Category: Reviews

Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles. The play is wrapped around the atrocities that took place in Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in 2006.

In Cain’s retelling of the story, Reeves is a young man with little hope and a history of personality disorder who enlists in the Army and is sent to Iraq—perhaps the last person that you’d want to trust with lethal weapons in a high-stress situation. Reeves’s story of the violence he witnesses, his brutal over-response to it, and the slender moment of grace he experiences in the meantime is unpacked by a series of interviews and meetings with various officers, psychiatrists, chaplains, and lawyers. His interlocutors are played by an ensemble of three (Scott McCormick, Jonathan Feuer, and Katy Carkuff), and the doubling serves to emphasize Reeves’s disorientation and isolation; on at least one occasion, he remarks to a new character played by an actor we have already seen, “You look familiar.” Each one tries to put his own spin on Reeves’s tale, and it’s only at the end, in a bravura monologue in which he undergoes death by lethal injection, that Reeves wrests control of the narrative and lets us viscerally feel what it’s really like to be him in this wretched situation.

One of Reeves’s lawyers remarks that his history is a threat to American complacency (and the complacency of all who practice violence) because it opens up a sympathy for the enemy. And as that sympathy knocks down the barrier between foes, how can any war survive? It is Cain’s play that instills sympathy for Reeves, and with that barrier down, how can the scapegoating murder that is capital punishment survive?

Carkuff’s scene as the Army “shrink” is particularly strong, as the career psychiatrist must walk the line between, on the one hand, compassion for her patient and getting him out of harm’s way (his own and others’), and on the other, the need to “recycle” warriors back to a state of fitness for duty and return them to the front lines.

• 9 Circles, by Bill Cain, directed by Jennifer L. Nelson, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

David Lindsay-Abaire puts aside the wacky characters and situations of some of his earlier work (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers) and plays it straighter in his new Good People. But his signature damaged people are still present to fuel this sober comedy set in Boston’s Southie neighborhood.

Margaret (Johanna Day) has spent her working life getting (and losing) a series of minimum-wage jobs, barely keeping a household together for her and her developmentally-disabled daughter Joyce. When Mike (Andrew Long), a boy she knew from high school 30 years earlier, returns to the city as a successful endocrinologist and with a very young bride, Margaret reluctantly approaches him with the thin hope of a hand up—a job as a receptionist, a referral to one of his well-to-do friends, anything. Precisely how well Mike and Margaret knew each other all those years before is the information, gradually given to us, that drives the plot.

In the second-act confrontation among Margaret, Mike, and his wife Kate (Francesca Choy-Kee), in Mike and Kate’s posh home in Chestnut Hill, everyone gets his say. In particular, Margaret makes a strong case that the line between success and failure is quite fine. Hard work will only get you so far; what’s needed is a lucky break or someone else’s sacrifice. And what should be sacrificed is not always obvious.

Yet there is a distance between us and the three characters, a separation—perhaps it is Lindsay-Abaire’s comic facility?—that makes it difficult for us to make a connection with them. And the epilogue (fraught with its own staging problems) casually imparts a key piece of information that many of us might miss.

I like the misdirection of an expensive-looking prop in a precarious spot that doesn’t end its stage time with a crash.

• Good People, by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Jackie Maxwell, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater, Washington

Yury Urnov uses an eclectic mix of theatrical devices to tell the story of Mia Chung’s You for Me for You, a fantasia of two sisters seeking to escape from North Korea to America: a revolving ring that delivers actors and props on stage, that can render a New York streetscape with toy taxis and waist-high apartment buildings; a backdrop stacked high with Asian storage boxes that pivots to reveal industrial scaffolding over which the sisters (Ruibo Qian as Junhee and Jo Mei as Minjee) clamber in their flight; a sound design by Elisheba Ittoop that simultaneously evokes the rumbles below decks of a huge cargo ship and taiko drumming; a song and dance break suggestive of Family Guy.

What, exactly, are the women escaping to? A consumerist paradise populated with fast-talking New Yorkers (uttered hilariously by Kimberly Gilbert as a salad of English understood imperfectly by newly-arrived Junhee) where the simple act of buying a phone requires graduate-school training? One that lacks the simple connections to the earth and home captured in a single ripe persimmon. And yet, as one of them says as they cross the border, “There’s nowhere else: let’s hurry to get there.”

• You for Me for You, by Mia Chung, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company, Washington

Forum Theatre continues its investigations into questions of faith with Kara Lee Corthron’s Holly Down in Heaven. The Holly of the title (the self-possessed) is a precocious 15-year-old who has placed herself in what she describes as religious exile for the term of her unintended pregnancy. Self-banished to the basement, she bickers with her tutor Mia (Dawn Thomas) and manipulates her preternaturally doting father (affable KenYatta Rogers) (a Steve Douglas lacking in tough love), but her deepest conversations are with the heterogeneous members of her extensive doll collection. And these dolls talk back, led by a marionette of Carol Channing (manipulated and voiced by the skilled Vanessa Strickland), the only therapist whose advice the fragile Holly will heed. We are cautioned against false gods, but it’s not the dolls that constitute Holly’s idolatry; rather, perhaps it is her own believed self-sufficiency.

As perhaps we would expect, Mia has issues of her own, which Thomas divulges (nay, it’s more like an evisceration) in a bravura second-act monologue. (And she does a fine Carol Channing riff, too.) But it’s the off-the-beaten-track storytelling of the puppets that’s the real charmer of this show. So strong are these alter egos of Holly that they conduct their own colloquy at the end of the first act, without Holly even being in the room.

• Holly Down in Heaven, by Kara Lee Corthron, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Kristoffer Diaz’s 2009 play is an entertaining slam of all things masscult, one that works on multiple levels. Macedonio “Mace” Guerra (the outstanding José Joaquin Pérez) is an artist doing what he has always wanted to do, performing as a professional wrestler. Small but physically talented, he is a journeyman playing the “heel” roles, making the charismatic “face” wrestlers (like the titular Chad Deity, well played with preening entitlement by Shawn T. Andrew) look good—and not getting his neck broken in the process.

When the beleaguered Mace meets Vigneshwar “VP” Paduar (Adi Hanash), an Indian immigrant in Brooklyn with moxie and mojo to match Chad’s, he envisions a story line for the two of them that ends with the little guy on top. Alas, his dreams are quickly co-opted by the promoter Everett K. “E.K.O” Olson (fearsome Michael Russotto), who is as culturally tone deaf as any Hollywood suit.

What makes the satire work is that hardly any cultural group escapes ridicule. The hayseed Billy Heartland (with a perfect theme song from Big and Rich) is just as annoying and stereotyped as the Muslim terrorist character that E.K.O. assigns to VP. Chad Deity serves to lampoon two conventionally opposed groups: he’s a trash-talking African-American and a Romney Republican who makes his entrance into the ring tossing dollar bills to the crowd.

What makes the show work as theater is the quiet intensity of Pérez. He narrates much of the story as a fourth wall-breaking monologue, and he’s not afraid to make us wait for what he has to say—this is appropriate, because Mace has spent his life withholding his true thoughts from others in order to keep a job, in order to get by. When Mace finally unloads on E.K.O. in a bravura surrogate fight scene (with echoes of a similar climax in Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days), pleading for the opportunity to tell his own story, we get the physical release that we’ve been hoping for.

Doing his part to make of Pérez look good in turn is James Long, who covers three ensemble roles and is a professional wrestler IRL.

In a story in which every character has at least one name given to him by someone else, a world of traditional Mexican face masks and engineered personas, of outer borough denizens reappropriating one another’s “authentic street” culture, perhaps it’s fitting that VP’s dialect is a little slippery.

If you really did get to tell your story, what would that look like?

• The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers. This time it’s a Law & Order procedural hopelessly warped by a shot of Viennese-school psychoanalysis, as well as automatic writing in the form of Mad Libs—all of it marked by Akerley’s signature physicality.

Heather Haney plays a young law student whose dreams (peopled by Caryl Churchillesque shapeshifters like a comic Chairman Mao [Jesse Terrill] with an inscrutable accent) threaten to overtake her waking life. She is prone to what you might call reverse auditory hallucinations, as she will make a cutting remark about someone and not remember having said it a moment later. Compelled to serve as her own Hercule Poirot—did she do something, say something, think something, awake or asleep, that caused a man to die?—she argues with a fellow student (the affable, goofy Michael Glenn) about which of her thoughts she can call her own, and which are archetypal bubblings from the collective unconscious.

Akerley explores the interesting theme of re-presentation through the metaphor of courtroom protocol that requires a defendant to remain silent and to express her thoughts only through her advocate, her mouthpiece, her representative. Abstruse as much of this is, nevertheless Akerley’s writing remains grounded and personal, as when she writes of a traffic altercation that ends uncertainly.

The necessities of the script’s many scene changes, as Haney’s law student slips from dreams to day and back again, at times tax Longacre Lea’s limited technical resources. And the significance of a point of law, the distinction between contractual acceptance (which occurs when given) and rejection (which occurs when received) still has me mystified.

• Goldfish Thinking, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

The piece is a series of monologues in which the speakers bear witness of their experience in the evangelical practice of Christianity. There is no discernible narrative arc. Kevin Hasser, as Reverend Jose, does well with his texts: when we first meet him, he is endearing and sincere, but he soon slips off the rails into hallucinatory ecstasy.

• Church, by Young Jean Lee, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

The unexpected emergent themes of this year’s festival are power cuts and educating our children.

Gidion’s Knot deals with a precociously literary fifth-grade boy whose violent revenge fantasies, expressed in a brutal lyricism, end rather badly. Set designer Margaret McKowen transforms the white box CCA performance space into a colorful classroom for 11-year-olds, fitted with a crafts resource center and marvelously bedecked with posters of the presidents. Audience seating in movable broad-armed chairs creates a few sight line problems.

Joey Collins as Bobby enlivens Neil LaBute’s In a Forest, Dark and Deep, an otherwise conventional story of sexual and emotional betrayal: most of the turns in the plot’s road are well marked with warning signs. Bobby is a ne’er-do-well carpenter in a small college town, someone who talks too loud (and yet Collins knows when to drop his volume to make a point) but finds a way to get ‘er done. His monologue about a long-suffering Iraq veteran’s wife, and about what Bobby will and won’t do, is especially striking.

The Exceptionals, by Bob Clyman, is the festival’s most thought-provoking piece, and its most confusing. Two mothers, Gwen (the guarded Rebecca Harris) and Allie (festival favorite Anne Marie Nest), have borne sons with sperm donated by men of exceptional genetics. Offered the opportunity to further advance their boys’ development by enrollment in an experimental school, they must both make sacrifices and jettison some cognitive baggage. I say thought-provoking, because the play raises questions like the degree to which we push our children’s intellectual development at the expense of their socialization. What profits a first-grader who can solve quadratic equations if he can no longer just play ball or hang out with his dad? As a adult, there is the hard nut of failing to live to one’s potential. Is walking away from an advanced degree with only a thesis defense to be completed ever a good idea?

I say confusing, because it’s difficult to understand whose story the play is telling us, complicated as it is with a subplot about illicit contact with a donor. Certainly it’s not that of the boys, Ethan and Michael, who exist for us only as shadows and distorted audio. Is it the mothers who make the journey? Is it Claire (stiff-backed Deidre Madigan), genetics researcher and Montessoriesque schoolmistress, who brackets the action with a pair of monologues about raising children as if they were hothouse flowers? Claire manipulates the women, driving them through an emotional maze that is mirrored by Lucina Stecconi’s set, all free-flowing corners and no doors–only starting points and goals.

Captors, based on the book Eichmann in My Hands by Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein, is an overwritten exercise, the sort of dreary historical reenactment that the festival is sometimes prone to (Miss Golden Dreams, Mary and Myra). Joey Collins (as Malkin) and Philip Goodwin (as Eichmann) are quite good—but read the book, instead.

Bess Wohl’s Barcelona is the strongest production of the five. It begins as a sexy comic romp set in the title city, a casual pickup between a woman sowing her bachelorette’s wild oats and a lonely, brooding Spaniard. It morphs into a genuine dialog between Old World and New about mourning and moving on, about taking responsibility for one’s actions. Anne Marie Nest is Irene, the tipsy real estate agent from Colorado, and Jason Manuel Olazàbal is the rock-steady Manuel. Nest’s monologue about slipping into her client’s lives, sitting on their conveyable sofas and holding imaginary tea parties, is delicious.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• Gidion’s Knot, by Johna Adams, directed by Ed Herendeen
• The Exceptionals, by Bob Clyman, directed by Tracy Brigden
• In a Forest, Dark and Deep, by Neil LaBute, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Captors, by Evan M. Weiner, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Barcelona, by Bess Wohl, directed by Charles Morey

What is this? we ask ourselves ten minutes into Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. Some guys sitting around a campfire, telling stories that they remember badly, hoping that the creak in the woods they just heard is food and not an intruder? A surprisingly moving passage in which news is exchanged by summoning names from address books?

And yet, and yet. Out of such rude yet inherently theatrical materials, Anne Washburn recapitulates the development of culture: survivors of a generalized failure of the electric power grid keep themselves alive by quoting bits of Gilbert and Sullivan and episodes of Matt Groening’s The Simpsons. As the years roll along, quotation becomes invention; light comedy and satire becomes bloody, lyrical tragedy. Or, as my OTC put it, when there is no physical property to speak of (when your stage machinery is made of recycled blue plastic tarpaulins), there remains intellectual property.

Some engaging acting performances in the first act—James Sugg’s taciturn, Robert Mitchum-channelling Sam, the travelling Gibson (Chris Genebach) with hidden G&S skills—become absorbed into the ensemble playing of the second and third acts. Indeed, by act 3, set far in the future, we’ve dispensed with distinguishable characters at all. But it’s that third act towards which this play is driving, a marvelous palimpsest of bits of Western culture high and low (mostly low)—Brechtian songs, all of the actors in half masks, Britney Spears chartbusters—all of the theatrical wires showing because there’s no technology to make them disappear. The thrilling miracle of the end of the act is that there are juice-carrying wires at all.

• Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, by Anne Washburn, directed by Steven Cosson, music by Michael Friedman, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Mike Nichols keeps the opening moments of Death of a Salesman quiet, soft, and slow, all the better to set off the fireworks to come. The performances here set a reference standard for Arthur Miller’s iconic work, though we do miss the scrim effects specified by the text. Andrew Garfield gives us a grittier, more street-wise Biff Loman; Molly Price does comic va-va-va-voom as The Woman. Philip Seymour Hoffman is grounded, stolid as Willy Loman as his American dream breaks apart under his feet. He is a bear at bay—until his closing beat, when he sprints to escape.

With one arguable exception, the underscoring by Alex North and Glen Kelly works very well here, giving the piece a bit of Tennessee Williams flavor. The compact set by Jo Mielziner keeps the playing spaces contained; for once, the Lomans’ kitchen is the size of a real kitchen for a house built in 1920.

What resonates with today’s audiences, evidenced by sympathetic chuckles, is the play’s critique of postwar consumption-driven economics; planned obsolescence is planned obsolescence, whether it’s a refrigerator that wears out just as the last installment payment is made, or today’s electronic gadgets with their forced upgrades. Willy Loman’s boss Howard (the wired-up gearhead Remy Auberjonois) would be less reprehensible were he pushing paperwork in his interview with Willy, rather than futzing with his new wire recorder.

• Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, directed by Mike Nichols, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York

Harold Pinter is perhaps at his most Beckettian in The Caretaker, particularly in the character of the shabby, smelly old man Davies (Jonathan Pryce, approaching statesman status). Director Christopher Morahan pushes the comedy as far as it will go, with a who’s-got-the-bag sequence that owes a little to Chuck Jones. Alex Hasselll as Mick delivers Pinter’s signature brooding menace, while Alan Cox gives us an understated gem of a monologue for damaged Aston, lit by an exquisitely gradually tightening pool of light designed by Colin Grenfell.

Extra-live acoustics in the work-in-progress BAM Harvey Theater at times rendered Pryce’s dialect too murky.

• The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter, directed by Christopher Morahan, BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, N.Y.

War Horse is a masterful piece of ensemble theatricality. This simple story of a boy and his horse Joey is told with live actors and bunraku-inspired puppets, augmented by a series of projections against a screen that resembles a torn scrap of paper.

The trials of Joey, acquired by the English army for service in the last major war in which cavalry was used (the so-called Great War), are our entry into an account of the inhumanity of that war — hence, as told here, this is not a piece that younger attendees will have the patience for.

This is the sort of puppetry that works because you’re always aware of the machinery, so a change to the fabric covering the horses’ bodies tells us all that we need to know about their condition.

If the acting and the musical underscoring are at times melodramatic, the work knows that its most touching effects are the simplest ones: a paddock established by four actors holding staffs; fallen bodies on a battleground transformed into a graveyard’s mounds by the arrival of the women they left behind, in chorus; the twitch of a horse’s ear or the heave of a foal’s chest; wagon ruts established by rumpled scraps of cloth laid on the deck. Perhaps most dramatic is the death of Joey’s rival-turned-compatriot, the horse Topthorn. When Topthorn goes down, the puppeteers detach themselves from his armature and back offstage quickly, his departing life force briefly become personified.

• War Horse, based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, adapted by Nick Stafford, in association with Handspring Puppet Company, directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, Lincoln Center Theatre at the Vivian Beaumont, New York

1st Stage delivers a clean, tight rendering of Leight’s memory play on the twilight of jazz bands. Patrick Bussinck gives a street-wise, wry reading to the narrator Clifford, one that’s much more connected than previous portrayals I’ve seen. Lee Mikeska Gardner makes the character arc of Clifford’s doomed mother Terry more distinct, albeit with a softened New England dialect. Director Michael Dove suits the play’s multiple locations to 1st Stage’s friendly space, using the house’s central aisle for entrances and conjuring a jail cell from two chairs. The atmospheric lighting by Stephanie P. Freed, relying on floor lamps and wall sconces to give us a cramped rent-controlled apartment or a downstairs jazz club, is exceptional.

• Side Man, by Warren Leight, directed by Michael Dove, 1st Stage Theatre, Tysons Corner, Virginia

Drag performer Joey Arias dresses up her cabaret act with inventive scrim projections and other effects by Basil Twist. Alas, Twist’s vintage puppets have more engaging personality than Arias’s persona. Unfunny banter, and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a gag based on a hand job. Arias does display some vocal skills, as well as an overworked deep squat move. She makes some wholly peculiar music choices, like George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” and the opening number, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s bombastic “Kashmir.” If the objective is something north of The Rocky Horror Show, what is realized is more like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

• Arias with a Twist, by Joey Arias and Basil Twist, directed by Basil Twist, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Sarah Marshall is monumental in the role of Big Hog in Jason Grote’s Civilization (all you can eat). It’s a fable (with more than a little debt to Orwell’s Animal Farm) in which most of the desperate, lonely people of its overlapping subplots are on the way down, while the hogs are are the way up. Grote usually dreams big, and here he swings from a scene watching the stars to a painfully frank confession at an open mic night. Daniel Escobar handles the latter with a deft touch, as he speaks of walking the waste paths of the city, noting every bit of trash along the verges.

All these scenelets make for a lot of scene transitions, and director Howard Shalwitz manages them skillfully. Nearly all the action takes place along a narrow strip downstage of a two-story barn wall marked with faded painted advertisements. Actors and set pieces always move on from stage right and go off to stage left, and the one-way movement begins to suggest a treadmill. And here’s something you don’t see much any more: the coffee shop tables, chairs, and people brazenly roll into view while the previous scene is still playing. Choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning contributes a fun dance with shopping carts for another scene change.

But it’s Marshall who’s the star. As the piggie who went to market and came back with a thousand-yard stare into our future, she will put you off your bacon for a while.

• Civilization (all you can eat), by Jason Grote, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington