Category: Theater

Drag performer Joey Arias dresses up her cabaret act with inventive scrim projections and other effects by Basil Twist. Alas, Twist’s vintage puppets have more engaging personality than Arias’s persona. Unfunny banter, and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a gag based on a hand job. Arias does display some vocal skills, as well as an overworked deep squat move. She makes some wholly peculiar music choices, like George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” and the opening number, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s bombastic “Kashmir.” If the objective is something north of The Rocky Horror Show, what is realized is more like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

• Arias with a Twist, by Joey Arias and Basil Twist, directed by Basil Twist, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Sarah Marshall is monumental in the role of Big Hog in Jason Grote’s Civilization (all you can eat). It’s a fable (with more than a little debt to Orwell’s Animal Farm) in which most of the desperate, lonely people of its overlapping subplots are on the way down, while the hogs are are the way up. Grote usually dreams big, and here he swings from a scene watching the stars to a painfully frank confession at an open mic night. Daniel Escobar handles the latter with a deft touch, as he speaks of walking the waste paths of the city, noting every bit of trash along the verges.

All these scenelets make for a lot of scene transitions, and director Howard Shalwitz manages them skillfully. Nearly all the action takes place along a narrow strip downstage of a two-story barn wall marked with faded painted advertisements. Actors and set pieces always move on from stage right and go off to stage left, and the one-way movement begins to suggest a treadmill. And here’s something you don’t see much any more: the coffee shop tables, chairs, and people brazenly roll into view while the previous scene is still playing. Choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning contributes a fun dance with shopping carts for another scene change.

But it’s Marshall who’s the star. As the piggie who went to market and came back with a thousand-yard stare into our future, she will put you off your bacon for a while.

• Civilization (all you can eat), by Jason Grote, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Forum Theatre offers a thoughtful comedy that follows the link between the words we use and the world that they create. George, a professional linguist (the multi-colored monologist Mitchell Hébert), preserves dying languages on tape, tracking down their last native speakers. Unfortunately, at home, relations with his wife Mary (the rock-steady Nanna Ingvarsson) are less successful: incapable of converting his love to words, George’s emotions are bracketed by quotation marks.

One of George’s interview subjects explains forcefully to him that the decay of a spoken language does not lead to the disappearance of a way of life; rather, it is the other way around, the disappearing world causing the language’s vanishing. And yet playwright Julia Cho leaves the question for us to decide, as the play often suggests the contrary, especially on the micro scale. George and Mary’s communication gap is neatly echoed by the argument between interview subjects Alta and Resten, a married couple and the last speakers of a vaguely north-central Eurasian tongue known for its musicality; their spat culminates in a mutual silent treatment. Covering several ensemble roles as well as those of Alta and Resten are Kerri Rambow and Edward Christian, and they do a fine job with each of them.

The play is enlivened by a few quirky breakings of the fourth wall, most notably the group Esperanto lesson that opens the second act.

• The Language Archive, by Julia Cho, directed by Jessica Burgess, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Time Stands Still is not a play that will wrap everything up for us in a tidy package, that will tell us what we need to know and feel about putting your life and values in danger to do journalism in a war zone. Rather, this comedy-drama requires that we do the work ourselves, guided by what the characters do and say: Sarah and John, together for eight years as foreign correspondents, and their friends Richard and Mandy, a May-December pairing that ultimately bears fruit and happiness. And they do not always express themselves consistently: photographer Sarah (the deeply resourceful Holly Twyford) especially, who shields herself from atrocity with her camera lens and a workmanlike defense that taking pictures is “doing my job,” and yet is shaken by a bleeding woman in a market, victim of a bombing, who smears blood on Sarah’s lens, crying “no pictures!”

It will come as no surprise that Sarah begins and ends her journey on the reporter’s side of the mental barrier that divides her from the civilian, despite her life-threatening injuries from a roadside bomb attack. What’s perhaps more interesting is the move to the nurturing center taken by her partner James (the funny, solid, loving Studio newcomer Greg McFadden), even if it does entail a retreat to pseudo-scholarly writing about pop culture and celebrity interviews for Vanity Fair. And let us not overlook Mandy (played by Laura C. Harris with serious depth), who begins the play as the earnest, pretty young thing girlfriend, a figure of ridicule by Sarah and James (Sarah’s look to Richard when Mandy feels it necessary to define “pro bono” is genius) and becomes a grounded, articulate voice for getting on with the task of living here and now.

John McDermott’s lovely live-in New York apartment set on the Metheny’s thrust stage at times presented a blocking challenge; a character would come to the extreme lip of the stage for a monologue with no reason to be there except to talk to us. And I had the feeling that occasionally light spill into the audience was a source of actor distraction.

The piece is one of Donald Margulies most accomplished, unified works, an equal to his Dinner with Friends (albeit with fewer working kitchens required).

• Time Stands Still, by Donald Margulies, directed by Susan Fenichell, The Studio Theatre Metheny Theatre, Washington

Bill Cain’s play is an accomplished piece of, shall we call it, imagined history. We know that William Shakespeare (however he really spelled his name) spun his plays (especially this histories) to suit the times: the last of the Tudors, the first of the English Stuarts, the unresolved religious conflicts. Cain asks, what if Shakespeare were more directly involved in contemporary political events than the annals of 400 years have revealed? What if a royal commission, objectified on stage by a red sack of money that is tossed from player to player like someone’s still-beating heart, overlay a complex political conspiracy and counter-conspiracy? His answer is an intriguing piece of theater with a wide sweep of echoes and allusions, ranging from The Parallax View by Alan Pakula, to The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard, to Shakespeare’s own Murder of Gonzago and Porter scene.

Indeed, the script is full of nuggets that tickle the fancies of the Shakespearean aficionados among us. It’s a little surprising that this production, a remount of the 2009 Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere, is presented on Maine Avenue rather than father north along Seventh Street. The ensemble cast has had the time to fine-tune some wonderful characterizations, first among them Jonathan Haugen’s gimpy-legged government official, Robert Cecil. A powerful man, used to getting his way, Cecil can silence objections with nothing more than a “sst.” Richard Elmore’s irascible Richard Burbage and John Tufts’ comic turn as James VI/I are also quite fine.

As the play slips back and forth through flashback and theatrical “reconstruction” of the same events, one of the characters directly asks us, “A ‘true history.’ How could there be anything true about a play?” Cain’s answer may lie in my favorite definition of a myth: not a word of it is true, and every word of it is true. Perhaps the same can be said both of Cain’s piece and the historical record of the events that sparked it, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

• Equivocation, by Bill Cain, directed by Bill Rauch, Arena Stage Kreeger Theatre, Washington

An entertaining, quite funny dollop of dark blackout comedy and Chicago-style audience abuse that brings these holiday tidings: “the world is a creepy place.” Of the six-member ensemble, Travis Turner stands out in a sketch in which he is called on to impersonate a domineering, supportive mother. Woolly company member Jessica Francis Dukes gets to show her musical chops with some serious belting. Maribeth Monroe is handy with a swiffer, cleaning up after an especially bloody scene. All four men of the ensemble do well with perhaps the deepest sketch of the evening, an exploration of race and cultural values as personified by Chicago’s two hapless baseball teams. And a hat tip to the evening’s followspot operator.

• Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies, written and performed by Chicago’s The Second City, directed by Billy Bungeroth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

We loved the details in this performance by which John Hurt and the production team make the piece their own: the cloud of dust when Krapp drops the ledger on the table; the overhead light fixture with one of its two bulbs burned out; the squeaky boots; the way that Hurt’s Krapp says spool like he’s enjoying a private joke. Perhaps most saucily, Hurt treats the squared pool of light that defines his den as something tangible: as he paces, he walks out of the light, then stops short, as if he’s hit a physical barrier.

He executes the material at a measured one-hour pace that some might find a little off-putting. And we missed the snatches of the hymn “Now the Day Is Over” that are scripted for Krapp. But in sum, it’s a performance to treasure.

I used to think that the piece could be adapted to more contemporary recording technology, but after seeing this performance, I doubt it. The meticulous fiddling and threading of a reel-to-reel tape recorder gives the play a breathing space, almost scene breaks, that would be lost if Krapp were merely popping DVDs into an optical drive slot.

• Krapp’s Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett, performed by John Hurt, directed by Michael Colgan, produced by the Gate Theatre Dublin, performed at Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington