Category: Reviews

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.

• The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Allison Arkell Stockman, Constellation Theatre Company, Arlington, Va.

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

Would that everyone in the world were as amiably self-aware as the characters in a play by George Bernard Shaw! Or at least our adversaries. Of this much reconciliation would come. Andrew Undershaft (the majestic Ted van Griethuysen), weapons dealer who is described by one character as “the Prince of Darkness,” returns to his petit-aristocratic family in Wilton Crescent with its hothouse niceties:

UNDERSHAFT. …consider for a moment. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen.

Who can quarrel with this argument? Perhaps only his daughter, the titular Barbara (the plucky proto-suffragette Vivienne Benesch) of this play from 1905, who has volunteered in the Salvation Army and risen to the rank of major. Will Barbara—disillusioned by the moral compromises that even her Army must make to remain viable—and her betrothed, former Greek professor Adophus Cusins (played with giddy fervor and wild hair by Karl Kenzler), assume the legacy of the family arms business? Well, this is a comedy, after all.

Director Ethan McSweeny keeps the proceedings fizzing along quickly and delivers a running time for the evening less than three hours. We particularly liked the scrim-projected titles that establish scenes reproducing morsels of Shaw’s stage directions—considered by many to be the best part of the plays. A tossed-off bit about a cushion turns into a running gag for Lady Britomart (Undershaft’s wife and Barbara’s mother) (Wildean Helen Carey) and her son Stephen (Tom Story, in fine squeaky, feckless fettle). McSweeny’s players keep their physicality in Edwardian-era check until the final scene at Undershaft’s munitions plant, when most of the explosions are emotional. Barbara and Adolphus have a good closing scene twirling about a Germanic-looking monument topped with an Iron Cross, and Undershaft comes positively undone in this speech:

UNDERSHAFT. Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

Also noteworthy are the sets by James Noone, from the highly polished steamship of the Wilton Crescent library to the gunpowder sheds of Undershaft’s factory. The red and black color scheme for the sheds is evocative of events later to come in the century, and the decision to leave their sheetrock walls (anachronistic? no matter) untaped and unpainted is inspired.

• Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Ethan McSweeny, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Chicago’s performance collective, The Neo-Futurists, returns to the Woolly stage with its 19-year-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a post-modern amalgam of mime, politics, sketch comedy, audience participation, depredations of food, and general “what the hell was that that just was?” The objective of each aleatory performance of TMLMTBGB is to execute 30 mini-plays (in rotation from the group’s repertory) in the course of an hour counted down by an onstage darkroom timer. Some pieces are silly, some bits are straight. I was particularly taken with the wordless “Why This Why,” an examination of a dysfunctional love relationship with red noses and a whiff of Beckettian futility; and Jessica Anne’s “Food Related Play #2,” a blackly comic anecdote about a loved one’s untimely passing. Easily the best-dubbed play is “Kristie and John perform two lines of text from Our Town, yes the one by Thornton Wilder…” In a triumph of self-referentiality, it is one of the rare works of art with a title, the recitation of which constitutes a performance of the work. The crowd-pleaser of the evening is the goofy bit of nerdcake “Ryan Walters: Bad Ass Bike Messenger.” Obviously, the secret to making this work is to give each piece as much time as it needs and no more, whether it is “Replay of a Long Distance Relationship,” which requires the two performers to sprint from the orchestra to the balcony and back to perform its scenes (with impromptu audience color commentary from several rows behind us explaining that running downstairs takes less time than going up); or the mercifully short “Republican Compassion in Action.” But the genius of the group’s writing is that each play is never talky, never there just to make a point, but rather finds its own unique elements of theatricality.

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

Rorschach Theatre turns in a gritty, muscular production of David Grimm’s tale of political intrigue and misplaced loyalty. The play elaborates upon the speculation that Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright renowned in his own time but fated to be eclipsed in posterity by William Shakespeare, was a secret agent to the Queen, acting under orders from Sir Francis Walsingham. Grimm offers an explanation for Marlowe’s murder, namely that it was an assassination entailed by the plotting of Protestant against Catholic in the late sixteenth century. Grimm’s script, set in modern English and by turns bawdy, fantastical, and contemplative, combines prose passages with sections set in verse (there’s nothing quite like a heroic couplet to let you know that a scene is over).

Adam Jonas Segaller attacks the title role with naked gusto, and shows us an interesting selection of vocal timbres. He leads a foursquare supporting cast of nine men. The rough-hewn two-level set by Eric Grims has the right feeling of precarious doom, but is perhaps not well matched with the various fluids that are spilled onstage in the course of the evening. The rich yet subtle sound design is by Veronica Lancaster. Costumes by Emily Dere are generally suggestive rather than in-period, maybe boots and a close-fitting jacket, but the on-a-budget approach works, and doesn’t get in the way of the swordplay (of two kinds).

• Kit Marlowe, by David Grimm, directed by Jessie R. Gallogly, Rorschach Theatre, Washington

Melissa James Gibson’s modern-dress retelling of the Odyssey puts the emphasis on the war at home and leaves the violence offstage. In a gender reversal, it’s house husband Od who stays at home with baby daughter Tel while his photojournalist Pen (Christina Kirk) trots off to cover the war in Troy and takes 20 years to return home. Jesse Lenat does good work in the opening scene, sliding from supportive to slouch as the years drag on and it appears his wife is lost forever—the man can keen! Pen’s travels through the Mediterranean are digested into a slide show for a press conference, the archaic place names of her narration clanging incongruously. Back at home, Od’s “suitors” are an indie documentary film crew who come to film the reunion and seriously overstay their welcome. There’s perhaps a message about the corrupting influence of the camera’s eye in here somewhere, but it’s not well-developed. An understated Michael Willis as Bill the Delivery Guy (and doorman) does his best not to steal the show (“Less is more, Tel,” he deadpans). The one-act evening closes with a nice moment between Od and Tel, now a young women (Casie Platt) who leaves to pursue her own destiny.

• Current Nobody, by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Daniel Aukin, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Firebelly Productions takes on George F. Walker’s Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s novel from 1862. Walker, Canadian taxi driver turned incendiary playwright, is not one to be pigeonholed, and nothing bespeaks this fact like the current offering, a tragi-comic Russian study of generation gaps and social revolution.

The central figure of the story is Yevgeny Bazarov, medical student and nihilist, played with ample quantities of supercilious arrogance by Jon Townson, who brings a whiff of Kevin Kline to the role. Bazarov befriends Arkady (Patrick Flannery), son of Nikolai Kirsanov (amiable Charles St. Charles), a freedman on whose farm most of the action takes place. Arkady, newly graduated from university and still somewhat impressionable, is seeking a path through life different from that of his father and his Europe-infatuated uncle Pavel (Dave Bobb). Unfolding events lead to declarations of love inappropriate, foolish gestures in defense of honor, much fumbling and fighting (most of it in the moonlight), and a death by stupid accident.

Among the supporting cast, Scott Zeigler makes his mark as Viktor Sitnikov, a fawning innkeeper’s son and friend to Arkady and Yevgeny with a keening laugh, maybe the most annoying sound in literature; and Cliff Williams III as Sergei, bodyguard to the widow Anna Odintsova (Kelley Slagle)—Sergei is a Clydesdale of a man with a comic susceptibility to folk tales of wood demons.

Director Robb Hunter keeps the action moving at a good clip, but sometimes doesn’t allow moments the time they need. For instance, Nikolai’s hesitations and self-interruptions seem forced and unmotivated. On the other hand, Hunter’s device of using title cards to help us keep track of scenes is well-handled (and indispensable in the modest playing area at Theatre on the Run) and is nicely reprised at the curtain call.

• Nothing Sacred, by George F. Walker, adaption of Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, directed by Robb Hunter, Firebelly Productions, Arlington, Virginia

Bruce Norris sets his bitter comedy of post-colonial race and economic relations in the villa of Nancy (newly blond company favorite Naomi Jacobson) and Don (Charles H. Hyman), somewhere in West Africa. It’s a comfortable, attractive place, but we can just see—at extreme stage right—the strands of razor wire that surround the compound.

Don is an industrialist with a mutualistic relationship to “Aunty” Mimi (the versatile Dawn Ursula), representative of the current government and member of the native aristocracy. When Don opens his house to Dave (Tim Getman) and Jane (Marni Penning), missionaries in matching sunburst tee-shirts, after their school and dwelling burn down under mysterious circumstances, the principals square off in a hard-edged geometry of vexed entitlement. Each character clings to the right to expropriate or civilize, as he or she sees fit, the grindingly-poor people of this equatorial backwater.

There’s more than a whiff of Tennessee Williams in Norris’s play, what with the Big Daddy-like Don nursing a secret heart ailment; the tropical setting; and the comic foil of The Doctor (the very enjoyable John Livingston Rolle), a local who has escaped into smoking pot but who is wise enough to know when to prescribe only a placebo.

It’s the passive-aggressive churchman Dave who provides the tautness to the story in the first act. Dave, when asked whether he objects to another’s smoking, says only “It’s not a problem for me,” with a lightly-veiled supercilious smirk. And yet it’s Dave who seems to have the most realistic grasp of the situation, and who cautions against do-gooders who want only “easy Jesus.” So when Dave goes missing at the end of the first act, the narrative comes unglued, as the remainder bicker over the severity of the response needed to ensure his return.

The play is framed by the fourth wall-breaking monlogues of Etienne (Kofi Owusu), a punk who may be involved in the arson. He tells us that the play is no good, that we’d be better off watching something entertaining on television. Though we can’t agree with him completely, he’s a good reminder that we haven’t fixed any problems by sitting in a theater box for two hours.

• The Unmentionables, by Bruce Norris, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter, was written in 1958 (contemporary to his reputation-building The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party) but not produced and published until 1980. The play may look back to conventional British satire and sex farce, but it does so shaded with Harold Pinter’s signature coloring of offstage menace. We watch the staff of a sanatorium for mental illnesses bumble through the investigation of a mysterious birth by one of the patients. What ensues includes gratuitously painful electroshock therapy and mayhem that leaves many of the professional staff dead. Although Roote, the administrator of the deathly place (played by Michael John Casey as a marionette martinet who gradually comes unstrung), declares that the maintenance of Order is the most important thing to him, what he gets is anything but.

Each member of the cast incorporates a distinctive physical style into his or her character, and this serves to animate what can be at times a talky script (especially for Pinter, the poet of silences). Noteworthy among them are Jason Lott’s naive and pop-eyed Lamb, a night watchman who lives up to his Dickensian tag name, and Jonathon Church’s menacing, cat-like Lush, lithely negotiating the huge level changes in Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden’s practical set.

Kathleen Akerley, in a director’s note, suggests that the play offers the possibility of hope, its events occurring as they do on Christmas Day. But it’s a Christmas Day when the falling snow has turned to slush, and the closing scene shows us that this hope is misplaced.

• The Hothouse, by Harold Pinter, directed by Kathleen Akerley, produced by Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Jack Marshall and American Century Theater attempt a reconstruction of Olsen and Johnson’s chaotic music and comedy revue of 1938, Hellzapoppin. Whether the show matches the popular vaudeville-influenced mayhem of the original is a question for experts of the era to answer. Marshall’s show is nevertheless an entertaining evening for fans of Hee Haw-corny jokes; running gags that run on and on and on and on (a bellhop wanders in with a potted plant to be delivered to “Mrs. Kenney,” and each time he reappears the plant has grown by 18 inches); goofy patter songs (“He Broke My Heart (in Three Places)” is a geographical mouthful of American place names mastered by Esther Covington as Robin Finch); “anything can happen day” hijinks; stooges in the audience lobbing food items onstage à la Rocky Horror; Hexagon-style political satire; and merciless fourth wall breaking. Oh, and don’t forget the singalongs. There is also an unhelpful program that promises a recreation of the Battle of Hastings and readings from Remembrance of Things Past. Fortunately, these promises are not kept.

Bill Karukas plays the slightly more sophisticated and bemused Ole Olson, Dan Rowan to the Dick Martin of Doug Krenzlin’s lumpish but sporting Chic Johnson. As the two preside over the shenanigans, they’re at their most effective when they let us know, “yes, we know that bit is so old it’s collecting Social Security, just let it go and we’ll move on.” All in all, the songs of the revue fare better than the jokes, perhaps because they’re played more lightly; at times, the cast is just selling the jokes too hard. The blizzard of costume changes that the cast plows through every night is impressive, and maybe this accounts for the snug configuration of Gunston’s black box Theater One, with a minimum of audience seating. Anyhow, this is the only time in your life you’re going to get to hear Doodles Weaver’s silly version of “Eleanor Rigby” performed live (at least, let us hope so!), so relax and enjoy the show.

• Hellzapoppin, concept and book by Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, directed by Jack Marshall, American Century Theater, Arlington, Virginia