Author: David Gorsline

Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living is a Christmas puzzle box in which we’re given a look at the characters’ inner lives, sort of Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones as reimagined by Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn. In this case, each of this hapless family’s secret coping strategies to get through a fraught holiday gathering are projected on a screen, for instance, Matthew must sit and eat in order to tell a lie or Deborah must clean in order to hold her tongue—all to some comic effect. Jonathan Feuer as Adam has the greatest challenge, and he pulls it off, with Adam must use a silly voice (some of them very specific) in order to tell the truth.

Although the Charades sequence is predictable, it does give Naomi Jacobson (Deborah) the opportunity for the biggest laugh of the show without saying a word or moving a muscle. The fate of a solitary empty bowl on an end table is telegraphed from Utah.

• Rules for Living, by Sam Holcroft, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

I’m all for reusing playbills, but not this one in my hands that has been overly thumbed.

The piece raises an occasional chuckle, but it goes into the bin of the rarely funny genre of Well-Intentioned People Getting It Wrong. There are the easy jokes about pronouns; a pedant stickles about the difference between literally and figuratively to set up another limp joke. There is the outsider who is not what everyone else takes her to be: a Waiting for Guffman trope telegraphed like it was on a fiber optic cable. The clash between art and commercial viability for women is better executed in Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business.

Shea-Mikal Green as Logan, the director of the no-budget “devised piece” about the American Thanksgiving, does manage to inject some manic energy into this wobbly vehicle.

• The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Suzanne Beal, Maryland Ensemble Theatre, Frederick, Md.

The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions is a funny-sweet-bitter reflection of playwright Paula Vogel’s emotional journey with her mother, named in the play’s world as Phyllis Herman (the always watchable Kate Eastwood Norris). The “evictions” of the title refer to the series of house moves undertaken by the Herman family—mother, son Carl (the surprising Stanley Bahorek) and daughter Martha (steady Zoe Mann)—gradually stepping up from a cockroach-riddled basement custodial flat* to a spacious three-bedroom apartment, all in the D.C. metro area. As Martha says early in the play, there is a season for packing, and a season for unpacking.

It’s not clear in the text whether each change of domicile is entailed by formal proceedings, but that’s not important. Rather, we can read each eviction as a point in the Herman’s lives when something is lost, and maybe something found. As the various Herman family apartments gradually become airier and more spacious, equally so the living rooms become emptier of furniture, highlighting Phyllis’s rejection of her children and general isolation. The Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch over Me” recurs as underscoring: Phyllis never does find that Someone until the closing moments of the play.

Shawn Boyle’s projection designs are formidable, perhaps even triggering.

• The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, by Paula Vogel, directed by Margot Bordelon, Studio Theatre Mead Theatre, Washington

*Writing as someone who’s lived with cockroaches in Prince George’s County, I’m of the mind that you’re never really rid of them.