Category: Reviews

The use of a prison setting for the recital of familiar material is well-known for its effect in theater, from Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, set in colonial Australia, to the legendary production of Waiting for Godot by the San Francisco Actors Workshop at San Quentin. And here it works again, in the powerful Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro, an ensemble retelling of the myth from Sophocles and the Greeks by tattooed inmates of a correctional facility in southern California.

In Alfaro’s version, Oedipus (the flexible Andres Munar) is born to a Latino drug kingpin in Los Angeles and spends his exile in North Kern State Prison; on his release, he follows the fated steps of killing his father Laius (David Anzuelo, an onstage character added from the Sophocles version) in a road-rage incident, taking over the family narcotics business from Creon (the intense Jose Joaquin Perez), and marrying his mother Jocasta (the fearless Romi Diaz).

Classical and contemporary elements blend well in this piece. A runway thrust stage (designed by Misha Kachman) ends upstage with a pair of industrial doors that evoke the devices in Greek theater, traditionally sliding away to reveal the results of bloodshed offstage—but here the sex and violence is front and center. The blinding of Oedipus is especially well-done: terrifying without making us fear for the safety of the actor. Choral work by Mando Alvarado and Jaime Robert Carillo is short, sharp, and sometimes funny, rather than rhapsodic; we liked the Coro’s remarks that explain the cruelty of Laius’s abandonment of Oedipus as “fathers sometimes do that.” Yoga, doo-wop, tai chi—all the pieces come together. While there are few passages of monologue, there is at times in the writing a gritty lyricism, as when Jocasta likens her tears to the Los Angeles River, usually dry and channeled, but gushing when in flood.

• Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro, directed by Michael John Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Tracy Letts returns to the trope of onstage violence with Superior Donuts, set in a seedy Uptown Chicago neighborhood. And the impressive fight, choreographed by Robb Hunter, is well executed by Richard Cotovsky (as donut shop proprietor Arthur) and Chris Genebach (as small-time criminal Luther). But the acting laurels go to Johnny Ramey in an endearing performance as Franco Wicks, an African-American youth with issues; in the course of working through them, he helps Arthur to master some of his own.

Arthur, a Vietnam-era draft evader who still hasn’t given up his beard and pony tail, has made it his life’s work to keep other people at arm’s length. So perhaps it’s a character choice, or perhaps just the length of the show’s run (it opened 10 November), that Cotovsky in his monologues of remembrance doesn’t take his time and make a connection to us in the audience.

Gregor Paslawsky does well with the character of Max, a neighboring merchant with designs on Arthur’s real estate, shifting from menace to exasperated comedy with ease.

The ground plan of Russell Metheny’s set excellently solves the familiar problem of actors being trapped behind a store counter by turning around the U of display case and seating so that its open section is downstage, placing the street entrance door directly upstage. The scene transition that calls for Arthur’s shop window to be boarded up is also smoothly handled.

• Superior Donuts, by Tracy Letts, directed by Serge Seiden, The Studio Theatre’s Metheny Theatre, Washington

For the holiday break, this is an entertaining evening of blackout comedy, mixing political caricature and straight-up social satire, with a good salting of silly cabaret songs. Although our audience dotes most on the monologues by Todd Palin and Nancy (“I’m not bitter”) Pelosi, the strongest material includes sketches like Joey Bland and Lili-Brown’s study in race relations reversal. Klyph Stanford’s minimal Metro-inspired set is clever (and up-to-date, with red platform lights). Of the five-member ensemble, Brooke Breit stands out with the widest spectrum of sharply realized characters, ranging from a twelve-year-old with an overactive sense of entitlement to an apoplectic consumer finance adviser. The bits, 30 seconds or five minutes long, transition swiftly with no more set or prop requirements than a couple of black IKEA chairs. There are some genuine good laughs on offer here.

• A Girl’s Guide to Washington Politics, written and performed by Chicago’s The Second City, directed by Billy Bungeroth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The technical team shines in House of Gold, Gregory S. Moss’s satirical fantasia on hypermultimedia and sexualized celebrity that leaps off from the JonBenét Ramsey murder case. David Zinn’s three-level set incorporates any number of devices that simultaneously heighten our experience and put distance between us and the proceedings: mirrors above an attic bedroom, a candy-colored dungeon in which our best views are not live but rather via video projections. The glossy white kitchen on the middle level is of necessity serviceable to the closing scene’s mayhem.

The play’s narrative covers some familiar ground, but it is not concerned with the facts of the case, considering that all of the principals (an over-committed investigator, a skeevy neighbor, a fat schoolfriend with identity issues, parents with their own fading dreams) share in the culpability—not a whodunit but a wedunit. As audience, we are asked why we devote so much energy to such a tawdry, gruesome case: at one point, The Girl (the assured Kaaron Briscoe), trying to avoid hearing a horror story told by Jasper (the generously endowed Randy Blair), cries, “That’s awful!—Then what?”

Emily Townley as Woman has an arresting monologue about her own loss of youth, “…when I no longer bent the light.”

Matt Tierney’s sound design is killer. It ranges from a subtle, almost inaudible easy listening underscore to dangerously loud piercing alarm sirens. Actors wear body mics or use handheld mics on stands: often it’s the electronically amplified words that express a character’s innermost thoughts. Those handheld mics capture other sounds on stage, as in the stunning opening breakfast scene where the noises of frying sausage and crunching toast are fired like domestic weapons.

• House of Gold, by Gregory S. Moss, directed by Sarah Benson, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

1st Stage’s less-is-more aesthetic, usually successful, doesn’t deliver the goods for Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a fighting-over-the-inheritance drama with overtones of American Buffalo. Indeed, what’s needed most to help this slight story—scams and counter-scams surrounding what could be an extremely valuable legacy of 19th-century postage stamps—is a trim to one-act length and more sharply drawn characters. As written, Mary (Amy Waldman), one of two sisters squabbling over the property, has only one note to play: “they’re my stamps; they’re not yours to sell.” Her ne’er-do-well sibling Jackie (Leigh Taylor Patton) does better, but the necessities of the plot require her to acquire information about her trove at unrealistically precise points in time. The casting of Roger Payano as the small-time stamp dealer Philip and of Edward Daniels as the small-time small-time Dennis unfortunately obscures the relationship between them.

• Mauritius, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Mark Krikstan, 1st Stage, McLean, Virginia

Bowler-hatted, gray-suited Henry Pulling is reunited with his eccentric aunt Augusta and begins a voyage to himself in this adaptation by Giles Havergal of Graham Greene’s novel, the sweet and saucy Travels with my Aunt. Generally narrated by Henry, the play’s gadget is that a quartet of men play Henry as well as 26 other characters, including the titular Mame-ish Augusta. The play’s reveal is perhaps never in doubt, but it gives the four actors a chance to cut loose, as in a hilarious scene between Lawrence Redmond and Nigel Reed as they play two old women cackling about their younger days organizing a Brighton wedding chapel for dogs. The mostly-reserved Bill Largess pulls most of the Henry duty. And any production that gives Michael Russotto the freedom to clown it up can’t be bad. James Fouchard’s formal yet flexible set hides some handy prop storage locations.

• Travels with My Aunt. by Graham Greene, adapted for the stage by Giles Havergal, directed by Kasi Campbell, Rep Stage, Columbia, Maryland

Kathleen Akerley does a commendable job of wrestling Kurt Vonnegut’s blackly comic novel onto the stage, trimming it to a two-and-a-half-hour evening while retaining good chunks of dialog intact—for instance, the memorable warning by Claire Minton to never index your own book. The script also maintains narrative drive by focusing on narrator Jonah’s (the bemused, solid Michael Glenn) urge to finish the book he is writing about Dr. Felix Hoenikker and his family, in much the same way that the reporter in Citizen Kane maintains a line through that film’s various episodes and reminiscences—or at least until Jonah arrives in San Lorenzo and all hell breaks loose.

The play is also cinematic in its distortion of space and scale: Jonah looks at Franklin Hoenikker’s scale-model town through a magnifier, and the actors become full-size representations of the plasticine people that he sees: bodies as set dressing. In a reversal of scale, Jonah re-enacts in act 3 the destruction of San Lorenzo with a paper doll theater, lip-buzzing the island as the planes in the air show, knocking the six-inch puppets with his hands into the abyss. And in the stunning opening scene with Jonah, a bartender, and a prostitute, Akerley solves the sight-line problems of the Callan’s black box performance space by placing the players in three different playing areas, each with a duplicate set of props: three letters from Newt Hoenikker to Jonah.

Alas, the technical reset necessary to get us into act 3 is a bit of a momentum-killer.

The Longacre Lea regulars are augmented with additional cast members, bringing their numbers to ten to fill the roles of three dozen named characters. Of particular note among Joe Brack, who gives us a manic Franklin Hoenikker, and Danny Gavigan’s clearly defined bartender, cabbie, and Angela Hoenikker.

• Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

This year’s festival, the twentieth, offers two plays that take fresh perspectives on the past decade’s hostilities; a two-character drama; and a musical contrivance that almost defies description. Despite what one character says of the conflict in Iraq and its aftermath—”It’s your mess, nothing to do with me”—Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Lidless makes it clear that all of us own this mess. When Alice (the super-flexible Eva Kaminsky), an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay and now out of the service running a flower shop fifteen years in the future, is confronted by Bashir (the doleful Barzin Akhavan), one of the prisoners on whom she performed extraordinary interrogation techniques, her repressed memories of that time come roaring back. The effects on Alice’s family take a tragic turn, leaving one of them literally breathless, but in the end a semblance of integration is achieved. Cowhig is a powerful storyteller with images: the passage in which Bashir crushes the blooms of a bouquet of yellow roses is stunning, while the climactic quintet rings with intensity. Certain plot developments (the question of daughter Rhiannon’s parentage, specifically) don’t seem to be fully anticipated, but a curtain speech suggests that this good work is still under development.

Akhavan returns as Yashin Shalid, a curator of antiquities in Mosul anxious that his museum’s treasures be protected from the imminent United States invasion, in Inana, by Michele Lowe. This is a slightly more comic role for him, as Yashin has just arrived in London bemused by his new wife Shali (Zabryna Guevara) who is exceptionally reluctant to begin the celebration of their wedding night. Michael Goodfriend shows some nice range in a couple of ensemble roles. While the story has a good misdirection to keep us guessing, it’s ultimately unsatisfying because Yashin’s success at saving the trove seems inevitable.

Kaminsky is joined by Helen-Jean Arthur in Jennifer Haley’s Breadcrumbs. Arthur plays Alida, a reclusive and crabbed writer, now an aging woman in the middle of her slide into dementia; she is accosted by needy, free-wheeling Beth, who tries to help Alida write her last story. The play is missing something: these two characters need someone else to bounce off them, so it came as no surprise to read Haley’s playwright’s note that they were lifted from a draft five-person play.

Lee Sellars’ and Max Baker’s concert with scenes, The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, widely anticipated, disappoints. There’s certainly a lot to look at here: the four-piece band (sardonic indie rockers Eelwax Jesus) is set up center-right, while most of stage left belongs to a group home of residents who watch the band on TV, sing and dance along, and generally try to break through the glass of the screen. Then there is an 50s-era office set upstage (in front of the exposed back wall of the Frank Center theater), a scruffy man’s apartment, a woman ironing handkerchiefs (the tireless Margot White), and two large projection screens. At intermission, the screens offer a diverting montage of cheesy drive-in movie snack bar promotions and countdown clocks, and in the second act we see a fascinating old-school animation of basic plane geometry concepts—so engrossing that it upstages the live action. Alas, pacing in the book scenes (except for the “banter” between the band and the TV host, Kurt Zischke as the pneumatic Mr. Shine) is slow. And there just isn’t any there to tie this slightly surrealistic production together.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• Lidless, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Inana, by Michele Lowe , directed by Ed Herendeen
• Breadcrumbs, by Jennifer Haley, directed by Laura Kepley
• The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, book and lyrics by Max Baker, music by Lee Sellars, directed by Max Baker

We might be forgiven for wondering why Woolly Mammoth, having built its fabulous proscenium-styled performance space, enables its directors and designers to reconfigure it variously, as in the recent Full Circle and Clybourne Park. Nonetheless, the seating shifts are worth it. For the current production, the interesting two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries, the audience is arranged arena style around the remains of a hockey rink. Scenes skip forward and backward at five-year intervals in the lives of Doug and Kayleen, as they age from 8 to 38; a relationship evolves between them that perhaps is never sexual (a particular scene ends ambiguously) but is often more intimate. The exchange of (other) body fluids, as well as scars (visible and otherwise), become their emotional currency. The excellent Tim Getman plays accident-prone Doug as one long goofy lope through life, while Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey’s Kayleen always holds something mysteriously in reserve.

• Gruesome Playground Injuries, by Rajiv Joseph, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Have you ever had this experience? A play finishes its first act, and as the house lights come up for intermission, you think, “that act was so polished and well-constructed that it could stand by itself; I could go home now and be happy.” That’s how we felt at the act break for Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, an dark comedy that responds to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun by telling the story of the Chicago house to which Hansberry’s Younger family aspires. Norris’s play probes the relations between America’s classes and races in the second half of the past century, relations where so much hangs on the nuanced meanings of the phrase, “thank you, but no.”

The first act, set in 1959, introduces us to the Arts and Crafts-influenced house, home to Russ and Bev (company bulwarks Mitchell Hébert and Jennifer Mendenhall). Russ is not immune to the charms of the National Geographic Society’s magazine and neapolitan ice cream eaten from the carton. The meticulous production design is realized by Properties Master Jennifer Sheetz and other Woolly Mammoth production staff. Russ and Bev are ready for the jump to the suburbs, and they have (unintentionally?) sold their home to a black family. It’s up to neighborhood association rep and general pain in the ass Karl Lindner (the exceptional Cody Nickell) to spell things out to them.

After the break, it’s now 2009, and the house has seen a lot of living. Lindsey (Kimberly Gilbert) and Steve (Nickell, again), a young white couple, have bought the house from the (unnamed) Youngers, and hope to build a new, architecturally engaging yet tasteful (?), home on the site. Another confrontation with neighborhood association reps ensues, this time sparked by Lena (the astonishing Dawn Ursula), who wants her family’s urban homesteading to be respectfully remembered. While Nickell’s Steve proceeds to offend everyone in the room (was there ever a man so gormless that he didn’t know to stop talking?), Ursula’s Lena delivers zingers serenely, sweetly. She’s a stealth bomber of black comedy.

By my reckoning, the play’s third act comes at intermission, when the stage crew tear down Russ and Bev’s cozy home and transform it into Steve and Lindsey’s work site. Velcro is a stage carpenter’s best friend.

• Clybourne Park, by Bruce Norris, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

In their temporary digs in Crystal City, Arena delivers an effective, if modest, production of Guettel’s small-scale musical of an American mother and daughter on tour in post-war Italy, an abbreviated family unit in which daughter Clara may be less than she seems. The simple set is lit well by Michael Gilliam: moving instruments allow us to move adagio with Clara and her mother Margaret through the streets of Florence,—although elsewhere in the show, the projections of famous Florentine paintings against the set are sometimes a distraction.

Clara falls in (as American girls will do) with a charming, handsome Italian, one Fabrizio, who has an endearing partial command of English as well as the first act “Il Mondo Era Vuoto,” sung by Nicholas Rodriguez with muscular brio. Indeed, some of the best music in the show is sung in Italian, especially the spiky second act opening quintet, “Aiutami.”

But the story, and the evening, belong to Hollis Resnik’s Margaret, who brings a mature clarity to “Dividing Day.” In the second act, when she cuts short a long-distance phone call to her husband Roy, she gives a little yelp, as if startled by her own determination to carry out her plans.

• The Light in the Piazza, book by by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, directed by Molly Smith, Arena Stage, Arlington, Virginia

Fourth wall-breaking opens this production of Charles Mee’s one act on the life and works of assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, a man who found both sides of the picture post card equally interesting. Preceding Wilderesque self-introductions, the cast solicits donations from the audience of found objects to be arranged into a box construction in the course of the play. (Can it be called a fourth wall when the stage in the black box Kogod is configured galley style?) In any event, it’s a nice touch to open this 70-minute fantasia, a co-production of the University of Maryland theater department and Round House Theatre. Scheduled for presentation at Round House’s space later in the year, let us hope that certain aspects of the production settle into more of a performance groove by then.

Mee’s intriguing, deceptively challenging, script effectively conjures the dream-like world of Cornell, one of infatuations with shop girls, devotional consumption of sweet treats, obsessions with movie stars, and tender caring for his infirm brother Robert. It’s a universe where a ballerina can drop by with a chocolate cake, or a lonely artist working in a basement can burst into song. The text enters Cornell (Equity member Scott Sedar, who approaches the role with bemused gravitas) into dialogues with his contemporary artists (Gorky, Duchamp, Matta) as well as a chorus of three men (coached by Leslie Felbain) who flounce like twittering birds—and in each case. we’re not sure how much of each dialogue is projection by Mee’s Cornell onto the other speakers. There are longish passages where Cornell watches Hedy Lamarr and Lauren Bacall in Algiers and To Have and Have Not, and he recites the dialogue along with—but to Sedar’s credit, not mechanically like a Rocky Horror Show fan, but rather a beat before or after the sound track, as one who is remembering in real time.

The standout among the ensemble cast of student actors is James Waters, as a member of the flittering birds chorus and as a character called the Astronomer: he delivers his monologues with a cool economy of means.

• Hotel Cassiopeia, by Charles L. Mee, directed by Blake Robison, University of Maryland Department of Theatre and Round House Theatre, Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Maryland

Mee himself constructs plays as a collagist. He writes:

…I try in my work to get past traditional forms of psychological realism, to bring into the frame of the plays material from history, philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory, sudden violent passion, lyricism, the National Enquirer, nostalgia, longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion, inability.

I like plays that are not too neat, too finished, too presentable.