THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010
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38 Mini
A star (B) denotes a show recommended by our critics.
Reviews
NEWLY REVIEWED COURAGE: A POLITICAL THEATRE REVIVAL
At the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop through June 26
The implicate-the-audience factor looms large in “Courage,” the intelligently devised, disappointingly executed new offering from the adventurous local troupe Dog & Pony D.C. When you walk in to take your seat at this busy, immersive version of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” you are offered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and handed a Regimental Recruit Information Form to fill out. The message: This parable about the public’s complicity in war and social injustice is, partly, a parable about you. Brecht’s drama follows its title character through Europe’s 17th-century Thirty Years’ War: Bent on toughing out the conflict and protecting her three children, Mother Courage hawks merchandise to soldiers and civilians from her cart. On a platform behind the stage stands a terrific band. Alas, the lyrics can be hard to hear. Even more problematic is the production’s uneven acting. If only this production, which strives for accessibility and vim, had the polish to match its inventiveness.
Friday-Saturday and Wednesday-Thursday at 7:30. 545 Seventh St. SE. 800-838-3006.
www.dogandponydc.com. $15 in advance, $20 at the door.
BGRETTY GOOD TIME At the H Street Playhouse through July 3
Gretty Myers is a polio victim, largely paralyzed and facing life in an iron lung (it’s 1955). She reasons that if this is as good as it gets, maybe she’d just rather not. The script is by John Belluso, a disabled playwright, so it’s no surprise that the dialogue rings true. The Theater Alliance production — part of the International VSA (Very Special Arts) Festival — has its arid patches, but it’s clear and ultimately forceful, especially in Ann Colby Stocking’s fierce performance as Gretty. The play intriguingly has this European refugee dream up a Japanese girl (Caitlin Gold) whose face was severely burned in the Hiroshima bombing. Remembering and forgetting emerge as key themes, as do surviving and letting go. Director Jeanette Buck’s staging is consistently artful and understated, and Stocking — disabled herself — supplies ample honesty and verve.
Friday-Saturday at 8, Sunday at 3 and Thursday at 8. 1365 H St. NE. 202-399-7993. Ext. 2. www.hstreet
playhouse.com.
www.theateralliance.com. $30, $20 students and seniors.
BMRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION At Sidney Harman Hall through July 11
Elizabeth Ashley’s earthy magnanimity proves a good match for the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s pragmatic matriarch, a lowborn woman of the Victorian era who could find no avenue to material comfort other than the path that ran through the boudoir. It’s a character that in George Bernard Shaw’s time represented the demeaning limits imposed on female aspiration and in ours is, perhaps, a symbol of the disdain we sometimes unfairly heap on the compromises of older generations lacking our advantages. That contempt is embodied in Mrs. Warren’s daughter Vivie (Amanda Quaid). As the carnal nature of Mrs. Warren’s economic affairs is disclosed to the unsuspecting Vivie, their escalating standoff forms the dramatic core of the play. The temperature of the performance is a mite cool. It proves increasingly effective, however, as the production builds to the director’s lovely take on the play’s final moments, when the cracks in Vivie’s facade appear. Even a woman for a new century, it seems, can retain a soft spot for her old mom.
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, Sunday at 2 and 7:30, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 and Thursday at 8. 610 F St. NW. 202-547-1122.
www.shakespearetheatre. org. $20-$82.
blend is exacting and so are the moral complexities Albee carefully unsettles in us. “The Goat” is a doozy — a wacko scandal that somehow hits close to home and a breathtaking piece of theatrical craftsmanship.
— N.P
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, Sunday at 2 and 7, and Wednesday and Thursday at 7. 10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. 410-772-4900.
www.repstage.org. $18-$30, $12 students, $16-$28 seniors.
B GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES
At Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Saturday
STAN BAROUH
Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey and Tim Getman star in “Gruesome Playground Injuries,” which closes Saturday.
COMINGS AND GOINGS — Celia Wren
Last chance Closing Saturday: “Gruesome Playground Injuries” at Woolly Mammoth Theatre (202-393-3939); American Century Theater’s “Treadwell: Bright and Dark” at Theatre on the Run (703-998-4555).... Closing Sunday Washington Shakespeare Company’s “Every Young Woman’s Desire” at the Clark Street Playhouse (703-418-4808).
On sale now Theatre J stages the humorous theological drama “New
Jerusalem” June 26 through July 25. $20-$55. 800-494-8497.
www.theaterj.org.... The Kennedy Center presents the Tony-winning musical “Mary Poppins” July 1 through Aug. 22. $25-$135. 202-467-4600.
www.kennedy-center.org.
CONTINUING
B AMERICAN BUFFALO At Studio Theatre through June 27
— Nelson Pressley
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 mole on the rear end of capitalism — how well “American Buffalo” is going to hold up. Thanks, though, to some 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.
Friday and Tuesday-Thursday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, and Sunday at 2 and 7. 1501 14th St. NW. 202-332-3300.
www.studiotheatre.org. $49-$63.
EL BOLA — CUBA’S KING OF SONG At GALA Theatre-Tivoli through June 27
This world premiere musical biography focuses on Ignacio Jacinto Villa, the popular mid-century Cuban
— Peter Marks
singer-songwriter nicknamed El Bola. The show — performed in Spanish with English surtitles — does have a pair of aces up its sleeve. One is the music, songs written by or associated with El Bola. The four-piece band creates an infectious pulse for both dance tunes and ballads. The other interest tickler is the choice to have three singers performing El Bola’s repertoire. All three are particularly adept at infusing the music with a smoldering, yearning quality that, the suggestion goes, is fundamental to El Bola. The scenario is ridiculous, but like El Bola himself, it seems to sense its weakness and smile, charming you into indulgence. It almost works.
Friday-Saturday at 8, Sunday at 3 and
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
Friday and Saturday at 8. 641 D St. NW. 202-393-3939.
www.woollymammoth.net. $20.
NAKED BOYS SINGING! At the 1409 Playbill Cafe through June 27
Thursday at 8. 3333 14th St. NW. 202-234-7174.
www.galatheatre.org. $34-$38, $20-$26 students and seniors.
EVERY YOUNG WOMAN’S DESIRE
At the Clark Street Playhouse through Sunday
— Peter Marks
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 and Sunday at 2. 601 S. Clark St., Arlington. 703-418-4808. www.washington
shakespeare.org. Pay what you can.
B THE GOAT OR, WHO IS SYLVIA?
At Howard Community College Rep Stage through June 27
— Nelson Pressley
Martin, the middle-aged hero doomed for a mighty tumble, has it all as Edward Albee’s delirious, wicked play begins. The object of his affection? Well, take the drama’s title seriously. Actor Bruce Nelson and director Kasi Campbell make a stern monument of Martin’s obsession, the isolating rapture that makes him snap at people who just don’t understand. That gravity helps the show land with force. Yet the show is also explosively funny, with Nelson and Emily Townley (quick and appealing as Stevie) firing punch lines at each other like deadpan vaudevillians. It’s saying something for a company to take the measure of this play; the comic-tragic
This Ganymede Arts production gets a blue ribbon for truth in advertising. Caution to the wind, pants backstage, the point isn’t greatness but sweetness. The six performers sing their hearts out and dare you not to love them. The cheerful nudity keeps things light, right from the opening song, which is aptly titled “Gratuitous Nudity.” The bare bods are the only subject, really, and you have to grin or the encounter would be too awkward for words. The lads can sing (as if you care), and if the lyrics strain for jokes, the cast’s joie de vivre invites you to overlook shortcomings and just have fun.
Friday at 8, Saturday at 6 and 8, Sunday at 5 and 7, and Thursday at 8. 1409 14th St. NW. 202-290-1502.
www.ganymedearts. org. $35.
B OTHELLO At the Kennedy Center through July 3
— N.P .
For its sixth venture into a genre that it has all but reinvented — vacuuming out the dialogue in Shakespeare’s greatest works and redecorating with mesmerizing movement — Synetic Theater has chosen the tragedy of a powerful soldier brought down by a venomous lie. What director Paata Tsikurishvili and his choreographer wife, Irina, seem able to do each time they take on Shakespeare is distill raw elements of the plays into feverish bursts of emotional energy. In “Othello,” a toxic mixture of desire and the need to control informs the scorching physicality. And even though the adapters manufacture their own unnecessary prologue for Othello and, in the end, a gratuitous comeuppance for Iago, the tragedy bleeds through profoundly. The null countenance of the murdered Desdemona, dangling like a bruised effigy, casts over this smashing production the right kind of heart-stopping pall.
— P
Friday at 7:30, Saturday at 1:30 and 7:30, Sunday at 1:30 and Wednesday-Thursday at 7:30. 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600. 800-444-1324.
www.kennedy-center.org. $30-$55.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER: THE HISTORY (AND MYSTERY) OF THE UNIVERSE
At Arena Stage through July 3
Have you ever been cornered by the most brilliant person in a room for a lot longer than you wanted? If so, you’ll have some idea of the itchy impulses stirred by Arena Stage’s talky treatise of a play. The wordy title hangs aptly over D.W. Jacobs’s long-winded performance piece, which takes the shape of an extended
.
discourse by Rick Foucheux playing Fuller, the late eccentric 20th-century visionary. Foucheux’s Fuller gases on and on about what’s best for all of us on spaceship Earth, while he fails to deduce what would be best for him: an editor. And we’re never given an essential ingredient of this narrow kind of theater, an opportunity to feel for the man, to understand what makes him tick.
— P
Friday and Thursday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, and Sunday and Tuesday- Wednesday at 7:30. 1800 S. Bell St., Arlington. 202-488-3300.
www.arenastage. org. $27-$69.
B SOPHISTICATED LADIES At the Lincoln Theatre through June 27
.M.
With Arena Stage producing part time at the Lincoln Theatre while the troupe’s regular home gets a two-year makeover, why not exploit U Street’s roots with a Duke Ellington tribute? The party hits the highest gear at every opportunity, rarely letting the dancers or the audience rest. As the action zips from the Cotton Club to the Savoy and then, as Duke Ellington goes international, to places like Amsterdam, the high kicks and exuberant spins seem like they’ll never stop. The perpetual motion can be exhausting, but it can also be a gas. Maurice Hines is still a gleeful ambassador of tap, surprisingly agile and full of mischief as he cocks his hips and prowls toward the various glamour-pusses inhabiting the highly decorated stage. The Ellington band is swell, and great tunes such as “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Satin Doll” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” give the show a lush framework.
Friday at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8, and Thursday at 8. 1215 U St. NW. 202-488-3300.
www.arenastage.org. $67-$79.
B [TITLE OF SHOW] At Signature Theatre through June 27 — N.P .
Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen’s hall-of-mirrors premise has characters named Hunter and Jeff composing a show for a festival of new musicals. Their musical is about the writing of the musical for the festival. The predominant feeling, reinforced by the elan of the four young singing actors, is that of an after-hours cabaret, one at which the musical-theater cognoscenti gather to revel in their love of the arcane ins and outs of the biz. Getting the references is part of the fun of this cuter-than-adorable chamber musical, which is receiving a sweetly in-the-know treatment by Signature Theatre. It’s the kind of postmodern entertainment that wraps you in an ever-tighter self-conscious hug. And as we know, sometimes, a friend’s affectionate squeeze can go on a teensy bit longer than we’re prepared to accommodate. Such is the sensation with “[title of show],” whose cleverness about the vicissitudes of writing a musical ultimately wears a little thin.
— P
Saturday at 2 and 8, Sunday at 2 and 7, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 and Thursday at 8. 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington.
www.signature-theatre.org. $64-$74.
TREADWELL: BRIGHT AND DARK At Theatre on the Run through Saturday
.M.
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.
Friday at 8 and Saturday at 2:30 and 8. 3700 S. Four Mile Run Dr., Arlington. 703-998-4555.
www.americancentury.org. $29-$32, $26-$29 seniors and students, age 18 and younger free with paying adult.
.M.
— N.P
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.M.
— C.W.
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