Category: Theater

WSC Avant Bard gives us a treat: a fine production of one of Harold Pinter’s less-produced plays of menace in an enclosed space, No Man’s Land (1975). Pinter’s fascination with abrupt shifts of dominance and usurpation is one of the strongest themes of this production: it’s never clear from one moment to the next whether Briggs (Bruce Alan Rauscher) and Foster (Frank Britton) are housekeeper and secretary to Hirst (ever-powerful Brian Hemmingsen) in his well-appointed Hampstead home, or his jailers. Imagine Veronica’s Room with more homoeroticism and even more peeping.

The opening scene springs from Hirst’s inviting Spooner (Christopher Henley) in for a drink. Twenty-five minutes later, Hirst is falling-down drunk and the scene unspools into slow-motion slapstick. Henley makes the most of Spooner’s weediness, with a sick little smile and a delight in uttering words like periphrastic and sequesteredness as if they were much smuttier than they are.

Rauscher’s second act monologue plays to his strengths: he’s a bemused thug telling the story of how he once gave directions to Foster about how to get to Bolsover Street (in Rauscher’s dialect choice, this sounds more like the so-appropriate Balls-Over Street).

One can read the coda section of the second act as an explanation of this enigmatic sequence of meetings, or as one more mystery to unpick.

• No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter, directed by Tom Prewitt, WSC Avant Bard, Theatre on the Run, Arlington, Va.

Seeking drama and humor in the living rooms of the privileged class, Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to Lyman and Polly Wyeth, retirees from 1960s-era Hollywood and old guard conservatives. Unfortunately, the drama (a tell-all memoir by their daughter Brooke) is not compelling, and the humor lodges in tired one liners. Helen Carey, as Polly, does give us a flinty Nancy Reagan; Larry Bryggman’s tentativeness as Lyman is puzzling.

The narrative’s chronology is forced and confusing: most of the play takes place shortly after the invasion of Iraq, yet the still-young Brooke is called upon to remember events from the Vietnam War, a minimum of three decades prior.

• Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Kyle Donnelly, Arena Stage Fichandler Theatre, Washington

This biography of Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente (the mimetic Modesto Lacén) comes alive in the songs and the dancing. The book scenes convey the story of Clemente’s childhood in Puerto Rico, his 3,000-hit baseball career, and its tragic, abrupt end by a plane crash in 1972. They tend to be choppy and episodic, despite the efforts of Ricardo Puente as the flashy Ramiro, who serves as narrator for much of the play.

The first act ends with a scene in which the dark-skinned Clemente is beaten by two racist policemen—an especially odd choice since we’ve just heard a rousing love song to Roberto from his to-be wife Vera (Keren Lugo).

The ensemble of five is anchored by the versatile Alexandra Linn, equally effective as character actor and musical performer.

• DC-7: The Roberto Clemente Story, book and lyrics by Luis Caballero, music by Luis Caballero and Harold Gutiérrez, directed by Luis Caballero, GALA Hispanic Theatre, Washington

Bill Cain’s brazenly autobiographical play takes a wry but clear-eyed view of what the modern clergy can and cannot accomplish. Cain says, through his protagonist also named Bill (the genial, bemused Ray Ficca), that a holy person proceeds mainly by calling attention to details. In this way, by being an indicator (as many depictions of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, show her), he resembles the modern playwright (and Cain is both playwright and Jesuit priest).

The details to which Cain points are simple but strong: the decline and death of his own mother Mary (the flexible Marybeth Wise), the life in flashbacks of his late father Pete (Mitchell Hébert, always a pleasure to watch), and the life journey of his brother Paul (Danny Gavigan). With many short scenes (some no more than a line or two long) and much direct address to the audience, the play clicks along. Hébert and Gavigan fill in minor characters of friends, neighbors, and health care professionals, and Gavigan is at his most watchable as a comically callow physician.

Nevertheless, the side trip to explore Paul’s military career in Vietnam, cut short by a crisis of faith in the rightness of our conduct there, serves to diffuse the focus of the play. Cain deals more effectively with the U.S.’s misadventures in Southeast Asia in his 9 Circles, recently produced by a Round House partner theater.

• How to Write a New Book for the Bible, by Bill Cain, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

This is the first Round House show directed by new Producing Artistic Director Ryan Rilette, who brings new life to the company’s repertory after its ill-advised overemphasis on dramatized novels. Next year’s season includes works by Martin McDonagh, August Wilson, and area premieres of plays by Theresa Rebeck, Melissa James Gibson, and Nicky Silver.

Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles. The play is wrapped around the atrocities that took place in Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in 2006.

In Cain’s retelling of the story, Reeves is a young man with little hope and a history of personality disorder who enlists in the Army and is sent to Iraq—perhaps the last person that you’d want to trust with lethal weapons in a high-stress situation. Reeves’s story of the violence he witnesses, his brutal over-response to it, and the slender moment of grace he experiences in the meantime is unpacked by a series of interviews and meetings with various officers, psychiatrists, chaplains, and lawyers. His interlocutors are played by an ensemble of three (Scott McCormick, Jonathan Feuer, and Katy Carkuff), and the doubling serves to emphasize Reeves’s disorientation and isolation; on at least one occasion, he remarks to a new character played by an actor we have already seen, “You look familiar.” Each one tries to put his own spin on Reeves’s tale, and it’s only at the end, in a bravura monologue in which he undergoes death by lethal injection, that Reeves wrests control of the narrative and lets us viscerally feel what it’s really like to be him in this wretched situation.

One of Reeves’s lawyers remarks that his history is a threat to American complacency (and the complacency of all who practice violence) because it opens up a sympathy for the enemy. And as that sympathy knocks down the barrier between foes, how can any war survive? It is Cain’s play that instills sympathy for Reeves, and with that barrier down, how can the scapegoating murder that is capital punishment survive?

Carkuff’s scene as the Army “shrink” is particularly strong, as the career psychiatrist must walk the line between, on the one hand, compassion for her patient and getting him out of harm’s way (his own and others’), and on the other, the need to “recycle” warriors back to a state of fitness for duty and return them to the front lines.

• 9 Circles, by Bill Cain, directed by Jennifer L. Nelson, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

David Lindsay-Abaire puts aside the wacky characters and situations of some of his earlier work (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers) and plays it straighter in his new Good People. But his signature damaged people are still present to fuel this sober comedy set in Boston’s Southie neighborhood.

Margaret (Johanna Day) has spent her working life getting (and losing) a series of minimum-wage jobs, barely keeping a household together for her and her developmentally-disabled daughter Joyce. When Mike (Andrew Long), a boy she knew from high school 30 years earlier, returns to the city as a successful endocrinologist and with a very young bride, Margaret reluctantly approaches him with the thin hope of a hand up—a job as a receptionist, a referral to one of his well-to-do friends, anything. Precisely how well Mike and Margaret knew each other all those years before is the information, gradually given to us, that drives the plot.

In the second-act confrontation among Margaret, Mike, and his wife Kate (Francesca Choy-Kee), in Mike and Kate’s posh home in Chestnut Hill, everyone gets his say. In particular, Margaret makes a strong case that the line between success and failure is quite fine. Hard work will only get you so far; what’s needed is a lucky break or someone else’s sacrifice. And what should be sacrificed is not always obvious.

Yet there is a distance between us and the three characters, a separation—perhaps it is Lindsay-Abaire’s comic facility?—that makes it difficult for us to make a connection with them. And the epilogue (fraught with its own staging problems) casually imparts a key piece of information that many of us might miss.

I like the misdirection of an expensive-looking prop in a precarious spot that doesn’t end its stage time with a crash.

• Good People, by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Jackie Maxwell, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater, Washington