Category: Reviews

This year’s festival in Shepherdstown engages with the world in a big way—questioning the American Dream, taking two different trips to Gaza, and challenging current trends in criminal justice and social policy. Certain parties felt sufficiently threatened by certain of the material as to withdraw support, and worse. Advocacy groups taking out program ads to present their side of the story, and police in the lobby! Exciting stuff.

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Jason Grote‘s 1001 is an enchanting theatrical palimpsest of Tales from the Arabian Nights and Scheherazade, ethnic New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11, the centuries-old clash of East and West in the Holy Land, and a little bit of Alfred Hitchcock and the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” The play’s various Borgesian stories interlock and overlap one another, so that following a particular narrative thread becomes as difficult as following the decorative ceramic tracery on a Persian mosque, and a couple of them simply leave us hanging with no satisfying conclusion. Something like Life, which (as one character aphoristically has it) “is suffering: to be released from it a kindness.”

The piece is deftly executed by an ensemble cast of six, plus two supernumeraries. The multi-flexible Ariel Shafir’s eyebrow-rolling schtick as The One-Eyed Arab is noteworthy, as is Reshma Shetty’s skillful juggling of multiple voices, among them a London-educated girl of the Emirates and a lisping princess in a Vertigo sendup.

Intriguing design elements include sparkly costume decorations made from fragments of compact disks; everything is unified by the reappearance of silks and banners of Della Robbia blue.

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Lee Blessing premieres a dystopian parable, set sometime in the near future, about current society’s twin tendencies toward constant monitoring of deviant behavior, and toward devolution of government prerogatives to private, corporate interests. The Lonesome Hollow of the play’s title is a minimum-security enclave where sexual deviants are incarcerated indefinitely; both predators and lesser offenders (like pornographers) are shunned by a country grown markedly theocratic, encapsulated by an archipelago of numberless similar facilities, each one less pleasant than the one before. Sharing themes with The Handmaid’s Tale and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the play’s warning is that things are likely to get worse, and then get worse again.

Lou Sumrall does good work as Nye, a hard-bitten predator of young boys; paradoxically, his character provides much of the play’s humor, while his chemical and electrical emasculation by the staff at Lonesome Hollow provides much of the pathos. He is matched by Frank Deal as Glover, a supercilious senior staffer at the site. Deal’s commitment to the demands of the role is compelling, playing as he does a subcontracting pseudo-head shrinker with a streak of sadism. The John Proctor of this tale is Tuck, played by Sheffield Chastain, a photographer-artist of the David Hamilton or Larry Clark stripe; his self-imposed occupational therapy is to build a meditation labyrinth of bricks set into the lawn.

The rings of security that surround the prison echo the ringed pattern of bricks in Tuck’s labyrinth. Ultimately, the degree to which they provide a barrier is equally illusory. As Glover points out that one need not follow the bricks to reach the center of the labyrinth, just so he also notes that the system of Lonesome Hollows does not provide a solution. “Even now we don’t feel safe,” he says. Oddly, perhaps this is the only note of hope that Blessing’s play offers.

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Robert Klingelhoefer’s off-kilter set, panelled in fragrant cedar, greets us as we enter the Frank Center auditorium for Richard Dresser’s darkish comedy, The Pursuit of Happiness. Part of a trilogy of plays on the titular theme that Dresser is developing, Pursuit looks in on Annie and Neil, grasping but surviving professional-class parents who are faced with the prospect that their own child, Jodi, will not or cannot go to college. Jodi (Carter Niles), resists the pressure from her parents to recapitulate their own struggles for happiness, and at least for a time, doesn’t buy into the idea of happiness at all. She suspects, in a college application essay that goes astray, “If you see someone walking down the street smiling, don’t you assume that they’re insane?”

Andrea Cirie stands out as the driven, overwound Annie, a woman who will do anything to get her daughter into her alma mater. And Sheffield Chastain also shines as Tucker, Neil’s nebbishy office mate. His put-upon head-cock is a winner. The narrative seems to drag a bit getting us to the first-act closer, but otherwise there are good moments for all the cast to enjoy. Scene changes are framed by music from the Beatles, especially the gloomier bits of Abbey Road, under Sharath Patel’s design.

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“Everyone must feel safe,” read Rachel Corrie on the wall of her grade-school classroom, and she took it as a motto for her life. Corrie went on to practice this thought to the fullest: as a young woman she travelled to Israel-occupied Gaza to serve as an anti-violence activist, or to use the more polemical term, a human shield. She met her untimely death in an incident with an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Her journals and other papers have been assembled by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner into the 85-minute monologue My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a piece mastered by CATF veteran Anne Marie Nest. In the first half of the play, largely taking place in Corrie’s home in Olympia, Wash., during her college years, Nest works the confines of the Studio Theater (configured arena-style), flirting with the audience and often making direct eye contact. Corrie at this point in her life is a bit of a post-modern tree-hugger, albeit one who admits her imperfect grasp of the geopolitical situation.

The impassioned speechifying and tears are reserved for the closing moments of the second half, set in Gaza during the last two months of Corrie’s life. The heaviest moments (perhaps too heavy) are spoken on tape, in which a fellow activist gives his account of Corrie’s death. The passages of the play where Nest is called on to speak the words of others in her life—her mother, an ex-boyfriend—are less effective.

Perhaps we’re left with the feeling that Corrie’s life and death was the stuff of theater, that no one could be this intense. But in a coda, we see a 10-year-old Corrie captured on video, speaking before a school assembly against poverty and violence with the eloquence and assuredness of any adult.

Far from sermonizing, the monologue is an inspiring, challenging work. Of her own death, Rickman and Viner have selected a set-piece from Corrie’s writings that suggest she is stoic, perhaps even mystical, about her passing. The passage from life to death, she writes, is “just a shrug.”

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In a program interview, Lee Blessing says,

What’s great about CATF is that they’re absolutely unafraid of subject matter. They seek out plays that challenge us as a society…. This play is not meant to move to completion of what to do. My hope is that it will trouble people and make them want to discuss the issues. I want them to feel that the play has credibility, that there is something troublingly believable about it.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• 1001, by Jason Grote, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Lonesome Hollow, by Lee Blessing, directed by Hal Brooks
• The Pursuit of Happiness, by Richard Dresser, directed by Ed Herendeen
• My Name Is Rachel Corrie, from the writings of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, directed by Ed Herendeen

I know someone who once found himself in the awkward situation of having to tell our mutual friends that one of our number had died unexpectedly. That’s sort of the situation that Jean (sad sack Polly Noonan) finds herself in at the top of Sarah Ruhl’s new black comedy. Jean, annoyed by the ringing phone of a neighbor in a cafe, accosts him, only to find that he has expired in the midst of eating his lentil soup. Impulsively, she takes his phone and takes on the responsibility of explaining to Gordon’s callers—for she eventually learns his name—what has happened to him.

There’s some comedy to be found here: we learn that there wasn’t much love in the businessman Gordon (a dyspeptic Rick Foucheux), but yet Jean lies to each of his loved ones that Gordon thought well of each one in his final moments. But that’s not what Ruhl is after. Rather, she’s interested in exploring the alienating effects of technology, as she explains in a program note:

I don’t think we’ve caught up, emotionally, culturally, or physically, to the digital age. We live in an instant culture. But we don’t have instantaneous bodies.

And one of her characters in the play says, more poetically, “We’re all disappearing, the more we’re there.” The sort of business Gordon deals in is a commoditization of the body.

While the first act closes with a beautiful stage picture of paper houses descending from the flies while Polly finds a moment of connectedness, the second act plotting, with its necessity to introduce Jean to Gordon face-to-face, feels forced.

The multiple scene shifts required by this production are managed neatly by Production Stage Manager Taryn Colberg’s crew, who are dressed in suits to match Gordon’s smart three-piece number.

• Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Rebecca Bayla Taichman, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Theater patrons of a certain age will remember Herman Raucher’s slightly scandalous film from 1971, a memoir of sexual awakening and the loss of of a certain kind of innocence. On a New England summer resort island, a stripling teenager (Hermie) becomes infatuated with a young woman (Dorothy) whose new husband has just been called away to war service in the Pacific. In the end, Hermie gets what he wants, but not at all in the way that he imagined it.

Raucher’s sea-breezed bit of sentimentality transfers to the Bethesda stage, and picks up a musical score along the way. Hermie (Ryan Nealy) is appropriately gawky, and Dorothy (Nancy Snow) is bemused, but the play gets its oomph from Michael Vitaly Sazonov’s spring-loaded portrayal of Hermie’s friend Oscy, a hormone-charged adolescent with his older brother’s sex manual.

Harmonies of the period make their appearance in the unmemorable songs, which are not well served by aggressive micing of the vocalists.

• Summer of ’42, book by Hunter Foster, music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum, based on the novel and screenplay by Herman Raucher, directed by Meredith McDonough, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” is perhaps our take-away from Martin McDonagh’s bitter-bitter black comedy of a fairy tale. It concerns Katurian (the indomitable Tom Story), a writer of bleak children’s stories (nearly all of them for his trunk), who is taken into custody by a pair of brutal Kafkaesque detectives when incidents in his tales begin, lethally, to come true. Most, but not all, of the ensuing violence happens in the mind or offstage. In the end, to protect his addled brother Michal (the engaging Aaron Muñoz), Katurian makes sacrifices of several kinds.

The grim outcome of this play is never much in doubt, and the work’s themes— the writer’s responsibility to his audience (Katurian tries vainly to convince that his stories are just that, that they don’t say anything), the tension between autobiography and creative invention, the preservation of his words after his death—are laid on a bit heavily at times. But the performances of Hugh Nees and Denis Arndt as the two policemen, a Lum and Abner of the Stasi set, are delectable. Nees, as the torturer Ariel, exchanges his customary teddy bear persona for one of clean-shaven malevolence; Arndt, as the so-called “good cop” Tupolski, squeezes out a deadpan sarcasm over a grit sandwich. Tupolski says, “I don’t have a world view. I think the world’s a pile of shit.”

Two of Katurian’s stories are reenacted with Taymoreseque wit by an ensemble of four, while he narrates, and after the second, we begin to think, enough with the stories, back to the plot. But Arndt/Tupolski redeems the trope with his own story, a drowned shaggy dog of a fourth-grade math problem he calls, “The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China.”

And unlike the best dark tales of Grimm, Lang, or Goose, the play leaves several loose ends. What significance does Katurian’s double name have for us? And why does Michal give Katurian the information that he does?

• The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, directed by Joy Zinoman, The Studio Theatre, Washington

Campbell and Columbus strip Dostoyevsky’s novel to its bones, producing 90 minutes of strong theater that zeroes in on the question of human redemption. Using just three actors in a production that recalls RHT’s similarly minimal two-person The Turn of the Screw, it remixes the story of feckless student Raskolnikov—who kills the crabbed pawnbroker Alyona, buries his robber’s booty, and ultimately confesses his crime— into a fractured narrative, one fitted around the biblical story of resurrected Lazarus. Roskolnikov cannot explain the reason for this crime to his friend, the prostitute Sonya, not even to himself, and that is perhaps his defining tragedy. Whether he can step from the grave of his crime into salvation is a question left for us to answer in the lobby.

The production is well-served by Robin Stapley’s set, a tilted disc threatening to spill its one set piece (a perilously trapezoidal chair) forward into the house, like some bleak Cezanne tabletop; the disc is surrounded along its upstage half with irregular lucite panels, slightly reflecting: the whole effect suggests a Hadean hockey rink of the soul. Likewise the show’s music, provided by the Bergonzi String Quartet, establishes the right mood of tension and introspection.

Aubrey Deeker’s shabby übermensch Raskolnikov (he is a stripling Napoleon in a long dirty coat, a Russian Dylan Klebold) evokes the right mix of emotions: sufficient disgust that we might question whether he deserves rebirth, mixed with enough pity that his saving can feel appropriate. The deft mind games played by Mitchell Hébert’s detective Porfiry Petrovich suggest a 19th-century Frank Pembleton. And RHT newcomer Tonya Beckman Ross manages her transitions from confessor Sonya to rebarbative Alyona to slightly daft Lizaveta with grace.

• Crime and Punishment, adapted by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

David Greenspan’s witty, very meta, very very literary masquerade of gender deception—inspired by Shakespeare, a venerable Lynn Fontanne vehicle, The Guardsman, and, so help me, Tootsie—gets off to a slightly wobbly start as Alexandra Page (Michael Russotto, a bit swishy but not at all in drag), both playwright and character in her own play, begins to sketch the action for her friend Kay Fein (a butched-up Kate Eastwood Norris). But then, that’s part of the mojo of this 100-plus-minute sprint through cross-dressing and rewrites, as Greenspan explains in a program interview:

I started the play in 1992… When I can back to it in 1999, I began to think that there was nothing wrong with having written myself into a corner—I would simply write myself out of it, but I would keep the mistakes. It’s like a canvas on which an artist has painted over a section; sometimes the underpainting shows through—a pentimento.

So sometimes Kay is an archeologist, and sometimes she is a lighting designer, one who has worked with actresses Alexandra and Alison Rose (Gia Mora, doing her best to fight off a cold last Saturday), Alexandra’s estranged paramour. And sometimes the wayward playwright typist contributes to the laughs: “She’s a treat,” Alexandra says at one point, “No, a threat! It was a typo!” At other times, a character will correct himself, and you can hear subtext and backstory leaking out through the scripted bobbles.

Alison is rehearsing an As You Like It out of town, directed by Hal Stewart (Daniel Frith) as assisted by Eve Addaman (say it backwards) (the pert Jenna Sokolowski). Alexandra concocts an alter ego, “Harry Sampson,” crashes the auditions, and slips into the cast. At rehearsals she encounters her rival Jayne Summerhouse (Norris, again, this time languidly narcissistic) and the not-really-silent Simon Lanquish (Woolly alum Daniel Escobar). Immediately we are lost in the woods of Arden and Shakespeare, who is (in the words of one character), “like a foreign language, not like Chekhov where everything is spelled out.”

Greenspan uses a wild spring mix of literary styles to tell his story. Characters speak their own stage directions. What would ordinarily be the climactic sex farce scene between “Harry” and Alison (with a drunk Simon sleeping in a chair) is related catechistically, à la Ithaca chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Norris plays a showstopping scene with herself as both Jayne and Kay. (Director Howard Shalwitz pulls this scene extremely downstage onto a thrust where row A normally is, the whole framed by an artificial carved-wood proscenium, and witnessed by the other five characters/actors.) And Escobar has an equally strong punctuated monologue, “Who needs a play about…?”, an oxygenated rant about the standing of gay characters in contemporary theater.

Greenspan likewise pays tribute to a broad spectrum of influences: props are given to Irma Vep; when she’s not tearing spike tape with her teeth, Eve plays Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” to accompany a scene.

It’s too bad about the poster design for this show, for it doesn’t convey how intelligent (and fun!) this production really is.

• She Stoops to Comedy, by David Greenspan, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

A powerful, compact, thought-provoking piece of theater: at St. Nicholas Church School in the Bronx, academic principal Sister Aloysius (the heralded Cherry Jones) becomes convinced that the parish priest Father Flynn (genial, robust Chris McGarry) has made inappropriate contact with one of her students. The time is the early 1960s, when the Catholic Church was undergoing the reforms accompanying the Second Vatican Council, taking steps towards accessibility, tolerance, and openness.

Yet flinty Sr. Aloysius, for whom even “satisfaction is a vice,” remains committed to the severities and regimen of the past. She gave up sugar for Lent one year, and when the season was over, forgot to resume the indulgence. She is convinced of Fr. Flynn’s misconduct on the merest shreds of evidence—and yet, she would ask, how much proof is needed when the exploitation of a twelve-year-old boy is at stake?

Fr. Flynn, for his part, answers her from the pulpit with a homily about accusations: as impossible as it is to catch the feathers of a torn pillow scattered to the wind, just so is it impossible to unsay a word of unsupported suspicion. As solid as Aloysius is in her certainly, Flynn finds comfort and a reminder of his own humanity in doubt. Of himself and his blamelessness? Perhaps.

Between the two stands Sister James, a young teacher at the school, played particularly effectively by Lisa Joyce. This is a role that in lesser hands would reveal its structural nature of providing exposition and comic relief, but Joyce gives the role reality. Despite her stated convictions, first on one side and then the other, it’s clear that she remans troubled with her own doubts.

As directed by Doug Hughes, there is a certain judiciousness in the early scenes, which play out for the most part in Aloysius’s cinderblock office and in the plain flower garden that separates the school from the priest’s quarters. Blocking is minimal. Jones keeps her hands bundled inside her habit, so that when she reveals them to ask for support or to make a point, the simple gesture has a lot of punch.

So it feels a little too much when emotions get the better of Flynn and Aloysius and the proceedings culminate in a shouting match between the two.

All around, dialects were sometimes difficult to place, sounding more Boston than Bronx.

But the closing moments of the play are perfectly modulated and genuine.

John Patrick Shanley’s notes to the play include an epigraph from Ecclesiastes 1:18: “…in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

• Doubt: A Parable, by John Patrick Shanley, directed by Doug Hughes, The National Theatre, Washington

This imagined reconstruction of the unlikely collaboration of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier on a 1960 production of Rhinoceros amuses, but fails to excite. To be sure, two egos as large as those of Olivier and Welles have not collided on a Bethesda stage since Shakespeare, Moses, and Joe Papp several seasons ago, and two more colorfully neurotic artists in eclipse (Welles’s truimphant Citizen Kane already nearly two decades in the past, Olivier on the verge of dropping his second wife, the forlorn Vivien Leigh) would be hard to find. But how much spark can a play generate when its first act climax is a hiring decision?

Wilbur Edwin Henry is particularly effective at capturing the bear at bay that was Orson Welles at mid-career.

• Orson’s Shadow, by Austin Pendleton, conceived by Judith Auberjonois, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

“Plants grow and die at the same time each year, and that makes them easier to love.” So says one character in Woolly’s current offering by Noah Haidle, a bittersweet fantasy about love, death, and letting go; the play’s theatrical construction has hints of Tony Kushner and Craig Wright.

Widow (all character names are anonymized to role names) has spent the last two years of her life mourning the death of her firefighter husband. Her clinging to the past takes on physical form, as she keeps his Soul (the surprising Michael Russotto) locked in a box at the foot of her bed. Widow (the always-strong Naomi Jacobson) and Soul replay and replay scenes from their less-than-happy life together—their marriage was forced by an unplanned pregnancy, which subsequently ended in a miscarriage— in sort of a Truly, Madly, Deeply meets Groundhog Day mashup. Unable to control their memories, Soul and WIdow replay scenes of pain more often than those of happiness, and although each would like to utter the words that would undo the pain, each scene repeats as in the past. Soul’s replays are carried out in part by Body (hunky Matthew Montelongo) because Soul is now blind, as he waits out the time on earth before Widow can release him to the afterlife. (The significance and theatrical effectiveness of Soul’s blindness is, unfortunately, lost on me.)

The three are almost overmatched by the perfect J. Fred Shiffman as the adenoidal Wooer, a fireman friend of the family. Shiffman’s Wooer is an amiable dork, awkward at small talk, who simply loves Widow and wants her to move on with her life.

Lest it be thought a heavy show, the play is still a comedy, and fantasy elements keep the mood light. A show-stopping set piece at a high school reunion calls for the four principals to line-dance to an old Britney Spears song, just because. Alas, the Foy flying apparatus for Soul and Widow, however effective, is still a bit obtrusive.

It’s an interesting twist that Wooer can interact, to a limited degree, with Soul. Haidle, young but already skilled in the art of putting a play together, says in a playbill interview,

To write the things I am trying to write, you have to establish the rules very quickly and the audience will give you their time. They’ll go with you for about eight minutes. And in those eight minutes you can do anything, but you have to show them that they’re in a world that has rules. You establish those rules, and most importantly I think, and I don’t know how you do this, but I think you have to tell them when they get to go home.

• Vigils, by Noah Haidle, directed by Colette Searls, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Nanna Ingvarsson executes a star turn in the title role of one of Caryl Churchill’s more demanding texts, The Skriker. The Skriker is “a shapeshifter and death portent, ancient and damaged,” and she is accompanied by all manner of denizens from the underworld of British folk tales—spriggans, kelpies, brownies—in this story set in modern England, originally produced in 1994. The Skriker carries off one, perhaps two, young working-class women (the effective Katie Atkinson and Lindsay Haynes) to the deeps below a no-longer green and pleasant Britain. The narrative, although ultimately unsatisfying in its perfunctory conclusion, carries echoes of the Persephone myth as well.

The Skriker speaks a slippery, allusive, punning speech with a logic of its own that brings to mind Monty Python’s Word Association Football sketch rewritten by James Joyce, and Ingvarsson and director Kathleen Akerley deserve high marks for making the words, at times impenetrable on the page, meaningful and accessible. Here’s a fragment from the punishing opening monologue:

Out of her pinkle lippety loppety, out of her mouthtrap, out came my secreted garden flower of my youth and beauty and the beast is six six six o’clock in the morning becomes electric stormy petrel bomb.

If the no-frills production doesn’t always manage the scene transitions well, it should be credited with finding a use for the Warehouse’s door to the back parking lot (a kind of Hades itself) that opens directly into the auditorium. Many of the folklore characters will be unknown to American audiences (who, at best, might know who the Green Man is), so it’s too bad that Churchill doesn’t give us more time and text to get to know the excellently-named demon Rawheadandbloodybones.

• The Skriker, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Kathleen Akerley, Forum Theatre & Dance, Warehouse Theater, Washington

RHT brings a gentle touch to the theatrical elements of this adaption of the short novel by Saint-Exupéry, the wide-eyed fairy tale well-known to tenth-grade French students nationwide. The Snake first appears behind a scrim, then fully lit but still in pantomime, manipulated by a puppeteer, before finally appearing in the form of a human actor; the various “big men” that the Little Prince meets in his fall to earth appear in a circus wagon-sized frame.

But the text of the production is faithful to the words and drawings of the novel, at times slavishly so, as when Craig Wallace (the aviator-narrator of the story) speaks to us exactly what he’s thinking. On the other hand, something we miss from Saint-Ex is the Little Prince’s jaunty cutaway royal gown: to accommodate the exuberant physicality of Jamie Kassel’s characterization, perhaps, the Prince wears some sort of bedraggled nightshirt. Kassel fully commits herself in her playing, but two shows in a row in Bethesda that feature principals with squeaky voices is a little too much to ask of us.

In the second half, as the Fox, Wallace has more scenery to chew, and he does so endearingly. The episode of the taming of the Fox is managed as a manic dance to Jacques Brel’s “La valse à mille temps,” and it’s a show-stopper.

• The Little Prince, by Rick Cummins and John Scoullar, based on the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, directed by Eric Ting, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland