Amy Oppenheimer’s Capital Fringe solo show has been five decades in the making, in more ways than one.
For starters, the play marks the 71-year-old’s return to theater after 50-plus years away, during which the lapsed actor found love, adopted two children, and built a career as an employment lawyer, administrative judge and workplace investigator. And the subject of the show — titled “Looking for Justice (in All the Wrong Places)” — is a 1970 rape case that still lingers in Oppenheimer’s mind as a symbol of the justice system’s ambiguity.
“I just wanted to be able to be more creative,” Oppenheimer says of deciding to step back onstage. “You can’t say as much of what you think, of course, in the role that I played as a lawyer.”
Oppenheimer will perform her show Friday through Sunday at the Bliss Theatre Space near Dupont Circle. This year’s Capital Fringe festival, D.C. theater’s annual embrace of offbeat expression, features 34 shows staged at five venues and runs Thursday through July 21.
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Oppenheimer’s piece will reflect on her awakening as a self-described “lesbian feminist” and decision to fight for women’s rights by opening her own law practice in Berkeley, Calif. But the crux of the show is a decades-old case in which Oppenheimer’s White friend accused a Black man of rape in Boston, then questioned the state’s case against him because she didn’t support its pursuit of a lengthy prison sentence.
“Amy is a very interesting person to have a conversation with because she has thought a lot about justice and its complexities,” says David Ford, the play’s director. “She keeps looking at the human side of things and wishing things could be better.”
Growing up in New York, Oppenheimer says, she frequented the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, studied at the American Mime Theatre and worked on an off-off-Broadway production. But after being wait-listed for New York University’s theater program, she gave up on a life in the arts and went to law school in California before embarking on a productive career in the courtroom.
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“I didn’t know how to break into theater,” Oppenheimer recalls. “I didn’t see a path. I wasn’t your typical ingenue. Somebody once said, ‘Well, if you’re going to do theater, you’re going to have to have major dental work.’ I wasn’t somebody who wanted to get major dental work.”
But as Oppenheimer’s children grew up and she entered the tail end of her career, she enrolled in Ford’s solo performance class in Berkeley. When each student was assigned to write and perform a 15-minute show, Oppenheimer knew she wanted to interrogate that 1970 case and the ways in which the criminal justice system approached race and sexual violence.
“It was really the story that I wanted to tell,” Oppenheimer says. “I would think about it now and again and just scratch my head. What is the answer? What should I have done? What should have happened? So it seemed like a very compelling story to use as the center of that exploration.”
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As Oppenheimer fleshed out that initial 15-minute piece into the 65-minute show she’ll debut at Capital Fringe, she found that a career spent speaking at conferences, leading sexual harassment trainings and addressing the courtroom in the occasional trial honed her ability to connect with an audience. But that experience went only so far when it came to opening up as herself onstage.
“Some people say, ‘Oh, well, being a trial lawyer is like being an actor,’” Oppenheimer says. “I don’t actually agree with that, because for acting, you have to have that empathy, that ability to really be in somebody else’s shoes. You don’t necessarily have to have that to be a trial lawyer. But I think some of the desire to be public and present and be out in the world is similar.”
Oppenheimer isn’t the only altruistic-minded artist performing at Capital Fringe: Civil rights attorney Badar Tareen is presenting the comedy show “Why Are You Brown?” on Saturday and Sunday at the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center. The festival also features “This Is My Sister,” a dark comedy by United Nations humanitarian officer Luigi Laraia that will debut Saturday at Bliss. Other offerings at the eclectic festival include a slew of dance pieces and musicals, a nudity-filled steampunk show, and an improvised murder mystery.
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As Oppenheimer looked to premiere her show, Capital Fringe’s showcase for unconventional voices — down the road from the highest court in the land, no less — provided the ideal opportunity to weigh in on the scales of justice. But as Ford points out, “This is a lot more than just a lawyer talking about law.”
“It’s very much a woman talking about trying to make sense of life,” Ford says. “She kind of had been carrying that around her whole life and through her career in the justice system. So she was very much still looking for someplace to put that burden down.”
If you go
Capital Fringe
Box office locations at 1150 Connecticut Ave. NW and 1529 16th St. NW. capitalfringe.org.
Dates: Thursday through July 21.
Prices: $15 per show.
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