Howard Shalwitz, the longtime artistic director of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, co-founded the theatre back in 1980–at a time when the repertory of American plays was limited to academic classics and NYC vogue. With a commitment to new approaches to theatre and a devotion to bringing new playwriting voices into the limelight, Woolly has had not just a tremendous national impact, but has been an important local influence as well as a partner in community development and a force for bringing new audiences to the theatre. Against the backdrop of the Capital Fringe Festival, DCist took to the interwebs to ask him about Woolly’s Fringe-minded roots and the Festival’s future in the city.

Would it be fair to suggest that Woolly, in your aesthetic and your approach, has a certain artistic kinship with the Fringe movement?

Yes, Woolly always tries to push the envelope in terms of challenging subject matter and styles; we’re never afraid of sharp language or images, we love quirky comedy, and we do mostly new plays where the writer is still honing the script. So in these respects we’re “fringy.” But, for the most part, our plays are still created in the traditional way, where a playwright writes the script, the director stages it, and actors perform it. By contrast, many of the projects in the Fringe Festival are generated by solo performers or small ensembles where the writers and the performers are the same people. Many also involve cross-disciplinary work (like dance-theatre pieces) – so in those respects Fringe can be quite different from Woolly. And Fringe pieces have virtually no set, since there’s no time and usually no money for a set, whereas Woolly’s plays, especially since the move to our new home, can be rather elaborate in terms of design and technical support.