Category: Theater

Rajiv Joseph fancies two guards assigned duty at the soon-to-be-unveiled Taj Mahal in 1648: the dour, straight arrow Humayun (Ethan Hova) and the free-spirited, bumbling, imaginative Babur (the fearless Kenneth De Abrew). They’re called upon to execute a quite bloody task, and their temporary paralysis in reaction to this horror turns out to be quite funny: complementary disabilities that suggest Beckett’s similarly doomed Hamm and Clov. Sound designer Palmer Hefferan conjures an ominous sonic landscape in the pre-dawn hours while the two clowns await their fate.

• Gaurds at the Taj, by Rajiv Joseph, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Early Stoppard and rebooted Sheridan, in an adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher, both of them quite fun. One might think that there is nothing funny left to be found in a play-within-a-play that experiences a disastrous run-through, but errant 18th century stage machinery and wobbly wigs are up to the task. And how much more interesting, how reflexive, that the Guffman for whom the play is being presented is “Sheridan” himself. Robert Dorfman is very fine as Mr. Sneer, egging on the hapless Sir Fretful Plagiary (John Catron), giving him ridiculous notes that move his historical play of the Spanish Armada onto a plane not visited by reality.

In the second half”s Stoppard, the opening monologue by theater critic Moon—a celebration of second-stringers and deputies—was all the more piquant on the night we heard it, as understudy Brit Herring was standing in as Moon. Naomi Jacobson is perfect as Mrs. Drudge, the dogsbody of Muldoon Manor who answers the telephone with the scene-setting stage directions. Dorfman is quite deranged as Inspector Hound, as if Agatha Christie’s Sgt. Trotter were played by a braying Harpo Marx. And hats off to the props and effects departments, who provide an offstage crashbox that actually sounds funny, as well as the excruciatingly noisy chocolates wrapper with which Birdboot opens the proceedings.

Who is the mysterious intruder? Tom Stoppard offered this answer in a 1999 speech reprinted as a program note: “…a play which depends on keeping its secrets isn’t worth seeing twice… When it comes to mystery stories I am in agreement with Edmund Wilson… whodunits would be more interesting if Playbill named the murderer.”

• The Critic, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
• The Real Inspector Hound, by Tom Stoppard, both directed by Michael Kahn, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Winners and Losers is an intriguing agon of words, a novel way to open up personal storytelling. Scripted and performed by Marcus Youssef and James Long, both of Vancouver, B.C., with breakouts of improvisatory riffs and a quick game of ping-pong, the work is a rapid-fire debate over the question of who, or what, is the biggest winner.

Warming up with a quick assessment of what they had for dinner last night, they move on to topics like whether Canada or the U.S has handled its First Nations/American Indian issues better. Digging most deeply, they confront one another: is James or Marcus the more worldly wise, the better father, the more successful person?

It’s key to their argument that you have to consider the resources randomly doled out to each of us when we commence this Checkered Game of Life. Through a bit of mental martial arts, a dominant culture like the U.S. can be seen as weak. (To physicalize this line of reasoning, the two men engage in a brief [we hope, choreographed] bout of wrestling.) Perhaps they explain it best in an interview with Woolly:

MARCUS: Doing the show in DC is a dream. You guys live in the centre. Of an empire. Holy winner. And we feel like winners just for being invited–that’s the Canadian way. But is your empire in decline? Seems like it. Then who’s the bigger loser? You guys, for an electoral system entirely about raising unimaginable sums of cash over an absurd length of time? Or the rest of us, for paying far closer attention to your endless electoral sideshow than than what’s actually going on in our own countries?

The stories they tell are sometimes hilarious, sometimes chastening (Marcus once worked in a hospital laundry, sorting through the fouled sheets of the departed), sometimes a little crazy (James’s set piece in a dive bar about swapping insult jokes with a First Nations man recently released from prison). Embellished? Perhaps. But it makes a good story.

James and Marcus are marvels of the improvisatory “yes-and” even when the requirements of the piece call for a “no-but.”

• Winners and Losers, created and performed by Marcus Youssef and James Long, directed by Chris Abraham, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Sheila Callaghan’s new play, a satire of gender roles and social expectations about mental and physical fitness, features some high-energy set pieces: white girls rapping about how to satisfy them, a dance club that morphs into a Paris boîte in the 1920s, a food fight with heads of lettuce. There’s a rejuvenation regimen with just a few nasty side effects that suggests the grotesqueries of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. What the play lacks is any sort of emotional journey for Meredith, Tori, or Sandy to embark upon.

It’s only in the second act, when a well-executed reversal develops, that we see much in the way of human feelings: it comes in the form of a lovely monologue by Janet Ulrich Brooks, looking back on the life of her first act character (Sandy) through the eyes of Sandy’s son.

• Women Laughing Alone with Salad, by Sheila Callaghan, directed by Kip Fagan, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

A Festival that gives the design departments an opportunity to shine.

¶ In her new play, World Builders, Johnna Adams revisits some of the territory she last explored in the distasteful Gidion’s Knot (this time to better effect): the power and importance of personal worlds of the imagination, albeit streaked with fantasies of revenge and death. Whitney (Brenna Palughi) and Max (Chris Thorn) are psychiatric patients enrolled in a clinical drug study who face a familiar dilemma: continue treatment, but at the loss of their individual universes, hearts, and souls.

While Whitney’s interior world is an elaborate multiplanetary melodrama, something out of George R. R. Martin (a writer mentioned by Adams in her program notes), Max imagines a constricted place more suggestive of Beckett’s The Lost Ones. In a rather intense, economical 90 minutes, it’s a bit of comic relief when Max finds logical inconsistencies in Whitney’s complex apparatus.

Whitney and Max develop what you might call a relationship, and along the way find a way to accommodate one another’s fantasies—a good metaphor for the space each of us sacrifices to make room for another person in our worlds, our hearts.

Arshan Gailus supplies the subtle, effective soundscape.

¶ The strongest and most ambitious piece is Everything You Touch, by Sheila Callaghan, a rich, dark comic fantasia of fashion and body image, nougat laced with hot sauce. We follow the paired journeys of Jess (Dina Thomas), a schlubby software technologist of the present day who has rejected her mother’s ideals of feminine beauty (and disparages herself for it); and Victor (Jerzy Gwiazdowski), a 1970s fashion designer who breaks onto the scene as an Alexander McQueen/Malcolm McLaren-ish child of the avant garde and undergoes a Damascene conversion into an easy, breezy Halston-like esthetic. Scenes interleave, mixing up present and past. Victor and Jess, each in their own way, come to a crossroads of identity, asking am I defined by this schmatte that I’m wearing? by the fast-food restaurant I frequent? Do I want to make art, or be accepted by the buyers for Dillard’s? And each makes a choice, although Victor’s is quite different from Jess’s.

The technical elements of this production need to be on the Festival’s highlight reel. Foremost among these elements are the costumes designed by Peggy McKowen, launching the play with a series of outrageous couture pieces for Victor’s 1974 show. The actor/models in that show also serve as ensemble, as well as autonomous set pieces to fill in the multiple locations called for by the script. What a luxury for director May Adrales to be furnished with a bedside table that can react to a remark by Jess about her mother. Also key for getting us from place to place are the projections, designed by Shawn Duan and projected against David M. Barber’s set. (I’m still wondering how Duan achieved the effect that ends the prologue.)

Some parts of the more outré costumes feel out of place in the mid-seventies, at times leaving us a bit confused about when we are. And the dialogue (and relationship) between Jess and her engineer colleague Lewis is rather weak.

But if you’ve only time for one show in this year’s Festival, Everything You Touch is the one to see.

¶ Michael Weller’s adaptation of David Carkeet’s novel, The Full Catastrophe, is an entertaining comedy of relationships that doesn’t reach too far. Jeremy Cook, a professional linguist down on his academic luck, takes a position as an unconventional marriage counselor with the Pillow Group, led by eccentric magnate Roy Pillow (Festival favorite Lee Sellars). To say that Pillow’s methods are opaque would be utter understatement.

In bringing the book to the stage, Weller excises an unnecessary subplot of professional jealousy but retains Jeremy’s point of view narration. If the early passages are a bit too expositional, Jeremy’s wry asides to us are usually worth it. T. Ryder Smith, covering the enesemble roles (his program credit is “Everyone Else”), earned his ovation for his last character’s final exit.

¶ Steven Dietz, in the program notes to his thriller, On Clover Road, says that the play is “built to take members of the audience certain that know what is going to happen and instead something wholly different happens.” Unfortunately, what does happen here, especially at the crux of Act 1 into Act 2, is wholly implausible.

The set, designed by David M. Barber and lit by John Ambrosone, is a grungy, crepuscular abandoned motel room. Much of the action is primarily illuminated by a portable mechanic’s work light, positioned down center on the floor. The lamp’s position and the slight rake of the stage make a powerful shadow play on the back wall.

The story of the play concerns a dissolute mother seeking to extract her teenage daughter from a religious cult with the assistance of a deprogrammer of questionable means. We’re left with no one to root for, even when the cult leader, played with silicone-slick determination by Tom Coiner, appears in the second half.

¶ WE ARE PUSSY RIOT, by Barbara Hammond, brings new life to the expression “show trial.” The play provides a context for the antics of the provocative Russian feminist group, a punk artist collective whose means and motives are easily misinterpreted by Western media.

The piece incorporates a jumble of overtly theatrical elements, some more successful than others: exaggerated gesture, lines spoken as a chorus, audience participation, a dance break with Madonna (who has spoken publicly in support of the group). If the pre-show in the cramped lobby of the Marinoff is a muddle, the cast are quick on their feet in dealing with audience members. (On premiere night, T. Ryder Smith, as Russian prosecutor, gave somewhat willing volunteer Paul a sheet of charges to read; when Paul begged off, saying that he needed his reading glasses, Smith bounded back to Paul’s companion in search of the specs.)

The scenes of the 2012 trial of three members of Pussy Riot, with dialogue taken almost exclusively from public statements, are interleaved with scenes in the cell of dissident Sergey (Smith, again), a composite character. While we are left with the impression that the young women’s movement will prove to be a flash in the pan, the passages with Sergey give the play gravity, bringing all that dancing on the catwalk back to earth. Russia’s problems and injustices aren’t going away soon, and maybe this kick in the shins from these young women with their guitars and video cameras will spark something of lasting impact.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• World Builders, by Johnna Adams, directed by Nicole A. Watson
• Everything You Touch, by Sheila Callaghan, directed by May Adrales
• On Clover Road, by Steven Dietz, directed by Ed Herendeen
• WE ARE PUSSY RIOT, by Barbara Hammon, directed by Tea Alagić
• The Full Catastrophe, by Michael Weller, based on the novel by David Carkeet, directed by Ed Herendeen