TMLMTBGB: 2

Woolly Mammoth brings the Chicago zanies back for another entertaining, provocative installment of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (previously reviewed). At December 17’s manifestation, the troupe nearly succeeded at packing all 30 plays into the allotted 60 minutes, bailing out only on #11, “Lacquer This to Your Driftwood Clock.” This team—Sharon Greene, Jacquelyn Landgraf, John Pierson, Caitlin Stainken, and Jay Torrence—could be tagged as “Now! With More Estrogen!” as the strongest pieces of the evening were written from a female perspective. Among these were seeking-validation “Let’s Pretend Mommy and Daddy” of universal applicability, the love letter with soap bubbles “Non-Toxic Miracle,” and the, shall we say, informative “One for the Ladies” about toilet seat etiquette. Warning: “Les Lesions Dangereuses” is not SAFD-certified. Fans of the Neo-Futurists’ preposterous titles were rewarded with “Having Missed Its Cue, the Orange Entered Hurriedly, but Once on Stage It Found That It Had Forgotten Its Lines Entirely and Remained Paralyzed Before the Audience for What Seemed Like an Eternity.” At least the orange hit its mark.

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

Boom

How did we get here? How we know for sure? And most importantly, how do we tell the story of how we got here? These are the questions explored in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s thought-provoking Boom, a highly theatrical science-fiction riff on one culture’s creation story.

Thomas Kamm’s set design for the show does its darnedest to treat Woolly Mammoth’s proscenium-shaped space like a black box. A basement biology research lab with attached living quarters is pushed forward into the auditorium, removing the first three rows of seats; while an upper-level playing space is extended to wrap around to the balcony seating: the effect is a little like the bowl of an operating theater.

In the lab, mysteriously fortified like a bunker, Jules (ever-endearing Aubrey Deeker) and Jo (tough chick Kimberly Gilbert) meet up for a few drinks and some premeditated casual sex—or perhaps the poorly socialized marine biologist Jules has other plans for the two of them. Deeker finds a way to reveal Jules’s unique geekiness without sliding into stereotype. The action is punctuated by loud Kubrickian movie music and louder timpani rolls from Barbara (infra-manic Sarah Marshall), up in the gallery. Jules and Jo don’t seem to be aware of her, although Jo gets a migraine every time Barbara hits the drums, but Barbara seems to be following their story as if she were reading a score.

When disaster strikes, Jules is prepared, more or less; Jo lodges herself somewhere between the denial and anger stages of grief; and Barbara seems to have it all under control.

The piece has some lyrical, positive moments. Jules explains that “biology is optimistic” (somehow I feel like I’ve heard that somewhere before) and that even mass extinctions result in the favorable outcome of new life: the radiation of the mammals from shrews, for instance. And there are some quite funny bits: we all loved the story of the “Halliburton Shale.”

Are there gaps in the narrative? Perhaps. Does the quality of Jules and Jo’s sexual history make sense? Not really. But then there are “gaps in the fossil record,” too.

It all comes unravelled in the end, of course. Jules holds the keys to new life, but doesn’t know it. And as for Barbara, well, imagine Zardoz in charge of the Creation Museum.

  • Boom, by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Doctor Atomic

So what do you get for your $23 ticket to The Met: Live in HD? Well, the food court at Tysons Corner Center doesn’t have the cachet of the plaza at Lincoln Center. Twenty-three bucks doesn’t get you a reserved seat in this almost-full medium-sized auditorium in the AMC Tysons Corner 16, and the program is a simple one-sheet affair. The subtitles are onscreen, not in the chair backs, and the AMC’s technical execution was only serviceable, not flawless (the image was not framed properly for a few minutes; sound and lights came up and down with peculiar timing). But you do get the opportunity to munch popcorn in your seat (a few of us indulged). And the proceedings are framed by backstage patter: it’s awful darn cool to get to hear the SM pass the “maestro to the pit, please” call.

What you do get is a good taste of something like the live experience, and in the case of this electrifying production about the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico, under the scientific direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that’s something special.

Julian Crouch’s set makes the first impact. Projected on a scrim is the periodic table of the elements known at that time, quaintly missing Francium and Technetium and stopping at Plutonium. The scrim is pulled to reveal a three-level set for the chorus: the effect is of pigeonholes in a rolltop desk, or a warren of office cubicles. The stage is abuzz with activity as preparations for the bomb test are being made.

In the second scene, Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer sings a lush, intimate “Am I in your light?” to her husband Robert. The act closes with a powerful “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” from Oppenheimer, sung by Gerald Finley of the piercing, haunted blue eyes.

John Adams is known for his choruses, and the second-act “At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous” is a stunner, as the atomic energy workers react to a vision of Vishnu in the skies. The put-upon meteorologist Frank Hubbard (Earle Patriarco) reports that weather conditions have finally cleared, and the test is on. The penultimate moments of the opera, as the atomic explosion ignites an era, perhaps carry more effect in the actual theater.

Generally, the multi-camera work is unobtrusive (the Met has been televising live performances effectively for years, of course) and follows the action, mixing long shots (a four-shot of Oppenheimer, Kitty, her shadow, and his gigantic one is well-framed) and extreme closeups—pans, zooms, and tilts up from the vantage point of the pit. Once in a while the lighting and exposure levels for Ms. Cooke wash her out.

Which leads me to the following question: do Met performers adjust their makeup when they’re being televised? What I saw looked natural in closeup, so I wonder how it plays in the upper reaches of the balconies.

And where can we score some of those great prop cigarettes? Oppenheimer and Kitty were rarely without one, and the cool thing about the prop is that you can take a drag from it and get a little puff of smoke.

  • Doctor Atomic, composed by John Adams, libretto by Peter Sellars, conducted by Alan Gilbert, directed by Penny Woolcock, Metropolitan Opera, New York/HD Live

Genius2

Four enjoyable pieces from Washington Ballet, emphasizing the strength of the company’s ensemble work. In Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, an elegiacal group piece sprinkled with some challenges to traditional gender roles, and accompanied by Glenn Sales at the piano, I was impressed by fifth-season company member Zachary Hackstock, who danced his solo breaks with especial power and brio. But reprising this piece from only last season seems an odd programming choice. After the first break: a clean reading of Christopher Wheeldon’s Morphoses—with its interesting lighting effects achieved with cyclorama and travelers—by the quartet of Sona Kharatian, Luis R. Torres, Jade Payette, and Jared Nelson; then a fluid duet by Kharatian and Nelson in Cor Perdut, by Nacho Duato. The evening closes with the spunky Baker’s Dozen, a dance for twelve by Twyla Tharp. The strongest effect in this piece are the masses of dancers rippling across the stage, dressed in white, the women in low character shoes. It’s a casual piece, perhaps to a fault, as it doesn’t seem to come to a proper ending. Pianist Sales didn’t seem to have the right mojo for playing Willie “The Lion” Smith.

  • Genius2 mixed bill, Washington Ballet, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

The refurbished Eisenhower Theater is quite beautiful, the walls faced with warm wood acoustic panels and the seats equipped with the generous armrests that also featured in the Opera House renovation. The awkward enclosure for lighting instruments on the face of the balcony has been removed. Unfortunately, the theater’s setup is more than a little clumsy for musicians playing from the pit, as there appears to be no backstage access (granted, the Ike doesn’t serve the same purposes as the larger space); house management has to shepherd them through the auditorium at intermissions. Although I miss the interlocking E’s of the red act curtain (a plain blue one replaces it), the decoration on the proscenium provides an allusive pattern.

CityDance Ensemble: Next

Some highlights from CityDance Ensemble’s mixed bill of six works by choreographers new and old:

The evening begins with a period piece, Sophie Maslow’s Folksay (1942), set on folk songs in the Woody Guthrie tradition and spoken word, in part by Carl Sandburg. The opening dance is a genial barn dance with flexed feet, punctuated by alarmingly vigorous foot stomps, the more so for the feet being unshod. Musicians Andrew Ratliff and John Ratliff perform the score on voice and guitar, and gamely execute certain passages of down home banter that would make the writers for Hee Haw blush. Still, there are some sweet passages, like the phrase, “Sometimes when I think about you, I think my heart will strip a gear.”

The evening then shifts into a darker mood, much of it costumed in black slashed with red. Han (2006/2007), scored in part by taiko drums and choreographed by company artistic director Paul Gordon Emerson, is typical of the company’s strengths: high energy, go-for-broke phrasing, themes of struggle. Jason Garcia Ignacio does well with Jason Hartley’s Nocturne Monologue (2003), a dimly-lit, muscular sketch with allusions to yoga postures as well as classic dance poses.

The evening closes with the most wide-ranging work, Christopher K. Morgan’s Ties That Bind (2002). There is a particularly lovely, languid passage in which a pair of women exchange energy almost as easily as if they’re doing a warm-up improvisation—hints of Pilobolus here. There are also human puppets, an odd solo with a parasol and veil, and a section that could be read as a particularly nasty game of Red Rover.

The standout dance, however, comes in the first half: Kate Weare’s Drop Down (2006), masterfully performed by Giselle Alvarez and Maleek Makhail Washington. Set on a score by Katie Down that sounds like sonically processed Astor Piazzolla, it’s a breathtaking power struggle of a duet. Equal parts deconstructed tango and exercise in especially violent martial arts, the opening sections are marked by a slow/snap quick rhythm. The climactic section takes place mostly on the floor, and is all the more powerful for having nothing but silence backing it up.

Maria/Stuart

Jason Grote takes his characteristic approach to a “kitchen-sink drama” in the new Maria/Stuart. Three sisters in suburban New Jersey-Pennsylvania revisit some frightful family history and eventually confront a sordid, if petty, secret. A slight story, as it goes, but Grote drapes the story on the armature of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play of nearly the same name, Maria Stuart. The earlier play, part of the canon of so-called Weimar Classicism, is a retelling of the sixteenth-century politico-religious conflict between Elizabeth I of England and Mary I of Scotland—a retelling that is particularly sympathetic to the cause of Mary, who was eventually executed by Elizabeth.

Dry stuff? Not at all, for Grote’s aesthetic is a magical, goofy, yet cerebral theatricality that can encompass lowbrow and high: food fights and references to Chekhov, Pynchon, and Borges (well, at least I thought the Borges joke was funny). Not two scenes into the first act and we’ve seen soda pop, stuffed olives, and cornstarch spilled on the floor. It’s not for nothing that house management tries to leave the front rows of the theater unsold.

The two families (Marnie’s and Lizzie’s) are haunted by a shapeshifter, who appears as other members of the family and is (conveniently) played by in turns by the corresponding cast members. The shapeshifter arrives in a tinkling of sound and disappears in a nice let-the-wires-show “poof!” of actor-blown dust. The shapeshifter, spouting bits of Schiller (its first scene calls for the complete German-text libretto of the closing movement of Beethoven’s choral symphony) and digging around in family cupboards looking for the evidence of past misdeeds, turns from sprite to demon as the Marnie and Lizzie resist the story’s revelations.

The third sister, emotionally wounded Sylvia, played by company favorite Naomi Jacobson, has lost both her hands in a failed suicide, so the part gives Jacobson a star turn opportunity to show us Sylvia the compulsive eater, scarfing junk food and using prosthetics to pick cheese puffs out of a Costco-sized jar of them. Washington theater vet Sarah Marshall also produces some good shades in her work, in the first act as the grandmother Ruthie and in the second act as the menacing shapeshifter.

Not all the theatrical effects work well: smoke and fog effects seen through the window of the set that doubles as Lizzie’s and Marnie’s kitchens seemed to come and go at random. And, in the end, the awful truth that links Marnie, Lizzie, Marnie’s son Stuart, and Lizzie’s daughter Hannah comes across as inconsequential and the acts leading up to it unmotivated. Perhaps this story of the twenty-first century is but the tip of the shadows cast by the plots of Mary and Elizabeth, the ones that led to the rise of the Stuarts.

  • Maria/Stuart, by Jason Grote, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole explores the grieving of a Westchester family stricken by the senseless, random death of their four-year-old boy Danny. Alas, the exploration—at least in this production—doesn’t dig very deep.

While Danny’s father Howie (sturdy Paul Morella) turns to external ways to deal with his pain—group therapy, and (it is hinted) some extramarital support—his wife wife Becca (Deborah Hazlett) copes with the loss by more subtle, effacing means. She “accidentally” erases a home movie of the boy, puts the family home on the real estate market, and just tries to forget.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is better known for his offbeat comedies (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers), so the character of Izzy, Becca’s kid sister and general screwup, comes to his keyboard easily. She pumps some energy into the piece, especially as played by Megan Anderson. Izzy starts the show looking into the refrigerator, and is never far from the kitchen, scarfing bites of torte from the pan or washing down creme caramel with orange juice. Izzy, in time, accomplishes some growth of her own along with Becca and Howie.

But apart from a well-crafted monologue for Becca’s mother Nat, there isn’t too much that’s flashy in the writing of this piece. It proceeds in its own quiet, suburban way.

  • Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Mitchell Hébert, Olney Theatre Center, Olney, Maryland

Theories of the Sun

Longacre Lea’s new production is a lyrical brain tickler, a serio-comic mystery packed with erudition. Perhaps too well-packed: at a running time of three hours, the piece is on a par with much of the work of one of the playwright’s touchstones, Tom Stoppard.

In the fall of 1963, Elizabeth and Barbara Sweeny, ostensibly daughter and mother, travel to an obscure French pension to consult in discretion with Dr. Giraud (played with hilarious sniffy eccentricity by Jason Lott) to learn the cause of Elizabeth’s mysterious affliction. The only other guests in this small hotel are a CIA-ish American and two playwrights: Tennessee Williams drinking incognito and the yet unpublished Stoppard himself. While the opening scene suggests Stoppard’s Travesties, the hotel’s smugly efficient proprietor (nice work by Daniel Vito Siefring) speaks with an accent more in keeping with one of Sir Tom’s adaptations of Molnar.

Elizabeth soon meets the shadowy Mr. Asher (oh-so cool Michael John Casey), who explains that he is a collector of sun myths from cultures around the world. In his evening visits, Asher tells several of these to Elizabeth, and each is a lovely bit of writing, a set piece for the cast/ensemble to illustrate choreographically. Unfortunately, it’s only in the story told solo by Casey that the play’s solar fables really shine.

The play, premiering in this production, needs some tightening. There’s an awkward transition in the second act that reveals the facts of Elizabeth’s complaint to the rest of the guests. However, the arc of Elizabeth’s journey is compelling, and its resolution (with its whiff of another master of contemporary fantasy, Craig Lucas and his Prelude to a Kiss) is quite satisfying.

  • Theories of the Sun, by Kathleen Akerley, directed by Jonathon Church and Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2008: 2

The completion of Richard Dresser’s Happiness trilogy, A View of the Harbor, comes as somewhat of a surprise. The first two parts of the cycle, Augusta and The Pursuit of Happiness explored the worlds of the working and middle classes, respectively, while the new play completes the plan by moving on to the upper classes. But rather than the caustic comedy and steely satire that is Dresser’s wont, this play is a drama about the decline of an old family of power and wealth and the establishment of a new order. The result is a crepuscular piece that suggests Eugene O’Neill more than A.R. Gurney.

The festival’s centerpiece production, in the expansive Frank Center Stage, is The Overwhelming by J.T. Rogers. Viewers of the film Hotel Rwanda or readers of Jared Diamond’s Collapse will be familiar with the events of April, 1994 in this small alpine African country of 10 million souls, but many Americans remain unacquainted with the horrific killings that took place then. Tensions between the two major ethno-political groups of the country and surrounding region, the Hutu and the Tutsi, boiled over into assassination and then genocidal violence, with the massacre of 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi.

The play takes place in the run-up to the killings. Our lens on this world is the American family of Jack Exley (a struggling academic), his second wife Linda White-Keeler (a magazine journalist), and Jack’s disaffected son Geoffrey. Perhaps too conveniently, each of them develops friendships with Rwandans from different sides of the conflict: Jack with a doctor with ties to Tutsi-associated RPF rebels, Linda with a hardline Hutu government minister (the frightening David Emerson Toney), and Geoffrey with average-Joe Gérard (the strong Maduka Steady). Also too pat, the publish-or-perish tenure decision hanging over Jack’s head is a weak reason for him to stay in the country when it becomes clear that something dangerous is going to happen.

Upon hearing the rumbles of forthcoming violence, Jack demands action from the U.S. embassy staff. He is met with pragmatic indifference from Woolsey (Michael Goodwin), who points out how few Americans there are in the country and how unimportant this small country “at the edge of the world” is to U.S. interests. He asserts that effective foreign policy is never based on “doing the right thing.”

The theme of individual action in the face of seemingly overwhelming historical forces is elaborated upon in the person of Jack. In an climax that, unfortunately, feels forced and rushed, Jack must choose which one of two people to protect against the killings. However, the ultimate bloodshed that pulls the play’s narrative toward its conclusion is more alluded to and suggested than actually depicted (and, as in the case of the film, this may be the more powerful choice).

Technically, the play is a masterful sprawl of language and sound, with a cast of more than a dozen speaking four languages on stage (including Kinyarwanda) along with several English dialects. Kudos to dialects coach Kirsten Trump and sound designer Todd Campbell, who provides energetic, sometimes frightening, drumming as transition material across scenes.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • A View of the Harbor, by Richard Dresser, directed by Charles Towers
  • The Overwhelming, by J.T. Rogers, directed by Ed Herendeen

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2008: 1

Neil LaBute breaks his pattern of writing for younger characters with Wrecks, a monologue for a businessman of late middle age, executed with skill by Kurt Zischke. We the audience are seated in the white box performance space of Shepherd University’s new Center for Contemporary Arts, which has been outfitted as a mortuary chapel, complete with (uncomfortable) sofas and armchairs for us. Edward Carr (Zischke) has stepped away from the line of mourners who have come to express their good wishes for the passing of Carr’s wife Mary Josephine. As he speaks to us, he reveals private thoughts that he will not, cannot express in public—a LaBute hallmark. LaBute’s final plot twist is less effective than his writing for Edward when he rages against the capricious forces of disease and death and our powerlessness against them.

The key element missing from Greg Kotis’s one-act Pig Farm is a musical score. Kotis, who collaborated with Mark Hollman on the satirical economics morality play Urinetown, the Musical, is here working solo in a close-by field. Tom and Tina run a pig farm along with their hired hand Tim. Times being hard, the farm is operating at overcapacity and Tom has resorted to extramural means to dispose of the porcine effluent. Trouble is, Teddy (Anderson Matthews, who can bluster and menace at the same time), a pistol-packing government inspector with a taste for the romantic agrarian life, has his own plans for Tom’s setup. What begins as kitchen sink drama slides into Guignolesque mayhem, with characters that won’t die (they keep popping up to sing reprises to their death arias) and a quantity of stage blood worthy of Martin McDonagh. This is a play that draws its comedy from our sardonic “yeah, right” reaction to a character’s claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is up to the task of guarding us against pollution by “fecal sludge.”

More representational is Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond, a lovely multithreaded piece that takes place at the Martha’s Vineyard summer house of the LeVays, an upper middle-class African-American family. Diamond explores themes of race, class, and most importantly, the expectations that a family places on its children to succeed—and in turn, that children place on their parents for recognition. Oldest son Flip has brought his girlfriend, who is white, home to meet the family, but he may have had an easier time of it than youngest son Kent, who has also brought his significant other to meet the folks. Multiply degreed Kent is still struggling to find his vocation, while his fiancée Taylor (the flexible Tijuana T. Ricks) brings more baggage to the home than just what will fit in the trunk. In a commonplace trope, Kent has an autobiographical novel that he is preparing for publication, and he needs to present the work to his family—but fortunately the play doesn’t bog down over this point. The place is presided over by the amiable but emotionally distant Dr. Joseph LeVay (the polished David Emerson Toney), a neurosurgeon; but the show-stealer is Joniece Abbott-Pratt as Cheryl, daughter of the housekeeper who has unfinished business with the LeVays.

The play is built from many short (sometimes simultaneous) scenes that take place in three separate rooms of the summer house. What’s most impressive technically is how director Liesl Tommy has worked with her lighting designer Colin K. Bills and the cast to isolate a character at the end of a scene with light, to allow the character to silently reflect on the scene that has just taken place, while the next scene is being prepared elsewhere. All this activity is taking place in the friendly confines of the Studio Theater’s black box. Indeed, at one point, as far as I can tell, a series of cues was built to follow a character’s movement through the house without movable lighting instruments.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Wrecks, by Neil LaBute, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Pig Farm, by Greg Kotis, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Stick Fly, by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Liesl Tommy

Measure for Pleasure

Woolly Mammoth gives its audience a frisson of what it would feel like to be titillated by a contemporary Restoration comedy with David Grimm’s riff on the genre, Measure for Pleasure. The piece is a post-modern romp through 21st-century sexual tastes, framed by 17th-century theatrical conventions. There are flirtatious poses, elaborate asides, wanton butt shots, nearly unintelligible dialects, and a series of wigs, each one taller than the one before. (Cheers for costume and wig designer Helen Q. Huang!) Long passages are in rhymed verse.

The setting is mid-18th century, and it finds Will Blunt (the fine Joel Reuben Ganz), valet to Sir Peter Lustforth (company stalwart Doug Brown) in dissatisfied love with openly cross-dressing Molly Tawdry (Andrew Honeycutt). When Sir Peter and his randy, dissembling friend Capt. Dick Dashwood (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend, showing completely different colors than he did in this season’s earlier Stunning) both make a play for young Hermione Goode (Kimberly Gilbert), Will sets his cap for her as well (and dons the most fop-rageous hot pink outfit and platform shoes to woo her). Trouble is, Hermione is protected by her Puritanical guardian Tiberia Stickle, a role executed by Kimberly Schraf with a brogue so flinty it could cut peat.

The second act culminates in a set piece that involves a pagan marriage rite, presided over by Sir Peter in ridiculous crested headgear made from a bicycle helmet and the legs from half a dozen Barbie dolls. There is much chasing around the house, followed by much exchange of bodily fluids—and a resolution that reminds us that true love is what’s important.

More bits of fun to celebrate in this production: the set design, which features plaster pilasters that crumble to reveal the steel framework underneath; the tension between the traditional design elements (a wall of clocks for Lady Lustforth’s boudoir) and their 21st-century counterparts (high-top sneakers on the servants, a single electric light fixture); Goodfriend’s cartoon Italian dialect when he is in disguise as the music teacher Fidelio; and the script’s tag names. I really regret that we never get to meet Miss Stickle’s comrade, the Reverend Puke.

  • Measure for Pleasure, by David Grimm, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Cinderella

The surprise star of this production, set to a supremely danceable score by Sergei Prokofiev, is the role of the Jester, who stirs up the merrymarking at the Prince’s ball. At Saturday’s performance, Chauncey Parsons danced the role with aerial brio. James Kronzer’s set also deserves mention: silvery birches frame all of the scenes, even the palace, setting an other-worldly feel; the effect of a dozen clock faces descending from the flies on the foretold stroke of midnight is also very impressive.

  • Cinderella, choreography by Septime Webre, Washington Ballet, Warner Theatre, Washington

Not that it will make a difference, but let me state a wish that the Warner would rethink its food policy (it’s acceptable in the house). The noise of crackling snack wrappers in the balcony was, at times, a noticeable distraction.

The Good Woman of Setzuan

What an apt commodity has Bertolt Brecht charged his character Wong with selling, for Wong is a seller of water, a commodity as free as the falling rain yet one of the most precious economic commodities. Wong (or Wang, in my editions) (nimbly played by Ashley Ivey) serves as narrator for this parable of Shen Te, a lowly prostitute who receives a gift from the gods because she is the one good person they can find. But alack, Shen Te must invent an alter ego for herself, a ruthless businessman named Shui Ta, in order to hold on to her gifts so that she can remain good.

Constellation Theatre Company puts its stamp on the play with music and dance interludes. The play is designed to be interrupted by fourth-wall-breaking monologues and other bits of presentational, anti-realistic theater. Costumes (designed by Yvette M. Ryan) and makeup are particularly effective, especially for the three gods (Catherine Deadman, John Geoffrion, and Kenny Littlejohn) who descend to earth in search of a good person. Katie Atkinson, as Shen Te/Shui Ta, does not give us two characters that are completely physically distinct from one another, but she shines in a passage that calls for her to change her costume and makeup before our eyes: Das Lied von der Wehrlosigkeit der Götter und Guten (“The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and the Good People” in the Manheim translation), which repeats the haunting line, “Why don’t the gods do the buying and selling?” (in the Bentley translation). The final ascension of the gods, returning to heaven having been defeated by the world’s exigencies, in a swirl of smoke and clangor of gongs, is also very fine.

High Lonesome

The afternoon’s two pieces from the company repertory, George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and Choo-San Goh’s Fives serve as reminders that some rules are to be broken. In Fives, it’s the rule that dancing must be set to music, for some of the most interesting passages come early in the piece when the ten ballerinas have nothing to sync with but themselves and their own breathing. Similarly, Balanchine achieves some stunning effects even when his dancers are motionless, in preparation. Jason Hartley’s dives to the floor in the “Melancholic” variation belie the truism that ballet is about pretending that gravity doesn’t exist, and Jared Nelson gives us a buttery-smooth “Phlegmatic” variation.

Hartley’s floor-tumbling prowess also works well for him in Trey McIntyre’s semi-autobiographical High Lonesome, set to music by Beck, a series of sketches of family dysfunction. Jade Payette, in the kid sister role, catches some serious air.

  • High Lonesome, Washington Ballet, Washington

Stunning

David Adjmi’s new play, set in the enclave of Syrian Jews of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, gives us a look into that prosperous but highly isolated community in which he himself grew up. It opens with a bang-up scene to introduce us to Lily, one of our two protagonists; in rapid-fire comic dialogue of a brevity suggests Beckett or Mamet, the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Lily (the flexible Laura Heisler) recounts her Caribbean honeymoon with Ike, whom she wed by arrangement, to her older sister Shelly and friend Claudine. Flighty Lily, who insists on telling us how mature she is, seems obsessed by her peeling sunburn.

Back in Brooklyn and setting up housekeeping, she hires Blanche as a live-in maid. Even though Blanche is African-American, Lily insists on speaking Spanish to her because she’s always had Puerto Rican servants before. Blanche (the charming Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is apparently down on her luck temporarily but waiting for it to turn with an expected job in academia. Blanche is biding her time, and she can be ingratiating or firm, as need be.

Blanche catalyzes Lily’s attempt to break out of her own ivory tower, the stultifying environment of this hidebound community where she is encouraged to do nothing but go shopping, symbolized by a two-level set by Daniel Conway painted (and repainted in the course of the evening) in nothing but white. Unfortunately, the set (which owes something to Woolly’s recent set for The Clean House) at times is too much a character, with mirrors that offer intended and unintended looks into the house and backstage, and balky sliding panels.

Lily’s community is nevertheless childishly naive at times, as when Shelly uses Pig Latin to tell something to Lily in Blanche’s presence, assuming that she won’t understand.

Alas, neither Lily’s effort to fly free nor Blanche’s attempts to find security (Ike is her brutal Stanley Kowalski antagonist, played as a nasty piece of work by Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) come to a good end, and one that doesn’t feel fully earned. Adjmi shows us that the cruelty of this culture is something it shares with the rest of the world without achieving a universality.

  • Stunning, by David Adjmi, directed by Anne Kauffmann, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington