Category: Reviews

WSC Avant Bard gives us a treat: a fine production of one of Harold Pinter’s less-produced plays of menace in an enclosed space, No Man’s Land (1975). Pinter’s fascination with abrupt shifts of dominance and usurpation is one of the strongest themes of this production: it’s never clear from one moment to the next whether Briggs (Bruce Alan Rauscher) and Foster (Frank Britton) are housekeeper and secretary to Hirst (ever-powerful Brian Hemmingsen) in his well-appointed Hampstead home, or his jailers. Imagine Veronica’s Room with more homoeroticism and even more peeping.

The opening scene springs from Hirst’s inviting Spooner (Christopher Henley) in for a drink. Twenty-five minutes later, Hirst is falling-down drunk and the scene unspools into slow-motion slapstick. Henley makes the most of Spooner’s weediness, with a sick little smile and a delight in uttering words like periphrastic and sequesteredness as if they were much smuttier than they are.

Rauscher’s second act monologue plays to his strengths: he’s a bemused thug telling the story of how he once gave directions to Foster about how to get to Bolsover Street (in Rauscher’s dialect choice, this sounds more like the so-appropriate Balls-Over Street).

One can read the coda section of the second act as an explanation of this enigmatic sequence of meetings, or as one more mystery to unpick.

• No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter, directed by Tom Prewitt, WSC Avant Bard, Theatre on the Run, Arlington, Va.

Seeking drama and humor in the living rooms of the privileged class, Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to Lyman and Polly Wyeth, retirees from 1960s-era Hollywood and old guard conservatives. Unfortunately, the drama (a tell-all memoir by their daughter Brooke) is not compelling, and the humor lodges in tired one liners. Helen Carey, as Polly, does give us a flinty Nancy Reagan; Larry Bryggman’s tentativeness as Lyman is puzzling.

The narrative’s chronology is forced and confusing: most of the play takes place shortly after the invasion of Iraq, yet the still-young Brooke is called upon to remember events from the Vietnam War, a minimum of three decades prior.

• Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Kyle Donnelly, Arena Stage Fichandler Theatre, Washington

This biography of Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente (the mimetic Modesto Lacén) comes alive in the songs and the dancing. The book scenes convey the story of Clemente’s childhood in Puerto Rico, his 3,000-hit baseball career, and its tragic, abrupt end by a plane crash in 1972. They tend to be choppy and episodic, despite the efforts of Ricardo Puente as the flashy Ramiro, who serves as narrator for much of the play.

The first act ends with a scene in which the dark-skinned Clemente is beaten by two racist policemen—an especially odd choice since we’ve just heard a rousing love song to Roberto from his to-be wife Vera (Keren Lugo).

The ensemble of five is anchored by the versatile Alexandra Linn, equally effective as character actor and musical performer.

• DC-7: The Roberto Clemente Story, book and lyrics by Luis Caballero, music by Luis Caballero and Harold Gutiérrez, directed by Luis Caballero, GALA Hispanic Theatre, Washington

Bill Cain’s brazenly autobiographical play takes a wry but clear-eyed view of what the modern clergy can and cannot accomplish. Cain says, through his protagonist also named Bill (the genial, bemused Ray Ficca), that a holy person proceeds mainly by calling attention to details. In this way, by being an indicator (as many depictions of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, show her), he resembles the modern playwright (and Cain is both playwright and Jesuit priest).

The details to which Cain points are simple but strong: the decline and death of his own mother Mary (the flexible Marybeth Wise), the life in flashbacks of his late father Pete (Mitchell Hébert, always a pleasure to watch), and the life journey of his brother Paul (Danny Gavigan). With many short scenes (some no more than a line or two long) and much direct address to the audience, the play clicks along. Hébert and Gavigan fill in minor characters of friends, neighbors, and health care professionals, and Gavigan is at his most watchable as a comically callow physician.

Nevertheless, the side trip to explore Paul’s military career in Vietnam, cut short by a crisis of faith in the rightness of our conduct there, serves to diffuse the focus of the play. Cain deals more effectively with the U.S.’s misadventures in Southeast Asia in his 9 Circles, recently produced by a Round House partner theater.

• How to Write a New Book for the Bible, by Bill Cain, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

This is the first Round House show directed by new Producing Artistic Director Ryan Rilette, who brings new life to the company’s repertory after its ill-advised overemphasis on dramatized novels. Next year’s season includes works by Martin McDonagh, August Wilson, and area premieres of plays by Theresa Rebeck, Melissa James Gibson, and Nicky Silver.

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