Category: Theater

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.

• The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Allison Arkell Stockman, Constellation Theatre Company, Arlington, Va.

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

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

Chicago’s performance collective, The Neo-Futurists, returns to the Woolly stage with its 19-year-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a post-modern amalgam of mime, politics, sketch comedy, audience participation, depredations of food, and general “what the hell was that that just was?” The objective of each aleatory performance of TMLMTBGB is to execute 30 mini-plays (in rotation from the group’s repertory) in the course of an hour counted down by an onstage darkroom timer. Some pieces are silly, some bits are straight. I was particularly taken with the wordless “Why This Why,” an examination of a dysfunctional love relationship with red noses and a whiff of Beckettian futility; and Jessica Anne’s “Food Related Play #2,” a blackly comic anecdote about a loved one’s untimely passing. Easily the best-dubbed play is “Kristie and John perform two lines of text from Our Town, yes the one by Thornton Wilder…” In a triumph of self-referentiality, it is one of the rare works of art with a title, the recitation of which constitutes a performance of the work. The crowd-pleaser of the evening is the goofy bit of nerdcake “Ryan Walters: Bad Ass Bike Messenger.” Obviously, the secret to making this work is to give each piece as much time as it needs and no more, whether it is “Replay of a Long Distance Relationship,” which requires the two performers to sprint from the orchestra to the balcony and back to perform its scenes (with impromptu audience color commentary from several rows behind us explaining that running downstairs takes less time than going up); or the mercifully short “Republican Compassion in Action.” But the genius of the group’s writing is that each play is never talky, never there just to make a point, but rather finds its own unique elements of theatricality.

• Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, created by Greg Allen; written, directed, and performed by The Neo-Futurists, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington