Category: Reviews

Fake cicada noises introduce Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate, a graceless drama of three Arkansas-raised siblings and their in-laws squabbling over the ruined estate of their recently-departed father. Fights with nasty words in the first act become physicalized in the second, a farcical battle royal of no import—stop me if you’ve heard this one.

This play’s Belle Rive is a plaster-shedding failed bed and breakfast; the legacy of the three children—Toni, Franz, Bo, and rebarbative every one—is a pile of debts and some quite disturbing Jim Crow-era artifacts. The only character who is in any way grounded is Franz’s fiancée River (Caitlin McColl), and even she is called upon to unnaturally overreact to her discovery of a nearby graveyard and to misunderstand her boyfriend’s past dalliances with minors—until a convenient turning point in the plot.

“Oh my God! What am I doing here?” one character cries in the course of the evening. Indeed.

• Appropriate, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Liesl Tommy, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups. Todd Scofield brings a yearning strength to the role of Tom, new stay-at-home dad and craftsman, while Will Gartshore is charmant as Jean-Pierre, the hunky French physician. Michael Glenn wisely does not overplay the (many) annoying sides of the feckless Alan. James Kronzer’s double revolve keeps the play’s many changes of scene moving quickly and smoothly. Directory Ryan Rilette does well by keeping Lise Bruneau pinned to the floor for her late monologues as Jane; seated on a step, her grief and pain are the more powerful.

• This, by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

Woolly once again reconfigures its performance space (thereby confusing its volunteer ushers) into a gallery configuration: two suburban tract houses (in a first-ring suburb of a mid-sized American city) face each other across their backyards. The design sets up an anticipated closing-scene effect that is less than spectacular, but it does provide a backdrop for some interesting film projections, accompanied by Christopher Baine’s sound, that cover the numerous scene transitions.

The misdirect in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit is that it is less to do with any broken suburban dreams (despite the somewhat misguided lobby collateral) and more to do with self-destruction and self-deception—what your mother calls “lying to yourself.” Danny Gavigan and Gabriela Fernández-Coffey are quite good as Kenny and Sharon, both of them fresh out of rehab and scratching for respectability and financial stability. Gangling Kenny, who gives us some great cringes in response to neighbor Mary’s (Emily Townley’s) play-by-play on her plantar wart surgery, speaks a working class dialect of indeterminate origin that nevertheless reminds me of a certain colleague’s natural voice. The desperation for conventional normalcy in the voice of Fernández-Coffey’s Sharon is palpable.

Sharon and Kenny backslide, pulling Mary and husband Ben (Tim Getman) along with them, and narrative track falls off the table. In the coda, company member Michael Willis looks newly trim and distingué.

• Detroit, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Why is it that I am so drawn to this powerful, murderously funny play? Maybe it is the third act, a capsule salmagundi of 250 years of musical theater and Greek tragedy, heavily salted by American pop culture.

Or perhaps it is the heart-breaking passage in the first act, in which survivors of an apocalypse (one that has disabled the electrical grid and scrambled nuclear power plants) exchange information about missing loved ones, paging through address books in ritualistic alphabetical order. As playwright Anne Washburn says in an interview with Tim Sanford,

I don’t think I thought about this directly when I was writing that scene but I was in New York on 9/11, and I was fascinated by the group-mind which followed the event…. People were desperate to seize on an order, and a way of doing things. I think I was also thinking of the fliers which went up, with the names and photos of the missing—for the first day or so they seemed like a practical idea, and they proliferated like mad. After the first day they continued to go up, but they felt like an increasingly desperate gesture, and like memorials, rather than a real way to find someone.

By comparison with the Washington version last year, in this production the characters feel a bit less actorly, more like the ordinary schlubs they are, who find themselves amid the broken shards of civilization, compelled to continue telling stories. Sam Breslin Wright, as the taciturn Sam of the first act, gives us a wonderful Mr. Burns in the third, with an evil whine that seems to come out of Jack Nicholson on meth. Matthew Maher is dead-on as Homer Simpson in the “How are you, Mr. Thompson?” scene, mastering Homer’s gormless eye take. And I hope someone finds a Diet Coke for Susannah Flood’s wired-up Susannah: she deserves it.

The orchestration for act 3 is more elaborate, to the best of my recollection. We hear a nice combo of piano, percussion, guitar, accordion, and (the too often overlooked) toy piano. But one wonders how the play’s survivors have keep all these instruments in good working order for 75 years.

Set designer Neil Patel fashions the “Cape Feare” houseboat out of a flat and some repurposed safety railing. The paint on the walls of the second act warehouse, seven years disused, is great: somewhat like Oscar Madison’s sandwiches, we can’t tell whether it’s green paint peeling to battleship gray and brown, or gray oxidizing to green. And the closing lighting effect, designed by Justin Townsend, is astonishing.

• Mr. Burns, a Post-electric Play, by Anne Washburn, music by Michael Friedman, directed by Steve Cosson, Playwrights Horizons, New York

WSC Avant Bard gives us a treat: a fine production of one of Harold Pinter’s less-produced plays of menace in an enclosed space, No Man’s Land (1975). Pinter’s fascination with abrupt shifts of dominance and usurpation is one of the strongest themes of this production: it’s never clear from one moment to the next whether Briggs (Bruce Alan Rauscher) and Foster (Frank Britton) are housekeeper and secretary to Hirst (ever-powerful Brian Hemmingsen) in his well-appointed Hampstead home, or his jailers. Imagine Veronica’s Room with more homoeroticism and even more peeping.

The opening scene springs from Hirst’s inviting Spooner (Christopher Henley) in for a drink. Twenty-five minutes later, Hirst is falling-down drunk and the scene unspools into slow-motion slapstick. Henley makes the most of Spooner’s weediness, with a sick little smile and a delight in uttering words like periphrastic and sequesteredness as if they were much smuttier than they are.

Rauscher’s second act monologue plays to his strengths: he’s a bemused thug telling the story of how he once gave directions to Foster about how to get to Bolsover Street (in Rauscher’s dialect choice, this sounds more like the so-appropriate Balls-Over Street).

One can read the coda section of the second act as an explanation of this enigmatic sequence of meetings, or as one more mystery to unpick.

• No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter, directed by Tom Prewitt, WSC Avant Bard, Theatre on the Run, Arlington, Va.

Seeking drama and humor in the living rooms of the privileged class, Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to Lyman and Polly Wyeth, retirees from 1960s-era Hollywood and old guard conservatives. Unfortunately, the drama (a tell-all memoir by their daughter Brooke) is not compelling, and the humor lodges in tired one liners. Helen Carey, as Polly, does give us a flinty Nancy Reagan; Larry Bryggman’s tentativeness as Lyman is puzzling.

The narrative’s chronology is forced and confusing: most of the play takes place shortly after the invasion of Iraq, yet the still-young Brooke is called upon to remember events from the Vietnam War, a minimum of three decades prior.

• Other Desert Cities, by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Kyle Donnelly, Arena Stage Fichandler Theatre, Washington

This biography of Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente (the mimetic Modesto Lacén) comes alive in the songs and the dancing. The book scenes convey the story of Clemente’s childhood in Puerto Rico, his 3,000-hit baseball career, and its tragic, abrupt end by a plane crash in 1972. They tend to be choppy and episodic, despite the efforts of Ricardo Puente as the flashy Ramiro, who serves as narrator for much of the play.

The first act ends with a scene in which the dark-skinned Clemente is beaten by two racist policemen—an especially odd choice since we’ve just heard a rousing love song to Roberto from his to-be wife Vera (Keren Lugo).

The ensemble of five is anchored by the versatile Alexandra Linn, equally effective as character actor and musical performer.

• DC-7: The Roberto Clemente Story, book and lyrics by Luis Caballero, music by Luis Caballero and Harold Gutiérrez, directed by Luis Caballero, GALA Hispanic Theatre, Washington

Bill Cain’s brazenly autobiographical play takes a wry but clear-eyed view of what the modern clergy can and cannot accomplish. Cain says, through his protagonist also named Bill (the genial, bemused Ray Ficca), that a holy person proceeds mainly by calling attention to details. In this way, by being an indicator (as many depictions of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, show her), he resembles the modern playwright (and Cain is both playwright and Jesuit priest).

The details to which Cain points are simple but strong: the decline and death of his own mother Mary (the flexible Marybeth Wise), the life in flashbacks of his late father Pete (Mitchell Hébert, always a pleasure to watch), and the life journey of his brother Paul (Danny Gavigan). With many short scenes (some no more than a line or two long) and much direct address to the audience, the play clicks along. Hébert and Gavigan fill in minor characters of friends, neighbors, and health care professionals, and Gavigan is at his most watchable as a comically callow physician.

Nevertheless, the side trip to explore Paul’s military career in Vietnam, cut short by a crisis of faith in the rightness of our conduct there, serves to diffuse the focus of the play. Cain deals more effectively with the U.S.’s misadventures in Southeast Asia in his 9 Circles, recently produced by a Round House partner theater.

• How to Write a New Book for the Bible, by Bill Cain, directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

This is the first Round House show directed by new Producing Artistic Director Ryan Rilette, who brings new life to the company’s repertory after its ill-advised overemphasis on dramatized novels. Next year’s season includes works by Martin McDonagh, August Wilson, and area premieres of plays by Theresa Rebeck, Melissa James Gibson, and Nicky Silver.

Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles. The play is wrapped around the atrocities that took place in Al-Mahmudiyah, Iraq, in 2006.

In Cain’s retelling of the story, Reeves is a young man with little hope and a history of personality disorder who enlists in the Army and is sent to Iraq—perhaps the last person that you’d want to trust with lethal weapons in a high-stress situation. Reeves’s story of the violence he witnesses, his brutal over-response to it, and the slender moment of grace he experiences in the meantime is unpacked by a series of interviews and meetings with various officers, psychiatrists, chaplains, and lawyers. His interlocutors are played by an ensemble of three (Scott McCormick, Jonathan Feuer, and Katy Carkuff), and the doubling serves to emphasize Reeves’s disorientation and isolation; on at least one occasion, he remarks to a new character played by an actor we have already seen, “You look familiar.” Each one tries to put his own spin on Reeves’s tale, and it’s only at the end, in a bravura monologue in which he undergoes death by lethal injection, that Reeves wrests control of the narrative and lets us viscerally feel what it’s really like to be him in this wretched situation.

One of Reeves’s lawyers remarks that his history is a threat to American complacency (and the complacency of all who practice violence) because it opens up a sympathy for the enemy. And as that sympathy knocks down the barrier between foes, how can any war survive? It is Cain’s play that instills sympathy for Reeves, and with that barrier down, how can the scapegoating murder that is capital punishment survive?

Carkuff’s scene as the Army “shrink” is particularly strong, as the career psychiatrist must walk the line between, on the one hand, compassion for her patient and getting him out of harm’s way (his own and others’), and on the other, the need to “recycle” warriors back to a state of fitness for duty and return them to the front lines.

• 9 Circles, by Bill Cain, directed by Jennifer L. Nelson, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

David Lindsay-Abaire puts aside the wacky characters and situations of some of his earlier work (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers) and plays it straighter in his new Good People. But his signature damaged people are still present to fuel this sober comedy set in Boston’s Southie neighborhood.

Margaret (Johanna Day) has spent her working life getting (and losing) a series of minimum-wage jobs, barely keeping a household together for her and her developmentally-disabled daughter Joyce. When Mike (Andrew Long), a boy she knew from high school 30 years earlier, returns to the city as a successful endocrinologist and with a very young bride, Margaret reluctantly approaches him with the thin hope of a hand up—a job as a receptionist, a referral to one of his well-to-do friends, anything. Precisely how well Mike and Margaret knew each other all those years before is the information, gradually given to us, that drives the plot.

In the second-act confrontation among Margaret, Mike, and his wife Kate (Francesca Choy-Kee), in Mike and Kate’s posh home in Chestnut Hill, everyone gets his say. In particular, Margaret makes a strong case that the line between success and failure is quite fine. Hard work will only get you so far; what’s needed is a lucky break or someone else’s sacrifice. And what should be sacrificed is not always obvious.

Yet there is a distance between us and the three characters, a separation—perhaps it is Lindsay-Abaire’s comic facility?—that makes it difficult for us to make a connection with them. And the epilogue (fraught with its own staging problems) casually imparts a key piece of information that many of us might miss.

I like the misdirection of an expensive-looking prop in a precarious spot that doesn’t end its stage time with a crash.

• Good People, by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Jackie Maxwell, Arena Stage Kreeger Theater, Washington

Yury Urnov uses an eclectic mix of theatrical devices to tell the story of Mia Chung’s You for Me for You, a fantasia of two sisters seeking to escape from North Korea to America: a revolving ring that delivers actors and props on stage, that can render a New York streetscape with toy taxis and waist-high apartment buildings; a backdrop stacked high with Asian storage boxes that pivots to reveal industrial scaffolding over which the sisters (Ruibo Qian as Junhee and Jo Mei as Minjee) clamber in their flight; a sound design by Elisheba Ittoop that simultaneously evokes the rumbles below decks of a huge cargo ship and taiko drumming; a song and dance break suggestive of Family Guy.

What, exactly, are the women escaping to? A consumerist paradise populated with fast-talking New Yorkers (uttered hilariously by Kimberly Gilbert as a salad of English understood imperfectly by newly-arrived Junhee) where the simple act of buying a phone requires graduate-school training? One that lacks the simple connections to the earth and home captured in a single ripe persimmon. And yet, as one of them says as they cross the border, “There’s nowhere else: let’s hurry to get there.”

• You for Me for You, by Mia Chung, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company, Washington

Forum Theatre continues its investigations into questions of faith with Kara Lee Corthron’s Holly Down in Heaven. The Holly of the title (the self-possessed) is a precocious 15-year-old who has placed herself in what she describes as religious exile for the term of her unintended pregnancy. Self-banished to the basement, she bickers with her tutor Mia (Dawn Thomas) and manipulates her preternaturally doting father (affable KenYatta Rogers) (a Steve Douglas lacking in tough love), but her deepest conversations are with the heterogeneous members of her extensive doll collection. And these dolls talk back, led by a marionette of Carol Channing (manipulated and voiced by the skilled Vanessa Strickland), the only therapist whose advice the fragile Holly will heed. We are cautioned against false gods, but it’s not the dolls that constitute Holly’s idolatry; rather, perhaps it is her own believed self-sufficiency.

As perhaps we would expect, Mia has issues of her own, which Thomas divulges (nay, it’s more like an evisceration) in a bravura second-act monologue. (And she does a fine Carol Channing riff, too.) But it’s the off-the-beaten-track storytelling of the puppets that’s the real charmer of this show. So strong are these alter egos of Holly that they conduct their own colloquy at the end of the first act, without Holly even being in the room.

• Holly Down in Heaven, by Kara Lee Corthron, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Kristoffer Diaz’s 2009 play is an entertaining slam of all things masscult, one that works on multiple levels. Macedonio “Mace” Guerra (the outstanding José Joaquin Pérez) is an artist doing what he has always wanted to do, performing as a professional wrestler. Small but physically talented, he is a journeyman playing the “heel” roles, making the charismatic “face” wrestlers (like the titular Chad Deity, well played with preening entitlement by Shawn T. Andrew) look good—and not getting his neck broken in the process.

When the beleaguered Mace meets Vigneshwar “VP” Paduar (Adi Hanash), an Indian immigrant in Brooklyn with moxie and mojo to match Chad’s, he envisions a story line for the two of them that ends with the little guy on top. Alas, his dreams are quickly co-opted by the promoter Everett K. “E.K.O” Olson (fearsome Michael Russotto), who is as culturally tone deaf as any Hollywood suit.

What makes the satire work is that hardly any cultural group escapes ridicule. The hayseed Billy Heartland (with a perfect theme song from Big and Rich) is just as annoying and stereotyped as the Muslim terrorist character that E.K.O. assigns to VP. Chad Deity serves to lampoon two conventionally opposed groups: he’s a trash-talking African-American and a Romney Republican who makes his entrance into the ring tossing dollar bills to the crowd.

What makes the show work as theater is the quiet intensity of Pérez. He narrates much of the story as a fourth wall-breaking monologue, and he’s not afraid to make us wait for what he has to say—this is appropriate, because Mace has spent his life withholding his true thoughts from others in order to keep a job, in order to get by. When Mace finally unloads on E.K.O. in a bravura surrogate fight scene (with echoes of a similar climax in Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days), pleading for the opportunity to tell his own story, we get the physical release that we’ve been hoping for.

Doing his part to make of Pérez look good in turn is James Long, who covers three ensemble roles and is a professional wrestler IRL.

In a story in which every character has at least one name given to him by someone else, a world of traditional Mexican face masks and engineered personas, of outer borough denizens reappropriating one another’s “authentic street” culture, perhaps it’s fitting that VP’s dialect is a little slippery.

If you really did get to tell your story, what would that look like?

• The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, by Kristoffer Diaz, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington