Category: Theater

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

Tracy Letts returns to the trope of onstage violence with Superior Donuts, set in a seedy Uptown Chicago neighborhood. And the impressive fight, choreographed by Robb Hunter, is well executed by Richard Cotovsky (as donut shop proprietor Arthur) and Chris Genebach (as small-time criminal Luther). But the acting laurels go to Johnny Ramey in an endearing performance as Franco Wicks, an African-American youth with issues; in the course of working through them, he helps Arthur to master some of his own.

Arthur, a Vietnam-era draft evader who still hasn’t given up his beard and pony tail, has made it his life’s work to keep other people at arm’s length. So perhaps it’s a character choice, or perhaps just the length of the show’s run (it opened 10 November), that Cotovsky in his monologues of remembrance doesn’t take his time and make a connection to us in the audience.

Gregor Paslawsky does well with the character of Max, a neighboring merchant with designs on Arthur’s real estate, shifting from menace to exasperated comedy with ease.

The ground plan of Russell Metheny’s set excellently solves the familiar problem of actors being trapped behind a store counter by turning around the U of display case and seating so that its open section is downstage, placing the street entrance door directly upstage. The scene transition that calls for Arthur’s shop window to be boarded up is also smoothly handled.

• Superior Donuts, by Tracy Letts, directed by Serge Seiden, The Studio Theatre’s Metheny Theatre, Washington

For the holiday break, this is an entertaining evening of blackout comedy, mixing political caricature and straight-up social satire, with a good salting of silly cabaret songs. Although our audience dotes most on the monologues by Todd Palin and Nancy (“I’m not bitter”) Pelosi, the strongest material includes sketches like Joey Bland and Lili-Brown’s study in race relations reversal. Klyph Stanford’s minimal Metro-inspired set is clever (and up-to-date, with red platform lights). Of the five-member ensemble, Brooke Breit stands out with the widest spectrum of sharply realized characters, ranging from a twelve-year-old with an overactive sense of entitlement to an apoplectic consumer finance adviser. The bits, 30 seconds or five minutes long, transition swiftly with no more set or prop requirements than a couple of black IKEA chairs. There are some genuine good laughs on offer here.

• A Girl’s Guide to Washington Politics, written and performed by Chicago’s The Second City, directed by Billy Bungeroth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The technical team shines in House of Gold, Gregory S. Moss’s satirical fantasia on hypermultimedia and sexualized celebrity that leaps off from the JonBenét Ramsey murder case. David Zinn’s three-level set incorporates any number of devices that simultaneously heighten our experience and put distance between us and the proceedings: mirrors above an attic bedroom, a candy-colored dungeon in which our best views are not live but rather via video projections. The glossy white kitchen on the middle level is of necessity serviceable to the closing scene’s mayhem.

The play’s narrative covers some familiar ground, but it is not concerned with the facts of the case, considering that all of the principals (an over-committed investigator, a skeevy neighbor, a fat schoolfriend with identity issues, parents with their own fading dreams) share in the culpability—not a whodunit but a wedunit. As audience, we are asked why we devote so much energy to such a tawdry, gruesome case: at one point, The Girl (the assured Kaaron Briscoe), trying to avoid hearing a horror story told by Jasper (the generously endowed Randy Blair), cries, “That’s awful!—Then what?”

Emily Townley as Woman has an arresting monologue about her own loss of youth, “…when I no longer bent the light.”

Matt Tierney’s sound design is killer. It ranges from a subtle, almost inaudible easy listening underscore to dangerously loud piercing alarm sirens. Actors wear body mics or use handheld mics on stands: often it’s the electronically amplified words that express a character’s innermost thoughts. Those handheld mics capture other sounds on stage, as in the stunning opening breakfast scene where the noises of frying sausage and crunching toast are fired like domestic weapons.

• House of Gold, by Gregory S. Moss, directed by Sarah Benson, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

1st Stage’s less-is-more aesthetic, usually successful, doesn’t deliver the goods for Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a fighting-over-the-inheritance drama with overtones of American Buffalo. Indeed, what’s needed most to help this slight story—scams and counter-scams surrounding what could be an extremely valuable legacy of 19th-century postage stamps—is a trim to one-act length and more sharply drawn characters. As written, Mary (Amy Waldman), one of two sisters squabbling over the property, has only one note to play: “they’re my stamps; they’re not yours to sell.” Her ne’er-do-well sibling Jackie (Leigh Taylor Patton) does better, but the necessities of the plot require her to acquire information about her trove at unrealistically precise points in time. The casting of Roger Payano as the small-time stamp dealer Philip and of Edward Daniels as the small-time small-time Dennis unfortunately obscures the relationship between them.

• Mauritius, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Mark Krikstan, 1st Stage, McLean, Virginia

Bowler-hatted, gray-suited Henry Pulling is reunited with his eccentric aunt Augusta and begins a voyage to himself in this adaptation by Giles Havergal of Graham Greene’s novel, the sweet and saucy Travels with my Aunt. Generally narrated by Henry, the play’s gadget is that a quartet of men play Henry as well as 26 other characters, including the titular Mame-ish Augusta. The play’s reveal is perhaps never in doubt, but it gives the four actors a chance to cut loose, as in a hilarious scene between Lawrence Redmond and Nigel Reed as they play two old women cackling about their younger days organizing a Brighton wedding chapel for dogs. The mostly-reserved Bill Largess pulls most of the Henry duty. And any production that gives Michael Russotto the freedom to clown it up can’t be bad. James Fouchard’s formal yet flexible set hides some handy prop storage locations.

• Travels with My Aunt. by Graham Greene, adapted for the stage by Giles Havergal, directed by Kasi Campbell, Rep Stage, Columbia, Maryland

Kathleen Akerley does a commendable job of wrestling Kurt Vonnegut’s blackly comic novel onto the stage, trimming it to a two-and-a-half-hour evening while retaining good chunks of dialog intact—for instance, the memorable warning by Claire Minton to never index your own book. The script also maintains narrative drive by focusing on narrator Jonah’s (the bemused, solid Michael Glenn) urge to finish the book he is writing about Dr. Felix Hoenikker and his family, in much the same way that the reporter in Citizen Kane maintains a line through that film’s various episodes and reminiscences—or at least until Jonah arrives in San Lorenzo and all hell breaks loose.

The play is also cinematic in its distortion of space and scale: Jonah looks at Franklin Hoenikker’s scale-model town through a magnifier, and the actors become full-size representations of the plasticine people that he sees: bodies as set dressing. In a reversal of scale, Jonah re-enacts in act 3 the destruction of San Lorenzo with a paper doll theater, lip-buzzing the island as the planes in the air show, knocking the six-inch puppets with his hands into the abyss. And in the stunning opening scene with Jonah, a bartender, and a prostitute, Akerley solves the sight-line problems of the Callan’s black box performance space by placing the players in three different playing areas, each with a duplicate set of props: three letters from Newt Hoenikker to Jonah.

Alas, the technical reset necessary to get us into act 3 is a bit of a momentum-killer.

The Longacre Lea regulars are augmented with additional cast members, bringing their numbers to ten to fill the roles of three dozen named characters. Of particular note among Joe Brack, who gives us a manic Franklin Hoenikker, and Danny Gavigan’s clearly defined bartender, cabbie, and Angela Hoenikker.

• Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington