WASHINGTON — What's a hard-nosed Hollywood survivor like "NYPD Blue" and "Smash" writer Theresa Rebeck doing inside the cool, Shakespeare-ghosted marble of the Folger Theatre?
Letting blue language fly in her update of the Restoration comedy "The Way of the World," for one thing. William Congreve's takedown of money-grubbing nuptials is being updated to the Hamptons in a voice that sounds like pure Rebeck: energetic, contemporary, funny and brutally honest about gender and leverage.
"It reminded me about lives of the 1 percent and how people misbehave when their values are that distorted around sex and money and power," Rebeck explains of her "Way of the World" update, which includes far naughtier modern byplay than the Folger's audience is accustomed to.
"Congreve is pretty salty, too," says Folger's artistic producer, Janet Alexander Griffin, who contends that Rebeck's wit is in sync with the original. The Folger rarely has living writers on site, so Griffin gave Rebeck —who has a PhD in Victorian melodrama — a tour of the rare material in the Shakespeare library's vaults. "She lit up," Griffin said.
The prolific Rebeck has written almost a play per season since emerging nearly 30 years ago; bruising realistic comedies are her primary line, from the post-9/11 dinner-party-in-hell "Omnium Gatherum" (a Pulitzer finalist co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros) to the recent sexism-in-the-office "What We're Up Against." She wouldn't seem to be the kind of writer who needs the lift provided by the Women's Voices Theater Festival, the new-works project sweeping the city over the next two months with "The Way of the World" among the first of 24 slated shows. Rebeck's plays have been produced across the country and more than a dozen times in New York, with three making it to Broadway.
In fact, it was during the 2011 Broadway run of her writing guru comedy "Seminar," which is full of swagger, acidic wit and romantic backstabbing, that star Alan Rickman suggested adapting one of the similarly wicked Restoration comedies. "It's got that same kind of cruelty," says Rebeck, who looked at an obscure 17th-century suggestion Rickman made before settling on the Congreve staple.
On the other hand, Rebeck, who is directing her play at the Folger, has practically never been produced in Washington's biggest theaters, though "Seminar" was notably good at Round House Theatre in 2014. Her fame generally simmers at mid-level; the biggest blast on her résumé is running the first year of "Smash," the NBC series (spearheaded by Steven Spielberg) about the making of a new Broadway musical — then being "famously fired, without cause," Rebeck says of her dismissal at the end of the gossipy backstage show's first season.
"Did that ever bother me? Yes, it did," Rebeck says of her place in the writing hierarchy, her tone rich with Whaddya expect? "I have taken more than my share of hits, I think, but I also feel privileged to be here. So I don't want to sound blue."
Rebeck, 59, was raised Roman Catholic outside Cincinnati, and was the bookish one among her five siblings. She studied English at Notre Dame before earning postgraduate degrees at Brandeis University in the 1980s. She moved to New York, picked up temp jobs and was quickly noticed by TV.
"It didn't feel quick," Rebeck says. "I was doing one-acts and festivals. We had no money. And there was a day when I finally thought, I have to get some money work." The language in her early battle-of-the-sexes comedies "Loose Knit" and "Spike Heels" had a crackle that translated well to the brisk pace of the small screen. She's migrated back and forth ever since.
"No question TV taught me a thing or two about forward motion," Rebeck says. But Rebeck is also deft at biting the Hollywood hands that have fed her; the inanity of bigwig executive demands is hilarious in her 2016 novel "I'm Glad About You," about a Cincinnati woman who becomes a screen star. (The depiction of sleeping with a powerful and manipulative film director is less riotous.) Her memoir/guidebook "Free Fire Zone" is a juicy read about the hazards of writing not just for TV and movies — "Harriet the Spy" is among Rebeck's film credits — but also in the supposedly noble, often insulting realm of the theater. Rebeck's first rule of showbiz survival, regardless of platform: Never look weak.
Then there's "What Came Next," the essay she wrote after being fired from "Smash." "I was an excellent general," she wrote of the bitter aftermath and trying to bounce back. "But to prove I could do it again, I had to be a good girl."
"I used to get into trouble when somebody would say, 'I want this character to do this,' and I'd go, 'Yeah, but she wouldn't do that,' " Rebeck says. "I'd get in a lot of trouble for that. I wasn't trying to be difficult." That's her standing critique of Hollywood, and it also goes for "Smash." "It was painful to talk about for a while. But I stand by what I did."
"She's gotten angrier in a good way," says Kristine Nielsen, a busy New York stage performer and frequent Rebeck collaborator who's playing the rich aunt in "The Way of the World." For years Nielsen's been friends with Rebeck and her husband, Jess Lynn (two practically grown kids, family based in Brooklyn). She compares Rebeck to "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You" writer Christopher Durang, another Catholic-raised playwright whose comic plays have sharp fangs. "They write in wildly different styles, but they both have a need to make the world better," Nielsen says. "And an anger that the world is not listening to them."
Sometimes the world catches up. The workplace sexism of "What We're Up Against" rang true when staged last season at Washington's Keegan Theatre, and the play made its off-Broadway debut as the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke. "That was so crazy," Rebeck says. "Audiences came and said, 'Yeah, that's what it's like.' But to have so many men say, 'I don't see it' - somebody said, 'Why didn't you tell us?' We did! Women have been saying this for years and years."
She's directing more these days, not only the play at the Folger but also "Trouble," an upcoming independent movie she scripted that stars Anjelica Huston and Bill Pullman as squabbling siblings. Of all the showbiz avenues, theater pays least; why keep writing for the stage?
"Because it's beautiful!" Rebeck says, breaking into a rare broad smile. "It's the way I understand the world."
But she's too clear-eyed to call theater her professional home; even though as she labored through one of her three novels she lamented to her husband, "I could fall out of a tree and write a play before I hit the ground."
"I like being on a set," she says of TV and movies. "Sets are fun. I liked running that TV show." She's writing a play about legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt playing "Hamlet" — Folger will give it a reading during the Women's Voices Festival, with Holly Twyford as Bernhardt — and has a Power Play commission from D.C.'s Arena Stage. Despite the hazards and heartbreak, she also wants to run another TV show. As Rebeck wrote in "What Came Next," "I am a stubborn girl."