Eclipsed; The Oogatz Man; Artist Descending a Staircase

Perhaps the theme for this review is “What is going on here?”

First up is Danai Gurira’s bracing Eclipsed: in a camp during the Liberian civil war of 2003, five women—four of them concubines of the local rebel leader and warlord—show us five different strategies for survival. We learn the ways of the camp through the eyes of the character known only as Girl (the masterful Ayesha Ngaujah), a teenager who has fled the town of Kakata (near Monrovia), only to be captured by the rebel LURD faction who are fighting against the forces of Charles Taylor. An aspect of the play that takes us out of our comfort zone is the language spoken, especially by the rural women. It’s a heavily-accented West African English with some creole elements (duplication of adjectives to intensify, e.g.), coached by Tonya Beckman Ross. At times, it’s as hard for us to follow the dialogue as it is for Girl to understand what has happened to her country, living as she is in such squalor that a solitary damaged book (a biography of a past American president) is the only entertainment to be found. Ngaujah confidently steers the wide arc written for her character, from doe-eyed runaway to the second act’s radicalized guerilla and back again, with even a side trip into comic goofiness. At the play’s close, she is left with a choice as vexing for us as it is for her: the way of the AK-47 or the way of the book.

  • Eclipsed, by Danai Gurira, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Later in the week we saw a pair of one acts from Longacre Lea, beginning with the brain-tickling The Oogatz Man, written by artistic director Kathleen Akerley. A story that begins with a simple premise—a man (Eric M. Messner) is preparing dinner in his apartment for his girlfriend (Heather Haney), with whom he intends to break up with that evening—but it quickly slides into a zone of indeterminate space and time, as if the imaginary force field he erects to keep her out of the kitchen has undergone a genuine power surge. Stair units at the back of the set sometimes take us upstairs and sometimes down; doorframe units are manipulated from scene to scene (by a backwards-gibberish-speaking building engineer) so that we see different sides of the same room; peculiar neighbors massage rolling pins into mind-controlling devices. It’s an ordinary walkup apartment building folded into a tesseract and peopled out of the imagination of David Lynch. Oh, and let us not miss Messner’s extended riff on the mentality that music takes him to, and the frustrations he feels trying to communicate that to someone else (dancing about architecture, anyone?), which leads into an ensemble air guitar session to selected tunes from Metallica. Much fun.

Akerley’s play is matched with Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase. Originally written for radio, the play does well in the black box of the Callan Theatre. The ensemble manages the scene transitions smoothly and with panache—and there are a lot of them, as the play (built from five nested flashbacks) is described in Stoppard’s script as having an ABCDEFEDCBA structure. The text has some of Sir Tom’s more provocative writing about art. Donner (the artist who descended, terminally, sometime between the A and B sections), says:

An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill…. An artistic imagination coupled with skill is talent…. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

In the end, the piece resolves into not much more than a shaggy dog story, but in the telling it is oh so entertaining.

  • The Oogatz Man, by Kathleen Akerley, and Artist Descending a Staircase, by Tom Stoppard, co-directed by Kathleen Akerley and Caitlin M. Smith, assisted by Mary Cat Gill, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington