theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
A disco shootout with a mom and her big-ass purse. Whatever happens, Tanya (Mom with the arsenal) (Nehassaiu deGannes) remembers to stay hydrated. Scenes with her matching pair of lawyers, Markus and Marcus (Breon Arzell and Brandon J. Pierce), are inspired.
David Ives has still got it! His 105 minute reduction of Molière’s Misanthrope (from 2017) is like clarified butter, crackling with wordplay in rhyme. Bonobo is word you usually find in crossword puzzles, not scripts, but it’s in there. I also scribbled down zipless tango. Delicious!
The physical stuff is there, too. Roses to rubbery Dylan Arredondo as Philinte and Jacob Yeh as the preposterous prig Oronte.
The pace was perhaps a skosh too fast for this Sunday matinee audience to follow, but everyone found something to enjoy.
Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s is a companion piece to her gritty Sweat. The new play is much lighter and more hopeful (even if the antagonist gets the last word), and is a tour de force for the props department. Four ex-felons work as sandwich makers and short order cooks, telling their stories while avoiding the domineering glare of their boss Clyde (force of nature Dee Dee Batteast)—there’s little plot to this long one act. As oppressed by Clyde as they were by any legal authority, nevertheless our scrappy chefs find creativity and meaning. They are led by the Zen master-ish Montrellous (the oracular Lamont Thompson) into a place something like freedom. Montrellous is a Jedi of the kitchen (sampling one of his coworker’s inventions, he says, “I can taste your impatience.”)
The show opens with a monologue that is right in the wheelhouse of fan favorite Nancy Robinette, but it’s clear that, by ten minutes after her entrance, it is Jennifer (the stalwart Kimberly Gilbert) who is at the end of her tether, and something is about to snap. Floyd King as Joey, Jennifer’s rebarbative charge, doesn’t have a lot of levels to play, but he finds what he can, including several disgusting ways to eat donuts.
This is a dark comedy about mundane, essential jobs, such as working the night shift at a Dunkin’ Donuts (the story takes place before the rebranding) and assisting the elderly with ADLs (like [ick] toileting). So perhaps my only quibble is that Nan’s floor mopping doesn’t catch all the corners.
Signature Theatre smooths out some of the less accessible elements of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures—no Kabuki makeup, no hanamichi (the vomitoria do just fine), no lion dance—but it’s still an effective piece of storytelling, and the music delights. For instance, Tamate and Kayama (Quynh-My Luu and Daniel May) sing their own thoughts in “There Is No Other Way,” rather than through distancing Observers, and the song still works. Jason Ma as the Reciter is positively genial, avuncular; his reactions to the story as it unfurls contribute to its effectiveness.
Non-males are part of the cast throughout, although cross-dressing is preserved for “Chrysanthemum Tea” (scheming Andrew Cristi) and “Welcome to Kanagawa,” the latter for comedic effect. And the production leans in to puppets, using them not only for the Emperor, but also in “Pretty Lady” and “Someone in a Tree.”
“Please Hello” is a hoot, with a nifty wooden-shoe tap dance for the Dutch Ambassador. The half masks for the Europeans are rather terrifying.
Ethan Mordden’s On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide, as well as the liner notes from the original cast recording, was quite helpful in preparing this post.
This very fine story of mystery and mourning opens with a walk to a funeral home—and then gets darker (and funnier) from there. But this is also a story about growing up, and hence it ends on notes of hope. And there’s a cat!
Trick of the Light Theatre brings The Griegol to life for a nearly wordless 60 minutes with some of my favorite low tech theatricality, including shadow play, bunraku-style puppets, and opaque projectors, as well as live actors and a musician. A terrifying smoke monster left us wondering, How did they do that? Was that a trick with iron filings?, but the team in a post-show Q&A fessed up that it was pre-produced stop motion video with sand (apparently an unforgiving medium).
A subplot introduced late in the piece confused us for a moment, but it was quickly integrated into the main story. We glad that the company of five was able to make the long trip from Aoteoroa/New Zealand.
Kia ora! (easier to write than it is to pronounce)
Kathleen Akerley is one of the few playwrights working today who bravely peels open her own dramaturgy. In her 90-minute remix of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, she accomplishes this by various means, among them
Despite the play’s heritage as a fixture of high school English literature classes, Akerley exposes the work for the “problem play” that it might be. After the assassination in Act III, why does a completely new faction of characters appear?
In Akerley’s version, the death of Caesar is not the point. Indeed, Caesar is never played by an actor, and his dead body is only represented by a bloodied mantle. The calculations that Cassius and Brutus make are still relevant today, and provoke discussion. But Akerley doesn’t take the easy road; early in her script, a character quickly dismisses any parallels to a recent disgraced American president.
Even though Grace is a successful travel writer, she is so alone and vulnerable that unpleasant news sends her tumbling, grasping at anything to make her feel safe. Keeping up a good front (she says, “Usually I only cry in parking garages”), Grace (as realized by the excellent Tonya Beckman) embarks on a journey that propels this intimate story, well suited to the confines of 1st Stage’s playing space. Unexpectedly, she finds support from a runaway (Madeline Regina), a tattoo artist (Joel Ashur) with a bit of mystic mystery about him, and a Japanese architect with a huge case of designer’s block. Jacob Yeh as Haruki, the flummoxed architect, brings a solidity that enfolds Grace (yes, there is some sweet origami) and proves to be what she needs to move forward.
This 90-minute tale has a bit of whimsy that brings to mind the work of Sarah Ruhl; Ashur and Regina serve as narrators and Greek chorus to keep the story clicking along.
Kathryn Kawecki’s set design is exceptional, giving us an enchanting, cozy Japanese garden that doubles as various other spaces.
I don’t know of a graceful way to put this: this play will resonate more with audiences who are different from me. Many of the work’s themes—prejudices in favor of light-skinned BIPOC, the shameful treatment of Sara Baartman (the so-called “Hottentot Venus”), an offhand homophobic remark unearthed from the deep social media timeline—have been elaborated elsewhere. And let us retire the trope of bringing up the house lights to implicate the audience.
The play does make it clear that, and why, Cleo (Leanne Henlon) is enraged. And the strongest element is the theatricalizing of the chaotic cacophony that is a viral thread, realized by Henlon and Tia Bannon as her friend Kara. Their physicalizing of emojis is quite the thing. Don’t understand current British slang and internet initialisms? It doesn’t matter. The playing is there.
Personally, I have never understood the mania for all things Jenner-Kardashian. But that’s easy for me to say.
The Vermont collective brings a touring version of its low-tech didactic theater to the Washington Monument grounds. It’s a collection of satiric sketches (with some utterly corny gags), provocations, and tableaux—with, shall we say, some stately transitions between—perfectly matched to the outdoor scene of kids running around, cyclists and scooters passing in front of the stage on the paved walkway, and the occasional bark of critique from a dog over my right shoulder. The vibe is a little Woodstock ’69, a little Medieval mystery play. Equally strong and effective are a lament in song for the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and an enormous five-person puppet that suggests the world tree Yggdrasil, the branches of its crown brushing the proscenium arch. The loose structure of the work admits of breaking-news topicality: a brief memorial dance for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a silly re-enactment of the recently observed collision of two black holes. If the puppeteer-actors paint with an overly broad brush, at least their earnestness is restorative.
Middle-aged literature professor Robert returns to Dublin to explore a what-might-have-been romance: a chance encounter with a superstitious guide to a walking tour of the city of James Joyce’s Ulysses comes to an abrupt, unsatisfying end. The slippery nature of time, particularly as experienced by Cait, the tour guide, engenders a dialogue between past and present.
When the focus is on young Robbie (Josh Adams) and Caithleen (Danielle Scott), the energy picks up, especially in the key scene in Sweny’s.
But playwright Dietz makes Robert a teacher of literature for no particular reason, unless it is so that Robert can commit the apostasy of bashing the novel for the benefit of audience members who regret never having read the book.
The stars of this highly theatrical comedy-thriller are Christopher Walker and Gwen Grastorf, each playing “cast of dozens”—with the assistance of three backstage dressers. Grastorf is particularly effective as the self-effacing Mr. Memory and is just plain adorable as the innkeeper Mrs. McGarrigle, who dotes on Hannay and Pamela as the “runaway couple.” There are shards of Bernard Herrmann’s film scores from at least three Hitchcock movies in Gordon Nimmo-Smith’s sound design. And, yes, there are shadow puppets.
A relentless comic monologue, purportedly structured as a recitation of every item in Kitson’s house. The soloist, with a background in stand-up, can match heckle for heckle, calling out on this Wednesday two different audience members who had drifted away from total engagement. Quickly, the piece becomes less an itemization of the things that Kitson hangs on to and more a dump of the ideas and narrative wisps that he can’t let go of. He speaks well of keeping things around that make one sad; in one specific case, a shelf of clean, empty jam jars like “horrible little pockets of hope.” Despite the direct audience address, Kitson’s rapid-fire delivery sucks most of the air out of the room, leaving little breath with which to make a genuine connection with his listeners.
The most powerful moments in this production come from the no song, no dance passage told by Paul (Jeff Gorti), a honest confession of a story not captured by cast recording albums. Samantha Marisol Gershman brings a naturalness to “Nothing,” dropping at times from a clear singing voice into speech. Emily Tyra’s Cassie shows us the fragility of a performer who’s hit some bumps in the road.
If the finale of the current production of this silly, entertaining show (some have even called it campy) lacks spectacle—where are the plants that ate Des Moines?—at least there is a great makeup change for the principals (whose characters are being slowly digested by Audrey II), not to mention one more sparkly red costume change for the doo-wop girls Chiffon (Selena Clyne-Galindo), Crystal (Charin Wereley), and Ronnette (Alana S. Thomas). Scott Ward Abernethy shines as Orin, the evil dentist, and the parade of hangers-on chasing Audrey II’s Time-Life fame. Choreographer Ilona Kessell has built an adorbs tango/hora/grapevine for Seymour and Mushnik’s “Mushnik and Son.” MattaMagical’s series of Audrey II puppets are increasingly alarming.