Category: Theater

David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 is a gleaming little gem of a two-hander for D.C. fan favorites Kate Eastwood Norris (as Diana) and Holly Twyford (as Alice). Auburn returns to life in the academic sphere, as explored by his Proof, this time with Alice as a visibly bored faculty wife and Diana as an artist, visibly blocked but not so visibly frustrated and self-defeating. These two unhappy women connect, through their six-year-old daughters, for a life’s moment in the titular summer.

The story unfolds largely in narration directly to the audience, Alice and Diana speaking in turn (and also jumping into the roles of their daughters and Alice’s husband from time to time). The effect is that the speaker gives us a window into what she’s thinking without the need to unspool a full dialogue scene—at least when she’s not describing a dream or fantasy to be abruptly yanked out from under us, or when she hasn’t deceived herself. And it allows her to speculate/presume what her partner is thinking and feeling—likewise not always a reliable read.

All that said, the play is a comedy, with betrayals and reversals and reveals—and a reunion with a wasp’s stinger of a coda.

• Summer, 1976, by David Auburn, directed by Vivienne Benesch, Studio Theatre Milton Theatre, Washington

Matthew Broderick leads a successful, if not always faithful, adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Jazz age satire. The framing device of ensemble members reading The Very Book in a public library of today, backed up by the dramaturg’s note, encourages audiences to engage with this hundred-year-old masterpiece, and that’s to the good.

While George Babbitt’s journey—from Republican conformity to soft-core rebellion, returning to the arms of the Good Citizens League (strong hints of It Can’t Happen Here in this adaptation)—is preserved, the dialogue is modernized, stripping out nearly all of the jargon and colloquialisms of the 1920s. This sweetening is probably also a good idea, as some of Lewis’s passages would be incomprehensible as spoken word today.¹ Babbitt does retain an occasional “Zowie!” or “That’s the stuff!”

Any adaptation must condense, consolidate, and excise, but I do miss the excursion to the realtors’ (S.A.R.E.B.) convention in Monarch. The unmitigated, vacant boosterism of George Babbitt and his clan is what makes him so endearing, or insufferable, as you will.

In the final break with Tanis, the roles are reversed from the book to the stage, for some reason.

Broderick brings a nice physicality to the role. In the first act, his George is so buttoned-up that his wildest gestures wouldn’t collide with the walls of a telephone booth.² Encouraged to sit on a floor cushion in Tanis’s flat, George makes heavy weather of getting down. Don’t worry, George loosens up and even cuts a rug in the second act. Vocally, Broderick has chosen a dweeby squeak somewhere in the neighborhood of Wally Cox. It’s funny, but blustering George needs a rumbly baritone.

First among the ensemble of seven is Matt McGrath, handling the equally odious Charley McKelvey and his antagonist Seneca Doane.

¹Check out the parody (?) Prince Albert Tobacco ad from Chapter VIII, spoken of with reverence by poetaster Chum Frink.

²Remember those?

• Babbitt, by Joe DiPietro, adapted from the novel by Sinclair Lewis, directed by Christopher Ashley, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Harman Hall, Washington

File this note under ICYMI, as the show closed last weekend.

INSeries’s captures some of the gist of the original, improvised presentation of Marc Bltizstein’s juicy, polemical The Cradle Will Rock, with a solo upright piano on stage and actors singing from the aisles of the house for a couple of numbers. Headgear is important here: the eight members of the liberty committee chorus are achieved with four singers, each wearing a hat on their hands; Mr. Mister (Rob McGinness, doubling Reverend Salvation) has a tiny silver top hat attached to the side of his head—maybe it was liberated from a Monopoly set?

Lighting in the Baltimore Theatre Project on Thursday’s opening night was dodgy, with dark spots and flickers that were unlikely to be expressionist choices.

• The Cradle Will Rock, text and music by Marc Blitzstein, directed by Shanara Gabrielle, music direction by Emily Baltzer, INSeries, Baltimore Theatre Project, Baltimore

Some news can be made to order. —Mr. Mister

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ new play The Comeuppance is a bit too topical, a bit too on-the-nose, and one wonders how well it will age. Set in 2022, the text name-checks nearly every conflagration that has beset the United States in the past 20 years, from 9/11 to 1/6, without engaging too deeply with any of them—burgeoning gun violence perhaps being the exception. It takes place on the front porch of Ursula, one of five friends and enemies meeting up before their twentieth high school reunion, the porch well realized by a minimal set designed by Jian Jung. The show is heavily expository in roughly its first half; call it, maybe, a multi-ethnic Return of the Secaucus 5.

Jacobs-Jenkins, himself approaching middle age, confronts the prospect of death head on with this work. The turning-40s is the age when many of us realize that we’re not actually going to live forever. He brings Death on stage by a tidy maneuver, one easier done than described. The (what—spirit? mojo? voice?) quintessence of Death passes among the five players, who each from time to time break character and address the audience directly as Death—starting with Emilio (expressive Jordan Bellow), who may serve as the playwright’s voice. Emilio is a conceptual/sound/installation artist working in Berlin; he has abandoned his early work in photography, saying that he had become “tired of mimesis.”

Emerging from the high-energy agita and decades-old recriminations, Kristina (TayshaMarie Canales) has a lovely monologue in which she questions the turns that her life has taken.

The title of the play is a bit of a tease, or perhaps a misdirection, or maybe a suspension.

• The Comeuppance, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Morgan Green, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Wilma Theater, Washington

Playwright David Adjmi takes another plunge into less-visited subcultures, in this case top-tier pop-rock music production in the 1970s with the double album-sized, polished Stereophonic. Music recording in this decade was in a transition period from the era when all musicians played together at the same time, in the same room, looking at and listening to each other. The five-member unnamed band (we may as well call them Bleetwood Mac) of Adjmi’s work do play through a song or two as an ensemble in the first half, but as relationships unravel like a bad macrame plant hanger, all of the subsequent taping sessions entail only one or a few band members, listening to playback and staring straight ahead.

Although the band and chief engineer Grover do have access to a gigantic mixing board the size of a corporate boardroom conference table, sound capture and mixing at the time was analog and linear, in the parlance. Nevertheless, Grover and drummer Simon (Chris Stack) consume an inordinate amount of energy pursuing a glitchy resonance in Simon’s drum kit, something inaudible to us and perhaps chimerical. As Grover learns the ropes of fake-it-till-you-make-it, in the latter stages of the play he overpowers Simon to play to a click track (again, a relatively novel technology) because Simon’s beat is wavering. Or so Grover says.

It was a silver age, with so much money and time available, chasing infinitesimal improvements in quality.

Adjmi’s approach to dialogue, matched by the direction of Daniel Aukin, follows a similar arc: early expository scenes are full of jumbled, overlapping, super fast passages (particularly from Sarah Pidgeon’s Diana), while at the end, characters’ decisions are underscored by searing pauses. With all involved looking dead downstage.

It’s not for nothing that perfectionist Peter (Tom Pecinka), as done up with aviator shades and drooping mustache, is a ringer for Walter Becker.

• Stereophonic, by David Adjmi, songs by Will Butler, directed by Daniel Aukin, Golden Theare, New York

A gold record on the wall for understudy Cornelius McMoyler, who stepped in seamlessly as Grover at Tuesday’s performance.

David Henry Hwang’s effective new musical Soft Power suggests a triangulation of the patriotism of Hamilton and the east-meets-west of Pacific Overtures, recently produced by Signature Theatre. However, it’s set in the here and now of strained USA-China relations and the two most recent election cycles. The text of the play explicitly acknowledges that it is a response to another well-loved musical, The King and I, Hwang working in a familiar groove.

“Welcome to America” explodes in your face, with the least sinister figure being a silent Times Square Elmo puppet. It sets up the arrival two songs later of Hillary Clinton (the electrifying Grace Yoo), an Asian American in a blonde wig. Clinton’s music and movement is a pastiche of Meredith Wilson,* Reno Sweeney, Evita Peron, Michael Bennett, John Kander, and Stephen Sondheim. Her 11:00 number (actually a 9:15, in this 90-minute play) is “Democracy,” which opens with a tremendous preach and closes with a scrim drop from the flies that will have most Americans losing their shit, in a good way.

“Happy Enough” (my notes say “tone song,” which perhaps better captures the spirit) is a lovely duet for Clinton and ex-pat Xūe Xíng (Daniel May), intimately exploring the nuances of Chinese pronunciation, with a slightly forced joke involving an English vulgarism.

• Soft Power, book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori, directed by Ethan Heard, Signature Theatre, Arlington, Va.

*Clinton’s repetition of the lyric “Problems” also brings to mind Laurie Anderson’s “Only an Expert,” but that’s just me.

Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting is a little much to take in at first viewing, which is part of the point. The narrative skitters fractally back and forth along a time line in the life of Chantal (a/k/a CB, for Chantal Akerman and Luis Buñuel) from ages 11 to 19, living on a small farm in the Great Plains with a loving, imperfect mother and father. Chantal (laser-focused Jean Christian Barry) checks several of the boxes in the catalog of neurodiversity, among them autism spectrum, ADHD, and synesthesia; CB is also nonbinary, or perhaps “abinary,” preferring to eschew pronouns altogether.

Chantal is learning to become a film-maker like CB’s namesakes. Most of the second half of the play consists of capturing/retelling/reassembling life-changing events when Chantal was much younger. There’s more than a suggestion that Chantal believes that coming out to CB’s parents as nonbinary caused the tornado that destroyed the family home.

Harmon dot aut wisely leans into CB’s synesthesia, as well as CB’s obsession with movies. Both of these aspects of neurodiversity are easy for us to make a connection with Chantal. There’s nothing threatening about synesthesia, unlike the culture dustups about pronouns¹ and public washrooms. Likewise, who doesn’t go a little too deep into movies?

Jasminn Johnson holds her own as Mom, a kindergarten teacher with a flair for little verses that end with an Edward Gorey twist. And Roderick Hill as Dad shows some chops remembering a horrible killing when he was deployed to Kabul, as well as a tasty comic run of movie star impersonations (as directed by Chantal).

A scattering of films referred to in the text:

• The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler, 1946: All those war stories.
• The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming-King Vidor, 1939: How did that twister effect work?
• News from Home, Akerman, 1976: I need to take a look at this one.
• El ángel exterminador [The Exterminating Angel], Buñuel, 1962: It’s a puzzle to work out why this film is so important to Chantal. Certainly it has made an impression on subsequent generations.

Not alluded to, but always under the surface when we talk about Buñuel: Un chien Andalou, 1929. Somehow those ants scurrying about reflect how/what Chantal is processing.

An ground-breaking piece, masterfully done. Bravo to CATF for bringing it to the festival. And cheers to the running crew scooting in to reset the wreckage of CB’s house.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting, by Harmon dot aut, directed by Oliver Butler

¹Between you and me, I look forward to a time, decades or centuries away, when English’s current gender marking seems as quaint as adjectives that decline and the ablative case.

The Happiest Man on Earth is the Holocaust survivor’s story of Eddie Jaku, told in monologue form by the avuncular Kenneth Tigar. What’s remarkable about Jaku’s memoirs is his breadth of experiences—suffering in at least two concentration camps, a life in occupied Belgium, a journey on foot across France—as well as his lack of animosity toward nearly all his persecutors. And his wry sense of humor.

Enough to Let the Light In sits at the intersection of several genres, and to go into too much detail would spoil some of the fun. Let’s just say that it’s as if Mary Chase’s Mr. Wilson were to meet a lesbian Heather Armstrong, as told by Henry James.

There’s one little detail that I must call out, be it from the script or a flourish added by director Kimberly Senior, that I’ll call the “coaster dance.” Type AAA Marc (Deanna Myers) is visiting the home of her girlfriend Cynthia (Caroline Neff) for the first time. Cynthia’s place is a tastefully appointed brownstone/Victorian house, one of those “oh, I could just live here” sets (designed by Mara Ishihara Zinky) that work so well in the Marinoff. Cynthia used to be a painter, and the one element in the room that seems out of place is a large self-portrait, largely representational but with what could be migraine halos surrounding Cynthia’s frizz of curly hair. There is also a smear that reminds us of Gerhard Richter. Hmm, anyway.

Cynthia brings drinks; Marc sets hers on a coaster and Cynthia sets hers directly on a beautiful wooden table, right next to a coaster; Marc quietly moves Cynthia’s drink on to a coaster. Remember, this is Cynthia’s house. They dance at least three rounds of this game.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• The Happiest Man on Earth, by Mark St. Germain, directed by Ron Lagomarsino
• Enough to Let the Light In, by Paloma Nozicka, directed by Kimberly Senior

Fun fact: Row J in the Frank Center has the electrical and audio-video outlets for the tech desk.

CATF launches a slightly simplified season for 2024, presenting only four plays (one in two parts), with no productions rotating out at the festival’s four venues. Sharp-eyed program readers will also note only one world premiere.

In the flagship Frank Center venue is mounted What Will Happen to All That Beauty?, by Donja R. Love. It’s a tender, multi-generational study of the effect of HIV/AIDS, with specific attention to Black communities in metropolitan New York (at the dawn of the crisis) and small towns (close to the present day).

As we enter the theater for Part 1, we see Luciana Stecconi’s handsome multi-playing area set with up to seven levels, faced on wood slats in shades of brown, with backing screens of the same slats. This same set, with some of the screens rearranged, serves for Part 2, albeit with more realistic dressing pieces—bedding is on the platform bed, the cooker and sideboard are visible, and there’s a practical chandelier. There’s no marked change in style in the text or otherwise in the storytelling, so we’re left to puzzle why.

Lengthy costume changes in Part 2 take some of the momentum out of the piece, especially after the penultimate scene, which felt like the play’s end to most of us.

Which takes us to the final step of the journey of Manny (the charismatic Jude Tibeau), the protagonist of Part 2, and his relationship with his grandfather, Rev. Emmanuel Bridges, Sr. (powerful Jerome Preston Bates). Bridges, Sr. is a traditional Mississippi preacher, leading off Part 1 with a sermon that sets two of the play’s themes, beauty and sacrifice; he claims a somewhat confusing dichotomy between the two. His descendants, however, profess no particular faith; a supporting character in Part 1 quietly espouses Islam, but is not taken up on it. At one meeting with his grandfather, Manny is openly resistant to Christianity. So we’re left with Manny’s ambiguous final monologue. Preaching beauty, has he (improbably) taken up his grandfather’s mantle in the church? Has he taken up a street corner pulpit?

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
• What Will Happen to All That Beauty?, by Dorja R. Love, directed by Malika Oyetimein