Johanna Day as Betty and Joey Collins as Bobby in In A Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil Labute.

Photo by Seth Freeman

Michael Gabriel Goodfriend as Uzi (left), Philip Goodwin as Eichmann, and Joseph Tisa as Hans (right) in Captors by Evan M. Weiner.

Photo by Seth Freeman

A short 90-minute drive will transport Washingtonians to a place serene and green where theatre is paramount. It’s The Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) in bucolic Shepherdstown, West Virginia, the epicenter of a celebrated five-play repertory through July 29. Led by founder and producing director Ed Herendeen, CATF has been producing and developing new American plays since 1991. More than two-thirds of the festival’s audiences come from the Washington and Baltimore areas, and many come for two or three days to see multiple plays.

Among this season’s 12 actors are Philip Goodwin and Johanna Day, familiar faces both on Washington and Broadway stages as well as in movies and television.

Goodwin plays Adolf Eichmann in Evan M. Wiener’s Captors, the dramatic account of the Israeli commandos who capture and smuggle the Nazi war criminal out of Argentina to be brought to trial in Israel.

The Eichmann role offers the kind of opportunity the actor craves. “I like to find the humanity in all characters I play; that, of course, is an actor's job. It is a particular challenge with a character like Eichmann who … has become more of an idea, or, as the playwright says, ‘a brand name,’ than a human being,” Goodwin explains.

“His arguments in defense of himself are always going to be specious at best, if not downright ridiculous, indefensible,” he observes. “Perhaps that will make what he did all the more frightening and monstrous.”

Goodwin grew up in Norway, a small town in southwest Maine, with parents who relished their rare theatre excursions. With no drama major offered at Bowdoin College, he took on “a lot of roles in extracurricular theatre.” After graduation, he went to London for a year of training at The Drama Studio, then joined other young thespians in The Acting Company, which toured the U.S. with a repertory of mostly classical plays.

Locally, Goodwin has worked at Signature and Studio theatres and The Kennedy Center, and has garnered Helen Hayes Awards for Shakespeare Theatre Company roles – the lead in Timon of Athens, and supporting player in Twelfth Night and An Enemy of the People. His Broadway credits include Diary of Anne Frank, The School for Scandal and Tartuffe.

Johanna Day is starring in Neal LaBute’s new two-handed psychological thriller, In A Forest, Dark and Deep. She prefers playing complicated characters, such as her role as the sister with secrets in the LaBute play. She had done a staged reading of the play two years ago in London. “The play scared me,” she says. “I tend to go toward that, something that makes me grow, builds muscles.”

Although she remembers expressing her intention to become an actor at age 3, her hometown — Sperryville in Rappahannock County, Va. — didn’t offer her much opportunity beyond talent shows. All that changed upon Day’s acceptance into a two-year American Academy of Dramatic Arts program in New York City.

As is almost standard in the field, Day worked as a server in nightclubs while struggling to make it as an actor. By her late 20s, she began getting paid for her work, landing roles at Circle Rep Lab, Circle Repertory Company’s Projects-in-Progress series, as well as other Off Broadway productions.

On Broadway, Day has acted in Lombardi and August: Osage County and was in the original cast of Proof, earning both Tony and Lucille Lortel award nominations for her work as Claire. She won a Drama Desk nomination for Peter and Jerry on New York’s Second Stage.

Day’s DC roles have been exclusively at Arena Stage. Her credits include a Helen Hayes Award for playing Lizzie in The Rainmaker. She likes working in the Washington area because her family is nearby. She also prefers DC audiences, because she says, “New York audiences are full of people in the business. [I feel] more judged in New York.”

Close enough to constitute a convenient getaway, CATF offers Washingtonians “hefty new plays with brilliant writing about important subjects,” Goodwin says. “And you can see all this amidst the beauty of Shepherdstown and get a great meal in one of its many fine restaurants to boot.”

The actor admits to sounding like a travel agent. “But heck,” he says, “I think the audiences must get as good a challenge and have as much, if not more, fun than the artists. And rightly so.”

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