Category: Theater

There’s a song from 1980 by The Police, “When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around.” It would make an interesting underscoring for Ali Viterbi’s excellent apocalyptic The World to Come, starring Woolly long-timers Brigid Cleary, Michael Russotto, and Naomi Jacobson.

Set in what we once called an “old folk’s home” that suggests both an assisted living facility (an “I could retire here” set (at least in the opening moments) by Misha Kachman) and later a concentration camp, the residents piece together news of the world outside that is literally crumbling away. They are aided, then thwarted, by a succession of nurses played by Ro Boddie, who sports a progressively alarming array of PPE.

These self-described alter kockers challenge each other with the question, “What could/would/should you have done to deal with the crumbling?”, be it climate change, tyranny, plague, or nuclear war. Rather than hear answer in words, we see them carry out acts of compassion one-on-one: bring medicine, make love, fight, tell a funny story, say Kaddish,¹ join in the other’s hallucination. Most movingly, to close Act 1, Fanny (Jacobson) sings to Barbara (Cleary), as Barbara slides into the undiscovered country; Barbara’s dementia has been punctuated by prophetic visions and moments of her career as physicist.²

Technical praise: Sarah O’Halloran’s sound design, realizing earthquake rumbles without Sensurround, and Ksenya Litvak’s terrifying raven puppets.

• The World to Come, by Ali Viterbi, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

¹Alas, there are too few characters to make a minyan.

²I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Whenever my friend M. sees a play that he doesn’t care for, he’ll say that the play is very long. This play is very long.

Wallace Shawn’s disposition to acidulous, lengthy monologue, salted with dialogue scenes, is stretched to three hours in the current material.¹ A routine love affair, some sordid practices, struggles with achieving and accepting success: at moments it seems that we’re watching The Four Faces of Wallace.

The play’s formal twist, that some of these four characters are speaking to us from a, shall we say, unique vantage point, doesn’t redeem the work; indeed, that vantage point yields no special insights. Maybe the single dialogue scene, after the second intermission, between Tim and Elaine, established an emotional connection or intellectual bond between the two, but it’s not a strong one—I’d drifted off by then.

• What We Did Before Our Moth Days, by Wallace Shawn, directed by André Gregory, Greenwich House Theater, New York

¹For a briefer example in my experience, see the film version of The Designated Mourner.

Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living is a Christmas puzzle box in which we’re given a look at the characters’ inner lives, sort of Alice Gerstenberg’s Overtones as reimagined by Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn. In this case, each of this hapless family’s secret coping strategies to get through a fraught holiday gathering are projected on a screen, for instance, Matthew must sit and eat in order to tell a lie or Deborah must clean in order to hold her tongue—all to some comic effect. Jonathan Feuer as Adam has the greatest challenge, and he pulls it off, with Adam must use a silly voice (some of them very specific) in order to tell the truth.

Although the Charades sequence is predictable, it does give Naomi Jacobson (Deborah) the opportunity for the biggest laugh of the show without saying a word or moving a muscle. The fate of a solitary empty bowl on an end table is telegraphed from Utah.

• Rules for Living, by Sam Holcroft, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

I’m all for reusing playbills, but not this one in my hands that has been overly thumbed.

The piece raises an occasional chuckle, but it goes into the bin of the rarely funny genre of Well-Intentioned People Getting It Wrong. There are the easy jokes about pronouns; a pedant stickles about the difference between literally and figuratively to set up another limp joke. There is the outsider who is not what everyone else takes her to be: a Waiting for Guffman trope telegraphed like it was on a fiber optic cable. The clash between art and commercial viability for women is better executed in Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business.

Shea-Mikal Green as Logan, the director of the no-budget “devised piece” about the American Thanksgiving, does manage to inject some manic energy into this wobbly vehicle.

• The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Suzanne Beal, Maryland Ensemble Theatre, Frederick, Md.

The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions is a funny-sweet-bitter reflection of playwright Paula Vogel’s emotional journey with her mother, named in the play’s world as Phyllis Herman (the always watchable Kate Eastwood Norris). The “evictions” of the title refer to the series of house moves undertaken by the Herman family—mother, son Carl (the surprising Stanley Bahorek) and daughter Martha (steady Zoe Mann)—gradually stepping up from a cockroach-riddled basement custodial flat* to a spacious three-bedroom apartment, all in the D.C. metro area. As Martha says early in the play, there is a season for packing, and a season for unpacking.

It’s not clear in the text whether each change of domicile is entailed by formal proceedings, but that’s not important. Rather, we can read each eviction as a point in the Herman’s lives when something is lost, and maybe something found. As the various Herman family apartments gradually become airier and more spacious, equally so the living rooms become emptier of furniture, highlighting Phyllis’s rejection of her children and general isolation. The Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch over Me” recurs as underscoring: Phyllis never does find that Someone until the closing moments of the play.

Shawn Boyle’s projection designs are formidable, perhaps even triggering.

• The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, by Paula Vogel, directed by Margot Bordelon, Studio Theatre Mead Theatre, Washington

*Writing as someone who’s lived with cockroaches in Prince George’s County, I’m of the mind that you’re never really rid of them.

Nia Akilah Robinson’s offering is a ghost story, of sorts, about how grief and pain are passed down from generation to generation and are processed, suppressed, transformed, and sometimes put to rest. In this instance, our story begins with a merchant-class Black family in 1832 Philadelphia. The father dies of cholera and ultimately his grave is desecrated by a so-called resurrectionist, “in the name of science.”

An extended dialogue offers a point-counterpoint on what we might call “medical justice.” To what extent does medicine (or science in general) owe a debt to marginalized populations when only European people benefit from its advances? How can we justify “your body, my health”? Be it forced dissection of cadavers, experimentation without consent, or contemporary practices that our great-grandchildren will find to be unjust?

But this is not just a high-falutin’ play of ideas. Scenes set in today’s world, played by the same actors, bring some comedy and even a closing moment of joy. The graveyard of 1832 has become a vexed summer camp, with frenzied counselors. This is one of the first plays in my experience that measure the generation gap between Millennials and Gen Alphas, to comic effect.

This production (albeit a co-production with Company One Theatre of Boston) is an encouraging sign for Woolly, as it looks for a new artistic director to lead the way. This season includes four one-person shows, including the regrettable return of Julia Masli.

• The Great Privation (How to flip ten cents into a dollar), by Nia Alikah Robison, directed by Mina Morita, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Two monologists to round out the festival.

Kevin Kling, storyteller from Minnesota, brings a bundle of endearing material to the Marinoff stage. His stories, sometimes equally harrowing and goofy (being struck by lightning, riding shotgun in a small plane with his father flying into a fog bank), are supported by multi-instrumentalist Robertson Witmer. The set by David M. Barber puts Kling in a Joseph Cornell box, deep cosmic blue, angel’s wings, painted portraits.

Kling has an extensive back catalog on NPR, from back in the days when we could spare six or seven minutes for a unique voice.

Cody Leroy Wilson, Asian American son of a Vietnamese mother and a West Virginia farmer, gives a voice and a face to the Vietnamese family that he can never know. His mother, adopted from an orphanage during the Vietnam War (some of us do remember the horror, whether at home or deployed), has no memory of her parents, that is, Wilson’s grandparents. What might have happened? Well, the title of the piece gives it all away.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Kevin Kling: Unraveled, by Kevin Kling, with music by Robertson Witmer, directed by Steven Dietz
• Did My Grandfather Kill My Grandfather?, by Cody Leroy Wilson, directed by Victor Malana Maog

In Magdalene, Mark St. Germain, continuing to mine the vein of real-life people who have become clouded in mythology, gives us an imagined meeting between Simon Peter, soon to become first in the line of Catholic popes, and the titular Mary, soon to be sidelined as an important figure in the Christian faith. The work probes the uncomfortable inconsistencies across the various accounts in the century following Jesus’s death;¹ asks why there are no women priests in Catholicism; and challenges the notion that a physical church is necessary for practice of the Christ’s worship.² As St. Germain notes in his playwright interview, “it’s not something that could play in the Kennedy Center right now.” What does a parable mean? Wherein lies a miracle? These are the play’s questions.

Something I can’t unhear: the idea that when speaking of Peter, never the sharpest tool in the shed, Jesus meant Matthew 16:18 as a joke.

The festival has backed up the production with a sturdy dramaturgical note and many links for additional reading.

¹How much would you trust a strictly oral account, handed down by his advisers and their successors, of what Warren Harding did and said?

²St. Germain’s Mary reminds Peter that Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the landlords.”

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Magdalene, by Mark St. Germain, directed by Elena Araoz

Side Effects May Include… is not a play so much as it is a dramatized version of a previously published memoir of Loomer’s struggles with her son’s akathisia, a debilitating, somewhat mysterious movement disorder linked to both genetics and medication. This is not to take away from solid ensemble work by Sophie Zmorrod, Susan Lynskey, and Jimmy Kieffer.

Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular is, in a sense, a nostalgic return to 1980, when it wasn’t safe to be out, and before AIDS replaced one scourge for another—before CGI, green screens, and all that jazz. It’s a love story between two stuntmen, an aging Tom Cruise type and a young upstart with some serious Eve Harrington vibes. We do see some fancy fights (my teachers call fight choreography “ballet with dangerous props”) and wire work, and a practice dummy takes some of the lines, but we don’t really learn that much about stunt work.

Do the multiple framing devices get in the way? I’m not sure. The trope of the 8-week movie shoot that runs over to 9 months, however, is a little forced.

Credit is due to Stefania Bulbarella’s projection design; Se Hyun Oh’s set is packed with scrims and TV monitors.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Side Effects May Include…, by Lisa Loomer, directed by Meredith McDonough
• Happy Fall: A Queer Stunt Spectacular, by Lisa Sanaye Dring, with Rogue Artists Ensemble, directed by Ralph B. Peña