B. Hamlin, C. Davenport, B. Shovlin and B. Largess (photo: Christopher O. Banks)

Incorruptible

Mark Russell, Shooting From the Lip
By Jane Horwitz

"I'm working on a song about Alberto Gonzales, but I can't find a rhyme for 'thumbscrews,' " deadpans Mark Russell. Ba-dum-bum.

The political satirist will take to the stage with his piano at Ford's Theatre tonight through Sunday -- coincidentally (or not) during this inauguration week -- to sift through the past year and the election. "I still do the song -- it still works and I'm kind of proud of it -- 'How Do You Solve a Problem Called Teresa,' " Russell says. He jabs at the right, as well: "I point out that anybody who says that George Bush is stupid makes a big mistake -- and anybody who says that he's brilliant makes a bigger mistake."

Russell will also "do a lot on myself." He told Backstage the tale of how while in the Marines he was busted from corporal to private for celebrating a payday with a bottle of Canadian whiskey on base. "To this day, when I see a map of Canada, I get my version of battle stress," he says. The military mind-set also made him question government. "Whenever you'd complain," Russell says, "they'd always say you're not supposed to know the big picture. . . . I'm still trying to know the big picture." Rattling Some Bones

"There was a relic downstairs, the finger of somebody," playwright Michael Hollinger recalls of a visit to New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. That gave him the idea for "Incorruptible," a comedy set in a monastery, being produced by Washington Stage Guild through Feb. 6.

In the play, the monks at a monastery in France, circa 1250, are distraught because their holy relics, the bones of Saint Foy, have not precipitated a miracle in years, and few peasants want to pay the penny fee to pray before them. In dire straits and eager to attract the pope's beneficence, the monks dig up their graveyard and sell the bones to churches around Europe as relics.

Hollinger learned of the medieval practice of selling fake relics in his research. "This idea of spiritual ends with the most earthly means -- dead bodies, body parts -- really struck me as a wonderful apparent contradiction," he says. Fake relics aside, "a devout Catholic who reveres relics would say that's not a contradiction at all," but rather a question of faith.

So his play becomes "about a quest for the nature of faith. Or maybe I would call it the spiritual versus the material."

When he wrote the play in 1992, says the Philadelphia writer (and associate theater professor at Villanova University), he didn't intend to "send up the church, but . . . at some level, I was certainly talking about what's universal about the inevitable corruption of a spiritual institution."

The Catholic League listed "Incorruptible" in its 1998 Report on Anti-Catholicism, citing a production at Florida Stage. "I took it as a point of pride," Hollinger says, but he adds that more often the play has been "really well reviewed by Catholic papers."

Stage Guild's Bill Largess, who plays the entrepreneurial Brother Martin, agrees "there's a certain irreverence to it, but I'm a practicing, devout Catholic [and] I don't find anything offensive about it. It's poking fun at things that really happened."

Hollinger, a Quaker, calls himself a "generalist" in his choice of subject matter. A recent work about evolution, "Tooth and Claw," ran off-Broadway. Baltimore's Everyman Theatre presented his "Red Herring," a McCarthy-era murder mystery and love story.

"I can just dig around in the Middle Ages . . . and satisfy my curiosity and [then] dive into something else entirely different," Hollinger says. "I just always try to mix it up for myself, partly to cleanse my palate or refresh myself and partly as a challenge to just say, now what's this all about?"

Washington Stage Guild
1901 14th St. NW.
Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; Fridays & Saturdays at 8 p.m.
matinees Saturdays & Sundays at 2:30 p.m.
(240) 582-0050