Category: Reviews

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.

For a man who spends two hours sitting behind a desk and talking, Mike Daisey reveals an energy and grace in his movement worthy of a tai chi chuan master. Steepling his fingers to make a point, then softly melting them to the side, storyteller Daisey explores in his current offering at Woolly Mammoth the peculiarities of the natives in the islands called Vanuatu and the big island called Long, and shows them to be hilariously ridiculous in equal measures.

If his analysis of the past years’ financial embarrassments is rather glib, bad economics, Daisey’s perception that we experience the spongy bottom of the current recession to be disappointingly mild—in his word, “AWK-ward,”—is acute. And his parsing of the false egalitarianism at a New England liberal arts college into the contents of the boxes unloaded by each arriving freshman, some of them with technological riches that inspire him to say, “our shit is AWESOME,” is well executed.

He is better off on his trip to a speck of land in the South Pacific, the island of Tanna, to observe the playing out of an annual rite, part village festival, part perverse appropriation of Western culture. At one point in the spectacle, a man is chased in circles by another man, the pursuer wearing a fright mask from the movie Scream: this is explained to Daisey by an interpreter as “President Obama being chased by a dragon.” Oh-kayy. Daisey, a generously proportioned man, figures that he is a match for anything unusual or unpleasant on offer by Tanna’s cuisine. But, as he comically bellows in a richly modulated voice, “the fermented yam paste proved me wrong.”

It’s Daisey’s control of his polychrome voice, which can range from the avuncularity of Garrison Keillor to the manic jeremiads of Chris Farley, often in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence, that makes for such an entertaining evening.

• The Last Cargo Cult, created and performed by Mike Daisey, directed by Jean-Michelle Gregory, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Kern and Hammerstein’s breakthrough musical gets a simplified and trimmed production in Arlington. This 1927 show from the novel by Edna Ferber shows the traces of turn of the century operetta and music hall—songs that don’t fit into a simple verse-chorus structure are plentiful and two songs of the period are interpolated—even as it takes on social issues, chief among them race and class relations. Plays that capitalize on backstage shenanigans are so common as to pall (if I see one more riff on Moon Over Buffalo I can’t be held responsible for my actions), but the current piece, which follows 40 years in the life of a Mississippi River show boat of traveling players (something like vaudeville with a paddewheel), is still charming.

Some of the cast manage the challenge of aging four decades in the course of the evening more gracefully than others. Delores King Williams’s Queenie, of the supple voice, is a pleasure to listen to. She’s part of the most energetic and enjoyable number of the show, the playful “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Act 1. The dancing in this number is modest, but appropriate to its time. Elsewhen in the show, swing player Patrick Cragin, playing the role of hoofer and stage villain Bobby Smith last Saturday night, also shows some fancy tapping.

The show’s signature song, “Old Man River,” is a lovely piece, but I found the choice to reprise it twice (with little change in emotional temperature) a bit odd while chunks of plot were clearly jettisoned in Act 2 to keep the running time down. When Joe (amiable VaShawn McIlwain) takes the dynamics of “I’m tired of living,/And scared of dying” to a 10 the first time through, there isn’t any place for him to go. Notwithstanding, music director Jon Kalbfleisch’s orchestra of fourteen supports him with one clean, clear voice.

• Show Boat, music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, directed by Eric Schaeffer, Signature Theatre, The Max Theater, Arlington, Virginia

Tracy Letts is working here on a larger canvas than his earlier Killer Joe and Bug, but he has not left behind his signature deadpan violence, both verbal and physical. The tour of August: Osage County brings the darkly comic story of the crumbling of a small-town semi-patrician Oklahoma extended family, extended sufficiently that we are happy for the headshot-enhanced family tree in the program (the sort of thing that helps us through Shakespeare and Chekhov). Events of the play are sparked by the disappearance of the father, poet and professor Beverly Weston (the superb John DeVries, showing us some of the salt and grandeur of Robert Ryan in his day). Yes, there are shocking reveals and pandemonium, but the work’s theme is in the running down; as one character remarks in the third act, “Dissipation is much worse than cataclysm.”

With such an expansive script, every actor has a moment or a monologue in which to shine, chief among them the headliner Estelle Parsons as Violet Weston, the barbiturate-fogged wife of Beverly. Paradoxically, it’s her dinner table explosion of invective (fueled by drugs and decades of resentment) that sets up her even more effective quiet scenes later. Shannon Cochran also comes on strong as eldest daughter Barbara, who tries and fails to keep the shards of this house together.

The huge three-level set, the Weston homestead with the front wall sliced off (“a dollhouse for nasty people,” as one of us may have said), is impressive, but Violet’s final climb to the top takes so long that the beat seems to lose momentum. For a piece that depends on physical violence, the design and execution of the fight choreography is disappointing. But we liked the subtle flickering light effects that stand in for the television unit set in the fourth wall. And the subtle and nearly flawless sound amplification means that actors can sit on both sides of the dinner table and we can still hear everyone.

• August: Osage County, by Tracy Letts, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

The most effective pieces in this year’s offerings (seen on December 8) don’t have much to do with one another. Some depend on Eliza Burmeister’s goofy gymnasticism, like “Zen and the Art of Flight,” or the politically charged “Dear NRA suggestion box: I would prefer not to be shot in the head.” Like comedy’s threes, it’s the third repetition of the final image of this piece, run in slow motion, that is the visceral payoff. Others are more ensemble pieces, like “Windsprints.” Bilal Dardai’s self-referential multi-layered sound soup “With All the Time I’ve Wasted Browsing the Wikipedia…” is another winner. And then there’s Mary Fons’s exuberant performance art “‘Crush’ (with Potato Stamp Stars)” to bring us back to the creative nexus of second grade art class.

Memo to front-row ticket holders: wear something waterproof.

• Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, created by Greg Allen, written, directed, and performed by The Neo-Futurists, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington

Not even a minor technical derailment in the third act can hinder the momentum of this venerable piece of American theater, which first appeared in 1927. This light comedy still has the power to summon chuckles, albeit not guffaws. The first act’s biggest line can perhaps only be played for applause instead of a laugh, as it is in MTC’s production. Kaufman’s gift for mayhem blends well with Ferber’s deep-rooted sense of family tradition—whether she’s writing about Midwestern farmers or here, the Cavendishes, a slightly veiled stand-in for the talented and mercurial Barrymore family of actors at the top of the American twentieth century. It is a play that calls up W-words to describe it: waspish, wistful, wacky.

Director Doug Hughes spins up the tempo to near-farce levels, overlapping as much expository dialogue as he can and more. A booming sound effect for the front door (about which I am ambivalent) sets a bass drum rhythm that keeps the show on pace to stay under the three-hour mark.

Jan Maxwell as Julie, flinging herself about the stage in the first act like the colt she once was, is nicely balanced by Ana Gasteyer as the grasping, talent-free Kitty. In early scenes of bickering with her husband Herbert (John Glover as a graying leading man), Gasteyer’s elastic mug looks like she’s just gulped a glass of vinegar. However, as the frenzy spirals up in the second act, both of the ladies’ performances skate on the edge of caricature.

Reg Rogers brings the swash and buckle as rakish Tony (the would-be John Barrymore), especially in a very good fencing sequence at the top of Act 2 with Rufus Collins.

A meticulous, beautiful two-and-a-half level set by John Lee Beatty is lit by Kenneth Posner (who places countless practicals in this grand New York apartment).

• The Royal Family, by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, directed by Doug Hughes, Manhattan Theatre Club, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, New York

The set (panels of corrugated tin) for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators’ new production spills out into the auditorium of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre (even as far as the exit doors), promising to break the boundaries between performance and viewer. As we enter, the ten-piece band, led by Aaron Johnson, is already rocking. Yes, there will be dancing in the aisles.

What the evening delivers is not quite so revolutionary, but entertaining nonetheless. This review of songs drawn from the work of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Nigerian musician and activist, is brought off with high energetic athleticism, heart and soul, and fiery politcal rage. The book for the musical, however, is inconsequential and choppy: Fela is haunted by the ghost of his mother Funmilayo, who apparently died in the course of a government raid on Fela’s compound. It is his mother, we can only conclude, who actually accomplished more towards reform in West Africa in the 1970s. Fela takes a spirit journey (admirably realized with fancy light effects, video projections, and lasers) to reconcile with her, and then the show’s over. (Alas, some of those lighting effects tend to blind us in row Q.)

Jones’s production doesn’t put a face on the corruption against which Fela (on this evening, the charismatically muscular Sahr Ngaujah) militates; there’s no dramatic arc to the work. As an audience member, one always feels vaguely manipulated when asked to stand and perform a bump-along of hip-shaking dance moves. And the jokey passage about crap and marijuana should be cut.

The unseen (but not unheard) star of this show is Stuart Bogie on tenor and percussion, who ghosts the wailing sax played by Fela.

(Disclosure: I saw this production thanks to the generosity of one of the technicians on the production staff.)

• Fela!, conceived by Bill T. Jones, Jim Lewis, and Stephen Hendel, music and lyrics by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Eugene O’Neill Theatre, New York

Forum Theatre, recently relocated to Round House Theater’s Silver Spring black box, delivers a commendable production of Tony Kushner’s huge, seven-hour two-part play. Each of the many, many scenes is suggested by only one or two set pieces on wheels—an armchair for Harper and Joe’s home, a counter and a bench for the Mormon visitors center. The dressings are modest, sometimes even a little ratty, in keeping with one of the show’s themes, that of extraordinary things happening to very ordinary people. Directors Jeremy Skidmore and Michael Dove minimize the transitional seams with sound, light, and characters holding in place while the next scene begins. This is a real accomplishment, when you consider the number of scenes that absolutely call for a double bed on stage.

The playing area is configured with audience on three sides and four corner exits. The fourth side is covered a patched-together canvas that suggests a monumental painting by Anselm Kiefer. Lights thrown on this drop, front and back, establish moods and present the burning aleph; and, as you would expect, this cloth parts for the arrival of the Angel (majestic Nanna Ingvarsson) at the end of Millennium Approaches. Rather than put the Angel in a flying harness, this production perches her atop an A-frame ladder on fancy wheels; this design choice works, except for the sequence in which Prior wrestles with the Angel. About all that he can do is climb onto the unit and hang on as it’s wheeled about.

Alexander Strain succeeds at making the problematic character of Louis Ironson likable and sympathetic, because as written, Louis spends so much time being craven, obnoxious, or both, that we wonder why Prior cares for him. Karl Miller gives us a fine, vinegary Prior Walter. The female Pitts in this show, Hannah and Harper, come off as rather subdued. Jennifer Mendenhall does better with her more dialecty roles, like the specter of Ethel Rosenberg. Ingvarsson also has a wonderful short scene as Sister Ella Chapter, an insecure real estate agent with an overcompensating toothy smile. Jim Jorgensen has a gay time as the closeted, hyperintense Roy Cohn—a furioso performance.

• Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, by Tony Kushner, directed by Jeremy Skidmore and Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland

A tornado conjured from scraps of paper fanned with a piece of stiff paper, a minature cow twirling on a stick, light projected through old-school photographic negative plates—such are the simple, powerful effects accomplished by Dan Hurlin in his new puppetry piece presented at the Clarice Smith Center. This time his subject is a reclusive, perhaps eccentric small-town portrait photographer: Mike Disfarmer, who worked in the Ozarks burg of Heber Springs, Ark. from the 1930s until his death in obscurity in 1959. Focusing on the obsessive, solitary life of Disfarmer, the piece has only one puppet character, that of the photographer himself. As conceived by Hurlin, Disfarmer begins as a three-foot bespectacled figure (imagine an elongated Bunsen Honeydew); as his days unwind (as well as the mid-century small-town way of life), smaller and smaller puppets take its place, until the touching final tableau in which a twelve-inch Disfarmer clambers under his photographer’s cloth for the last time.

As with his other pieces, Hurlin puts his own spin on the Japanese bunraku tradition of puppetry. His five performers (along with Hurlin as narrator and voice for Disfarmer’s unspoken thoughts) both manipulate and interact with the puppet. The mix of scales works out because most of the scenes take place on waist-high wagons. Designers and builders for human performance would envy Hurlin’s freedom to position set pieces without the need for chocks, since his artificial actor isn’t in danger of skidding away or breaking through the set. Hurlin compares puppetry to dance, and indeed his performers often contribute to the story by the simple stillness of a standing pose.

Other technical theater elements contribute to this rewarding piece. Music by Dan Moses Schreier accompanies a projected montage of Disfarmer’s portraits. As the images corrode and fade away (as all emulsion-based photos must), the music becomes a demented, polyphonic bluegrass, to be eventually overwhelmed by sirens blasting from speakers scattered throughout the auditorium. The effect is an uncanny echo of Hurlin’s Hiroshima Maiden, which takes place in an overlapping time period. In a stately passage, lights designed by Tyler Micoleau evoke an evening’s twilight that takes 30 years to fall into night.

This bittersweet production is not without lightness: there’s a good running gag of Disfarmer bopping his head on his own studio safe light. Some of the names of Heber Springs’ denizens are too good to be made up (Carthel?).

• Disfarmer, conceived, directed, and designed by Dan Hurlin, Smith Center Kay Theatre, College Park, Maryland

Perhaps the theme for this review is “What is going on here?”

First up is Danai Gurira’s bracing Eclipsed: in a camp during the Liberian civil war of 2003, five women—four of them concubines of the local rebel leader and warlord—show us five different strategies for survival. We learn the ways of the camp through the eyes of the character known only as Girl (the masterful Ayesha Ngaujah), a teenager who has fled the town of Kakata (near Monrovia), only to be captured by the rebel LURD faction who are fighting against the forces of Charles Taylor. An aspect of the play that takes us out of our comfort zone is the language spoken, especially by the rural women. It’s a heavily-accented West African English with some creole elements (duplication of adjectives to intensify, e.g.), coached by Tonya Beckman Ross. At times, it’s as hard for us to follow the dialogue as it is for Girl to understand what has happened to her country, living as she is in such squalor that a solitary damaged book (a biography of a past American president) is the only entertainment to be found. Ngaujah confidently steers the wide arc written for her character, from doe-eyed runaway to the second act’s radicalized guerilla and back again, with even a side trip into comic goofiness. At the play’s close, she is left with a choice as vexing for us as it is for her: the way of the AK-47 or the way of the book.

• Eclipsed, by Danai Gurira, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Later in the week we saw a pair of one acts from Longacre Lea, beginning with the brain-tickling The Oogatz Man, written by artistic director Kathleen Akerley. A story that begins with a simple premise—a man (Eric M. Messner) is preparing dinner in his apartment for his girlfriend (Heather Haney), with whom he intends to break up with that evening—but it quickly slides into a zone of indeterminate space and time, as if the imaginary force field he erects to keep her out of the kitchen has undergone a genuine power surge. Stair units at the back of the set sometimes take us upstairs and sometimes down; doorframe units are manipulated from scene to scene (by a backwards-gibberish-speaking building engineer) so that we see different sides of the same room; peculiar neighbors massage rolling pins into mind-controlling devices. It’s an ordinary walkup apartment building folded into a tesseract and peopled out of the imagination of David Lynch. Oh, and let us not miss Messner’s extended riff on the mentality that music takes him to, and the frustrations he feels trying to communicate that to someone else (dancing about architecture, anyone?), which leads into an ensemble air guitar session to selected tunes from Metallica. Much fun.

Akerley’s play is matched with Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase. Originally written for radio, the play does well in the black box of the Callan Theatre. The ensemble manages the scene transitions smoothly and with panache—and there are a lot of them, as the play (built from five nested flashbacks) is described in Stoppard’s script as having an ABCDEFEDCBA structure. The text has some of Sir Tom’s more provocative writing about art. Donner (the artist who descended, terminally, sometime between the A and B sections), says:

An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill…. An artistic imagination coupled with skill is talent…. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

In the end, the piece resolves into not much more than a shaggy dog story, but in the telling it is oh so entertaining.

• The Oogatz Man, by Kathleen Akerley, and Artist Descending a Staircase, by Tom Stoppard, co-directed by Kathleen Akerley and Caitlin M. Smith, assisted by Mary Cat Gill, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Michael Weller’s Fifty Words heads up the list of five plays (featuring two pianos!) presented at another fine festival in Shepherdstown. A smartly-written, 90-minute two-hander for Anthony Crane (playing the affable “goof-bag” husband Adam) and Joey Parsons (as Jan, his wound-too-tight wife), this sweet-bitter drama plays out in the course of one evening and night in their professionally-polished Brooklyn kitchen. A secret is revealed, and in the ensuing violence and passions, the tidy ménage becomes disheveled, serving as a metaphor for the state of their relationship. The play explores the contradictions in the things we want out of a marriage. A hat tip to Robert Klingelhoefer’s set design and dressing: we hope those rice bowls are on the table at CATF’s next yard sale.

Joey Parsons’ other part in the festival is in the one-woman Dear Sara Jane, by Victor Lodato, a fantasia on our culture’s way of violence and the dissociation of personality—with musical interludes. A Sara Jane, a fragile neurotic bride of a soldier fighting overseas, Parsons offers an intriguing master gesture: she pumps both fists up, ear-level, in what her character must imagine is a cheerleading kind of gesture, but it looks to us that she is warding off a blow. Sight lines in the Center for Contemporary Art and Theater, which the festival has used for its confessional, direct-address monologues like this one, are sometimes an issue.

Meanwhile, Anthony Crane takes on the role of Paul Zara in Beau Willimon’s Farragut North, a internet-age drama of hardball politics at the time of the Iowa caucuses. The show follows Stephen Bellamy (played by Eric Sheffer Stevens), young and idealistic press secretary to one of the candidates. Stevens, striding determinedly through the snow in a camel-hair overcoat, bears more than a passing resemblance to Michael Murphy in Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88. Stevens’ Bellamy is pinched between expediency and loyalty, in a milieu of double-dealing where “You can trust me” can be a laugh line. The production is propelled by David Remedios’ pulsing soundscapes that cover scene changes. asupporting work by Anderson Matthews as a genial dirty trickster of a campaign manager, and John Lescault in a cleverly-rendered cameo.

The History of Light, by Eisa Davis, follows two unhappy stories of mixed-race love, from the 1960s and the 1990s, while also tracking a young woman’s (Amelia Workman as Soph) rebonding with her estranged father (returning favorite David Emerson Toney). Perhaps there’s too much story going on here. Time periods and recollections intersect with dreamlike haze. The most effective scene comes when Workman appears as Vietnam-era shock comedian Dick Gregory, who reverse-heckles a black-white couple in his audience.

The festival is rounded out by Steven Dietz’s riff on conspiracy theorists and the women who love them, Yankee Tavern.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• Yankee Tavern, by Steven Dietz, directed by Liesl Tommy
• Fifty Words, by Michael Weller, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Farragut North, by Beau Willimon, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Dear Sara Jane, by Victor Lodato, directed by Ed Herendeen (world premiere)
• The History of Light, by Eisa Davis, directed by Liesl Tommy (world premiere)

1st Stage presents another successful showcase for its developing young talent in Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R&J, another script that calls for flexible ensemble performers. Four boys in a Catholic prep school take a break one evening from “amo-amas-amat” and antediluvian sex education textbooks and start horsing around with the Shakespeare text they’ve been set. They begin with an overly broad riff on one of the street scenes from Romeo and Juliet, and before they know what’s hit them, they’re realizing a complete performance of they play, picking up male and female roles on the fly as called for. Somewhat like Moby Dick Rehearsed, it’s a script that distills the essence of its source material through the alembic of caricature and improvisation.

Alex Mandell, as “Student One,” brings a fine athleticism to his Romeo, while Aeneas Hemphill (“Student Four”) revels in his comic turn as the Nurse. “Student Three” has the greatest challenge, in that he must cover the widest range of characters, from a ditsy Lady Capulet to a brawling Mercutio, and Jonathan Elliott generally meets it. His is certainly the most vigorous Friar Lawrence you’re likely ever to see. Finally, “Student Four” finds himself pressed into the role of Juliet: this role has the greatest arc, moving from “who me?” diffidence through to full-blooded, warm love. Jacob Yeh does a lovely job with it, especially the moment when his character realizes that it’s time to cowboy up and play the role that’s been assigned him. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with Jacob on projects in the past.)

The set, designed by Mark Krikstan, is a marvel: a thicket of bamboo (harvested by cast and crew from a farm in Calvert County) lashed together by a team of Eagle Scouts into two walls that look like piles of pick-up sticks or a pair of tank traps. It provides multiple playing levels and an endless supply of staffs for the good-looking stage fights, choreographed by Paul Gallagher.

• Shakespeare’s R&J, adapted by Joe Calarco, directed by Mark Krikstan, 1st Stage, Tysons Corner, Virginia