Category: Theater

Chad Beckim’s economical three-hander tells the story of an unconventional love triangle among Grace, her husband Large, and the man he meets in prison, Riece. The play weaves together narrative monologue passages with deft ensemble scenes, with blade-sharp transitions between. It’s most enjoyable in an early scene from high school, where painfully shy Grace (the flexible Jeena Yi) first meets, goofy, affable Large (endearing DeLance Minefree).

It’s an actorly work—the players get to show off their chops—but one that’s less than engaging. The piece’s insistent mirrored structure, featuring pairs of completely different scenes played with almost identical dialog, comes off as excessively symmetrical. It touches on themes of race relations and the compromises we make to survive in challenging situations without going very deep.

• Lights Rise on Grace, by Chad Beckim, directed by Michael John Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Frank works in a shabby office, with nothing but his own OCD and a rather talkative office safety manual for company. The expression on his face usually registers somewhere between bemusement and mild alarm. Frank is also a bunraku puppet and the protagonist of this 60-minute piece—a charming, often goofy, at times phantasmagorically frightening tale of one man’s obsession with common city pigeons and the secret messages they carry to us.

Writer/director Robin Frohardt always lets us know what Frank is thinking, which is rather a challenge because Frank is wordless (we do hear some expressively heavy sighs from him); a lot of the information about Frank’s emotional and cognitive states is the responsibility of composer Freddi Price. Doubling on laptop, Price’s sound effects are clean and crisp, and sometimes not quite what they seem.

There’s a lot of good straightforward puppetry here: a formidable trash monster, a hilarious set of venetian blinds with a mind of its own. Frohardt is not afraid to go a little meta, as well, as when Frank himself turns feckless puppeteer. But the core of this piece is Frank’s endearing personality (although I don’t think I’d want to share a break room with him), sometimes revealed by something as simple as the squeak of a highlighting pen.

• The Pigeoning, created and directed by Robin Frohardt, composed by Freddi Price, Artisphere Dome Theatre, Arlington, Va.

This was my first (and very likely last) opportunity to visit Artisphere’s friendly Dome Theatre (the ceiling of which was used very creatively to register an underwater effect). Alas, the multivenue county-funded facility is slated to be closed later this year.

Wilson set his agon in the back yards of three Pittsburgh row houses. By contrast, the set for this production is spare, with nary a building in sight: nearly the only nod to realism is the patch of stony ground where King tries to grow flowers. To a certain extent this abstract approach works: Stool Pigeon’s opening prologue is given to the rest of the characters, who generally remain onstage throughout the evening. One gets the sense of a ritualistic retelling of a Greek tragedy. And the squared-off space of the Fichandler is the perfect setting for King’s Act 1 closing monologue by Bowman Wright, lightning escaping from the bottle. Would that the ring speeches on the pro wrestling circuit could be as terrifying.

E. Faye Butler produces some powerful, throaty vocal colors in her reading of Ruby. And André De Shields gives us a clear-headed Stool Pigeon. Thrust into the role of the community’s savant (now that the multicentenarian Aunt Esther has passed), their Teiresias manqué, Stool Pigeon never falls into the trap of mere mumbling craziness.

• King Hedley II, by August Wilson, directed by Timothy Douglas, Arena Stage Fichandler Stage, Washington

Many strong D.C. area actors combine to perform this this play of historical fiction, written in 1800. The payoff comes in the second half, a meeting in the woods of the two royal antagonists, Queen Elizabeth of England (a bottled-up Holly Twyford, until she explodes) and the eponymous Queen Mary of Scotland (Kate Eastwood Norris, beaming with paradoxical purity). And it’s a good payoff, but perhaps not enough to redeem the first half, laden with exposition and little lyricism, a challenge to the actors’ breath control. Rajesh Bose presents an interesting take on Lord Burleigh, hard-line adviser to Elizabeth who counsels her to execute Mary posthaste: he parks himself on stage and avoids superfluous movement. One is put in mind of a 16th-century Jabba the Hutt.

• Mary Stuart, by Friedrich Schiller, in a new version by Peter Oswald, directed by Richard Clifford, Folger Theatre, Washington

A collection of short pieces of puppetry, all of them concerned with death—or more broadly and accurately, the evanescence of existence—from the broadly comic to the baldly conceptual. The company uses a variety of techniques and materials: some of them are rather steampunk and indebted to Edward Gorey, while others depend on such elements as an oversize popup book, a child’s play set of farm animals, or live-blown soap bubbles (chew on that, Joseph Cornell). (Some of the more obscure works of the Neo-Futurists find a certain affinity here.) Spoken English language is relegated to obscurity: perhaps the most effective pieces are wordless, narrated by grunts and gasps, or in a foreign language. Most of the time, the troupe is not concerned whether we see the manipulating hands or not: if it happens, it happens. While the interludes spoken by “Nathanial Tweak,” one of the few articulating puppets in the cast, lend little to the proceedings, the troupe’s ability to animate mute wood and plastic is strong.

• Famous Puppet Death Scenes, created and performed by the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington

The collisions of ideas and recriminations that highlight the first two acts of Tony Kushner’s Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, multiple conversations/arguments taking place in the Brooklyn brownstone of Gus Marcantonio, are by turns invigorating and exhausting. Whereas OTC is fond of referring to the overlapping dialog in the second act of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County as the “fugue of dysfunction,” in Kushner’s work there is no delicate counterpoint, but rather Ivesian clangor—albeit modulated deftly by director John Vreeke.

The house of Marcantonio (Gus’s three children, his sister, an ex-son-in-law, two same-sex partners, and a baby on the way) is replete with people of higher learning and the word: a former nurse, a lawyer, two theology Ph.D.’s, a historian ABD. As for Gus (the firm Tom Wiggin), he’s a mere autodidact, a retired longshoreman and radical labor organizer who taught himself Latin and translates Horace for recreation. It’s not surprising (and yet it’s very funny) when the two theologians bicker over a translation when one of them is going into labor.

Yet there is a hollowness in Gus’s soul (made perhaps too explicit by a subplot involving something hidden behind a broken plaster wall) that he can’t fill, a compromise made earlier in his life that he still regrets. And so he makes plans to make his quietus, to distribute his estate, thereby throwing his family into a tizzy.

A subplot centered on Gus’s son PierLuigi (known as “Pill”) explores the commodification of sex and some aspects of labor’s alienation that Karl Marx chose not to discuss. The love triangle involving Pill’s husband Paul and the weedy hustler Eli feels a bit labored, but is redeemed when Eli appears in the closing moments of the play to solve a problem for Gus.

In all this wordy maelstrom, the standouts are two women of quiet power: Jenifer Belle Deal as Shelle, a dockworker’s widow who matter-of-factly explains to Gus how a home suicide can be accomplished, and Rena Cherry Brown as Gus’s sister Clio (called “Zeeko”), a polytheist who left the convent to follow Mao and Mary Baker Eddy. Brown is at her most eloquent sitting calmly, with crossed arms, speaking when it is meet to speak.

Mashups of high-minded intellection and simple, sublime pleasures drive much of the humor in this piece. The payoff for one of Gus’s stories about the old country concerns an anarcho-communist choral society. Kushner swings from the nigglingly precise (as projections tell us, the play takes place in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood, in 2007, on such-and-such dates and at such-and-such times) to the sweepingly allegorical, as in Gus’s dream of the tragedians and the single audience member. The point of Gus’s parable is that the the tragedy takes place in the mind of the viewer. And so, as we watch Kushner’s play, we ask ourselves, where does this story of betrayal and collapse take place? There on the stage, or within each one of us?

• The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, by Tony Kushner, directed by John Vreeke, Theater J, Washington

David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, a star turn for Woolly company member Kimberly Gilbert, has some affinities with the 2006 film of the same name by Sofia Coppola, but it also recalls Adjmi’s Stunning from 2008: a sheltered, privileged young woman, bratty at times and certainly ill-equipped to deal with the wider world, is hobbled by the man in her life, someone who proves to be weaker than she. Adjmi’s Marie says, “I feel like a game that other people play, but not me.” As her marzipan and fondant world dissolves all around her, this Marie’s journey is to a smaller, quieter place where she acquires some measure of fortitude, even in the hour of her doom.

The theatrical exaggeration and the “snapshots” of the famous lines from history in this script and production remind us that what we think we know about Marie’s story is only framing, not knowledge at all.

As events fall out and the pretty venue of the Petit Trianon disassembles into Marie’s prison, the complex set changes (e.g., rolling up a grass carpet to expose an iron-mesh deck) call for visible crew members to make the shifts—a rare, welcome sight at Woolly. Indeed, is this disassembly or dissembling: how many layers of artifice do the technicians need to peel away?

Sarah Marshall’s work as Sheep is expressive, even though her puppet has no articulation, just a head stuck on a pole. Ominous and playful, sometimes a head cock is all that’s needed.

• Marie Antoinette, by David Adjmi, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The Shoplifters is a quick, entertaining comedy set in an overstuffed back store room of a contemporary big box store. From the first scene, our sympathies are torn between the world-weary, savvy-enough Alma (confident Jane Houdyshell) and the idealistic apprentice security guard Dom (overwound Adi Stein) who has detained her for stealing a ribeye steak. Swimming in a uniform two sizes too big for him and suffering from a nut allergy, Stein’s frantic attempt to assert his authority is fun to watch.

Alma and Dom are mirrored in their respective pragmatism and frenzy by the dour Otto (Michael Russotto filling in for Delaney Williams), a senior security guard who’s just had a “you can’t fire me, I quit” conversation, and the leporine Phyllis (skittish Jenna Sokolowski), who has been recruited by Alma into her bit of Robin Hood larceny. Newly-hatched thief Phyllis finds a surprising number of places to conceal heisted baking ingredients on her slender frame.

We’re asked to consider “Who stole the American dream?” and the piece does give us something to chew on in that respect, inviting us to join the 99%; as a counterbalance, the play touches on the depersonalization of all economic transactions. Is it OK to steal if and only if you don’t see the person you’re stealing from?

At its heart, the work is an updating of that fine series of Looney Tunes featuring the sheepdog chasing the wolf all day and punching out when the whistle blows at the end of the shift.

Unfortunately, the script calls for a series of choppy scenes, all set in that store room and separated from one another by only a moment or two. And a momentum-breaking intermission is needed largely to do a little cleanup and to precisely position a key prop.

• The Shoplifters, written and directed by Morris Panych, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater, Washington

Qui Nguyen’s comedy of coming-out, She Kills Monsters, blurbs as a run-of-the-mill satire about geeky teenagers and their barely out of adolescence high school teachers, but it is uplifted by some exceptional stagecraft. Agnes, a milquetoast English instructor (the resourceful Maggie Irwin¹), comes across a Dungeons and Dragons scenario written by her younger sister Tilly (the commanding Rebecca Hausman), who has died too young in a car crash. To discover the withdrawn sister she never really knew, Agnes tumbles into the role-playing world of D&D, and much of the early comedy flows from this fish-out-of-water situation: when asked her affiliation alignment,² Agnes offers, “Well, I’m a Democrat.” On her quest for the lost soul of Athens (well, Ohio), Tilly’s characters appear in live action, dragging Agnes along with them.

It’s the outstanding fight choreography, designed by Casey Kaleba, that transforms this play. Working on a multi-level set by Ethan Sinnott inspired by Avalon Hill’s hexes, and in a in-the-round seating configuration in the Atlas’s Sprenger black box (with its sometimes unforgiving acoustics), Kaleba and stage director Randy Baker deliver lots of multiple simultaneous fights, good sight lines, a variety of weapons, and safety for all.

The play’s a hilarious smashup of pop culture references from the 1990s and places you can see from there. (Did Louis E. Davis’s evil, rams-horned Orcus just riff on Quantum Leap?) Naturally, in this estrogen-powered adventure (Orcus is the token guy on the quest), delicate fairies like Farrah (gymnastically executed by Emma Lou Hébert) turn out to be wicked badasses. And the final set piece, a dance-off between Agnes’s crew and a band of evil cheerleaders that escalates from Wham! (“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”) through the Spice Girls into En Vogue territory (“My Lovin’ [You’re Never Gonna Get It]”), is quite wonderful and fizzy fun.

• She Kills Monsters, by Qui Nguyen, directed by Randy Baker, fight choreography by Casey Kaleba, Rorschach Theatre, Atlas Performing Arts Center Paul Sprenger Theatre, Washington

And “Volcano Girls” for the curtain call!

¹ Thanks, Leta!
² Thanks, Brett!

Strong ensemble work in this somewhat vexing musical of art and perception by Stephen Sondheim: individual voices, well blended, especially in “Putting It Together.” The comic breaks are effective, particular Paul Scanlan’s salty Boatman in the first act and George’s (Claybourne Elder) “duet” of the two dogs in the park.

There’s a thoughtful conversation about permanence in the scene between George and his mother, Old Lady (Donna Migliaccio): what is merely “pretty” is subject to alteration; the perceiving eye is necessary to transform something, anything into being beautiful, and hence into something that lasts.

Nothing in Act 2 can match the majestic finale of the first (“Sunday”), and so the second half feels like a few comments on the first. But the vocal pianissimos, always harder to execute well than they seem, are well done.

• Sunday in the Park with George, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, directed by Matthew Gardiner, Signature Theatre, Arlington

OTC and I both liked the nice touch of giving Jon Kalbfleisch’s orchestra its call via photographs projected with George’s chromolume screens.