Fairfax County’s newest professional company turns in a balanced ensemble performance of John Hollinger’s waterfront sendup of assumed identities, 1950s-era Commies, and the G-women who chase them. 1st Stage meets the challenges inherent in the script—lots of little scenes scattered across “Boston, Wisconsin, and the South Pacific”—with a masterful yet inexpensive set design (uncredited) built from a palette of packing crates and plywood and a crew of two period-costumed Grips (Kate Karczewski and Conor Dinan) who perform most of the scene shifting. Thus an entire kitchen is conjured from a waist-high box, a mixing bowl, and a package of oatmeal. The cast of six doubles up to cover seventeen speaking roles, each with a clearly distinguished dialect. Wireless audio embedded in several of the moving set pieces is also a nice touch to localize the sound of a radio or television.
Hollinger’s script offers some tasty technical turns to the actors, including a second-act opener that hinges on the audio delays on an overseas telephone call: the bit calls for syllable-level timing from Katie Foster as Lynn and Lucas Beck as James. The playwright sometimes strains to put a comic button on the end of each of those little scenes, and the plot left a few of us mystified at intermission.
- Red Herring, by John Hollinger, directed by Jessica Lefkow, 1st Stage, Tysons Corner, Virginia
1st Stage’s performance space is a generously-ceilinged black box with good sight lines (seating about 140) in an industrial park. The company’s web site, unfortunately, is overburdened with Flash effects and rather opaque when it comes to providing information.