D'Vera Cohn did a fine writeup of the Huntley Meadows Park nest box program (at least for the ducks—maybe she'll come back to talk to the bluebird team).

posted: 8:54:48 PM  

Richard Greenberg presents for us a new instance of his signature shimmering style, in this case the story of three couples immediately after Truman Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball, the party itself being an aftershock of the success of Capote's In Cold Blood. The partygoers mix and match and pair off, and take off their masks (not all of them the fancy ones they wore to the party), each of them trying to avoid, in the words of Trey (steely Jeff Allin), "squandered time."

Brigid Cleary, in a splendid turn as Trey's wife Greer and a has-been confidante of Capote, glows in a full spectrum of vocal colors in her rhapsodic monologues.

Capote, for Greenberg, comes to stand for all of Celebrity, as a way of being, as a way of relating to the world. Another character posits at one point the in-crowd cogito, "He thinks I'm real, then I must be real." And art patron Marietta (played by Maia DeSanti with a comic voice that owes a lot to Elmer Fudd) is less interested in illicit sex than in an anecdote that she can pass along to Capote. In this, she is an inversion of John Guare's Ouisa from Six Degrees of Separation, who fears that her life-changing brush with the dangerous "Paul" will become nothing more than a story to tell over cocktails.

Cameron McNary sounds a false note as the painter Owen and Marietta's new protégé—a bit too much Ashley Wilkes. Lindsay Haynes, replacing Colleen Delany, is appealing as Owen's nervous wife Joanna. The final scene in measured cadences between Trey and Russell (Todd Scofield) is as inevitable as it is electric.

Daniel Conway's economical set serves as four locations and features skillful fake works of art by Pollack, Warhol, and Brancusi. Matt Rowe's fabulous pre-show and intermission sound design mixes a gabble of party voices over pulsing music by Philip Glass.

posted: 8:48:40 PM