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

Major Barbara

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

7×7: Love Duets

The WB brings us seven sketches on the theme of love, some of them duets, others with more complex groupings. In the leadoff pair, Elizabeth Gaither reminds us that a dancer’s hands are an important expressive part of her instrument in Stephen Mills’s “Desire.” Adam Houghland’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” is a flirtatious punk-inspired piece for two couples, set on music of the same name by Soft Cell. The groupings in Nicolo Fonte’s “Aria 1&2” (music by Handel) are more complex: one woman and three men, arranged into a two-man pair with the other man and woman providing an ostinato behind, followed by a reversal of figure and ground. After the break comes the Philip Glass-scored “2 Long 2 Love,” a lush, dangerous piece by Nejla Y. Yatkin danced in soft slippers on a deck strewn with red paper rose petals: a man, a woman loved, and a woman spurned. After this piece, the company appears with dust mops to Zamboni the dancing surface in preparation for “Falling Away with You,” choreographed by company member Jared Nelson. This is a sharp, fast, go-for-broke piece for two pairs, well-executed by Runqiao Du, Aurora Dickie, Corey Landolt, and Giselle Alvarez.

  • 7×7: Love Duets, Washington Ballet, England Studio Theater, Washington

Genius!

There’s a lovely passage in Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (1988) where something happens that you don’t often see: the dancers look down at their feet. The ballerinas on pointe, arms outstretched, step forward daintily, their eyes demurely cast down, as if they were moving from one rock to another to cross a mountain stream in spring spate. That’s the fresh feeling of this ensemble piece, set on Virgil Thomson piano etudes.

After spring must come summer and fall, and both of the latter seasons are represented in the superb There Where She Loved (2000) by Christopher Wheeldon. Cheery sexy pieces set on Chopin songs (performed by soprano Kate Vetter Cain with Glenn Sales’s accompaniment) (e.g., Brianne Bland’s post-coital joyful rolls on the floor) alternate with dark ruminations on love gone wrong by Kurt Weill. The most heart-breaking of these is “Surabaya-Johnny” (wrenchingly interpreted by mezzo Shelley Waite): serially monogamous Luis R. Torres dances through three girls, Diana Albrecht, Morgann Rose, and Jade Payette. Unfortunately the background scrim created some nasty moire patterns when it was hit by the follow-spot.

I have a weak spot for Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs (1982), and not in a good way, as it is scored with some of the worst late-career excesses from the singer Frank Sinatra, chief among them the smug attitudinizing of “My Way.” But it’s hard to resist Erin Mahoney-Du as the comic drunk girlfriend who won’t leave the bar, her trapeze dress failing to stay in place to cover her bottom, in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road).” Or the adolescent fumble of “Somethin’ Stupid” by Maki Onuki and Zachary Hackstock. Ball gowns for the women, designed by Oscar de la Renta, are stunning.

  • Genius!, The Washington Ballet, Sidney Harman Hall, Washington

The comfy seats in the Harman Hall steeply-raked balcony have extra-high backs.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

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

The Second Shepherds’ Play

The Folger Consort and director Mary Hall Surface’s reconstruction of this pre-Shakespearean mystery play is a marvel for the Christmas holiday season. Indeed, the genesis of this play is one of its mysteries. At one time it was attributed to “the Wakefield master,” as the manuscript had been bound with a cycle of 32 plays once thought to be performed in the town of Wakefield. (And yes, the apostrophe is in the right place, for there is also a First Shepherds’ Play in the codex.)

Despite our uncertainty of who wrote it, or even what century it was written it, the play presents a simple, engaging farce of three shepherds beset by a sheep-rustler Mak (our friend Andy Brownstein) who are visited by a heavenly presence announcing good news in the darkest time of the year. The Consort and Surface have built on the bones of the one-act script (perhaps the most richly characterized of the cycle) with period music, fun puppetry to manage scene changes, and a spot of sprightly dance to make a full evening’s entertainment. To aid our understanding, pronunciation follows Modern, not Middle, English, and vocabulary has been modernized, except for a few bits spoken by Mak in a “southern tooth,” like “Ich” for “I.”

We particularly enjoyed the blue streamers and mechanical whistler that evoke the wintry blasts of wind confronting the pastoralists. And the appearance of the angel from the Folger theater’s gallery level is a gem of low-tech theatricality. The shepherds’ offerings to the Christ child—a bunch of cherries, a bird, and a ball—are quite touching.

The three shepherds are played by Bob McDonald, Aaron Cromie, and Chris Wilson, and their comic skills are matched by their vocal musicianship. Of course, the highlight of a Folger Consort production is the array of old-fashioned instruments, and this one does not disappoint: we see and hear a slide trumpet, shawms, viols, lutes, and a hurdy-gurdy. The Consort restricted its music choices to tunes from England of the 16th century or earlier. Fortunately this means the inclusion of the stirring call-and-response “Nova, Nova,” a showcase “Gabriel fram heven-kinge” for Kate Vetter Cain, a surprising multi-voiced setting of “Sumer is icumen in,” and the haunting “Coventry Carol.”

What grace we have found.
Come, now are we unbound.
Let’s make a glad sound,
    And sing it not soft.

Kit Marlowe

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

Current Nobody

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

Nothing Sacred

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.