Category: Reviews

Sarah Treem’s The How and the Why explores some interesting topics in the way that science is practiced today, most notably, the apparent lack of interest in aspects of human biology that are specific to females: why does menopause occur? what function does menstruation serve towards the perpetuation of the species? But the piece suffers from a severe case of theatrical compression that compromises its believability.

Zelda Kahn (played by Liz Pierotti), a senior professor of evolutionary biology, meets for the first time a young unpublished researcher (graduate student? post-doc? the text isn’t clear) named Rachel Hardeman (with whom she shares a past that will come as little surprise). After some awkward moments that owe something to Oleanna, Rachel is invited to explain the gist of her research, which she does in a spirited monologue (played well by the passionate Nora Achrati). Although Rachel doesn’t yet have the data to back up her hypothesis, after one or two gently probing questions Zelda becomes a champion of her work and arranges for Rachel to present at an imminent conference—an slot has opened up unexpectedly. Look to plays such as David Auburn’s Proof for a more nuanced look at how minds are won in math and science; aha! moments like this don’t happen.

There’s also some confusion in language. The characters toss around the word “abstract” to refer to Rachel’s work, as if it comprised all the methods, evidence, reasoning, and citations. Anyone who’s ever cracked a journal understands that an abstract is no more than a précis of one paper: 150 words that tell you why you want to read the whole article.

The second act takes place after the conference, where the two scientists meet in a seedy bar (well designed by Richard Montgomery: nothing says underground rock club better than a row of 12×12 columns plastered with old show posters). Rachel’s youthful reaction to the Q&A after her presentation is plausible—she feels personally attacked, and is considering abandoning her research—whereas Zelda’s exhortation to buck up and continue working is undermined by Pierotti’s tentativeness in her role. Zelda needs to show more starch. On the other hand, her wisdom is an effective foil to Rachel’s fresh inventiveness.

• The How and the Why, by Sarah Treem, directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner, 1st Stage Theatre, Tysons Corner, Virginia

The opening image of A Bright New Boise is a powerful one: Michael Russotto’s Will stands under a highway overpass, shouting for the end of the world. Will, like all of us, is a seeker of truth, a man trying to find meaning in his life; however, the particulars of his journey are out of the theatrical ordinary, for Will has recently parted company with a millenarian congregation in northern Idaho, and perhaps has left his religious faith behind as well.

When the apocalypse comes, who’s to say it won’t come to the break room of a chain store specializing in arts and crafts?—a chain whose labor practices (enforced by Pauline, the excellent Emily Townley) would make many an HR professional’s hair stand on end. For it is there that Will tries to put his economic house in order, and maybe build some bridges to the past. A standout among his misfit coworkers is the limp-haired Anna (Kimberly Gilbert), a woman with an unmodulated voice and limited social skills.

In the end, Will remains a curiosity for us, despite an honest performance by Russotto. The barriers he has raised against the emotional and financial shocks of the world leave him isolated, and it’s difficult for his to feel empathy for him.

• A Bright New Boise, by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Forum Theatre finds its way through the deep woods of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a fantasia on the events in Romania before, during, and after December, 1989, when the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu was removed.

Acts 1 (before) and 3 (after) unfold in short, elliptical scenes, often wordless. A priest might converse with an angel, or a vampire with a dog, or merely a father with his wife, the family radio turned up to deafening volume lest the security police listen in. Everywhere is uncertainty: who fought whom during the regime change, and with what motive? Someone says, “we don’t know who we know,” while another explains an architect’s artifice of arranging for sunlight in an enclosed space.

The crux of the play is the compelling Act 2, in which the ensemble cast directly address the audience with the house lights turned up, each actor performing a single character’s monologue of what happened that December. From time to time, the voices overlap, bringing forth the image from Churchill’s epigraph, in which ancient Bucharest’s wooded plain, braided by multiple streams, was seen by outsiders as a place of madness. Matt Dougherty has an especially effective turn as a bulldozer driver and construction worker (on the job that became the Palace of the Parliament) sidelined by the political upheaval.

• Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Delia Taylor gives a gleeful yet genteel reading of Winnie, Beckett’s lady of the mound—indeed, it’s musical: her “Hoo-oo!” summons of Willie (Jose Carrasquillo) is particularly fine. Taylor’s eyes (a key to this role) are mobile and expressive; her various reactions to the revolver in her bag are effective. Carrasquillo adopts a creaky old man’s voice for Willie that doesn’t quite fit.

Technical elements in this production are mixed. Here, the mound that encloses Winnie is a clever extension of her elegant china blue brocade dress. Tony Cisek’s design also places Winnie high enough off the deck so that we all can see her clearly, especially in Act 2. But the constraints of working in Artisphere’s black box theater leave Winnie pinned onstage during the intermission, so that the transition to her neck-deep state in Act 2 has to happen in black, after an unnecessary introductory “the days pass” lighting effect. And the challenge of Beckett’s specification “Maximum pause. The parasol goes on fire. Smoke, flames if feasible” isn’t met.

The program notes that provide the details of the allusions in Winnie’s text (Shakespeare, Milton, Robert Browning, Thomas Gray, and others) are quite helpful.

• Happy Days, by Samuel Beckett, directed by Jose Carrasquillo, WSC Avant Bard, Arlington, Virginia
  

Longacre Lea makes good on its promise of “physical productions of cerebral works” with this year’s Something Past in Front of the Light, an articulate, allusive, provoking examination of the nature of faith in the divine: whose promises can you trust?

Alexander Strain is stunning as a young man who presents himself to Christopher Henley’s documentary filmmaker with a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. Strain’s character, so he says, is The Devil—Beelzebub himself—and the wants Henley to tell the story of his life. He can provide some home movie clips to fill in the details.

Whoever he is, Satan, or “Stan” as he comes to be known, is not of this world. He inhabits Strain’s body like one of David Byrne’s big suits; the voice is overloud and the social niceties ignored, as if he were somewhere in the midband of the autism spectrum; a barefoot, awkward gait recalls Shaw’s hoofed demon in Man and Superman. When Stan chooses to participate in a conversation, he speaks in koans—or are they midrashim? The easy sentiments of a pop love song, as well as the rare display of integrity of character, are equally likely to spin him into a collapse to the floor.

Kathleen Akerley’s script places this personification of negativity in a pop/classical culture context. Stan imagines the Crucifixion as a stage-managed cinematic event; a catfight on a strangely reflexive television reality program echoes the postures of Laocoön and his sons. A second-act encounter with Stan’s nemesis, his Other, is somewhat unsatisfying, suggesting as it does an audience with Bokonon over closed-circuit TV. But then, it was Satan who arranged this meeting. Double bluff?

• Something Past in Front of the Light, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Plays at this year’s CATF are dominated by grim themes of black-white race relations, with the concomitant issues of money, power, and social class. In four out of the five shows (none of them conventional musicals), someone at one time or another will break into song, and at least in one case, we in the audience are encouraged to join in.

The strongest production this year is Sam Shepard’s masterful new piece from 2009, the two-hander Ages of the Moon. On the front porch of a country cottage in Kentucky, two old friends sitting begin the play with a comic passage of Lum and Abner-style non sequitur; they run a series of emotional changes through silly bickering and a slapstick fight into the sharing of grievous loss, experiencing a kind of “functional pain.” The wakeup moment mid-act recalls duck hunting and a ceiling fan—don’t ask. Let’s just say that Sean McArdle earns his program credit. Festival veteran Anderson Matthews (Ames) is well matched with John Ottavino (Byron), each of them showing a range of autumnal colors of the heart. D .M. Woods’ subtle changes of light are stunning.

The play by the festival’s other heavy-hitter playwright, Race by David Mamet, is less successful. Mamet’s signature dialectic of interruption and contradiction is at work in this tight 75-minute script, but perhaps—perhaps—the script is too tight. Clues (props, costume changes) to the unfolding chronology of the piece’s three scenes are lacking; it’s only once we get home that we work out that the play has taken place over several days, at a minimum. And we’re left wondering why super-rich Charles Strickland has retained such an under-resourced law firm, one that apparently consists of two partners and an associate, with nary a Della Street nor Gertie in evidence to screen telephone calls. (Thanks to my Official Theater Companion for helping me work this out.)

Crystal A. Dickinson, the associate Susan in Race, does better as the giddy Billie in Tracy Thorne’s song-infused We Are Here. Unfortunately, the production’s static stage pictures and rushed pace undo Thorne’s exploration of a mother’s grief over the untimely loss of her child. Kyle Bradstreet’s From Prague demands much of our credulity. As rumpled academic Samuel, John Lescault misreads signals and commits an infidelity that entails life-ending consequences through a contrived chain of coincidences.

OTC and I left the festival on a stronger note, The Insurgents by Lucy Thurber. It’s an intriguing piece, albeit flawed. Sally (the got-game Cassie Beck) returns to her broken Massachusetts mill town home after failing to complete college, funded by an athletic scholarship. She becomes obsessed with the failures in other American cities: in a good passage she talks of visiting Detroit and New Orleans, places where “people walk around like it’s their fault.” Inspired by writings by and about American millennial insurrectionists of the 19th and 20th centuries—Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and Timothy McVeigh (Cary Donaldson in a hoodie, looking like a bearded Mark Zuckerberg)—Sally progresses from an uncertain yearning to right wrongs to an even more unfocused rage. Hence the problem with the play: though we understand Sally’s urge for vengeance, it’s evident that anything violent she might do will be small-scale. The theatrical space she inhabits doesn’t extend beyond her own shabby kitchen and her broken-down family.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• From Prague, by Kyle Bradstreet, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Race, by David Mamet, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Ages of the Moon, by Sam Shepard, directed by Ed Herendeen
• We Are Here, by Tracy Thorne, directed by Lucie Tiberghien
• The Insurgents, by Lucy Thurber, directed by Lear Debessonet

Leta and I found an intershow meal at the congenial Mellow Moods Cafe and Juice Bar on German Street.

Director Michael Kahn and his cast give a cool, clean, faithful reading of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of memory and friendship. The intermission changeover of the set from the sitting room to the bedroom, specified in the script, serves to disrupt the momentum of the piece; the perfunctory second act (30 minutes, if that) feels as if the narrative arc has fallen off the table.

But this mounting, admirably, makes the story both more transparent and more opaque to me compared to the last time I saw a production. (It couldn’t have anything to do with the intervening twenty years, could it?) Steven Culp’s amiable Deeley is a bit shambling; Tracy Lynn Middendorf is languid in pink satin as Kate; Holly Twyford’s brittle Anna makes us wish that she had known as much fun as a young girl in London as she claims to have.

• Old Times, by Harold Pinter, directed by Michael Kahn, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Lance Coadie Williams runs away with the show with his opening scene, a monologue by Reverend Benson, a neighborhood preacher who gives up some of his own revelations from the altar: Williams’s mastery of rhythm, dynamics, and timbre is marvelous. Perhaps the work as a whole, a series of scenes (calling on the five actors to play multiple roles, sometimes even within the same scene) that show facets of the life of a young man growing up gay and black, doesn’t quite hang together. The closing scene of Act 1 offers a frame into which all the pieces might fit, and it certainly provides a novel, anti-climatic way to end an act, with the house lights already up and the characters slouching off one by one. But playwright O’Hara gives us a confusing message about the dynamics of racial and sexual identity: the black and/or gay playwright/characters in the scene refuse to engage with the gormless white moderator of the “Conference.” And maybe that’s the point.

Certainly there is much here that’s entertaining, such as the scene in which a couple and their friends get away to a sunny island for a “non-commitment ceremony” to give back their rings and exchange handwritten vows of “F U!” Company member Jessica Frances Dukes is one of the best parts of the “Happy Meal” scenes, as she’s asked to play a pre-schooler, almost wordlessly. And the intriguing “Mug,” another monologue, this time for the fearless Sean Meehan, is dressed cleverly by set designer Tom Kamm. To suggest a late-night Brooklyn street corner, he brings in a bus stop sign, but since the post itself isn’t needed, it’s only the sign itself that flies in.

• Bootycandy, written and directed by Robert O’Hara, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Using a cast of three, Brook and Estinenne present four of Beckett’s short dramatic pieces, plus a bit of prose serving as transition, in a production that takes the Angl0-French-Irish master’s limited theatrical requirements and strips them down still further. Perhaps not surprisingly, generally this works, as in Rough for Theater I, where B’s wheelchair is nothing more than a black rehearsal box fitted with wheels. As B poles himself along, he takes on the grandeur of a quondam samurai. And Rockaby is improved by eliminating the recorded voice and giving all of those lines to Hayley Carmichael, who delivers a clear, multi-colored, wrenching reading. But we do miss the rocking chair.

In Act without Words II, Yoshi Oïda as A is completely overmatched by Bruce Myers as B in the physical comedy departments; Oïda is reduced to mugging. In his spoken pieces, Oïda’s command of language also introduces an unwanted barrier.

The suite closes with a truly peculiar and graceless version of Beckett’s Noh piece for three aging schoolgirls, Come and Go, with two-thirds of the cast in drag.

• Fragments, texts by Samuel Beckett, directed by Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

The use of a prison setting for the recital of familiar material is well-known for its effect in theater, from Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, set in colonial Australia, to the legendary production of Waiting for Godot by the San Francisco Actors Workshop at San Quentin. And here it works again, in the powerful Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro, an ensemble retelling of the myth from Sophocles and the Greeks by tattooed inmates of a correctional facility in southern California.

In Alfaro’s version, Oedipus (the flexible Andres Munar) is born to a Latino drug kingpin in Los Angeles and spends his exile in North Kern State Prison; on his release, he follows the fated steps of killing his father Laius (David Anzuelo, an onstage character added from the Sophocles version) in a road-rage incident, taking over the family narcotics business from Creon (the intense Jose Joaquin Perez), and marrying his mother Jocasta (the fearless Romi Diaz).

Classical and contemporary elements blend well in this piece. A runway thrust stage (designed by Misha Kachman) ends upstage with a pair of industrial doors that evoke the devices in Greek theater, traditionally sliding away to reveal the results of bloodshed offstage—but here the sex and violence is front and center. The blinding of Oedipus is especially well-done: terrifying without making us fear for the safety of the actor. Choral work by Mando Alvarado and Jaime Robert Carillo is short, sharp, and sometimes funny, rather than rhapsodic; we liked the Coro’s remarks that explain the cruelty of Laius’s abandonment of Oedipus as “fathers sometimes do that.” Yoga, doo-wop, tai chi—all the pieces come together. While there are few passages of monologue, there is at times in the writing a gritty lyricism, as when Jocasta likens her tears to the Los Angeles River, usually dry and channeled, but gushing when in flood.

• Oedipus El Rey, by Luis Alfaro, directed by Michael John Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Tracy Letts returns to the trope of onstage violence with Superior Donuts, set in a seedy Uptown Chicago neighborhood. And the impressive fight, choreographed by Robb Hunter, is well executed by Richard Cotovsky (as donut shop proprietor Arthur) and Chris Genebach (as small-time criminal Luther). But the acting laurels go to Johnny Ramey in an endearing performance as Franco Wicks, an African-American youth with issues; in the course of working through them, he helps Arthur to master some of his own.

Arthur, a Vietnam-era draft evader who still hasn’t given up his beard and pony tail, has made it his life’s work to keep other people at arm’s length. So perhaps it’s a character choice, or perhaps just the length of the show’s run (it opened 10 November), that Cotovsky in his monologues of remembrance doesn’t take his time and make a connection to us in the audience.

Gregor Paslawsky does well with the character of Max, a neighboring merchant with designs on Arthur’s real estate, shifting from menace to exasperated comedy with ease.

The ground plan of Russell Metheny’s set excellently solves the familiar problem of actors being trapped behind a store counter by turning around the U of display case and seating so that its open section is downstage, placing the street entrance door directly upstage. The scene transition that calls for Arthur’s shop window to be boarded up is also smoothly handled.

• Superior Donuts, by Tracy Letts, directed by Serge Seiden, The Studio Theatre’s Metheny Theatre, Washington

For the holiday break, this is an entertaining evening of blackout comedy, mixing political caricature and straight-up social satire, with a good salting of silly cabaret songs. Although our audience dotes most on the monologues by Todd Palin and Nancy (“I’m not bitter”) Pelosi, the strongest material includes sketches like Joey Bland and Lili-Brown’s study in race relations reversal. Klyph Stanford’s minimal Metro-inspired set is clever (and up-to-date, with red platform lights). Of the five-member ensemble, Brooke Breit stands out with the widest spectrum of sharply realized characters, ranging from a twelve-year-old with an overactive sense of entitlement to an apoplectic consumer finance adviser. The bits, 30 seconds or five minutes long, transition swiftly with no more set or prop requirements than a couple of black IKEA chairs. There are some genuine good laughs on offer here.

• A Girl’s Guide to Washington Politics, written and performed by Chicago’s The Second City, directed by Billy Bungeroth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The technical team shines in House of Gold, Gregory S. Moss’s satirical fantasia on hypermultimedia and sexualized celebrity that leaps off from the JonBenét Ramsey murder case. David Zinn’s three-level set incorporates any number of devices that simultaneously heighten our experience and put distance between us and the proceedings: mirrors above an attic bedroom, a candy-colored dungeon in which our best views are not live but rather via video projections. The glossy white kitchen on the middle level is of necessity serviceable to the closing scene’s mayhem.

The play’s narrative covers some familiar ground, but it is not concerned with the facts of the case, considering that all of the principals (an over-committed investigator, a skeevy neighbor, a fat schoolfriend with identity issues, parents with their own fading dreams) share in the culpability—not a whodunit but a wedunit. As audience, we are asked why we devote so much energy to such a tawdry, gruesome case: at one point, The Girl (the assured Kaaron Briscoe), trying to avoid hearing a horror story told by Jasper (the generously endowed Randy Blair), cries, “That’s awful!—Then what?”

Emily Townley as Woman has an arresting monologue about her own loss of youth, “…when I no longer bent the light.”

Matt Tierney’s sound design is killer. It ranges from a subtle, almost inaudible easy listening underscore to dangerously loud piercing alarm sirens. Actors wear body mics or use handheld mics on stands: often it’s the electronically amplified words that express a character’s innermost thoughts. Those handheld mics capture other sounds on stage, as in the stunning opening breakfast scene where the noises of frying sausage and crunching toast are fired like domestic weapons.

• House of Gold, by Gregory S. Moss, directed by Sarah Benson, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington