Best Line Wins does a good job of capturing the flavor of the best-loved sketches from the 1950s and 60s by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, without (as the dramaturg’s notes tell us) infringing on material that is still in copyright.
My Favorite Sociopath is a sharp satire of hypercompetitive journalism graduate students chasing (and besmirching) reputation in the early twilight years of news in print. I wonder what my newsroom colleagues would say. I wonder what Truman Capote would say.
In The Smoker, Lisa D’Amour spins a tale of striving (working-class, middle-class, artistic-class) out of a relatively recent opportunity for socializing, the front stoop nicotine break. There are some interesting doublets, among them two mishaps that fall from the skies. Regina Gibson is particularly winning as Kim, an opera singer with auditions but no gigs, who imagines a prospective hookup in sad detail.
In her interview in the program notes, D’Amour identifies why I am not always taken in by a new play:
[My mentor, Sherry Kramer]… told me that audiences will not tolerate didacticism. They will shut down and not listen. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being lectured to in a play. So this is part of the magic trick of writing a play. It’s a little bit of a sleight of hand. You’re trying to hide what you’re talking about in something very casual, and hopefully by the end of the play, the audience realizes what we were talking about the whole time.
To realize Refugee Rhapsody, cheers for the design and technical crew for accomplishing multiple playing spaces in the white box of Studio 112, chief among them a minimalist apartment for the uber-rich, all cream and ivory right down to the faux Mark Rothko on the wall. How do we frame someone else’s suffering, someone else’s disaster? The question is made concrete in the most theatrical elements of this play.
¡VOS!, by Christina Pumariega, braids together two story lines, a middle-aged woman’s last chance at IVF, and the Argentine military’s 1976 coup that suspended Peronism1 and resulted in tens of thousands of desaparecidos.
A design/direction quibble: a few scenes consist of telephone calls between Annie and her OB-GYN, Dr. Cossi. Annie is where we can easily see her from three sides (in the often challenging Marinoff black box) but Dr. Cossi is at a corner between two of the seating areas, where she can’t easily be seen by many in the audience.
1About which I am rather under-informed.
- Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
- The Smoker, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by Shelley Butler
- Refugee Rhapsody, by Yussef El Guindi, directed Zi Alikhan
- Best Line Wins, by Beth Kander, directed by Jessica Kubzansky
- ¡VOS!, by Christina Pumariega, directed by Kimberly Senior
- My Favorite Sociopath, by Aurin Squire, directed by Céline Rosenthal