Category: Theater

Plays at this year’s CATF are dominated by grim themes of black-white race relations, with the concomitant issues of money, power, and social class. In four out of the five shows (none of them conventional musicals), someone at one time or another will break into song, and at least in one case, we in the audience are encouraged to join in.

The strongest production this year is Sam Shepard’s masterful new piece from 2009, the two-hander Ages of the Moon. On the front porch of a country cottage in Kentucky, two old friends sitting begin the play with a comic passage of Lum and Abner-style non sequitur; they run a series of emotional changes through silly bickering and a slapstick fight into the sharing of grievous loss, experiencing a kind of “functional pain.” The wakeup moment mid-act recalls duck hunting and a ceiling fan—don’t ask. Let’s just say that Sean McArdle earns his program credit. Festival veteran Anderson Matthews (Ames) is well matched with John Ottavino (Byron), each of them showing a range of autumnal colors of the heart. D .M. Woods’ subtle changes of light are stunning.

The play by the festival’s other heavy-hitter playwright, Race by David Mamet, is less successful. Mamet’s signature dialectic of interruption and contradiction is at work in this tight 75-minute script, but perhaps—perhaps—the script is too tight. Clues (props, costume changes) to the unfolding chronology of the piece’s three scenes are lacking; it’s only once we get home that we work out that the play has taken place over several days, at a minimum. And we’re left wondering why super-rich Charles Strickland has retained such an under-resourced law firm, one that apparently consists of two partners and an associate, with nary a Della Street nor Gertie in evidence to screen telephone calls. (Thanks to my Official Theater Companion for helping me work this out.)

Crystal A. Dickinson, the associate Susan in Race, does better as the giddy Billie in Tracy Thorne’s song-infused We Are Here. Unfortunately, the production’s static stage pictures and rushed pace undo Thorne’s exploration of a mother’s grief over the untimely loss of her child. Kyle Bradstreet’s From Prague demands much of our credulity. As rumpled academic Samuel, John Lescault misreads signals and commits an infidelity that entails life-ending consequences through a contrived chain of coincidences.

OTC and I left the festival on a stronger note, The Insurgents by Lucy Thurber. It’s an intriguing piece, albeit flawed. Sally (the got-game Cassie Beck) returns to her broken Massachusetts mill town home after failing to complete college, funded by an athletic scholarship. She becomes obsessed with the failures in other American cities: in a good passage she talks of visiting Detroit and New Orleans, places where “people walk around like it’s their fault.” Inspired by writings by and about American millennial insurrectionists of the 19th and 20th centuries—Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and Timothy McVeigh (Cary Donaldson in a hoodie, looking like a bearded Mark Zuckerberg)—Sally progresses from an uncertain yearning to right wrongs to an even more unfocused rage. Hence the problem with the play: though we understand Sally’s urge for vengeance, it’s evident that anything violent she might do will be small-scale. The theatrical space she inhabits doesn’t extend beyond her own shabby kitchen and her broken-down family.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• From Prague, by Kyle Bradstreet, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Race, by David Mamet, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Ages of the Moon, by Sam Shepard, directed by Ed Herendeen
• We Are Here, by Tracy Thorne, directed by Lucie Tiberghien
• The Insurgents, by Lucy Thurber, directed by Lear Debessonet

Leta and I found an intershow meal at the congenial Mellow Moods Cafe and Juice Bar on German Street.

Director Michael Kahn and his cast give a cool, clean, faithful reading of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of memory and friendship. The intermission changeover of the set from the sitting room to the bedroom, specified in the script, serves to disrupt the momentum of the piece; the perfunctory second act (30 minutes, if that) feels as if the narrative arc has fallen off the table.

But this mounting, admirably, makes the story both more transparent and more opaque to me compared to the last time I saw a production. (It couldn’t have anything to do with the intervening twenty years, could it?) Steven Culp’s amiable Deeley is a bit shambling; Tracy Lynn Middendorf is languid in pink satin as Kate; Holly Twyford’s brittle Anna makes us wish that she had known as much fun as a young girl in London as she claims to have.

• Old Times, by Harold Pinter, directed by Michael Kahn, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Lance Coadie Williams runs away with the show with his opening scene, a monologue by Reverend Benson, a neighborhood preacher who gives up some of his own revelations from the altar: Williams’s mastery of rhythm, dynamics, and timbre is marvelous. Perhaps the work as a whole, a series of scenes (calling on the five actors to play multiple roles, sometimes even within the same scene) that show facets of the life of a young man growing up gay and black, doesn’t quite hang together. The closing scene of Act 1 offers a frame into which all the pieces might fit, and it certainly provides a novel, anti-climatic way to end an act, with the house lights already up and the characters slouching off one by one. But playwright O’Hara gives us a confusing message about the dynamics of racial and sexual identity: the black and/or gay playwright/characters in the scene refuse to engage with the gormless white moderator of the “Conference.” And maybe that’s the point.

Certainly there is much here that’s entertaining, such as the scene in which a couple and their friends get away to a sunny island for a “non-commitment ceremony” to give back their rings and exchange handwritten vows of “F U!” Company member Jessica Frances Dukes is one of the best parts of the “Happy Meal” scenes, as she’s asked to play a pre-schooler, almost wordlessly. And the intriguing “Mug,” another monologue, this time for the fearless Sean Meehan, is dressed cleverly by set designer Tom Kamm. To suggest a late-night Brooklyn street corner, he brings in a bus stop sign, but since the post itself isn’t needed, it’s only the sign itself that flies in.

• Bootycandy, written and directed by Robert O’Hara, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Using a cast of three, Brook and Estinenne present four of Beckett’s short dramatic pieces, plus a bit of prose serving as transition, in a production that takes the Angl0-French-Irish master’s limited theatrical requirements and strips them down still further. Perhaps not surprisingly, generally this works, as in Rough for Theater I, where B’s wheelchair is nothing more than a black rehearsal box fitted with wheels. As B poles himself along, he takes on the grandeur of a quondam samurai. And Rockaby is improved by eliminating the recorded voice and giving all of those lines to Hayley Carmichael, who delivers a clear, multi-colored, wrenching reading. But we do miss the rocking chair.

In Act without Words II, Yoshi Oïda as A is completely overmatched by Bruce Myers as B in the physical comedy departments; Oïda is reduced to mugging. In his spoken pieces, Oïda’s command of language also introduces an unwanted barrier.

The suite closes with a truly peculiar and graceless version of Beckett’s Noh piece for three aging schoolgirls, Come and Go, with two-thirds of the cast in drag.

• Fragments, texts by Samuel Beckett, directed by Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

The use of a prison setting for the recital of familiar material is well-known for its effect in theater, from Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, set in colonial Australia, to the legendary production of Waiting for Godot by the San Francisco Actors Workshop at San Quentin. And here it works again, in the powerful Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro, an ensemble retelling of the myth from Sophocles and the Greeks by tattooed inmates of a correctional facility in southern California.

In Alfaro’s version, Oedipus (the flexible Andres Munar) is born to a Latino drug kingpin in Los Angeles and spends his exile in North Kern State Prison; on his release, he follows the fated steps of killing his father Laius (David Anzuelo, an onstage character added from the Sophocles version) in a road-rage incident, taking over the family narcotics business from Creon (the intense Jose Joaquin Perez), and marrying his mother Jocasta (the fearless Romi Diaz).

Classical and contemporary elements blend well in this piece. A runway thrust stage (designed by Misha Kachman) ends upstage with a pair of industrial doors that evoke the devices in Greek theater, traditionally sliding away to reveal the results of bloodshed offstage—but here the sex and violence is front and center. The blinding of Oedipus is especially well-done: terrifying without making us fear for the safety of the actor. Choral work by Mando Alvarado and Jaime Robert Carillo is short, sharp, and sometimes funny, rather than rhapsodic; we liked the Coro’s remarks that explain the cruelty of Laius’s abandonment of Oedipus as “fathers sometimes do that.” Yoga, doo-wop, tai chi—all the pieces come together. While there are few passages of monologue, there is at times in the writing a gritty lyricism, as when Jocasta likens her tears to the Los Angeles River, usually dry and channeled, but gushing when in flood.

• Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro, directed by Michael John Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington