A Honey of an Anklet

Kathleen Turner is the headliner in this fine presentation of Brecht’s fable with music, but what is going on all around her in the Fichandler that’s just as interesting. Force of nature that she is, she can’t pull this show all by herself, even if her Mother Courage does try to pull that cart by herself. (In this production, that iconic closing image seems to get short shrift.)

David Hare’s crisp translation skates the line between jaded and glib; his “War is like love: it finds a way” crackles. The snappy music, by the multi-talented James Sugg, is outstanding: making no virtuosic demands, it tells the story, plain and simple, relying on accordion, low brass, and “found instruments” like a musical saw, and performed completely by the cast without added musicians.

This is a show that isn’t afraid to let the wires show. While generally cleaving to a design consistent with the play’s seventeenth-century setting, modern safety equipment for dangerous stunts is in full view, vocalists are (modestly) miked, a tuba player who needs a little help has his music on a stand, and the rubber wheels on that cart would not be out of place on a moon rover.

The musical centerpiece of the first act is “Each Night in May,” a violent tango (designed by David Leong) for Meg Gillentine as Yvette; Jack Willis’s salty, torch-bearing Cook stops the show in the second half with “Solomon’s Song (You’re Better Without).”

• Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Hare, directed by Molly Smith, composer and music supervision by James Sugg, movement by David Leong, Arena Stage Fichandler Stage, Washington

Theresa Rebeck’s waspish comedy is a nerdish treat for the New Yorker set. Four desperately young, aspiring writers hire industry veteran Leonard for a series of private coaching lessons in the art of fiction. Leonard (here played by Marty Lodge [and we are so glad to see him again on Round House's stage], in full command of the rainbow of timbres that he can summon from his baritone) offers his students equal measures of tough-love criticism (more accurately, verbal abuse), access to insider connections, hard-nosed advice (“[fellow] writers are as civilized as feral cats”), and ridiculous ramblings about his various Hemingwayesque adventures. Martin (Alexander Strain sporting eyewear from Jonathan Franzen’s optician) is both the most talented and the most self-censoring of the four, each of them unique in the bundle of self-delusions they carry around.

We forgive the exigencies of theater that call for someone to assess a short story after skimming four or five paragraphs; to spend more time than this would derail the play’s momentum. If the work doesn’t achieve greatness, it does accomplish what it sets out to do, and it’s “good, even,” in Leonard’s hyperjudgmental words.

• Seminar, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

While there’s a lot to enjoy and appreciate in this post-modern piece, a play about the making of a play about a particular genocide in specific and enormous inhumanity in general, it overstays its welcome. Actors improvise props with found objects (snapping a letter-box shut to simulate a gunshot is especially effective); improvise scenes and break character to argue the authenticity of a theatrical moment; find the humor in an admittedly glum topic; and like good Brechtians, chant the preposterously long, tautological complete name of the work, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915.

It’s in the play’s constant second-guessing of its genuineness, its refusal of its own rights and abilities to portray, that it falters. A young black man, who has never been to Africa, challenges any white person’s legitimacy to present something other than he is not. And he is contradicted in a powerful turn by Peter Howard, a middle-aged white actor, as a wizened black African woman, crossing race and gender lines at a stroke.

When the work’s closing sequence finally arrives, a harrowing scene of violence in all its universality, we’ve already been distanced from this skilled ensemble of six by too many presentational gimmicks. It’s like a Lum and Abner play-acting bit that spins out of control.

This is not meant to dismiss the calamity that befell the Herero (perhaps more accurately known as the Ovaherero), who were nearly decimated by their German colonial rulers, years before Armenians died, decades before Hutu and Tutsi slaughtered one another in Rwanda.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work is most effective when it is quiet and specific: a simple, lethal scene with one herdsman, one border guard, one imaginary fence, and one pantomime gun.

• We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, directed by John Michael Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington