Wild and Woolly.

In its 20th season the Woolly Mammoth Theatre still rocks and shocks Washington, D.C.

Howard Shalwitz is proud of the niche the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has carved in the staid cultural landscape of Washington, D.C. "Woolly's goal has always been to shove American theater a little bit to the left," says Shalwitz, the company's 47-year-old cofounder and artistic director. This small but feisty theater company has made a name for itself both locally and nationally by specializing in wacky, offbeat plays--often by gay writers. "We're trying to open up the possibilities for new subject matter, new styles of writing, and new voices in the American theater," Shalwitz says. "Gay writers have been at the forefront of that in the last 15 years."

When Shalwitz and two friends started the company, they picked the name almost at random from what Shalwitz remembers as "a little ratty wine-soaked list of 200 names." Out of that drunken late night grew a theater that will launch its 20th anniversary season in September. To mark the occasion Broadway Play Publishing will bring out Plays From Woolly Mammoth, an anthology of works that premiered with the company. It will include such recent hits as Christi Stewart Brown's The Gene Pool, a comedy that portrays a lesbian couple and their 18-year-old son, who wants to find out who his sperm-donor father was, and The Chinese Art of Placement by San Francisco--based gay playwright Stanley Rutherford, a tour de force monologue by a nerdy ex-spy who imagines throwing a wine-and-cheese reception for his close personal friends and Tina Turner.

Among the writers most closely associated with Woolly Mammoth is Nicky Silver, whom the company produced back when he was still an unknown playwright selling socks at Barneys. Three of his wildest plays have premiered there, including The Food Chain, a manic comedy about skinny people and fat people and their desperate search for love. In the mid '80s the dark, poetic comedies of Harry Kondoleon became a Woolly Mammoth staple. The theater produced four of his plays before Kondoleon died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.

Shalwitz is amused that many people assume he's gay, perhaps because of his indelible performance as Nissim, the gay flight attendant who comes between a married couple expecting a baby in Kondoleon's Christmas on Mars (one of Woolly's biggest hits). Although he's not gay, he's remarkably attentive to the tastes of Woolly Mammoth's sizable gay audience, presenting queer performance artist Tim Miller and lesbian clown Sara Felder, among others.

"We position ourselves on the pivot point between the counterculture and the mainstream," Shalwitz says. "We want to speak to our audience from an interesting edge, to move and upset and disturb and entertain them. But you can't close your doors to mainstream culture. Your goal is to influence it. I got into theater to change the world. For me, it's always about looking around and saying, `Things could be better.'"

Shewey is the editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.

To find more about the history of Woolly Mammoth Theatre and its impact on gay and lesbian theater in Washington, D.C., visit www.advocate.com.