dance Africa, a festival she has staged for 23 years. Last year’s edition closed down the Brookland space’s block of 8th Street NE for 20 vendors and more than 500 performers. That won’t be repeated this year. Perlo decided to reduce the festival’s scope before hearing of the cut to NCACA funding in anticipation of a total loss amid federal budget wrangling.

“We are a fiscally conservative organization,” Perlo says. “I am proud for making the decision to not have that aspect of the festival. That’ll save the organization $18,000.” Not that she’s boasting. Smaller performances mean fewer partnerships with local businesses and part-time jobs for city youths. “I think the thinking is, ‘That’s OK, no free art’,” she says. “It’s not just about art. It’s about jobs and cultural programs and keeping teenagers off the street and keeping them employed.”

GALA Hispanic Theatre also depends on a NCACA grant for a substantial chunk of its budget: The $296,385 it got last year was 18.6 percent of its roughly $1.6 million operating income. “I don’t know how much we’re going to do yet,” says Rebecca Read Medrano, GALA’s executive director. When Medrano met with her board of directors earlier this week, one proposed solution cut the upcoming season from four shows to three.

Plugging the hole that will be left by a much smaller NCACA grant means relying more heavily on private donors. In catering to a specific ethnic group, GALA has a few challenges. “We don’t have a large subscription base. Latinos don’t subscribe as much,” Medrano says. Just to qualify for an NCACA grant an organization must raise at least $1 million annually for at least three years without the help of the federal government. “To raise $1 million in private funds is hard. Latino donors are tiny.”

The District government chips in a bit, but those funds are receding too, Medrano says. “We’ve been hit on all sides. We have no money for our summer program now.”

The city’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities has seen its grant funding fall from $7.25 million in 2010 to $3.8 million this year. While it distributes hundreds of grants, very few exceed $30,000 and nearly all are awarded for specific programming, not operations. Applicants are also prohibited from receiving more than two grants per year. For 2011, GALA received a $22,500 award for arts education. The “wonderful part” of an NCACA grant, Medrano says, is that it applies to general operations—it can pay a performer as readily as it can pay the mortgage.

Ayris Scales, the interim director of the D.C. arts agency, is unsure what revisions to the federal arts agenda mean for her office. “At this point in, I do not know what if any administrative changes will be imposed,” she writes in an email.

But while in fiscal year 2011 NCACA grants may favor its richer recipients, the Commission of Fine Arts hopes that will change if control of the fund shifts to DCCAH in 2012. “Is it fair when you have much larger, well-established organizations, get the big grants? We have no mechanism to change the formula,” says Thomas Luebke, the secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts. “The president’s budget makes it more competitive. We’re not set up to do it that way; perhaps another organization could.”

—

D.C.’s private arts organizations are quick to point out that every state has a mechanism for funding arts and culture. But those are paid for with the states’ own tax dollars—just as D.C. taxes fund both the Commission on the Arts and Humanities and city appropriators. Arena Stage didn’t have to go to the federal government for the $25 million that helped build its new complex. Using federal dollars, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities help organizations all over the country. And arts budgets, both federal and state, have been shrinking.

In contrast, the NCACA gives federal dollars to one city’s private organizations and no others—it’s a bonus.

But that doesn’t mean cuts aren’t crippling. While Dance Place assumed it would lose all NCACA funds, the cuts caught most other arts organizations by surprise. The two or three richest groups of the 24 grant recipients will likely be fine without it, but to rewrite the program so abruptly has shocked the financial ledgers of most. Medrano calls it “one more slap” and a “sad situation” for the District’s cultural life.

Studio Theatre received an NCACA grant of $343,112 last year. The gift was 6.3 percent of its $5.4 million operating income—a smaller ratio than Dance Place or GALA, but not insignificant. Morey B. Epstein, Studio Theatre’s director of institutional development, echoes Perlo’s predictions this cut will ripple through the local economy.

“This is just a terrible time for the city to be losing $7 million that goes to arts organizations and from there into the city’s economy,” Epstein says. “They’re the economic engines that revitalize neighborhoods. They pay vendors and salaries. The nation’s capital should be a shining light where the country showcases its arts and cultural life. This cut is going to diminish that.”

Studio Theatre’s retired founder, Joy Zinoman, was more blunt in her criticism of the federal budget process and angry the slashing of NCACA grants wasn’t noticed sooner. “What [this] will do to the cultural life in Washington is a criminal act,” she said. “To suddenly get a hit of this magnitude is like a state arts council being demolished, but no one is saying poop.”

As an emergency revenue-boosting measure, Medrano says GALA may have to keep its bar open longer, stretch extra performances out of productions, and show films on nights the stage is dark. GALA has instituted hiring and wage freezes, as has Dance Place. Perlo is “trying desperately” to avoid layoffs, to say nothing of the part-time positions she won’t be able to have this summer.

The $6.5 million cut from the NCACA program amounts to just over one-one-hundredth of one percent of the $38.5 billion shaved off the total federal budget last week. But unlike the controversial rider prohibiting the District from using its own tax revenues to provide abortions to low-income women, there were no demonstrations or arrests to protest the loss of arts funding.

“Where is the screaming?” Zinoman asks. “They said, ‘we’re fucking over D.C. on [abortion],’ but no one’s saying ‘we’re fucking over the arts community.’”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Lots of DMV rap yesterday! Kingpen Slim, Ra the MC, Fat Trel, and Black Cobain all released mixtapes/albums. Looking forward to hearing the Black Cobain tape, especially—the one time I saw him perform, at January's Haiti benefit at the 9:30 Club, he slayed. Here's a Slim song:

Also on my radar: A "Go-Go for Fenty" video with Junkyard, Stinky Dink, and Big G, though a Gray sign sneaks in around the 2:15 mark. The Latin American Film Festival announces its lineup, which, Ryan Kearney of TBD notes, includes an omnibus work featuring directing contributions from Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, stars of Y tu mamá también and the less good Rudo y Cursi. The Vinyl District has been running great stuff all week from John Davis, who performs the songs of, um, John Davis this Friday at Story/Stereo.

And since we're on the topic of freedom: Isn't the lede of the New York Times Book Review's cover review of the new Franzen novel a bit much? I'll get back to you once I read the book.

Coming from a woman whose titanic personality has kept at least two generations of Washington theater people busy telling backstage stories, that can only be counted as a compliment.

"David" is David Muse, who'll be stepping into Zinoman's shoes come September, when he takes over as artistic director of the Studio Theatre, the company Zinoman co-founded 35 years ago. Currently the No. 2 guy at a big D.C. house with another big temperament atop the org chart—the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he's been Michael Kahn's associate artistic director for the last five years—Muse is just a year older than the theater whose reins he's about to take.

And there were those in D.C. who weren't convinced, as rumors flew in the days leading up to the announcement last week, that Muse would be the right fit. Too shy and soft-spoken, some whispered, to work the room and raise the money. Too young, maybe too green to ride herd effectively on the three seasoned and loyal lieutenants Zinoman is leaving behind.

"I can't answer that question," Zinoman says, with regard to the last. But she notes that the selection process was a long and careful one. (Seventy-five people threw their hat in; Zinoman personally interviewed 24, and the selection committee eventually narrowed the shortlist to six.)

And besides, Zinoman points out, Muse has personal history with two of the three veterans whose goodwill he'll need: Serge Seiden, Zinoman's artistic second and the company's de facto production manager, and Keith Alan Baker, who as managing director helps make the trains run while also serving as artistic director of SecondStage—the theater-within-a-theater that works mostly with less experienced artists, and where Muse directed two well-received shows before graduating to the Studio mainstage. (His roaringly successful production of Neil LaBute's Reasons to be Pretty runs through May 23.)

"He studied with Serge," Zinoman says of Muse. "And there is nothing more powerful than teacher-student. [And] the first two things he did here were at SecondStage, with Keith as artistic director."

Still, how those personal connections—and the professional considerations threaded in among them—will settle out is "a question much discussed," Zinoman acknowledges. "Only a person of exceeding charm" could be expected to manage such a transition successfully.

"So one of my answers will be that David has that in spades. Right?  He can woo them. He can, and does, and has."

And when the wooing doesn't work? Zinoman points out that at the Shakespeare Theatre, casting shows and negotiating deals, Muse has been perceived by many D.C. theaterfolk as "the tough guy."

"So, although I will not use the word 'hatchet-man,' that impresses me," Zinoman says. "I think ... he has the charm to do it, but he also has the strength."

The House That Joy Built

The institution Zinoman is handing over to Muse is, to put it bluntly, a prize: A handsome 60,000-square-foot edifice comprising four theaters. Between 900 and 1,000 seats, depending on how the auditoriums are configured. Sixteen apartments for visiting artists. An enviable earned-income ratio of 65 percent—nationwide the average is 52 percent—on a $5 million operating budget. A half-million-dollar surplus as of September 2009, amid a recession that has had many theaters bleeding cash.

And it is, without question, The House That Joy Built.

The usual nonprofit-theater model involves the sort of triumvirate that kept things in Rome so interesting: an artistic director to handle the aesthetic questions, a managing director to keep things running smoothly, and a board to raise the money the other two spend. The exact balance of power varies from house to house—but almost without exception, the AD and the MD have to answer to the board for what they spend and how they spend it.

Not at the Studio Theatre.

"The artistic director in this theater raises the money," Zinoman says. "With the director of development"—Morey Epstein, the third of Muse's new colleagues—"and now the managing director. Three of the four of us raise the money." And they set the theater's agenda themselves, in a style Zinoman describes as "both communal and hierarchical."  (It used to be more of the latter, but the balance shifted a bit as Zinoman began to think about retirement.)

That's the underpinning of the "artist-managerial philosophy" that board chair Susan Butler held up as sacrosanct in the Washington Post story that profiled Muse after word of his appointment broke on April 30.

It's a crucial difference, Zinoman stresses—"because if you raise the money, you have the power."

It's why Studio, under Zinoman's leadership, has been able to take risks like a season anchored by an expensively produced bit of lesser Chekhov and two little-known contemporary Russian plays — or a near-impenetrable but unexpectedly thrilling Caryl Churchill play about hatmakers, which was really a play about totalitarianism and global war.

Studio's institutional structure is set up to let a bold artist go for that kind of gold. And its physical plant—the Zinoplex, as an anonymous wag on my now-defunct theater blog dubbed it a few years back—is designed to let the company seize the moment when lightning strikes: With multiple spaces at its command, Studio can extend a show when audiences decide it's a hit.

"All we need is one giant hit, or two medium-sized hits a year, and we can survive," Zinoman says.

But there's the trap, too: A lazy artist might program less ambitious fare. A dominant money-guy might lean on a weak artistic director to make sure there's enough light comedy each year to keep the books in the black.

"You need strong leadership," Zinoman acknowledges, "to make sure that the values of the programming don't get lost. ... Are you going to be an aesthete, and be interested just in form? Or are you going to have some things that you care about? This theater has a long tradition and history of doing plays about certain things, and there are people who care about that."

Which is why "not a pushover" is going to be important.

A Recipe For Schizophrenia?

Muse admits to a certain eagerness to find out how it feels to be a Zinoman-style big dog—to take the lead in that artist-manager role.

"The idea of running a place where ... the same people are making the decisions about the money and the art, to me it's a wild idea," he says. "It requires people who can really put on different hats—who can think bold artistic-vision thoughts in one moment, and then check themselves and look at budgets and make sure those things are realistic.

If it sounds like a recipe for schizophrenia, Muse has at least danced with that devil before.

"The truth is it's not terribly dissimilar to what I do in my role here every day, as the manager of budgets and a director of shows at the Shakespeare Theatre," he says. "How do I keep myself in check?  How do I support the art and watch the bottom line at the same time? ... Should this person be an Equity actor, or can we get away with a non-Equity actor? How big does the cast need to be? ... Those are questions that come up all the time. And normally I'm dealing with those issues as I deal with other directors, or Michael. ... But then sometimes you have to do it with yourself—which is I think what they do at Studio all the time."

When The Founder Leaves

Any number of questions—and perils—come with a founder's departure from a thriving institution. Do you promote the second-in-command, and can the battle-scarred troops learn to think of her as boss if you do? Can the person who spent decades loyally supporting a Caesar really have the right stuff? If you cast the net wide, do you risk hiring an opportunist whose goals don't line up with the singular passions of the person who was driven to start the thing in the first place? Many a nonprofit has foundered on those shoals, and many a D.C. theater among them.

At the Source Theatre Company—launched just up the block from and a couple of years after Studio—Bart Whiteman's scandal-clouded departure ushered in a long, slow decline that ended with the company's dissolution, and the near loss of the space to a developer who meant to turn it into a billiards parlor. More recently, Jerry Whiddon stepped down at Bethesda's Round House Theatre, and though Blake Robison has earned a degree of respect for the literary adaptations he's been programming since he took over, the house doesn't have a particularly strong personality any more.

But in Washington, the signal example is that of the 60-year-old Arena Stage, where the dynamic Zelda Fichandler handed the reins after 40 years to Douglas Wager, whose six-year tenure is referred to by some as "The Interregnum," by others as "the Time of Which We Do Not Speak," and by almost no one as a success. Wager's own departure made way for Molly Smith, whose artistic stewardship has been uneven at best, but who has at least championed a $120 million overhaul that may help restore the company's status as a regional-theater powerhouse and help get it back in the game as a producer of exciting new work.

Muse, who arrived in D.C. after most of those transitions, is careful to note that he doesn't know much about them first-hand.

"But I know that Joy does," he says. "And [while] there may be examples from here, there are also examples from all over the country. And I know the two of us are committed to learning all we can from them, and not repeating those mistakes. We've talked about it explicitly."

The Point

Muse's plans, in the short term, include a lot of getting-to-know-you. He'll cement the relationships he has, develop more, learn the Studio's operating rhythms from the inside. He told the Post that more international works are among his ambitions, and he says that for a while, at least, any spare time—as if—will be spent scouting artists and plays to bring home to D.C., rather than looking for outside projects of his own.

"Both about the international-play question and the new-play question, I feel like I'm wading into some waters that I have to become familiar with," he acknowledges. "There's a landscape to learn about that, working here at the Shakespeare Theatre, I haven't been all that attached to, and it's gonna take a lot of effort"—cultivating contemporary writers, reading scripts, attending developmental workshops, shopping for scripts in England and Ireland and Eastern Europe and  beyond.

"I'd say look to the programming of the Studio Theatre over the next five years," Muse says, "and hopefully an answer will start to emerge."

"The real issue," says Joy Zinoman, "is what will he change? Will he continue the same kind of programming? Will he distinguish himself with new ideas? That's the issue. ... I mean, I hope he has new ideas. I hope he does—my God! What's the point?"

How do I know? Not because the Studio folks are talking: As they did with the news of Zinoman's impending departure, they've presumably fed the info exclusively to the Post's Peter Marks, in hopes of getting a splashy news item. Other media have so far had to be content with an e-mail that went out April 26, saying merely that the new guy would be named on May 3.

But one reliable source with direct knowledge of the appointment—and two with indirect knowledge—confirm what theatrical Washington has been murmuring about since even before that e-mail went around: that Muse, currently the associate artistic director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, is the man. Neither Muse nor Liane Jacobs, the Studio Theatre's director of communications, immediately responded to requests for comment.

Muse has drawn plaudits for shows he's directed at Studio—among them the wrenching murder drama Frozen, the lively comedy The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, and most recently the Neil LaBute scorcher Reasons to be Pretty. For the Shakespeare Theatre, he's staged classics like Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar; previously announced commitments elsewhere include a production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus planned for Round House Theatre in 2011.

Other candidates said to have been included on the Studio shortlist: director Pam MacKinnon, whose production of Clybourne Park earned hosannas at Playwrights Horizons in March, and the D.C.-based actor Ed Gero.

Joy Zinoman, the longtime artistic director of 14th Street institution Studio Theatre, will be giving a luncheon address today at the National Press Club. Chow starts at 12:30, "program" at 1:00.

This is a great match—Zinoman and the National Press Club. After all, consider all that this founding artistic director accomplished in the area of press and public relations. As discussed in this blog post, Zinoman managed to keep the news of her planned departure from local news outlets for four years.

Over those four years, Studio execs and board members deliberated repeatedly about Zinoman's retirement, what it would mean to the outfit, how to handle it, and so on. Yet none of us caught on. This "secret" was known to at least 100 individuals.

And so Zinoman could be expected to craft an amazing address to the National Press Club entitled, "How to Hold On to Your News Embargo."

But, alas, that's not going to be the focus. According to the press club, Zinoman will be talking about how a theater saved a neighborhood.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

And a catch-all assessment for all other D.C. media outlets that pretend to cover area news and culture: Suck!

What other word, after all, could possibly describe the following reportorial breakdown: Joy Zinoman, an absolute titan of the D.C. theater scene, announced to Studio insiders that she had settled on a schedule for stepping down as the founding artistic director of Studio Theatre.

That was four years ago.

The public didn't find out till last week, when Studio decided to release the news.

If you're not registering what a blockbuster reportorial failure went down here, let's try some background. Zinoman founded Studio in 1978, an event with grand implications not only for the D.C. arts scene but also for its economic development. Her playhouse, which has expanded into what theater lovers call the "Zinoplex," laid down roots at 14th and P Streets, anchoring a slow but astonishing revitalization of one of the city's critical commercial corridors. Washington Post critic Peter Marks wrote that her departure "augurs one of the most significant changes in years at the top of a Washington performing arts organization."

Not significant enough, though, for local media to snuff out. It was all the way back in spring 2005 that Zinoman announced to a "retreat" of Studio staff, board members, and others that she wished to step down in 2010. She noted that this was not a public announcement and asked people not to blab about it. "One reason I did this was because I wanted to get some work done," says Zinoman. "I still had five years of what I considered my life’s work, and I didn’t want to be distracted by the chatter."

When Zinoman made her presentation at the retreat, she was speaking to 35 or so full-time Studio staffers, the 30-plus members of the board, plus a bunch of other individuals! Serge Seiden, Studio's associate producing artistic director, says that retreats pull in somewhere between 150 and 200 attendees.

Attendees? No, potential sources.

In handling the information, Studio didn't gather a few longtime company agents in a safe house and swear them to secrecy or make anyone sign a non-disclosure agreement. Instead, it just gathered hordes of people, gave them the 411, and politely asked that they keep it to themselves—a scenario that even lame journalists prey on. Zinoman herself was surprised that the secret held: "I actually thought that some people must know. I couldn't believe that they didn't. I thought, No way can we control what 100 people say in the gym or at their Christmas breakfast or in the gym."

And get this. A year or so into this four-year secrecy campaign, Studio created a committee to manage the post-Zinoman transition. A committee, with meetings, documents, e-mails, and what have you—journalistic gold!

That the secret indeed held up was evident on the night of Sept. 16, when Zinoman made her announcement at the theater. According to several sources, gasps were audible as the news broke. It's unclear whether the mass incredulity stemmed from shock that Zinoman was stepping down or from disgust at the miserable performance of D.C. news organizations.

A breakdown this complete has to invite comparisons. When asked to do just that, the New York Times' Frank Rich points out via e-mail: "I have never heard of anyone in the New York theater telling 100 people anything–a minor bit of casting, let alone big news like this–without it leaking out instantly. Someone would blog about it immediately on a theater web site–[a typical example is here]–and The Times and New York Magazine (among others) would race to get it confirmed and on line."

Zinoman's deputies have theories as to how they managed to compartmentalize the information. One is that Studio is a healthy institution and the 66-year-old Zinoman remains at the top of her game —so pressing questions about fresh leadership don't just pop up. Another is that Studio people didn't gossip out of respect for Zinoman: "Everybody who cared about her understood that this was a big decision and we all, out of respect, wanted to do it how it should be done," says Seiden. A third relates to institutional discretion: "We’re very good at keeping secrets," says Keith Alan Baker, managing director and artistic director of Studio’s 2ndStage.

Studio's board chair, Susan Butler, "had it the hardest" when it came to keeping the secret, according to Zinoman. Butler confirms the struggle: "Because I’m chair of the board, over the last four years, I was asked many times when Joy was going to retire," says Butler.

You mean, by reporters?

"No, no, no—never by a reporter," replies Butler.

Well, at least one scribe was in the ballpark. The Post's Marks addressed the question in a March 2008 profile of Zinoman: "And it is a measure of how deep is her imprint that when the question is broached of who might one day succeed her, even some high-up people in the organization decline to speculate."

When asked about this durable secret, Marks writes via e-mail: "Never in all my years of talking to Joy Zinoman and her staff had any of them uttered a word about her plans."

Marks, who sucks far less than the rest of the D.C. theater reporting corps, was well-positioned to carry the Zinoman exclusive once Studio was good and ready to tell the world. He snared a sit-down with Zinoman prior to the announcement and worked under an embargo that never sprouted a leak. "At the end I was worried about bloggers, and the advice I got was there was nothing I could do about it, so I had to hold my breath and hope," says Zinoman.

Worried about bloggers? In D.C.?

And why did Studio feed the news to the Post? "I certainly thought that the Post had covered the theater community well and they had cared," says Zinoman. "They had tried to improve the coverage, they were responsive to the community and certainly they would have the farthest reach."