Category: Theater

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

Yury Urnov uses an eclectic mix of theatrical devices to tell the story of Mia Chung’s You for Me for You, a fantasia of two sisters seeking to escape from North Korea to America: a revolving ring that delivers actors and props on stage, that can render a New York streetscape with toy taxis and waist-high apartment buildings; a backdrop stacked high with Asian storage boxes that pivots to reveal industrial scaffolding over which the sisters (Ruibo Qian as Junhee and Jo Mei as Minjee) clamber in their flight; a sound design by Elisheba Ittoop that simultaneously evokes the rumbles below decks of a huge cargo ship and taiko drumming; a song and dance break suggestive of Family Guy.

What, exactly, are the women escaping to? A consumerist paradise populated with fast-talking New Yorkers (uttered hilariously by Kimberly Gilbert as a salad of English understood imperfectly by newly-arrived Junhee) where the simple act of buying a phone requires graduate-school training? One that lacks the simple connections to the earth and home captured in a single ripe persimmon. And yet, as one of them says as they cross the border, “There’s nowhere else: let’s hurry to get there.”

• You for Me for You, by Mia Chung, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company, Washington

Forum Theatre continues its investigations into questions of faith with Kara Lee Corthron’s Holly Down in Heaven. The Holly of the title (the self-possessed) is a precocious 15-year-old who has placed herself in what she describes as religious exile for the term of her unintended pregnancy. Self-banished to the basement, she bickers with her tutor Mia (Dawn Thomas) and manipulates her preternaturally doting father (affable KenYatta Rogers) (a Steve Douglas lacking in tough love), but her deepest conversations are with the heterogeneous members of her extensive doll collection. And these dolls talk back, led by a marionette of Carol Channing (manipulated and voiced by the skilled Vanessa Strickland), the only therapist whose advice the fragile Holly will heed. We are cautioned against false gods, but it’s not the dolls that constitute Holly’s idolatry; rather, perhaps it is her own believed self-sufficiency.

As perhaps we would expect, Mia has issues of her own, which Thomas divulges (nay, it’s more like an evisceration) in a bravura second-act monologue. (And she does a fine Carol Channing riff, too.) But it’s the off-the-beaten-track storytelling of the puppets that’s the real charmer of this show. So strong are these alter egos of Holly that they conduct their own colloquy at the end of the first act, without Holly even being in the room.

• Holly Down in Heaven, by Kara Lee Corthron, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Kristoffer Diaz’s 2009 play is an entertaining slam of all things masscult, one that works on multiple levels. Macedonio “Mace” Guerra (the outstanding José Joaquin Pérez) is an artist doing what he has always wanted to do, performing as a professional wrestler. Small but physically talented, he is a journeyman playing the “heel” roles, making the charismatic “face” wrestlers (like the titular Chad Deity, well played with preening entitlement by Shawn T. Andrew) look good—and not getting his neck broken in the process.

When the beleaguered Mace meets Vigneshwar “VP” Paduar (Adi Hanash), an Indian immigrant in Brooklyn with moxie and mojo to match Chad’s, he envisions a story line for the two of them that ends with the little guy on top. Alas, his dreams are quickly co-opted by the promoter Everett K. “E.K.O” Olson (fearsome Michael Russotto), who is as culturally tone deaf as any Hollywood suit.

What makes the satire work is that hardly any cultural group escapes ridicule. The hayseed Billy Heartland (with a perfect theme song from Big and Rich) is just as annoying and stereotyped as the Muslim terrorist character that E.K.O. assigns to VP. Chad Deity serves to lampoon two conventionally opposed groups: he’s a trash-talking African-American and a Romney Republican who makes his entrance into the ring tossing dollar bills to the crowd.

What makes the show work as theater is the quiet intensity of Pérez. He narrates much of the story as a fourth wall-breaking monologue, and he’s not afraid to make us wait for what he has to say—this is appropriate, because Mace has spent his life withholding his true thoughts from others in order to keep a job, in order to get by. When Mace finally unloads on E.K.O. in a bravura surrogate fight scene (with echoes of a similar climax in Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days), pleading for the opportunity to tell his own story, we get the physical release that we’ve been hoping for.

Doing his part to make of Pérez look good in turn is James Long, who covers three ensemble roles and is a professional wrestler IRL.

In a story in which every character has at least one name given to him by someone else, a world of traditional Mexican face masks and engineered personas, of outer borough denizens reappropriating one another’s “authentic street” culture, perhaps it’s fitting that VP’s dialect is a little slippery.

If you really did get to tell your story, what would that look like?

• The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers. This time it’s a Law & Order procedural hopelessly warped by a shot of Viennese-school psychoanalysis, as well as automatic writing in the form of Mad Libs—all of it marked by Akerley’s signature physicality.

Heather Haney plays a young law student whose dreams (peopled by Caryl Churchillesque shapeshifters like a comic Chairman Mao [Jesse Terrill] with an inscrutable accent) threaten to overtake her waking life. She is prone to what you might call reverse auditory hallucinations, as she will make a cutting remark about someone and not remember having said it a moment later. Compelled to serve as her own Hercule Poirot—did she do something, say something, think something, awake or asleep, that caused a man to die?—she argues with a fellow student (the affable, goofy Michael Glenn) about which of her thoughts she can call her own, and which are archetypal bubblings from the collective unconscious.

Akerley explores the interesting theme of re-presentation through the metaphor of courtroom protocol that requires a defendant to remain silent and to express her thoughts only through her advocate, her mouthpiece, her representative. Abstruse as much of this is, nevertheless Akerley’s writing remains grounded and personal, as when she writes of a traffic altercation that ends uncertainly.

The necessities of the script’s many scene changes, as Haney’s law student slips from dreams to day and back again, at times tax Longacre Lea’s limited technical resources. And the significance of a point of law, the distinction between contractual acceptance (which occurs when given) and rejection (which occurs when received) still has me mystified.

• Goldfish Thinking, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington