David Greenspan’s witty, very meta, very very literary masquerade of gender deception—inspired by Shakespeare, a venerable Lynn Fontanne vehicle, The Guardsman, and, so help me, Tootsie—gets off to a slightly wobbly start as Alexandra Page (Michael Russotto, a bit swishy but not at all in drag), both playwright and character in her own play, begins to sketch the action for her friend Kay Fein (a butched-up Kate Eastwood Norris). But then, that’s part of the mojo of this 100-plus-minute sprint through cross-dressing and rewrites, as Greenspan explains in a program interview:
I started the play in 1992… When I can back to it in 1999, I began to think that there was nothing wrong with having written myself into a corner—I would simply write myself out of it, but I would keep the mistakes. It’s like a canvas on which an artist has painted over a section; sometimes the underpainting shows through—a pentimento.
So sometimes Kay is an archeologist, and sometimes she is a lighting designer, one who has worked with actresses Alexandra and Alison Rose (Gia Mora, doing her best to fight off a cold last Saturday), Alexandra’s estranged paramour. And sometimes the wayward playwright typist contributes to the laughs: “She’s a treat,” Alexandra says at one point, “No, a threat! It was a typo!” At other times, a character will correct himself, and you can hear subtext and backstory leaking out through the scripted bobbles.
Alison is rehearsing an As You Like It out of town, directed by Hal Stewart (Daniel Frith) as assisted by Eve Addaman (say it backwards) (the pert Jenna Sokolowski). Alexandra concocts an alter ego, “Harry Sampson,” crashes the auditions, and slips into the cast. At rehearsals she encounters her rival Jayne Summerhouse (Norris, again, this time languidly narcissistic) and the not-really-silent Simon Lanquish (Woolly alum Daniel Escobar). Immediately we are lost in the woods of Arden and Shakespeare, who is (in the words of one character), “like a foreign language, not like Chekhov where everything is spelled out.”
Greenspan uses a wild spring mix of literary styles to tell his story. Characters speak their own stage directions. What would ordinarily be the climactic sex farce scene between “Harry” and Alison (with a drunk Simon sleeping in a chair) is related catechistically, à la Ithaca chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Norris plays a showstopping scene with herself as both Jayne and Kay. (Director Howard Shalwitz pulls this scene extremely downstage onto a thrust where row A normally is, the whole framed by an artificial carved-wood proscenium, and witnessed by the other five characters/actors.) And Escobar has an equally strong punctuated monologue, “Who needs a play about…?”, an oxygenated rant about the standing of gay characters in contemporary theater.
Greenspan likewise pays tribute to a broad spectrum of influences: props are given to Irma Vep; when she’s not tearing spike tape with her teeth, Eve plays Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” to accompany a scene.
It’s too bad about the poster design for this show, for it doesn’t convey how intelligent (and fun!) this production really is.
- She Stoops to Comedy, by David Greenspan, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington