Category: Reviews

Jason Grote takes his characteristic approach to a “kitchen-sink drama” in the new Maria/Stuart. Three sisters in suburban New Jersey-Pennsylvania revisit some frightful family history and eventually confront a sordid, if petty, secret. A slight story, as it goes, but Grote drapes the story on the armature of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play of nearly the same name, Maria Stuart. The earlier play, part of the canon of so-called Weimar Classicism, is a retelling of the sixteenth-century politico-religious conflict between Elizabeth I of England and Mary I of Scotland—a retelling that is particularly sympathetic to the cause of Mary, who was eventually executed by Elizabeth.

Dry stuff? Not at all, for Grote’s aesthetic is a magical, goofy, yet cerebral theatricality that can encompass lowbrow and high: food fights and references to Chekhov, Pynchon, and Borges (well, at least I thought the Borges joke was funny). Not two scenes into the first act and we’ve seen soda pop, stuffed olives, and cornstarch spilled on the floor. It’s not for nothing that house management tries to leave the front rows of the theater unsold.

The two families (Marnie’s and Lizzie’s) are haunted by a shapeshifter, who appears as other members of the family and is (conveniently) played by in turns by the corresponding cast members. The shapeshifter arrives in a tinkling of sound and disappears in a nice let-the-wires-show “poof!” of actor-blown dust. The shapeshifter, spouting bits of Schiller (its first scene calls for the complete German-text libretto of the closing movement of Beethoven’s choral symphony) and digging around in family cupboards looking for the evidence of past misdeeds, turns from sprite to demon as the Marnie and Lizzie resist the story’s revelations.

The third sister, emotionally wounded Sylvia, played by company favorite Naomi Jacobson, has lost both her hands in a failed suicide, so the part gives Jacobson a star turn opportunity to show us Sylvia the compulsive eater, scarfing junk food and using prosthetics to pick cheese puffs out of a Costco-sized jar of them. Washington theater vet Sarah Marshall also produces some good shades in her work, in the first act as the grandmother Ruthie and in the second act as the menacing shapeshifter.

Not all the theatrical effects work well: smoke and fog effects seen through the window of the set that doubles as Lizzie’s and Marnie’s kitchens seemed to come and go at random. And, in the end, the awful truth that links Marnie, Lizzie, Marnie’s son Stuart, and Lizzie’s daughter Hannah comes across as inconsequential and the acts leading up to it unmotivated. Perhaps this story of the twenty-first century is but the tip of the shadows cast by the plots of Mary and Elizabeth, the ones that led to the rise of the Stuarts.

• Maria/Stuart, by Jason Grote, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Rabbit Hole explores the grieving of a Westchester family stricken by the senseless, random death of their four-year-old boy Danny. Alas, the exploration—at least in this production—doesn’t dig very deep.

While Danny’s father Howie (sturdy Paul Morella) turns to external ways to deal with his pain—group therapy, and (it is hinted) some extramarital support—his wife wife Becca (Deborah Hazlett) copes with the loss by more subtle, effacing means. She “accidentally” erases a home movie of the boy, puts the family home on the real estate market, and just tries to forget.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire is better known for his offbeat comedies (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers), so the character of Izzy, Becca’s kid sister and general screwup, comes to his keyboard easily. She pumps some energy into the piece, especially as played by Megan Anderson. Izzy starts the show looking into the refrigerator, and is never far from the kitchen, scarfing bites of torte from the pan or washing down creme caramel with orange juice. Izzy, in time, accomplishes some growth of her own along with Becca and Howie.

But apart from a well-crafted monologue for Becca’s mother Nat, there isn’t too much that’s flashy in the writing of this piece. It proceeds in its own quiet, suburban way.

• Rabbit Hole, by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by Mitchell Hébert, Olney Theatre Center, Olney, Maryland

Longacre Lea’s new production is a lyrical brain tickler, a serio-comic mystery packed with erudition. Perhaps too well-packed: at a running time of three hours, the piece is on a par with much of the work of one of the playwright’s touchstones, Tom Stoppard.

In the fall of 1963, Elizabeth and Barbara Sweeny, ostensibly daughter and mother, travel to an obscure French pension to consult in discretion with Dr. Giraud (played with hilarious sniffy eccentricity by Jason Lott) to learn the cause of Elizabeth’s mysterious affliction. The only other guests in this small hotel are a CIA-ish American and two playwrights: Tennessee Williams drinking incognito and the yet unpublished Stoppard himself. While the opening scene suggests Stoppard’s Travesties, the hotel’s smugly efficient proprietor (nice work by Daniel Vito Siefring) speaks with an accent more in keeping with one of Sir Tom’s adaptations of Molnar.

Elizabeth soon meets the shadowy Mr. Asher (oh-so cool Michael John Casey), who explains that he is a collector of sun myths from cultures around the world. In his evening visits, Asher tells several of these to Elizabeth, and each is a lovely bit of writing, a set piece for the cast/ensemble to illustrate choreographically. Unfortunately, it’s only in the story told solo by Casey that the play’s solar fables really shine.

The play, premiering in this production, needs some tightening. There’s an awkward transition in the second act that reveals the facts of Elizabeth’s complaint to the rest of the guests. However, the arc of Elizabeth’s journey is compelling, and its resolution (with its whiff of another master of contemporary fantasy, Craig Lucas and his Prelude to a Kiss) is quite satisfying.

• Theories of the Sun, by Kathleen Akerley, directed by Jonathon Church and Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

The completion of Richard Dresser’s Happiness trilogy, A View of the Harbor, comes as somewhat of a surprise. The first two parts of the cycle, Augusta and The Pursuit of Happiness explored the worlds of the working and middle classes, respectively, while the new play completes the plan by moving on to the upper classes. But rather than the caustic comedy and steely satire that is Dresser’s wont, this play is a drama about the decline of an old family of power and wealth and the establishment of a new order. The result is a crepuscular piece that suggests Eugene O’Neill more than A.R. Gurney.

The festival’s centerpiece production, in the expansive Frank Center Stage, is The Overwhelming by J.T. Rogers. Viewers of the film Hotel Rwanda or readers of Jared Diamond’s Collapse will be familiar with the events of April, 1994 in this small alpine African country of 10 million souls, but many Americans remain unacquainted with the horrific killings that took place then. Tensions between the two major ethno-political groups of the country and surrounding region, the Hutu and the Tutsi, boiled over into assassination and then genocidal violence, with the massacre of 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi.

The play takes place in the run-up to the killings. Our lens on this world is the American family of Jack Exley (a struggling academic), his second wife Linda White-Keeler (a magazine journalist), and Jack’s disaffected son Geoffrey. Perhaps too conveniently, each of them develops friendships with Rwandans from different sides of the conflict: Jack with a doctor with ties to Tutsi-associated RPF rebels, Linda with a hardline Hutu government minister (the frightening David Emerson Toney), and Geoffrey with average-Joe Gérard (the strong Maduka Steady). Also too pat, the publish-or-perish tenure decision hanging over Jack’s head is a weak reason for him to stay in the country when it becomes clear that something dangerous is going to happen.

Upon hearing the rumbles of forthcoming violence, Jack demands action from the U.S. embassy staff. He is met with pragmatic indifference from Woolsey (Michael Goodwin), who points out how few Americans there are in the country and how unimportant this small country “at the edge of the world” is to U.S. interests. He asserts that effective foreign policy is never based on “doing the right thing.”

The theme of individual action in the face of seemingly overwhelming historical forces is elaborated upon in the person of Jack. In an climax that, unfortunately, feels forced and rushed, Jack must choose which one of two people to protect against the killings. However, the ultimate bloodshed that pulls the play’s narrative toward its conclusion is more alluded to and suggested than actually depicted (and, as in the case of the film, this may be the more powerful choice).

Technically, the play is a masterful sprawl of language and sound, with a cast of more than a dozen speaking four languages on stage (including Kinyarwanda) along with several English dialects. Kudos to dialects coach Kirsten Trump and sound designer Todd Campbell, who provides energetic, sometimes frightening, drumming as transition material across scenes.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• A View of the Harbor, by Richard Dresser, directed by Charles Towers
• The Overwhelming, by J.T. Rogers, directed by Ed Herendeen

Neil LaBute breaks his pattern of writing for younger characters with Wrecks, a monologue for a businessman of late middle age, executed with skill by Kurt Zischke. We the audience are seated in the white box performance space of Shepherd University’s new Center for Contemporary Arts, which has been outfitted as a mortuary chapel, complete with (uncomfortable) sofas and armchairs for us. Edward Carr (Zischke) has stepped away from the line of mourners who have come to express their good wishes for the passing of Carr’s wife Mary Josephine. As he speaks to us, he reveals private thoughts that he will not, cannot express in public—a LaBute hallmark. LaBute’s final plot twist is less effective than his writing for Edward when he rages against the capricious forces of disease and death and our powerlessness against them.

The key element missing from Greg Kotis’s one-act Pig Farm is a musical score. Kotis, who collaborated with Mark Hollman on the satirical economics morality play Urinetown, the Musical, is here working solo in a close-by field. Tom and Tina run a pig farm along with their hired hand Tim. Times being hard, the farm is operating at overcapacity and Tom has resorted to extramural means to dispose of the porcine effluent. Trouble is, Teddy (Anderson Matthews, who can bluster and menace at the same time), a pistol-packing government inspector with a taste for the romantic agrarian life, has his own plans for Tom’s setup. What begins as kitchen sink drama slides into Guignolesque mayhem, with characters that won’t die (they keep popping up to sing reprises to their death arias) and a quantity of stage blood worthy of Martin McDonagh. This is a play that draws its comedy from our sardonic “yeah, right” reaction to a character’s claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is up to the task of guarding us against pollution by “fecal sludge.”

More representational is Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond, a lovely multithreaded piece that takes place at the Martha’s Vineyard summer house of the LeVays, an upper middle-class African-American family. Diamond explores themes of race, class, and most importantly, the expectations that a family places on its children to succeed—and in turn, that children place on their parents for recognition. Oldest son Flip has brought his girlfriend, who is white, home to meet the family, but he may have had an easier time of it than youngest son Kent, who has also brought his significant other to meet the folks. Multiply degreed Kent is still struggling to find his vocation, while his fiancée Taylor (the flexible Tijuana T. Ricks) brings more baggage to the home than just what will fit in the trunk. In a commonplace trope, Kent has an autobiographical novel that he is preparing for publication, and he needs to present the work to his family—but fortunately the play doesn’t bog down over this point. The place is presided over by the amiable but emotionally distant Dr. Joseph LeVay (the polished David Emerson Toney), a neurosurgeon; but the show-stealer is Joniece Abbott-Pratt as Cheryl, daughter of the housekeeper who has unfinished business with the LeVays.

The play is built from many short (sometimes simultaneous) scenes that take place in three separate rooms of the summer house. What’s most impressive technically is how director Liesl Tommy has worked with her lighting designer Colin K. Bills and the cast to isolate a character at the end of a scene with light, to allow the character to silently reflect on the scene that has just taken place, while the next scene is being prepared elsewhere. All this activity is taking place in the friendly confines of the Studio Theater’s black box. Indeed, at one point, as far as I can tell, a series of cues was built to follow a character’s movement through the house without movable lighting instruments.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• Wrecks, by Neil LaBute, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Pig Farm, by Greg Kotis, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Stick Fly, by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Liesl Tommy

Woolly Mammoth gives its audience a frisson of what it would feel like to be titillated by a contemporary Restoration comedy with David Grimm’s riff on the genre, Measure for Pleasure. The piece is a post-modern romp through 21st-century sexual tastes, framed by 17th-century theatrical conventions. There are flirtatious poses, elaborate asides, wanton butt shots, nearly unintelligible dialects, and a series of wigs, each one taller than the one before. (Cheers for costume and wig designer Helen Q. Huang!) Long passages are in rhymed verse.

The setting is mid-18th century, and it finds Will Blunt (the fine Joel Reuben Ganz), valet to Sir Peter Lustforth (company stalwart Doug Brown) in dissatisfied love with openly cross-dressing Molly Tawdry (Andrew Honeycutt). When Sir Peter and his randy, dissembling friend Capt. Dick Dashwood (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend, showing completely different colors than he did in this season’s earlier Stunning) both make a play for young Hermione Goode (Kimberly Gilbert), Will sets his cap for her as well (and dons the most fop-rageous hot pink outfit and platform shoes to woo her). Trouble is, Hermione is protected by her Puritanical guardian Tiberia Stickle, a role executed by Kimberly Schraf with a brogue so flinty it could cut peat.

The second act culminates in a set piece that involves a pagan marriage rite, presided over by Sir Peter in ridiculous crested headgear made from a bicycle helmet and the legs from half a dozen Barbie dolls. There is much chasing around the house, followed by much exchange of bodily fluids—and a resolution that reminds us that true love is what’s important.

More bits of fun to celebrate in this production: the set design, which features plaster pilasters that crumble to reveal the steel framework underneath; the tension between the traditional design elements (a wall of clocks for Lady Lustforth’s boudoir) and their 21st-century counterparts (high-top sneakers on the servants, a single electric light fixture); Goodfriend’s cartoon Italian dialect when he is in disguise as the music teacher Fidelio; and the script’s tag names. I really regret that we never get to meet Miss Stickle’s comrade, the Reverend Puke.

• Measure for Pleasure, by David Grimm, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

What an apt commodity has Bertolt Brecht charged his character Wong with selling, for Wong is a seller of water, a commodity as free as the falling rain yet one of the most precious economic commodities. Wong (or Wang, in my editions) (nimbly played by Ashley Ivey) serves as narrator for this parable of Shen Te, a lowly prostitute who receives a gift from the gods because she is the one good person they can find. But alack, Shen Te must invent an alter ego for herself, a ruthless businessman named Shui Ta, in order to hold on to her gifts so that she can remain good.

Constellation Theatre Company puts its stamp on the play with music and dance interludes. The play is designed to be interrupted by fourth-wall-breaking monologues and other bits of presentational, anti-realistic theater. Costumes (designed by Yvette M. Ryan) and makeup are particularly effective, especially for the three gods (Catherine Deadman, John Geoffrion, and Kenny Littlejohn) who descend to earth in search of a good person. Katie Atkinson, as Shen Te/Shui Ta, does not give us two characters that are completely physically distinct from one another, but she shines in a passage that calls for her to change her costume and makeup before our eyes: Das Lied von der Wehrlosigkeit der Götter und Guten (“The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and the Good People” in the Manheim translation), which repeats the haunting line, “Why don’t the gods do the buying and selling?” (in the Bentley translation). The final ascension of the gods, returning to heaven having been defeated by the world’s exigencies, in a swirl of smoke and clangor of gongs, is also very fine.

• The Good Woman of Setzuan, by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Allison Arkell Stockman, Constellation Theatre Company, Arlington, Va.

David Adjmi’s new play, set in the enclave of Syrian Jews of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood, gives us a look into that prosperous but highly isolated community in which he himself grew up. It opens with a bang-up scene to introduce us to Lily, one of our two protagonists; in rapid-fire comic dialogue of a brevity suggests Beckett or Mamet, the not-quite-seventeen-year-old Lily (the flexible Laura Heisler) recounts her Caribbean honeymoon with Ike, whom she wed by arrangement, to her older sister Shelly and friend Claudine. Flighty Lily, who insists on telling us how mature she is, seems obsessed by her peeling sunburn.

Back in Brooklyn and setting up housekeeping, she hires Blanche as a live-in maid. Even though Blanche is African-American, Lily insists on speaking Spanish to her because she’s always had Puerto Rican servants before. Blanche (the charming Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is apparently down on her luck temporarily but waiting for it to turn with an expected job in academia. Blanche is biding her time, and she can be ingratiating or firm, as need be.

Blanche catalyzes Lily’s attempt to break out of her own ivory tower, the stultifying environment of this hidebound community where she is encouraged to do nothing but go shopping, symbolized by a two-level set by Daniel Conway painted (and repainted in the course of the evening) in nothing but white. Unfortunately, the set (which owes something to Woolly’s recent set for The Clean House) at times is too much a character, with mirrors that offer intended and unintended looks into the house and backstage, and balky sliding panels.

Lily’s community is nevertheless childishly naive at times, as when Shelly uses Pig Latin to tell something to Lily in Blanche’s presence, assuming that she won’t understand.

Alas, neither Lily’s effort to fly free nor Blanche’s attempts to find security (Ike is her brutal Stanley Kowalski antagonist, played as a nasty piece of work by Michael Gabriel Goodfriend) come to a good end, and one that doesn’t feel fully earned. Adjmi shows us that the cruelty of this culture is something it shares with the rest of the world without achieving a universality.

• Stunning, by David Adjmi, directed by Anne Kauffmann, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Would that everyone in the world were as amiably self-aware as the characters in a play by George Bernard Shaw! Or at least our adversaries. Of this much reconciliation would come. Andrew Undershaft (the majestic Ted van Griethuysen), weapons dealer who is described by one character as “the Prince of Darkness,” returns to his petit-aristocratic family in Wilton Crescent with its hothouse niceties:

UNDERSHAFT. …consider for a moment. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen.

Who can quarrel with this argument? Perhaps only his daughter, the titular Barbara (the plucky proto-suffragette Vivienne Benesch) of this play from 1905, who has volunteered in the Salvation Army and risen to the rank of major. Will Barbara—disillusioned by the moral compromises that even her Army must make to remain viable—and her betrothed, former Greek professor Adophus Cusins (played with giddy fervor and wild hair by Karl Kenzler), assume the legacy of the family arms business? Well, this is a comedy, after all.

Director Ethan McSweeny keeps the proceedings fizzing along quickly and delivers a running time for the evening less than three hours. We particularly liked the scrim-projected titles that establish scenes reproducing morsels of Shaw’s stage directions—considered by many to be the best part of the plays. A tossed-off bit about a cushion turns into a running gag for Lady Britomart (Undershaft’s wife and Barbara’s mother) (Wildean Helen Carey) and her son Stephen (Tom Story, in fine squeaky, feckless fettle). McSweeny’s players keep their physicality in Edwardian-era check until the final scene at Undershaft’s munitions plant, when most of the explosions are emotional. Barbara and Adolphus have a good closing scene twirling about a Germanic-looking monument topped with an Iron Cross, and Undershaft comes positively undone in this speech:

UNDERSHAFT. Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara?

Also noteworthy are the sets by James Noone, from the highly polished steamship of the Wilton Crescent library to the gunpowder sheds of Undershaft’s factory. The red and black color scheme for the sheds is evocative of events later to come in the century, and the decision to leave their sheetrock walls (anachronistic? no matter) untaped and unpainted is inspired.

• Major Barbara, by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Ethan McSweeny, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Chicago’s performance collective, The Neo-Futurists, returns to the Woolly stage with its 19-year-running Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, a post-modern amalgam of mime, politics, sketch comedy, audience participation, depredations of food, and general “what the hell was that that just was?” The objective of each aleatory performance of TMLMTBGB is to execute 30 mini-plays (in rotation from the group’s repertory) in the course of an hour counted down by an onstage darkroom timer. Some pieces are silly, some bits are straight. I was particularly taken with the wordless “Why This Why,” an examination of a dysfunctional love relationship with red noses and a whiff of Beckettian futility; and Jessica Anne’s “Food Related Play #2,” a blackly comic anecdote about a loved one’s untimely passing. Easily the best-dubbed play is “Kristie and John perform two lines of text from Our Town, yes the one by Thornton Wilder…” In a triumph of self-referentiality, it is one of the rare works of art with a title, the recitation of which constitutes a performance of the work. The crowd-pleaser of the evening is the goofy bit of nerdcake “Ryan Walters: Bad Ass Bike Messenger.” Obviously, the secret to making this work is to give each piece as much time as it needs and no more, whether it is “Replay of a Long Distance Relationship,” which requires the two performers to sprint from the orchestra to the balcony and back to perform its scenes (with impromptu audience color commentary from several rows behind us explaining that running downstairs takes less time than going up); or the mercifully short “Republican Compassion in Action.” But the genius of the group’s writing is that each play is never talky, never there just to make a point, but rather finds its own unique elements of theatricality.

• Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, created by Greg Allen; written, directed, and performed by The Neo-Futurists, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington