Contemporary American Theater Festival 2008: 1

Neil LaBute breaks his pattern of writing for younger characters with Wrecks, a monologue for a businessman of late middle age, executed with skill by Kurt Zischke. We the audience are seated in the white box performance space of Shepherd University’s new Center for Contemporary Arts, which has been outfitted as a mortuary chapel, complete with (uncomfortable) sofas and armchairs for us. Edward Carr (Zischke) has stepped away from the line of mourners who have come to express their good wishes for the passing of Carr’s wife Mary Josephine. As he speaks to us, he reveals private thoughts that he will not, cannot express in public—a LaBute hallmark. LaBute’s final plot twist is less effective than his writing for Edward when he rages against the capricious forces of disease and death and our powerlessness against them.

The key element missing from Greg Kotis’s one-act Pig Farm is a musical score. Kotis, who collaborated with Mark Hollman on the satirical economics morality play Urinetown, the Musical, is here working solo in a close-by field. Tom and Tina run a pig farm along with their hired hand Tim. Times being hard, the farm is operating at overcapacity and Tom has resorted to extramural means to dispose of the porcine effluent. Trouble is, Teddy (Anderson Matthews, who can bluster and menace at the same time), a pistol-packing government inspector with a taste for the romantic agrarian life, has his own plans for Tom’s setup. What begins as kitchen sink drama slides into Guignolesque mayhem, with characters that won’t die (they keep popping up to sing reprises to their death arias) and a quantity of stage blood worthy of Martin McDonagh. This is a play that draws its comedy from our sardonic “yeah, right” reaction to a character’s claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is up to the task of guarding us against pollution by “fecal sludge.”

More representational is Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond, a lovely multithreaded piece that takes place at the Martha’s Vineyard summer house of the LeVays, an upper middle-class African-American family. Diamond explores themes of race, class, and most importantly, the expectations that a family places on its children to succeed—and in turn, that children place on their parents for recognition. Oldest son Flip has brought his girlfriend, who is white, home to meet the family, but he may have had an easier time of it than youngest son Kent, who has also brought his significant other to meet the folks. Multiply degreed Kent is still struggling to find his vocation, while his fiancée Taylor (the flexible Tijuana T. Ricks) brings more baggage to the home than just what will fit in the trunk. In a commonplace trope, Kent has an autobiographical novel that he is preparing for publication, and he needs to present the work to his family—but fortunately the play doesn’t bog down over this point. The place is presided over by the amiable but emotionally distant Dr. Joseph LeVay (the polished David Emerson Toney), a neurosurgeon; but the show-stealer is Joniece Abbott-Pratt as Cheryl, daughter of the housekeeper who has unfinished business with the LeVays.

The play is built from many short (sometimes simultaneous) scenes that take place in three separate rooms of the summer house. What’s most impressive technically is how director Liesl Tommy has worked with her lighting designer Colin K. Bills and the cast to isolate a character at the end of a scene with light, to allow the character to silently reflect on the scene that has just taken place, while the next scene is being prepared elsewhere. All this activity is taking place in the friendly confines of the Studio Theater’s black box. Indeed, at one point, as far as I can tell, a series of cues was built to follow a character’s movement through the house without movable lighting instruments.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Wrecks, by Neil LaBute, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Pig Farm, by Greg Kotis, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Stick Fly, by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Liesl Tommy

From the Director

A Warning:

There will be no gunfire in this production.
There will be no smoking of cigarettes during this production.
No strobe light will be used.
There will be no intermission.
There will be no strong language.

If you are looking for any of the above when attending the theatre, we are sorry to disappoint you. However, we do encourage you to remain.

What there WILL be before you on the stage is a celebration. It is a celebration of the very essence of what makes live theatre such an exciting and engaging art form. There will be two actors acting.

They will use no props. They will not change costumes. The set will not spin around them. They will use their considerable talents to create for you eight characters—both seen and unseen—as they relay one of the greatest ghost stories ever told.

Have I seduced you? Well. God be with you.

—Kathy Feininger, director’s notes to Round House Theatre’s production of The Turn of the Screw, January 1999

And yet… I must also note that this production was excellently, if minimally, designed, by a team of established talents in the D.C. theater community: Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden (scenic), Rosemary Pardee (costume), Ayun Fedorcha (lighting), and Tom McCarthy (sound).

Measure for Pleasure

Woolly Mammoth gives its audience a frisson of what it would feel like to be titillated by a contemporary Restoration comedy with David Grimm’s riff on the genre, Measure for Pleasure. The piece is a post-modern romp through 21st-century sexual tastes, framed by 17th-century theatrical conventions. There are flirtatious poses, elaborate asides, wanton butt shots, nearly unintelligible dialects, and a series of wigs, each one taller than the one before. (Cheers for costume and wig designer Helen Q. Huang!) Long passages are in rhymed verse.

The setting is mid-18th century, and it finds Will Blunt (the fine Joel Reuben Ganz), valet to Sir Peter Lustforth (company stalwart Doug Brown) in dissatisfied love with openly cross-dressing Molly Tawdry (Andrew Honeycutt). When Sir Peter and his randy, dissembling friend Capt. Dick Dashwood (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend, showing completely different colors than he did in this season’s earlier Stunning) both make a play for young Hermione Goode (Kimberly Gilbert), Will sets his cap for her as well (and dons the most fop-rageous hot pink outfit and platform shoes to woo her). Trouble is, Hermione is protected by her Puritanical guardian Tiberia Stickle, a role executed by Kimberly Schraf with a brogue so flinty it could cut peat.

The second act culminates in a set piece that involves a pagan marriage rite, presided over by Sir Peter in ridiculous crested headgear made from a bicycle helmet and the legs from half a dozen Barbie dolls. There is much chasing around the house, followed by much exchange of bodily fluids—and a resolution that reminds us that true love is what’s important.

More bits of fun to celebrate in this production: the set design, which features plaster pilasters that crumble to reveal the steel framework underneath; the tension between the traditional design elements (a wall of clocks for Lady Lustforth’s boudoir) and their 21st-century counterparts (high-top sneakers on the servants, a single electric light fixture); Goodfriend’s cartoon Italian dialect when he is in disguise as the music teacher Fidelio; and the script’s tag names. I really regret that we never get to meet Miss Stickle’s comrade, the Reverend Puke.

  • Measure for Pleasure, by David Grimm, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Upcoming: 12

Leta and I have our seats reserved for this year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival, 9 July through 3 August. I’ll be posting reviews of that we see, but since our dates are late in the run, I’m posting now to spread the word. We’re especially looking forward to Neil LaBute’s monologue Wrecks and the completion of Richard Dresser’s Happiness Trilogy, A View from the Harbor.

Bad, bad, ghastly, and bad

Via ArtsJournal: a Rochester, N.Y. artists’ group is giving staged readings of the notorious stinker, Moose Murders, reports Campbell Robertson. The play closed after its opening performance on Broadway in 1983.

The number of people who claim to have seen the [Broadway] show, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, seems to have multiplied beyond physical possibility, like those who claim to have seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium or Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.

The Good Woman of Setzuan

What an apt commodity has Bertolt Brecht charged his character Wong with selling, for Wong is a seller of water, a commodity as free as the falling rain yet one of the most precious economic commodities. Wong (or Wang, in my editions) (nimbly played by Ashley Ivey) serves as narrator for this parable of Shen Te, a lowly prostitute who receives a gift from the gods because she is the one good person they can find. But alack, Shen Te must invent an alter ego for herself, a ruthless businessman named Shui Ta, in order to hold on to her gifts so that she can remain good.

Constellation Theatre Company puts its stamp on the play with music and dance interludes. The play is designed to be interrupted by fourth-wall-breaking monologues and other bits of presentational, anti-realistic theater. Costumes (designed by Yvette M. Ryan) and makeup are particularly effective, especially for the three gods (Catherine Deadman, John Geoffrion, and Kenny Littlejohn) who descend to earth in search of a good person. Katie Atkinson, as Shen Te/Shui Ta, does not give us two characters that are completely physically distinct from one another, but she shines in a passage that calls for her to change her costume and makeup before our eyes: Das Lied von der Wehrlosigkeit der Götter und Guten (“The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and the Good People” in the Manheim translation), which repeats the haunting line, “Why don’t the gods do the buying and selling?” (in the Bentley translation). The final ascension of the gods, returning to heaven having been defeated by the world’s exigencies, in a swirl of smoke and clangor of gongs, is also very fine.

Tell me another

Via ArtsJournal: Laurie Anderson talks to John O’Mahony about her new piece, Homeland:

[Anderson] insists there couldn’t be a better time to be a storyteller. “We have an extremely story-savvy government here,” she says. “Take the way George Bush recently retold his Iraq story about the evil dictator and weapons of mass destruction. It went over just fine because it really doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a true story. It matters whether it’s a good story, with evil people and a plot. And then, with Hillary and Barack Obama, you have another wonderful story. It doesn’t matter who wins, because kids and young people have gotten interested in the story and they will be different as a result. And, given that it’s an election year and Bush will be leaving, we’ll soon move on to an entirely new story. America is a good place for stories”.

On behalf of H.M. Government

Noël Coward acted covertly on behalf of the British government in the early years of World War II. Coward kept mum about his involvement, but the recent publication of his letters, with commentary by Barry Day, has “pulled a fair amount of the covert nitty-gritty out of the archival murk,” as Stephen Koch writes.

Being Noël Coward, he also partied—notably with the recently abdicated pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor and his more intelligent and even more pro-Nazi wife. The Windsors may have looked like Coward’s type, but Coward had always privately despised the former king. In 1936, he wrote, “I’ve known for years that he had a common mind and liked second-rate people, and I am sure it is a good thing for England that he abdicated.”

By 1940, the Windsors had graduated from mediocrity into real menace. One factor in the abdication had been that the prime minister had been told, reliably, that the woman inflaming the king’s already fascistic sentiments was a friend of Ribbentrop and the next thing to a Nazi agent. After the abdication, the Windsors were married in the residence of a Nazi collaborator. As the Battle of Britain approached, British intelligence believed—correctly—that Hitler, assisted by Ribbentrop, planned to restore the duke to the throne as a quisling monarch. Worst of all, intelligence suspected that the couple may have been complicit in this treachery….

We can only speculate whether Coward was keeping unofficial tabs on the couple.

Stunning

David Adjmi’s new play, set in the enclave of Syrian Jews of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, gives us a look into that prosperous but highly isolated community in which he himself grew up. It opens with a bang-up scene to introduce us to Lily, one of our two protagonists; in rapid-fire comic dialogue of a brevity suggests Beckett or Mamet, the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Lily (the flexible Laura Heisler) recounts her Caribbean honeymoon with Ike, whom she wed by arrangement, to her older sister Shelly and friend Claudine. Flighty Lily, who insists on telling us how mature she is, seems obsessed by her peeling sunburn.

Back in Brooklyn and setting up housekeeping, she hires Blanche as a live-in maid. Even though Blanche is African-American, Lily insists on speaking Spanish to her because she’s always had Puerto Rican servants before. Blanche (the charming Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is apparently down on her luck temporarily but waiting for it to turn with an expected job in academia. Blanche is biding her time, and she can be ingratiating or firm, as need be.

Blanche catalyzes Lily’s attempt to break out of her own ivory tower, the stultifying environment of this hidebound community where she is encouraged to do nothing but go shopping, symbolized by a two-level set by Daniel Conway painted (and repainted in the course of the evening) in nothing but white. Unfortunately, the set (which owes something to Woolly’s recent set for The Clean House) at times is too much a character, with mirrors that offer intended and unintended looks into the house and backstage, and balky sliding panels.

Lily’s community is nevertheless childishly naive at times, as when Shelly uses Pig Latin to tell something to Lily in Blanche’s presence, assuming that she won’t understand.

Alas, neither Lily’s effort to fly free nor Blanche’s attempts to find security (Ike is her brutal Stanley Kowalski antagonist, played as a nasty piece of work by Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) come to a good end, and one that doesn’t feel fully earned. Adjmi shows us that the cruelty of this culture is something it shares with the rest of the world without achieving a universality.

  • Stunning, by David Adjmi, directed by Anne Kauffmann, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Major Barbara

Would that everyone in the world were as amiably self-aware as the characters in a play by George Bernard Shaw! Or at least our adversaries. Of this much reconciliation would come. Andrew Undershaft (the majestic Ted van Griethuysen), weapons dealer who is described by one character as “the Prince of Darkness,” returns to his petit-aristocratic family in Wilton Crescent with its hothouse niceties:

UNDERSHAFT. …consider for a moment. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen.

Who can quarrel with this argument? Perhaps only his daughter, the titular Barbara (the plucky proto-suffragette Vivienne Benesch) of this play from 1905, who has volunteered in the Salvation Army and risen to the rank of major. Will Barbara—disillusioned by the moral compromises that even her Army must make to remain viable—and her betrothed, former Greek professor Adophus Cusins (played with giddy fervor and wild hair by Karl Kenzler), assume the legacy of the family arms business? Well, this is a comedy, after all.

Director Ethan McSweeny keeps the proceedings fizzing along quickly and delivers a running time for the evening less than three hours. We particularly liked the scrim-projected titles that establish scenes reproducing morsels of Shaw’s stage directions—considered by many to be the best part of the plays. A tossed-off bit about a cushion turns into a running gag for Lady Britomart (Undershaft’s wife and Barbara’s mother) (Wildean Helen Carey) and her son Stephen (Tom Story, in fine squeaky, feckless fettle). McSweeny’s players keep their physicality in Edwardian-era check until the final scene at Undershaft’s munitions plant, when most of the explosions are emotional. Barbara and Adolphus have a good closing scene twirling about a Germanic-looking monument topped with an Iron Cross, and Undershaft comes positively undone in this speech:

UNDERSHAFT. Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

Also noteworthy are the sets by James Noone, from the highly polished steamship of the Wilton Crescent library to the gunpowder sheds of Undershaft’s factory. The red and black color scheme for the sheds is evocative of events later to come in the century, and the decision to leave their sheetrock walls (anachronistic? no matter) untaped and unpainted is inspired.

  • Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Ethan McSweeny, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Are you watching?

In addition to the shows that I see for fun, especially those with my friends in them, I’m an adjudicator for WATCH, also known by the backronym Washington Area Theatre Community Honors. (As I’ve posted elsewhere, generally I don’t comment on the merits of community theater productions that I see, for a number of reasons.) This means that I do a lot of driving around the extended metropolitan area, judging six or eight shows in the course of a calendar year. I see companies with a wide range of physical assets to work with, everything from the two well-appointed theaters in Fairfax County community centers (the Alden and the CenterStage), the modest but scrappy facility at Silver Spring Stage, high school auditoriums where some of the semi-nomadic groups work, and some spaces that are just modest.

And I see a wide range of material, about 40% of it musicals. And this is a good thing, because sometimes I’ll see a really great script (we don’t judge the script, just what you do with it) that I otherwise wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see. Sometimes I’ll notice something really interesting on a schedule and I will ask my adjudication coordinator, “Do you need an alternate to judge that?” I also see things that I am far too familiar with. By the end of this year there will be at least two plays for which I have adjudicated multiple productions. (One of the favorite war stories passed around WATCH is that of the judge who was assigned three productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in one year. We’ve tweaked the scheduling algorithm since then.)

Here’s what I’ve seen in the past few years, and what I expect to see this year. There’s some really chewy stuff here:

  • The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, by Barbara Robinson
  • All My Sons, by Arthur Miller
  • The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein
  • Hotbed Hotel, by Michael Parker (hotel-room farce)
  • The Memory of Water, by Shelagh Stephenson (family ties)
  • The Piano Lesson, by August Wilson
  • The Boys Next Door, by Tom Griffin (issue-driven comedy)
  • A New Brain, William Finn and James Lapine (urban musical)
  • Intimate Apparel, by Lynn Nottage (family history)
  • Aida, Elton John and Tim Rice
  • The Pajama Game, Adler and Ross
  • Moon over Buffalo, by Ken Ludwig
  • The Complete History of America (abridged), Long, Tichenor, and Martin
  • A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
  • Arsenic and Old Lace, by Joseph Kesselring
  • The Full Monty, David Yazbek and Terrence McNally (steelworker stripper musical)
  • Stalag 17, Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski (WWII drama)
  • Chapter Two, by Neil Simon
  • Floyd Collins, Adam Guettel and Tina Landau (Baby Jessica as folk opera)
  • The Last Five Years, by Jason Robert Brown (reverse-chronology relationship revue)
  • Jesus Christ Superstar, Webber and Rice
  • Catch Me If You Can, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert
  • Rumors, by Neil Simon
  • A Christmas Carol, adapted by John Mortimer
  • Becket, by Jean Anouilh
  • A Grand Night for Singing, Rodgers and Hammerstein
  • Run for Your Wife, by Ray Cooney (cab driver farce)
  • The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler

Oh, yeah, and WATCH is throwing a big party next Sunday night.

Adaptation

… a cult of religious veneration for the wishes of the composer now rules the musical roost. [Richard] Wagner himself played a big part in promoting this by putting out a lot of self-serving propaganda about art being pretty well the sole purpose of life and the wickedness of tampering with the work of an artist, especially a great artist such as himself. To be authentic, to do exactly what the scholars say Scarlatti, Schubert or Monteverdi would want you to do, if necessary going to the length of building a sixteenth-century ophicleide—this today is pretty well the holy grail. Never mind that the piece would sound much better played another way or that modern acoustics are different, that pitch has gone up, musical taste changed, musical marathons don’t fit into our culture—never mind anything at all, just stick a harpsichord into the Albert Hall and not on any account a Steinway. If you can’t hear it at least you know what you’re not hearing is authentic. The real obstacle to producing a sensibly revised version of The Ring is not the chorus of outrage that would go up, but the difficuly of finding a musician of genius to do it.

—Sir Denis Forman, A Night at the Opera: An Irreverent Guide…, p. 555

How much easier we have it in theater! No one would demand seeing Shakespeare only according to 16th-century performance practices, played by men only, en plein air (though it is certainly fun to see a simulacrum of this at the Blackfriars in Staunton), with Elizabethan pronunciation. The moment the first line is read at the first read-through, something of the playwright’s original intention has been betrayed. This betrayal might be an essential quality of theater.

Does this mean that ensemble pieces like The Laramie Project or An Experiment with an Air Pump could be played with no doubling? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: the film version of Laramie worked. Or that Arthur Miller can be reset in outer space? Well…