Category: Reviews

A rose-colored scrim drapes the stage before each act of Act One, a dramatized version of Moss Hart’s memoir of becoming a playwright. The play, written and directed by James Lapine, is a big wet kiss to American theater of the 1910s and 20s. The Algonquin denizens make quick, funny cameo appearances; the first act closes with an uplifting view of Broadway marquees. Indeed, the narrative of the entire second act (and perhaps it’s not the strongest one) is whether and how Hart can find a way to write and rewrite his first well-supported production, Once in a Lifetime, into a successful New York show. Well, to paraphrase Hart, often life doesn’t follow the most dramatically urgent pattern.

Beowulf Borritt’s set, three levels on a revolve, is a stunner, with details that give the multiple locations of the story extra character: a stairway with a step down before you can go up; the framework of a New York rooftop water tank.

The story unfolds linearly, but it is framed as the reminiscences of an older Hart, played by Tony Shalhoub. Matthew Schecter plays Hart as a boy, but most of the work goes to the adorable Santino Fontana, who plays Hart as a young man. Fontana’s Hart never walks down the stairs when he can run; he is eager to volunteer for a job that he’s not ready for; sometimes his mouth runs away with his thoughts. Over the course of the play, his dialect shows Hart’s voice modulating from the rough working class English that his parents and playmates speak to the urbane tones of the mature Hart.

Shalhoub doubles as Hart’s abusive father Barnett, but he comes into his own as Hart’s collaborator, George S. Kaufman, all his tics and quirks on parade. Kaufman, pathologically concerned with hygiene, would go to any lengths to avoid shaking hands with someone; Shalhoub’s balletic avoidance maneuvers are a delight.

Andrea Martin does nicely with the three roles of Hart’s poor-relation aunt Kate (early encourager, nay enabler, of Hart’s budding interest in theater); Frieda Fishbein (Hart’s agent with a good dash of Edith Prickley); and Kaufman’s wife Beatrice, the quiet power behind the throne.

• Act One, written and directed by James Lapine, from the autobiography by Moss Hart, Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, New York

Paul Morella shines as The Librarian in this gentle existentialist fable with just a dash of conspiracy theory. A naive provincial librarian in The Netherlands receives a Baedecker’s travel guide in the book drop, only to find that it’s overdue by more than a hundred years. Seeking an explanation for this mysterious return, he assembles a package of clues, which he presents to us as a chalkboard- and slide carousel-illustrated lecture.

The Librarian’s quixotic mission to reveal, to prove, to justify the existence of his quarry, working from no more than “the ephemera of a life” (tram tickets, police reports, laundry receipts) redeems his own life—and perhaps each of ours—from its more usual fate, the insignificance of an abandoned voice recording at a fair, bought and sold for 50 cents.

This thoughtful, spiritual piece also has its comedy: there’s a nice running gag about a certain juggernaut of a French musical that seems to be playing everywhere in the world simultaneously.

In this solo work, Morella does well with the multiple voices that are required to populate The Librarian’s lecture; however, his baseline Dutch dialect wanders a bit. Nevertheless, his engaging, bemused, slightly obsessive Netherlander bureaucrat is a pleasure to watch.

• Underneath the Lintel, by Glen Berger, directed by John Vreeke, MetroStage, Alexandria, Va.

Best courtesy reminder of the season: The Librarian enters the lecture hall with the house lights still up, straightens his presentation material, then writes on the chalkboard, “TURN OFF CELL PHONES.” He adds, “PLEASE.”

Two powerful solo shows played in the area over the past weekend, both of them responses to violence: in one case, large-scale mayhem that many of us would consider heroic; in the other, a small-group killing, inexplicable, that has deep emotional resonance.

Denis O’Hare is The Poet, a time-shifting tramp in a trenchcoat and porkpie hat (rather than one of Samuel Beckett’s bowlers), tumbled down the centuries to sing the story of Homer’s Iliad. The Poet’s song/riff is a blend of the original Greek, a verse translation, a bit of audience interaction and prompting, and a free adaptation into vernacular English. His memory failing, nevertheless the Poet can summon music and his Muses (skillful Brian Ellingsen on double bass and Milltone tongue piano) and can turn a clever phrase: “Athena tequila” is especially fun.

The piece focuses on the best-known incidents of Homer’s poem: the love between Achilles and Patroclus, Achilles’ great sulk, and the brutal killings of Patroclus and Hector. The Poet’s sentiments perhaps lie with the people of Troy, for although O’Hare’s voice is neutral when he embodies one of the Trojans, he adopts a loutish English dialect for the Greeks that owes something to Sicily or South Philly. The crux of this 100-minute monologue is a stupendous catalogue of wars known to Western history, for a thousand years an unbroken chain ending (for now) in Syria.

Speaking to us out of time as he does, when the Poet names the great cities destroyed by war, from Troy down to Dresden and Hiroshima, he briefly pauses, then moves on. Could it be that, Cassandra-like, he can see the next great devastation of the future, and knows (better than the Greek prophetess did) that it is pointless to share his vision with us?

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Nanna Ingvarsson’s task is no less challenging, as she personifies more than half a dozen people (many of them composites) connected to the 2006 mass murder-suicide at the West Nickel Mines School, a former Amish one-room schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. From an innocent schoolgirl of six or seven, to a sassy supermarket clerk, to the tormented killer himself, Ingvarsson runs through a series of emotional and physical changes; Jessica DIckey’s script is a patchwork quilt of interlayered monologues (with a small debt to the Tectonic Theater Project’s own Laramie Project). The actor does well to focus on a specific, simple gesture for each speaker (a twirled bonnet string, a closed-off pair of folded arms) so that we keep our bearings as characters pop in and out.

The piece works best as a primer on the Amish perspective on the shootings. Rather than seek an explanation, a “why” of the violence, the community’s immediate response is one of of compassion, most notably toward the widow of the gunman. We hear the inspiring story of martyred Anabaptist Dirk Willemsz, who escaped from religious imprisonment across thin ice, only to turn back to rescue his pursuer who had broken through into the icy water. Is it possible that such a simple gesture of peace can forestall destruction?

• An Iliad, by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, based on Homer’s Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles, a Homer’s Coat project, directed by Lisa Peterson, Clarice Smith Center Kay Theatre, College Park, Md.
• The Amish Project, by Jessica Dickey, directed by Holly Twyford, produced by Factory 449, Anacostia Arts Center, Washington

Timothy Douglas’s cast brings home a strong, balanced production of August Wilson’s play set in 1969 Pittsburgh. Tony Cisek’s generously-proportioned set design, a rundown restaurant where the overhead fixtures haven’t been cleaned in a long time, gives the characters the opportunity to step forward to tell a story or to recede into the background as needed. There’s a rich texture to the lives of these people, as they go about their days, refilling salt shakers, playing solitaire dominoes to pass the time, or just eating a much-needed meal of beans and corn muffins.

Shannon Dorsey’s gimlet-eyed Risa rejects the appeals of the men around her, even as she knows she will end up tied to the charismatic Sterling (Ricardo Frederick Evans), a would-be revolutionary destined to serve petty sentences for petty crimes. Frank Britton gives comic relief Hambone a gravel voice and a ruined dignity. A great scene in a corner booth between the cranky old man Holloway (lanky Michael Anthony Williams with an expressive wingspan) and the louche numbers runner Wolf (stocky, stylin’ KenYatta Rogers in a red hat) crackles with energy.

• Two Trains Running, by August Wilson, directed by Timothy Douglas, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

An efficiently-told 57-minute version of the Tchaikovsky ballet, executed with a sort of “street puppetry” aesthetic in the confines of Flashpoint’s Mead Theatre Lab. The puppets Aurora, her suitor Florimund, the king and queen, and the two key fairies of the story are manipulated bunraku-style; the cast of eight doubles as live actors who fill in the roles of courtiers and the like.

If Aurora finds more than one pirouette to be a challenge, she does show remarkable hang time on her jumps. The transformation of the evil fairy Carabosse (she looks like a furry insect) into a dragon is quite fearsome.

The piece makes a good introduction to non-verbal storytelling for younger audiences; there were a few rapt youngsters with us on Saturday afternoon. A comic pair of courtiers break up the action with mischief and remind us that needles of any kind are not permitted in Princess Aurora’s home.

Arrive early to secure a front-row seat for the little ones; sight lines in this tiny black box are a challenge.

• Sleeping Beauty: A Puppet Ballet, directed by Matt Reckeweg, Pointless Theatre, Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint, Washington

A brief introduction to Elevator Repair Service’s aesthetic: performance of a found text, in this instance oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc. The case was argued in 1991, and concerned an Indiana statute that regulated go-go dancers in nightclubs and the like: a dancer was required to wear pasties and a g-string. Two South Bend clubs and three of their dancers brought suit, claiming the right to perform completely nude, citing First Amendment protections.

Whether you stand with the State or with the nightclubs on this issue, either before seeing this performance or after, hardly matters. The first two-thirds of the play is a whirlwind of citations and closely reasoned legal points, beyond the ken of a layman. It is precisely executed, retaining every harrumph, um, and disfluency (a lawyer’s fumbled “communicamating” is a happy accident). Ben Williams, in a distinctly unflattering wig, makes us sympathetic for the nerdy prosecutor from Indiana, Mr. Uhl.

Gradually, the play leaves realistic portrayal behind, commencing with a ballet for rolling desk chairs and culminating in a fantastical, graphic display (one could call it gratuitous, but what does that mean, in this context?). The battling lawyers do raise an interesting ontological question, certainly underscored by ERS’s performance: what is the difference between a depiction of conduct and the live performance of that conduct?

The justices display razor-sharp imagination: one of them speculates about an “adults-only car wash.” Justice Antonin Scalia gets off some of the best one-liners, among them a reference to the “Good Taste Clause” of the Constitution.

• Arguendo, by Elevator Repair Service, directed by John Collins, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

What kind of play is this? Well, it’s a good one, yet one that’s difficult to capture in complete sentences. My notes mostly consist of single words or phrases, among them “quiet,” “rich with time,” “waving back and forth,” and “arrogant? elegant?” But we can describe it as an autobiographical attempt by the writer Toshiki Okada to engage in a dialogue with his own younger self by 15 years, as he braids together his response to Thoreau’s Walden, the survivalist visions of the Japanese architect Kyohei Sakaguchi in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, and Björk’s second album, Post.

The ensemble of five takes turns portraying the playwright himself (as well as a cranky Thoreau and a loosely-screwed-down Sakaguchi), but it is Dito van Reigersberg who perhaps best catches the essence of Okada as a diffident, Japanese Bob Newhart (simile thanks to OTC). With a gesture that suggests either the scrawl from Tristram Shandy or the last flight of Challenger, van Reigersberg indicates the “trajectory” of Okada’s career. Rachel Christopher spends a good chunk of her stage time simply reading Walden and taking notes, but her expressive eyes tell an eloquent story nonetheless. Ephemeral.

• Zero Cost House, by Pig Iron Theatre Company and Toshiki Okada, directed by Dan Rothenberg, Clarice Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Md.

A carpenter’s workshop, and not one too tidy or sturdy, reveals a broadly played, stirring production of one of Shakespeare’s best-loved romantic comedies. One might call the production “mixed media,” in the the Athenians are played by live actors, while the fairies are larger- or smaller-than-life puppets—or at least actors with some measure of mechanical augmentation. Oberon is realized with no more than an outsized head and arm; Titania sports a peacock’s tail of wooden planks manipulated by the ensemble. The shape-shifting Puck, managed and voiced by three actors, is an assemblage of spare parts: an arm basket, some hard tools, and a garden sprayer.

It turns out that the devices of puppetry and the magic of fairyland work well together. It’s easy to disappear from the sight of men when you want to: just lower your fairy accoutrements to the side. Those planks get a workout: played as a xylophone they can summon a rain-kissed lullaby; held upright, they can become an impenetrable forest; and when lowered again, they can effect an astoundingly instantaneous transition into act III, scene i. And “O Bottom, thou art chang’d!” swoops in with a cheeky steampunk contrivance that is quite indescribable. Some of the effects don’t sit that well in the Ike’s wide expanses: those of us sitting house left had sightlines sometimes obscured by a workshop ladder.

How does Shakespeare fare in all this? Rather well, if the company does feel the need for ad libs to make sure that we get all the jokes. Colin Michael Carmichael is the bossiest, most abusive Peter Quince that I’ve seen. Miltos Yerolemou, when he’s not covering Bottom, does well with the thankless role of blustering Egeus (also known as Exposition Dad). Naomi Cranston gives us an engaging, high-energy Helena. The fight between Helena and Hermia is successful; the mechanicals’ play in act V runs a little long (but that’s the case in almost all productions).

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, Bristol Old Vic in association with Handspring Puppet Company, directed by Tom Morris, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

A fine showcase for the talents of Ronnie Burkett, the piece presents interlinked stories that center on a rooming house at the end of the world. For the most part told with marionettes, with a brief excursion into hand puppets, the stories’ central figure is Penny Plain, an elderly blind woman who has seen it all and is ready for what comes next. The work is by turns broadly satirical, darkly gothic (echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and stereotype-pushing farcical. There are three, maybe four, talking dogs: Hickory Sanchez, a chihuahua with an outsized ego and a sex drive to match, is a particular guilty pleasure.

Burkett’s puppets do things that you don’t expect marionettes to do, like walk with a Zimmer frame, or slouch unladylike in a chair, or engage in the gallows humor of cracking jokes about dog meat. Burkett keeps his two- and three-character scenes snapping with rapid cue pickups, so rapid that sometimes his voice characterizations are a bit blurred. His voice does him better service in monologues, as when we meet a milquetoast of a bank teller who breaks the rules and advises his favorite customer to withdraw all of her money, NOW.

The device of the rooming house, which enables all sorts of eccentrics to drop in (or barge in) wears a bit thin. But on the whole, it’s an enjoyable experience. Don’t bring the kids.

• Penny Plain, produced by Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes, created and produced by Ronnie Burkett, Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, Washington

Kathleen Turner is the headliner in this fine presentation of Brecht’s fable with music, but what is going on all around her in the Fichandler that’s just as interesting. Force of nature that she is, she can’t pull this show all by herself, even if her Mother Courage does try to pull that cart by herself. (In this production, that iconic closing image seems to get short shrift.)

David Hare’s crisp translation skates the line between jaded and glib; his “War is like love: it finds a way” crackles. The snappy music, by the multi-talented James Sugg, is outstanding: making no virtuosic demands, it tells the story, plain and simple, relying on accordion, low brass, and “found instruments” like a musical saw, and performed completely by the cast without added musicians.

This is a show that isn’t afraid to let the wires show. While generally cleaving to a design consistent with the play’s seventeenth-century setting, modern safety equipment for dangerous stunts is in full view, vocalists are (modestly) miked, a tuba player who needs a little help has his music on a stand, and the rubber wheels on that cart would not be out of place on a moon rover.

The musical centerpiece of the first act is “Each Night in May,” a violent tango (designed by David Leong) for Meg Gillentine as Yvette; Jack Willis’s salty, torch-bearing Cook stops the show in the second half with “Solomon’s Song (You’re Better Without).”

• Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Hare, directed by Molly Smith, composer and music supervision by James Sugg, movement by David Leong, Arena Stage Fichandler Stage, Washington

Theresa Rebeck’s waspish comedy is a nerdish treat for the New Yorker set. Four desperately young, aspiring writers hire industry veteran Leonard for a series of private coaching lessons in the art of fiction. Leonard (here played by Marty Lodge [and we are so glad to see him again on Round House’s stage], in full command of the rainbow of timbres that he can summon from his baritone) offers his students equal measures of tough-love criticism (more accurately, verbal abuse), access to insider connections, hard-nosed advice (“[fellow] writers are as civilized as feral cats”), and ridiculous ramblings about his various Hemingwayesque adventures. Martin (Alexander Strain sporting eyewear from Jonathan Franzen’s optician) is both the most talented and the most self-censoring of the four, each of them unique in the bundle of self-delusions they carry around.

We forgive the exigencies of theater that call for someone to assess a short story after skimming four or five paragraphs; to spend more time than this would derail the play’s momentum. If the work doesn’t achieve greatness, it does accomplish what it sets out to do, and it’s “good, even,” in Leonard’s hyperjudgmental words.

• Seminar, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

While there’s a lot to enjoy and appreciate in this post-modern piece, a play about the making of a play about a particular genocide in specific and enormous inhumanity in general, it overstays its welcome. Actors improvise props with found objects (snapping a letter-box shut to simulate a gunshot is especially effective); improvise scenes and break character to argue the authenticity of a theatrical moment; find the humor in an admittedly glum topic; and like good Brechtians, chant the preposterously long, tautological complete name of the work, We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915.

It’s in the play’s constant second-guessing of its genuineness, its refusal of its own rights and abilities to portray, that it falters. A young black man, who has never been to Africa, challenges any white person’s legitimacy to present something other than he is not. And he is contradicted in a powerful turn by Peter Howard, a middle-aged white actor, as a wizened black African woman, crossing race and gender lines at a stroke.

When the work’s closing sequence finally arrives, a harrowing scene of violence in all its universality, we’ve already been distanced from this skilled ensemble of six by too many presentational gimmicks. It’s like a Lum and Abner play-acting bit that spins out of control.

This is not meant to dismiss the calamity that befell the Herero (perhaps more accurately known as the Ovaherero), who were nearly decimated by their German colonial rulers, years before Armenians died, decades before Hutu and Tutsi slaughtered one another in Rwanda.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work is most effective when it is quiet and specific: a simple, lethal scene with one herdsman, one border guard, one imaginary fence, and one pantomime gun.

• We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Afrika, from the German Südwestafrika, between the Years 1884-1915, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, directed by John Michael Garcés, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

It may sound like faint praise to lead with compliments on the tech work, but the (uncredited) hair design for The Lyons is quite impressive. The razor-cut bob sported by Rita (Naomi Jacobson), bleached with the roots long grown out, tells us a lot about this grasping, reality-denying soon-to-be widow who bemoans the upholstery in her home as a “washed out shade of dashed hopes.” Her lonely, sad, self-destructive son Curtis (Marcus Kyd) wears a gravity-proof Tintin foreshock that is perhaps his most endearing quality.

Nicky Silver’s powers of invention in the realm of acidulated comedies of broken families are still strong. Granted, John Lescault’s dying patriarch Ben, confined to a hospital bed for the entirety of act 1, doesn’t get to do much but make up for the lifetime of swear words he’s never uttered until now. But director John Vreeke gives him a delicious slow comic take in reaction to a piece of deadly information revealed: who knew that a bed elevator could be funny?

Vreeke also gives Kimberly Gilbert’s Lisa (Ben and Rita’s other child) the time to let us see how shaken she is by her father’s imminent passing. In a monologue not always performed, done as an entr’acte under the house lights at the lip of the stage, Gilbert attends an AA meeting and receives the audience’s greeting. When the ultimate telephone call interrupts her story, her crushed, silent reaction is show-stopping.

• The Lyons, by Nicky Silver, directed by John Vreeke, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.

The Smith Center changes up from its usual high-minded puppetry programming into something that’s just rubbery good fun. Blind Summit presents, in bunraku style, the character of Moses. Moses is the collision of a gravelly working-class British accent, a stretchy cloth body out of Tex Avery, and a head made of corrugated cardboard with a craggy face that looks like it should be on some country’s currency.

With hints of Beckett (Moses’s world is limited by the featureless dining room table that he stands on), in a rambling, irreverent monologue of 75 minutes, he tells the story of the Biblical Moses’s last hours on earth—more or less. Acting out multiple parts (the Hebrews on the plains of Moab, God swimming in his firmament) in an improvisational style that sometimes wanders on to less-than-successful side tracks, Moses cracks up the audience, his three puppeteers, and even the techs working the board at the back of the Kogod’s intimate black box. Yet Blind Summit achieves stirring effects with simple means: the puppet’s head has no moving parts above the swivel of its neck, so all of its emotions flow through the tilt of the head, quiet shifts of focus, and the reactions of its manipulators (Mark Down, Sean Garratt, and the extra-bendy Irena Stratieva).

But it’s that super-bouncy body that drives the physical comedy. You’d think that we’d be over the gag of George Jetson bounding off a runaway treadmill. No, we’re not: it still does its magic.

• The Table, by Blind Summit Theatre, directed by Mark Down, Clarice Smith Center Kogod Theatre, College Park, Md.