Jason Grote takes his characteristic approach to a “kitchen-sink drama” in the new Maria/Stuart. Three sisters in suburban New Jersey-Pennsylvania revisit some frightful family history and eventually confront a sordid, if petty, secret. A slight story, as it goes, but Grote drapes the story on the armature of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play of nearly the same name, Maria Stuart. The earlier play, part of the canon of so-called Weimar Classicism, is a retelling of the sixteenth-century politico-religious conflict between Elizabeth I of England and Mary I of Scotland—a retelling that is particularly sympathetic to the cause of Mary, who was eventually executed by Elizabeth.
Dry stuff? Not at all, for Grote’s aesthetic is a magical, goofy, yet cerebral theatricality that can encompass lowbrow and high: food fights and references to Chekhov, Pynchon, and Borges (well, at least I thought the Borges joke was funny). Not two scenes into the first act and we’ve seen soda pop, stuffed olives, and cornstarch spilled on the floor. It’s not for nothing that house management tries to leave the front rows of the theater unsold.
The two families (Marnie’s and Lizzie’s) are haunted by a shapeshifter, who appears as other members of the family and is (conveniently) played by in turns by the corresponding cast members. The shapeshifter arrives in a tinkling of sound and disappears in a nice let-the-wires-show “poof!” of actor-blown dust. The shapeshifter, spouting bits of Schiller (its first scene calls for the complete German-text libretto of the closing movement of Beethoven’s choral symphony) and digging around in family cupboards looking for the evidence of past misdeeds, turns from sprite to demon as the Marnie and Lizzie resist the story’s revelations.
The third sister, emotionally wounded Sylvia, played by company favorite Naomi Jacobson, has lost both her hands in a failed suicide, so the part gives Jacobson a star turn opportunity to show us Sylvia the compulsive eater, scarfing junk food and using prosthetics to pick cheese puffs out of a Costco-sized jar of them. Washington theater vet Sarah Marshall also produces some good shades in her work, in the first act as the grandmother Ruthie and in the second act as the menacing shapeshifter.
Not all the theatrical effects work well: smoke and fog effects seen through the window of the set that doubles as Lizzie’s and Marnie’s kitchens seemed to come and go at random. And, in the end, the awful truth that links Marnie, Lizzie, Marnie’s son Stuart, and Lizzie’s daughter Hannah comes across as inconsequential and the acts leading up to it unmotivated. Perhaps this story of the twenty-first century is but the tip of the shadows cast by the plots of Mary and Elizabeth, the ones that led to the rise of the Stuarts.
- Maria/Stuart, by Jason Grote, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington