THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2010
18
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A star (B) denotes a show recommended by our critics.
Reviews
NEWLY REVIEWED
EVERY YOUNG WOMAN’S DESIRE
At the Clark Street Playhouse through June 20
When a woman walks in her front door and a man slips in behind her — a government thug in suit and sunglasses — he’s in for good, and his relentless harassment of the woman quickly defines her whole life. The context for this terse, surreal 1986 play by the Washington Shakespeare Company is Chilean politics and the murderous regime of Augusto Pinochet. But what seems to interest playwright Marco Antonio de la Parra is not just the brutality and repression but the corrosive mind-set that evolves within a terrorized society. The big ideas have a bit of a hollow ring, though, in this brittle production. The more time the characters spend together, the more complicated and complicit the relationship becomes, but the concept plays like a diagram: The two don’t generate either the heat or the high style the show wants.
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, Sunday at 2 and Thursday at 8. 601 S. Clark St., Arlington. 703-418-4808. 800-494-8497.
www.washingtonshakespeare.org.
$26.50-$36.50.
SYCAMORE TREES
At Signature Theatre through June 13
You’ll recognize the people that Ricky Ian Gordon and his co-librettist, Nina Mankin, write about here, especially Sydney and Edie, an earthy Bronx couple of the 1940s. Like much of their generation, they move to the suburbs and raise a brood of driven, loving, neurotic, damaged baby boomers. Director Tina Landau expertly steers the company through the turmoil that is sparked in the family. Yet it feels as if there’s still work to be done. At the outset, we are told that the evening is both an examination of “a family through six decades” and “a country trying to find its way.” As it stands, the second vow isn’t kept. Even so, the puzzle pieces of a vivid family’s
emotional life do form a bracing mosaic, one that allows us to feel that our time sorting through them is utterly worthwhile.
Saturday at 2 and 8, Sunday at 2 and 7, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30, and Thursday at 8. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. 571-527-1860. www.
signature-theatre.org. $64-$76.
TREADWELL: BRIGHT AND DARK
By American Century Theatre at Theatre on the Run through June 19
From the biography of the trailblazing 20th-century writer Sophie Treadwell, dramatist Allyson Currin has shaped a play that is excruciatingly dull. Though chiefly remembered for her 1928 drama “Machinal,” Treadwell (1885-1970) was no one-hit wonder. She was an accomplished journalist. She wrote 40 plays, producing a couple herself on Broadway. She penned novels and campaigned for women’s rights. In Currin’s historical infomercial, we encounter a self-aware Treadwell (Melissa Flaim) looking back on her achievements from late in her career. Plodding more or less chronologically through her CV, Currin’s protagonist spends yawn-inducing minutes nattering about her childhood and reading her mother’s letters. The account of “Machinal” crops up late in the play and gives no taste of that classic’s unnerving power.
— Nelson Pressley — Peter Marks
mole on the rear end of capitalism — how well “American Buffalo” is going to hold up. Thanks, though, to perceptive casting and, as it turns out, the durability of these hard-luck characters, it remains a gleefully flinty slice of burnt-out life: taut, funny and, in the end, surprisingly touching.
— P
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, Sunday at 2 and 7, and Tuesday-Thursday at 8. 1501 14th St. NW. 202-332-3300. www.
studiotheatre.org. $35-$63.
B GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES
At Woolly Mammoth Theatre through June 13
— Celia Wren
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2:30 and 8, Sunday at 2:30, Wednesday-Thursday at 8. 3700 S. Four Mile Run Dr., Arlington. 703-998-4555.
www.americancentury.org. $26-$32, with pay-what-you can performances Wednesdays.
CONTINUING
B AMERICAN BUFFALO
At Studio Theatre through June 20
How fitting that Joy Zinoman’s parting directorial act for Studio Theatre should be David Mamet’s cunning portrait of small-time thievery. Like the company she founded, the piece dates from the mid-1970s. And it takes place in Zinoman’s home town of Chicago, where, as a child actress, she first indulged her passion for the stage. You do wonder as you sit down to the 35-year-old play, set in the cluttered junk shop of Edward Gero’s Donny— a guy who’s sort of a
Rajiv Joseph’s romantic dramedy, offered up with an appealing vivacity by Woolly Mammoth Theatre, wrestles with the problem of a young man and woman who struggle vainly over the decades to wrap each other in a blanket of love and protection. Recounted as a series of vignettes that hopscotch back and forth across time, the story of Doug (Tim Getman) and Kayleen (Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey) unfolds around their respective affinities for mishap. It’s the jaunty, quirkily amusing tone Joseph takes with their encounters, from the time Doug and Kayleen are 8 until they’re 38, that makes this play more than the sum of its metaphors. Director John Vreeke effectively embraces the story’s crosscurrents, drawing out the play’s youthful exuberance as well as its sadder dimension — the sense that even when two people can be each other’s salvation, there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever reach the kind of emotional synchronicity that allows them to carry out the rescue.
— P
STAN BAROUH
Theater J’s “Mikveh” starring, from left, Amal Saade, Rachel Condliffe, Sarah Marshall and Kim Schraf, closes Saturday.
COMINGS AND GOINGS
Last chance
Closing Saturday: “Mikveh” at Theater J (800-494-8497).
Closing Sunday: “Hamlet” at Folger Theatre (202-544-7077).
On sale now
The Source Festival of new works, including 10-minute and
.M.
Friday-Saturday and Wednesday-Thursday at 8 and Sunday at 2 and 7. 641 D St. NW. 202-393-3939.
www.woollymammoth.net. $40-$62.
HAMLET
At Folger Theatre through Sunday
Don’t look for a princely Dane with a mind disheveled — or a single hair out of place — in Folger’s chilly new “Hamlet,” a production so primly orchestrated that even the passions feel tucked in. The idea of Elsinore as a domain disinfected of any emotion comes through in James Kronzer’s sterile set, a modern white interior, all sharp angles and twisting stairways. Absolutely nothing is rotten in this Denmark: It seems positively germ-free. And no one embodies director
one-act plays and plays created in 24 hours, gets underway at the Source June 12 through July 3. $18. 202-204-7800.
www.sourcedc. org. . . . Keegan Theatre stages the musical “A Man of No Importance” June 12 through July 11. $30-$35. 703-892-0202.
www.keegantheatre.com. . . . Several dance companies come to town for Ballet Across America II at the Kennedy Center June 15-20. $29-$79. 202-467-4600.
www.kennedy-center.org.
Joseph Haj’s concept more completely than Graham Michael Hamilton, whose generically contemporary Hamlet is redolent less of the character’s days at Wittenberg University than of nights at the gym and the mall. In fact, everyone in this placidly uninvolving version — in which all of the myriad roles are played by a mere 12 actors — is decked out as if being styled for a J. Crew photo shoot. The verse is delivered competently by the ensemble, but little evidence is offered of the attributes that set this peerless royal tragedy apart: the sneaks-up-on-you humor, the love of pretending, the intensity of the hero’s quest to come to terms with life’s intractable ambiguities.
— P
SAIL INTO SAVINGS.
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, and Sunday at 2 and 7. 201 East Capitol St. SE. 202-544-7077.
www.folger.edu. $30-$60.
MIKVEH
At Theater J through Saturday
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Although the locale is exotic — a haven of ritual purification whose doors are closed to men and outsiders — the results are pretty much what you might imagine. Hadar Galron’s play, a hit in Israel, conforms to the recipe for this theatrical staple, turning the bath, or mikveh, into a forum for the airing of perspectives in a tradition-bound community. In this insular environment, the women reveal their attitudes about men, duty and sex. At one extreme are the imperious Hindi (Kim Schraf) and hidebound Shoshana (Sarah Marshall), the latter the mikveh’s senior attendant. At the other end of the spectrum is the libertine Miki (Tonya
stage continued on 20
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