Category: Theater

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.

Kathleen Akerley serves up another tasty, savory omelette of ideas, one so packed with themes that it would seem to spill off the plate.

What we seem to to have here is the story of six men, partners and paraprofessionals in a law firm, who escape the city to form an agrarian residence in the deep woods, a commune ruled by group votes and a collective job jar. I write “seem to have here” because one of the play’s emphases is the stretch between appearance and reality: one of the characters spends considerable effort to repaint their new home’s tables with a marbleized finish; at times, sounds are naturalistic and at others overamplified. And a seventh actor, sinister Jonathon Church, appears as multiple characters to disrupt the equilibrium of the group, threatening unusual rent increases and police inquiries. Is this a story of six guys who ran off to live in a treehouse, or a six rabbits in an experimental hutch? (The lawyers have taken on new nature-themed names, as in a monastic community, and one of them, Fiver/Fiber? [would that the web site had given us character names] brings to mind Watership Down.) The idea of the malevolent external manipulator is reinforced by various plot points involving the house’s dumb waiter (Mr. Pinter, your check is waiting for you).

Or is this a murder mystery, involving the death of a distinctly weird young lady (the flexible Kira Burri), with interrogations from Church as a police detective that read like questions in the monthly puzzle book’s logic problem? Burri is an oracular young lady who remains warm while dead and capable of moving about at will. Or, perhaps, is it an investigation of what it means to form and maintain a community? Does it naturally settle into layers in which some members are more equal than others (the play’s animal imagery is quite strong— Ravens, Mallards—and we hear echoes of Animal Farm throughout)? How does a flock of birds maintain its shape? How many make a group, and how many of them become a swarm?

Closely linked to this line of thought is the concept of the dictator who rises from the collective to become Brother No. 1, the Southeast Asian despot Pol Pot of the work’s title. Like Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now (lurking in an image of a Willard-like submerged hippopotamus that powers an anecdote about an office copy machine), what drives a visionary community leader like charismatic Michael Glenn’s Frog to madness, knocking out the skylights and building a self-powered flying machine?

Or is it, as the closing dialog suggests, a story about the friendship between two men? We have Michael John Casey’s in-control/not-in-control Hector, ex-office manager. Who is Achilles, and who Patroclus?

With a scrambled timeline and multiple scene resets, the play calls for the ensemble cast to swap out bits of Elizabeth McFadden’s set repeatedly—and they even manage to turn some of these tasks of stagecraft into entertaining bits.

And then there is the thread of Tarot, with the ambiguity of reading the significance of each card in the deck, each image comprising its own reversal. As Hector hints, is our Fool, the man-child Séamus Miller, perhaps the one who is really in charge?

• Pol Pot & Associates, LLP, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Themes of this year’s selections include black-white race relations, death and dying, acceptance of the other, hard choices, gender issues—and indoor plumbing.

Chisa Hutchinson’s waspish comedy Dead and Beathing pits Carolyn (the fearless Lizan Mitchell), a wealthy woman weakened by a long-term illness and in hospice status, against her caregiver Veronika, an equally tart-tongued woman (the resourceful, pitch-perfect N. L. Graham). Carolyn, who has made no friends and many enemies in her life, needs Veronika’s assistance to accomplish a single task, one that might redeem both of their lives. Veronika, a ardently Christian woman of hidden talents (she prepares “the tastiest fucking omelette” with Gruyère and herbs for Carolyn), carries a secret that threatens to undermine their shared project. The setup is a bit perfunctory—Carolyn makes a too-hasty decision to get the action of the play moving and to keep it within the 90 minutes of real-time running. However, the moral dilemma that Veronika faces, one of money and life, is well-drawn, and good fodder for drive-home discussions with a theater companion.

One Night, a physically and emotionally violent drama by Charles Fuller, addresses the strains endured by soldiers fighting in the 21st century, chief among them the gnarly issue of gender integration within combat units. It’s told largely in a tangle of paranoid hallucinatory flashbacks, and the effect is appropriately disorienting, if perhaps a bit distancing. The here-and-now of the play is a hot-sheets motel somewhere on the West Coast where two Iraq war veterans on the run, Alicia (Kaliswa Brewster) and Horace (Jason Babinsky), seek shelter for the titular one night. Offstage voices (it’s the sort of cheap place with paper-thin partitions), alas, are only audible when it’s convenient to provide an impetus to the story. And a highway patrolman who turns out also to be a vet is too pat. But Fuller’s command of military lingo (his A Soldier’s Play is from 1982) is convincing, and his outrage is clear.

Some of the flashiest acting comes from Alex Podulke as Julian in Thomas Gibbons’ chamber drama Uncanny Valley, a science fiction drama of bioethics and life extension. Julian is a androidish construction being put together, part by part, by offstage engineers and being trained (cognitively, kinetically, and emotionally) by Claire (the quietly strong Barbara Kingsley). It turns out that Julian is being assembled for a mission, one for which Claire’s programming is only a substrate. Once Julian begins to execute that mission, the action of the play bogs down a bit, as these two skillful actors are left to tell us what transpires offstage. However, the challenges that Claire faces in her backstory, cognitive excursions on the part of her family members, throw some discussion-worthy highlights on to Julian’s narrative.

In a supporting interview, Gibbons says,

One of the things that’s interesting about [2001: A Space Odyssey] is the way that Hal, the computer, is more human than the astronauts. He acts almost irrationally. Throughout the movie, the human beings show very little emotion. They’re all corporate space travelers. Hal, even though he is just a lens and a red light, is the one that is more human.

The drama The Ashes under Gait City, by Christina Anderson, is sparked by the history of Oregon’s pre-Civil War exclusion laws; little discussed today and not repealed until 1926, the legislation was surprisingly effective at suppressing the population of African Americans. In 1860, there were but 128 among a total population of 52,645.

The play follows the charismatic Simone the Believer (Daphne Gaines), who uses social media to organize a tiny group of followers. Their mission: to disrupt the complacence of fictitious Gait City, Oregon and to make a home for the displaced and ignored. Gaines is commanding onstage, but she is even more effective in video projection: the twinkle in her eyes obscures the controlling, paranoid soul that is just discernible there. Willie E. Carpenter is charming as a socially inept mailman who joins the group and (quite conveniently) has mad hacking skills. The play’s violent climax doesn’t unfold the way we might expect, but it provides one cautionary example of how a cult can form. The revolution will not be televised, but it will certainly be YouTubed.

The weekend’s high point is Bruce Graham’s North of the Boulevard, an entertaining black comedy set (in this production) in a small city somewhere in the crotch of Pennsylvania. David M. Barber’s richly detailed, grunge-soaked set gives us Trip’s Auto, a neighborhood garage losing out to urban blight and chain competition from Pep Boys. There’s a grimy tool cabinet, practical lighted advertising signs, an Obama poster hiding a huge crack in the wall, and a blown-out lawn chair patched with a moving blanket.

What drives the play are the get-rich-and-get-out dreams of the proprietor Trip (the brooding, explosive Brit Whittle) and his friends Larry (Jason Babinsky again) and Bear (Jamil A. C. Mangan), and so it reminds us of A Raisin in the Sun. That is, until the three’s plans (which involve a theft of McDonald’s scratch-off game pieces and grisly insurance fraud) start to unravel à la American Buffalo. Mangan’s Bear, an African American security guard with a lot of time for self-education, a rich basso voice, and John McCain’s politics, engages in some George Jefferson-Archie Bunker sparring with the unloved Zee (Michael Goodwin, nevertheless endearing despite all the nasty stuff his character’s been up to).

Babinsky is astonishing as Larry, a stammering schlub of a guy who’s lost his house and is working as an orderly in a nursing home (skills that provide valuable to him in the end). Verbally abused by his crummy father Zee, burdened with a special-needs son, and naive enough to think that a petition drive will accomplish change in this corrupt burg, Larry has a comic Kenny McCormick moment where he seems to swallow the collar of his parka to tamp down his revulsion. When he’s particularly stressed, he judiciously squeaks into falsetto—Babinksy could give a master class on this accent note. With all that Larry’s endured, his first act “so long, Dad” (not exactly his words) aria is well-deserved.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• The Ashes under Gait City, by Christina Anderson, directed by Lucie Tiberghien
• One Night, by Charles Fuller, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Uncanny Valley, by Thomas Gibbons, directed by Tom Dugdale
• North of the Boulevard, by Bruce Graham, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Dead and Breathing, by Chisa Hutchinson, directed by Kristin Horton

Gibbons’ play was inspired in part by the LifeNaut Project, whose Bruce Duncan spoke at the festival. It’s an intriguing, perhaps disturbing proposal. The flattening of personality that our current limited technology entails is distressing, but no doubt, at one time, the same was said of tintypes and wax cylinders.