Category: Reviews

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

The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997, at a time when the city’s black upper-middle class is enjoying both economic good fortune and the prospect of genuine political power. The parallels between protagonist Harmond Wilks—African-American real estate developer and aspiring mayoral candidate—and the Current Occupant are emphasized in this production, right down to a Shepard Fairey-inspired campaign poster. Yet , inasmuch as Wilks’s fortunes rise and fall on the basis of some illicit real property transactions, he more closely resembles the more self-destructive President from his own decade.

Walter Coppage’s Wilks, empowered to the point of smugness, as well as the rest of the cast, seem pinned down by the staging in this production: there’s too much of a feel of “this is where I stand for my monologue.” Some transitions are forced: characters change the topic of conversation for apparently no reason. At least that’s the case until the electrifying closing scene when all of Wilks’s deals fall apart and Coppage gets to cut loose.

Easily stealing the show is Frederick Strother in the chewy comic role of “Elder” Joseph Barlow, a shuffling street person who resists Wilks and partner’s attempts to gentrify his Hill District neighborhood.

• Radio Golf, by August Wilson, directed by Ron Himes, The Studio Theatre, Washington

Fever/Dream is a manic comedy of ups and downs on the corporate ladder. In a way, the fortunes of its protagonist Segis (Daniel Eichner) reflect the wild swings of stock market prices and corporate health, as we say, In This Economy.

Segis, a customer service drudge literally chained to his desk (yes), one day is lifted by his hitherto unacknowledged father to a different desk, one in the executive suite. How he squanders that opportunity and falls back into his previous life (as if the changes were nothing but a dream), then finds a new way to the top is the engine of the play’s narrative. Playwright Sheila Callaghan has brought forward a four-century-old classic by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream) and given it new life, while retaining most of its structure and themes—suppression of a child, succession to empire. The current play works as a corporate spoof, eager to let us see its own artifice, and as such brings to mind a meld of Urinetown, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and classical soliloquizing drama.

An ensemble of cubicle drones and bean counters, choreographed by Meisha Bosma, keep the scene transitions snappy. A massive set piece, running down right to up left, looking like a Madison Avenue skyscraper lying on its side, serves as projection screen for the vlogging chorus, and with its five doors, it provides the requisite insides and outsides. This high-rise screen also backdrops a juddering Bloomberg ticker and an early expository text message exchange between corporate plotters Stella Strong and Aston Marton (the always welcome Kate Eastwood Norris and KenYatta Rogers). Scenes set in Segis’s call center dungeon are less successful, as the lowering of the stage floor creates sightline problems for us in the orchestra.

In a parallel plot, Kimberly Gilbert’s Rose seeks the lover who has forsaken her, and she is accompanied in her quest by the dweeby figure of Claire, played by Jessica Francis Dukes. Known to us for her straight roles, Dukes’s superb turn as a comic dork is a revelation.

• Fever/Dream, by Sheila Callaghan, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Headbanging intellectuals! Joy Zinoman and her team bring to life Stoppard’s retrospective look at the last decades of Communism in Czechoslovakia, filtered through a haze of pot smoke and scored by the popular music of the time. Her coup is the casting of Stafford Clark-Price as the Czech dissident Jan, a stand-in for the playwright; Clark-Price’s uncanny resemblance to Sir Tom is matched by a nuanced performance, especially touching when emotions force a choked cry out of Jan. Also noteworthy is Lawrence Redmond’s scene as the flinty interior minister of this once-satellite of the Soviets.

Seeing the show late in the run, we noted an uncharacteristically squeaky floor on the set, as well as some perplexing costume and makeup choices. But the key challenges of this script rich in language (think of how many of Stoppard’s stories begin with a language lesson, often a translation) and steeped in Socialist history are met by this production, and the text’s burdens borne lightly.

• Rock ‘n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington

Fairfax County’s newest professional company turns in a balanced ensemble performance of John Hollinger’s waterfront sendup of assumed identities, 1950s-era Commies, and the G-women who chase them. 1st Stage meets the challenges inherent in the script—lots of little scenes scattered across “Boston, Wisconsin, and the South Pacific”—with a masterful yet inexpensive set design (uncredited) built from a palette of packing crates and plywood and a crew of two period-costumed Grips (Kate Karczewski and Conor Dinan) who perform most of the scene shifting. Thus an entire kitchen is conjured from a waist-high box, a mixing bowl, and a package of oatmeal. The cast of six doubles up to cover seventeen speaking roles, each with a clearly distinguished dialect. Wireless audio embedded in several of the moving set pieces is also a nice touch to localize the sound of a radio or television.

Hollinger’s script offers some tasty technical turns to the actors, including a second-act opener that hinges on the audio delays on an overseas telephone call: the bit calls for syllable-level timing from Katie Foster as Lynn and Lucas Beck as James. The playwright sometimes strains to put a comic button on the end of each of those little scenes, and the plot left a few of us mystified at intermission.

• Red Herring, by John Hollinger, directed by Jessica Lefkow, 1st Stage, Tysons Corner, Virginia

1st Stage’s performance space is a generously-ceilinged black box with good sight lines (seating about 140) in an industrial park. The company’s web site, unfortunately, is overburdened with Flash effects and rather opaque when it comes to providing information.

A young and naive Jewish woman of Atlanta, looking forward to seeing the world premiere of Gone with the Wind with her husband, is accosted by a mysterious black woman; while the commandant of a mid-1930s German prison camp maintains a peculiar relationship with one of his black prisoners: the links between these two stories drive the action of Robert O’Hara’s play, one that is not altogether satisfying and at times overcome by didacticism. The connection that is eventually revealed between two of the characters is not backed up by some necessary physical and character choices. On the positive side of the ledger, each of the cast of five delivers committed performances in challenging roles that require, by turns, physical intimacy and vulnerability and raging power.

• Antebellum, by Robert O’Hara, directed by Chay Yew, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The designers for Round House Theatre’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice have produced a masterful solution to the challenge presented by this, shall we say, post-modern Romantic play. It’s a modern retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Adriano Gatto)—the skilled musician who loses his wife to death, goes to the Underworld to retrieve her, escorts her back to to life on condition that he not look at her, and loses her again—told this time largely from her point of view. What should you do when you are lost to someone you loved? Is is less painful to remember and regret, or to drown in the waters of forgetfulness?

Rather than precisely specify a ground plan and a look for her plays (think of the precision of Williams or Beckett), and rather than leave everything up to imagination (Shakespeare), Ruhl demands that the director and designers fill in the gaps with their own creativity. Consider, for instance, these stage directions from movement 2, scene 3:

The father creates a room out of string for Eurydice.
He makes four walls and a door out of string.
Time passes.
It takes time to build a room out of string.

Set designer Clint Ramos, lighting designer Colin K. Bills, sound designer Matthew M. Nelson, costume designer Kathleen Geldard, and movement coach Karin Abromaitis have collaborated to create a techno Hell to hold Eurydice (wide-eyed Jenna Sokolowski) and her father (Harry A. Winter, a petit bourgeois with quiet dignity): multiple playing levels on a grid of industrial scaffolding, a series of water effects that start very small and end up harrowing, punked-out kandy-kolored costumes for the Greek chorus of stones, Big Stone (KenYatta Rogers), Little Stone (Linden Taylor), and Loud Stone (Susan Lynskey). (In an inspired last-minute response to recent laryngitis, Lynskey is currently signing her part in ASL, no easy trick when you’re hanging off the side of that scaffolding.) Presiding, as it were, as the Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld, is the always-fun-to-watch Mitchell Hébert.

• Eurydice, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Derek Goldman, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

The friendly space at 7th and D welcomes a traveling production from Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company of the provocative Hell Meets Henry Halfway, with text by Adriano Shaplin, after a work by Witold Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz, Polish playwright and novelist of the avant garde, is best known (if at all, in this country) for the novel Ferdydurke.

The current offering, according to playwright Shaplin, is an adaptation of the first 40 pages or so of a gothic novel that Gombrowicz himself considered hack work. And frankly, not a lot happens, but it’s intriguing to watch it unfold. Traveling separately, a pudgy tennis pro (Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel) and a doctor of unspecified discipline (Steve Cuiffo) arrive at a small pension, the pro to give lessons to spoiled young woman Maya Okholovska (bitchy, neurasthenic Sarah Sanford) and the doctor to attend to the deranged sole resident of the fourth floor, known only as the Prince (actress Bel Garcia). The establishment is overseen by the titular Henry Kholavitski (wound-up-tight Dito van Reigersberg), fiancé of Maya. Serving the role of engaging us in the story is Jon the Ball Boy, played with juvenile goofiness to the point of idiocy by James Sugg. There is savage, ironic coupling; there is betrayal and death; there are rewards and returns.

Pig Iron’s approach is heavily movement based, as evidenced by a painstakingly slow, small, precise series of actions in a scene for Cuiffo’s Dr. Hincz; it makes for a nice opposition with the delicious, quotable language by Gombrowicz/Shaplin. Sugg and Shaplin provide the score for the production (nearly every scene has music behind it), featuring a menacing pulse that sounds like half of a heartbeat. The small-footprint set is by Matt Saunders, anchored by back flats painted in grisaille like the most fatal of Mark Rothko’s dark horizons. At the center, nearly a seventh cast member, is a magic wardrobe, which pivots into position or takes on additional furniture to become, for instance, an entrance hall, a railway carriage, a dining table, or a bedroom.

A running gag, if you can call it that, is Henry being pelted by tennis balls thrown from the wings, as if in some Beckett outtake. This play is Beckett grown more expansive, sexier, more grotesque; our polite titters of dread at times erupt into guffaws. But in the interest of accentuating the positive, let’s give Jon the last word: “How many for nothing? Hands up! How many for something? Hands! Okay! Something wins! Me too!”

• Hell Meets Henry Halfway, conceived & created by Pig Iron Theatre Company, text by Adriano Shaplin, after Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz, directed by Dan Rothenberg, presented at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

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

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