Stupid Fucking Bird

Woolly Mammoth‘s jaunty staging of Aaron Posner‘s rejiggered Seagull is enormously entertaining. It’s like—

Well, at times the actors have scenes together that are kind of…borrowed…or lifted…or cribbed or whatever…from Chekhov’s original, and at other times they…I don’t know, they—

Actually what they do is they address the audience like they…well, you know…

So there’s these seven actors, see. And they each play a role in the basic story that Chekhov wrote. And there’s tons of love on stage. Yeah, that’s what Chekhov himself said in 1895 while he was writing The Seagull: “tons of love.” Except it’s all…what do you call it?…blown off…rebuffed…unrequited or whatever. And so the actors are all really fun to watch even when their characters are bummed and very sad. Just very very sad because…I don’t know they—

Know whud I mean?

My point here is that Posner has taken Chekhovian subtext—unspoken charged emotions below the surface of what characters say aloud (Chekhov’s signature dramatic technique that famously influenced theatrical history)—and traded it for unfinished thoughts and dangling utterances that litter his script with ellipses and em dashes at line endings. This textual stunt is tons of fun, especially when Posner has characters say the filler words whatever and fuck. The voices on stage sound contemporary, not nineteenth century at all. Posner captures precisely how people communicate in real life these days—in fumbling, incomplete fragments groping for expression and hoping for comprehension. That’s what’s expected and accepted. In fact in this era of inarticulation, there are certain social circles (for instance among the young) where someone who articulates clearly, who makes real sense in complete syntax, is regarded with suspicion and even derision.

Know whud I’m sayin’?

The only other time I’ve seen The Seagull on stage was in London. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s acclaimed production, directed by Trevor Nunn with Ian McKellan, was wrapping up its international tour. And that was the point in my life when I understood why theater folks revere Chekhov. The language on stage was so rich, the acting so emotionally resonant, the characters so hilarious in their melancholy, that I finally got it: I got why Chekhov deemed The Seagull a comedy. The human-all-too-human kind. The kind that keeps your eyeballs really moist.

The snippets of the Seagull story that Posner has plugged into his script are unsustained; the actors regularly break character, unsentimentally. The rollicking waves of humor come mainly from Posner’s clever colloquialisms and anachronisms and interactive bits with the audience. And it’s indeed a hilarious crowd pleaser, like watching actors improvise on the edge. But to the limited extent it’s Chekhov, it’s a Cliff’s Notes version for those more familiar with Chekov from Star Trek.

The effect is as discombobulating as it is entertaining. We are drawn into a scene fraught with emotion, then suddenly yanked out. Over and over, again and again, as if everything is in air quotes, bracketed in ironic detachment. So after a while, we learn we dare not care too much about the lives of the characters on stage. We literally learn not to trust our own empathy, because to do so is to be set up to be a little bit betrayed by another bait and switch.

Now, I know that Posner can write one hell of a full-fledged play. His adaptation of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen at Arena was utterly gorgeous. I was moved beyond words. Changed too, actually—I left that theater experience different from when I went in.

The earnest young wannabe writer in Posner’s riff on The Seagull declaims early on that there must be new forms of art, creations that change us. By the end the lovelorn lad (actually the out-of-character actor who plays him) is searching aloud for the catharsis. Where’s the catharsis? he laments. Where is it?

It’s a very funny joke. But it also exposes Posner’s own grasping for authentic emotional content inside his trickster technique. Which can sometimes feel, you know, like he’s run out of ideas…or at a loss for meaning…or drawing a blank…or whatever.

Perfect Arrangement

I’ll cut to the chase: This play is ready for Broadway. It’s knockout funny, with crackling punch lines. It’s flawlessly constructed—paced like a bubbly farce at times, like a jaw-dropping drama at others. And it’s got a core of sexual political content that puts Neil Simon–ish froth to shame.

The author’s name is Topher Payne. Remember it. Because in Perfect Arrangment—one of three full-length plays debuting in the DC Source Festival—he has gifted the American theater with an instant classic. And if he keeps this up, he’ll have a theater named after him someday.

I’ll try to explain what’s so brilliant about Perfect Arrangement. (I don’t have to persuade the opening night audience; they were on their feet cheering afterwards.)

It begins kind of sit-com-y. (Bear with me here.) It’s set in 1950 in Georgetown, in a very beige period living room shared by Bob & Millie & Jim & Norma. No, they don’t all share the same  bed. From all appearances, Bob & Millie are married. As are Jim & Norma. But actually an offstage bed is shared by Millie & Norma. And another is shared by Bob & Jim. Because Bob & Norma work in the State Department, the four of them have devised this nuptial ruse in order—or so they hope—to escape the dragnet that was then purging America of dykes and fags. (That part is historical fact: the so-called Lavender Scare. You can look it up.)

The comic potential in this setup jump-starts the hilarity as the foursome entertain Bob’s straight-arrow boss Ted and his ditsily clueless wife Kitty. Hiding behind phoney personas is an age-old comic stage device, and Payne reinvents it ingeniously: two lesbians in love pretending to be married to husbands, two gay men in love pretending to be married to wives. (Memo to Broadway producers: If you’re not lucky enough to catch Perfect Arrangement for yourself, you just gotta trust me on this—the belly laughs are nonstop.)

And then—with a sure and steady writerly hand—Payne introduces plot turns and character conflicts that gradually unravel and reveal what’s not “perfect” here at all. An auspicious visit in the first act from Barbara—a State Department employee under investigation—sets in motion events that lead to one of the most profound endings I’ve ever witnessed in a new play. Near the end of the second act, Payne tops everything that’s gone before with a breathtaking scene that rips open a gender divide among the once happy foursome. I can’t in conscience give away any more of Payne’s astonishing story structure, but I have to marvel at how he keeps finding what’s funny. Payne has an uncanny knack for keeping faith with his audience through humor. (Memo to producers: If you’re worried about whether Perfect Arrangement is “too gay” for a Broadway audience, just don’t; that’s silly.) And kudos to the superb Source Festival ensemble (Andrew Keller, Raven Bonniwell, Natalie Cutcher, Kiernan McGowan, Zach Brewster-Geisz, Karen Lange, and Jill Nienhiser) and director (Linda Lombardi), who filled every moment with exquisite panache.

Lake Untersee

Rocky, a 15-year-old boy from a broken home, goes in search of  the boy whom he loves. That’s it; that’s pretty much the story. But mix this adolescent quest with evocative metaphors, add some beautifully lyric poetry, chill over lots of ice—and you get the surprisingly intoxicating concoction that is playwright Joe Waechter‘s  Lake Untersee.

One of three full-length plays world-premiering in DC’s Source Festival, Lake Untersee contains some wonderfully imagined elements. Primary among them is Noah Chiet‘s embodiment of  Rocky. For someone who is himself not yet 15, Chiet brings a remarkable range of emotional truthfulness to his role. When choking on inexpressible feelings—as with his disfunctional parents—his Rocky utters gutteral sounds (somewhere between a bark and a croak) that begin as a running gag but then become heart-wrenching. This kid has acting chops. Chiet’s performance alone is reason enough to see this production.

Another wonder to behold is Waechter’s central conceit, which is that Rocky’s youthful crush, Charlie, is buried under eons of ice in Antarctica’s Lake Untersee—and Rocky must get to him and rescue him. Yeah, I know, as a metaphor for a boy’s homoerotic infatuation—frozen below the surface, untouched by adult warmth, requiring a high-risk solo self-discovery trek—that harsh, chilly image sounds interesting on paper. But how the heck can it work on stage? Incredibly, it pretty much does, the actors’ artful delivery of Waechter’s poetic speeches aided and abetted by Joseph Walls’s startling stark lighting and Roni Lancaster’s sound design featuring blizzards and glacial ice.

Thanks in part to The Inkwell, the Lake Untersee script has been in development for a couple years—and, to be honest, it still plays like a work in progress. A few scenes fall flat. For a play with such a tender emotional core, the character of Rocky’s mother seems over-the-top cartoonish; his father, too much a stiff cliché. And the too-familiar story of their marital strife resembles a warmed-over TV dinner. So I don’t think the text is yet ready to be, um, frozen.

But Waechter is definitely on to something good.

Actually the next most interesting character after Rocky is his dad’s live-in girlfriend, Gale (Liz Osborn), who is—just simply—really nice. Rocky and Gale have a scene together that is sweetly moving; we see Rocky realize she genuinely cares about him; we see him stop barking/croaking and open up to her. You’d think a character whose basic trait is ordinary niceness would be rather a bore on stage, but somehow Waechter and Osborn have made her fascinating.

Throughout the play, Rocky intrepidly pursues his (emotional) rescue mission, with a cool twist at the end.  Once we get that by rescuing his longed-for love, Rocky is actually saving himself, his single-minded story becomes en route one of those original theatrical turns that can suddenly hook one’s heart and prompt a tear or two. Like when a winter thaws.

2013 Music in the Night

I’m aware that hearing someone’s stark raving enthusiasm for a one-night-only, pop-up theater performance can sound like “Nyah-nyah, here’s what you missed.” Well, my sincere apologies…but here’s what you missed: a dazzling showcase of some of the most thrilling musical-theater talents in DC.

A co-presentation of Theatre Washington and Capital Pride at Town, this blazing comet comes around but once a year. Monday night’s was only its second appearance in the DC night sky. And I’m already impatient for next year’s.

Assembled and accompanied on piano by Joshua Morgan—who puts the imp in impressario—eleven rising stars did turns in solos and duets belting out show tunes so gorgeously and powerfully you might well worry that a savvy casting director will snatch them off the stage right there and then.

Happily, you can bask in some of this brilliance yourself in upcoming productions. Consider what follows a stargazing guide, annotated (to the best of my knowledge) with online coordinates and next-up appearances:

Shayna Blass (Rabbit Hole at Keegan), Matthew DeLorenzo (Rocky Horror at Studio), Aaren Keith (also Rocky Horror at Studio), Kevin S. McAllister (Violet at Ford’s), Stephen Russell Murray (Spin at Signature), Amy McWilliams (Laramie Project and Violet at Ford’s), Farrell Parker (until June 8 in Full Monty at Keegan, then WAIFs), Nova Y. Payton (Smokey Joe’s Café at Arena), Paul Scanlan (Laramie Project at Ford’s), Matthew Rubbelke (Rocky Horror at American University), Bayla Whitten (Enchanted April at Arena).

There you have it: a constellation of crazy-gifted local luminaries. I’m tempted to say, “Knock yourself out.” But any one of them can do that for you.

No Man’s Land

Harold Pinter may be the biggest tease ever to write for theater. Case in point: his No Man’s Land—which just ended a run in a superb production by WSC Avant Bard at Theater on the Run. Pinter piles on the dialogic misdirection, plot ambiguity, and character non sequiturs as if in a fugue state. And woe to anyone who tries to learn what’s really going on; for as with most of Pinter, one cannot  breathe the word  “reality” without air quotes. But there’s canny method here, and if one yields to Pinter’s calculated obfuscation, the effect is fascinating—and often hilarious.

A fifty-something literary lion (Hirst, played both powerfully and buffoonishly by Brian Hemmingsen) has picked up a fifty-something literary wannabe (Spooner, played connivingy and fey by Christopher Henley) at Hampstead Heath, a notorious gay cruising ground in northwest London. Hirst has brought Spooner home to his high-toned but kind of creepy and off-kilter lair (designed by Steven T. Royal Jr.). The talky assignation that follows, while never overtly sexual, has more homoerotic undertones than one can shake a dick at.

This ostensible “no man’s land” is in fact very much a man’s land, and Pinter is a master at tracking the subtle and not-so-subtle dominance games that men play with one another when there are no women around to put down. There’s an amazing scene in which Hirst goes on and on about having had an affair with Spooner’s wife. (We’re never really certain whether Spooner was ever actually married, but never mind, the point is the cockfight.) We see Spooner wither under Hirst’s taunting tale of cuckoldry, and the round goes to Hirst. Then Spooner rallies and launches into a graphic and detailed depiction of his own dalliances with women whom Hirst had fancied but never shagged. (Again, did any of this really happen? Doesn’t matter.) It’s Spooner’s triumph at oneupsmanship and Hirst’s turn at defeat.

The whole play is kind of a patchwork of beats and scenes like that—artful innuendo and elegant verbal fisticuffs by which Pinter puts the men in menace. The sparring gets deviously and delectably more complex with the entrance of two younger male characters, apparently Hirst’s hired help and perhaps sex buddies besides (Foster, played by Frank Britton, and Briggs, played by Bruce Alan Rauscher).

Pinter was an actor before he became famous as a playwright, and his trust in the actor’s craft runs through and through his work. The characters in No Man’s Land don’t really have clear arcs; indeed they’re not necessarily the same characters from scene to scene. The play functions not at all like a well-made play but rather like a long-form improvisation, with the premise or setup shifting from scene to scene and the actors immersing themselves in the fluidity of the proposition at hand—with the benefit of Pinter’s language to locate themselves somewhere in the moment.

I’ve admired several recent WSC productions: Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Bacchae, and Tooth of Crime. I have to say, though, this No Man’s Land easily tops that list. Watching the splendid performances of Hemmingsen and Henley (both past artistic directors) under the astute direction of Tom Prewett (the company’s new AD), I could not help but hope that Helen Hayes award nominators had caught the show. Henley’s poseur performance in particular tickled me—he kept cracking me up, sometimes with no more than a twitch of eyebrow or flick of tongue.

WSC Avant Bard’s daring engagements with classic theater literature are a DC-area treasure. Alas, for the time being WSC Avant Bard  is nomadic, because last year it was unceremoniously booted from its black-box space in Artisphere (a deeply dumb decision that prompted me not to want to return to Artisphere since). To shake things up, the company’s next production will be a new play—Caesar and Dada by Allyson Currin. It opens June 29 at Catholic University’s Callan Theatre. I’ll be there.

Optimism! Or Voltaire’s Candide

There’s gotta be a mischievous alchemist lurking in the church building that is Spooky Action Theater‘s current haunt, because down in the basement there a 250-year-old French novel has been transmuted into a giddily playful and energetic romp of a show—in rhymed couplets, no less—that is two and a half hours of nonstop serious fun.

Well, maybe the adapter, TJ Edwards, deserves some credit. His rhymes propel the tale with  zinger after zinger.

Oh, and maybe I should mention the director, Michael Chamberlin. His dazzling conception was to stage the play in the round, like a boisterous commedia dell’arte.

Oh, gosh, can’t forget the cast of nine. Ryan Alan Jones gives a virtuoso performance as Candide, with a physicality that astounds as he seems to dance even through stage fights. Rosemary Regan as the Old Woman delivers a poignant monolog with a passion and power we didn’t see coming. The others also beguile in all their diverse guises: Adoeye, Michael Kevin Darnall, Patricia Lynn, Jessica Shearer, Gregory Stuart, Ryan Tumulty, and John Tweel.

And the design—set, costume, sound, lighting—and the hilariously silly cardboard props. Oh dear, maybe it wasn’t alchemy after all.

But the truly amazing thing is, this delightful entertainment has a point. It’s a very serious point, actually, as was Voltaire’s—about the dubious durability of optimism. You know, that hopey changey thing? And how the pileup of horrible things that happen to people can give even the most inveterate Pollyanna pause?

After the fun of the show was over (well, a little bit during), I began reflecting on how Voltaire’s framing of this dilemma has some darn profound contemporary resonance. He takes dead aim at a broad swath of villains—the secular and sacred powers that have allied to oppress and victimize—and he ruthlessly exposes their cruelty. Voltaire also lays bare men’s systematic sexual violence against women, as one by one the female characters give graphic report, and he presents their violation as being no less despicable than men’s violence against other men. All this the guileless Candide bears witness to. And his heady optimism is, understandably, sorely tested.

I have to credit this production for more than its theatricality. With extraordinary verve and nerve, this production revives Voltaire’s stark critique of men’s inhumanity to women and other men. And in the process, it challenges us to be mindful that we do not fall for any optimism that opts for obliviousness.

4000 Miles

Not five minutes into the Studio Theatre production of 4000 Miles, I knew that by the end I would be giving the play a standing ovation. The writing and the acting were that good, from the get-go.  I could tell I was going to love it. And I did. Every scene, every beat, every line.

Now, some might assume I came to the theater having read one too many raves of Amy Herzog’s Pulitzer Prize–finalist drama, so maybe I was all hopped up to see a snob hit. I will concede I arrived with more than usual anticipation. But I did not expect to be so transported before the first scene-break blackout—and then completely blown away by the end.

How to explain this? And how to explain why Amy Herzog just became one of my very fave living English-speaking playwrights? To be honest, I was so mesmerized I’m not sure.

The four characters in 4000 Miles are a 20-something young man, Leo (played by Grant Harrison), who, having bicycled cross-country from Seattle drops in unexpectedly on his octogenarian grandmother, Vera (Tana Hicken), in her Greenwich Village apartment. Over the course of the play, which flashes forward scene by scene in time, Leo gets a visit from his probably-no-longer girlfriend, Bec (Heather Haney). And some time later he brings back to his grandmother’s apartment a woman he picked up, Amanda (Annie Chang). There is a lot of completely engrossing storytelling. But there’s really no big overarching Plot.

There’s just life. Real people connecting, disconnecting, speaking of this and that from the heart, from off the top of their heads, always from someplace profoundly human—with a verisimilitude I did not realize was so rare in theater until I witnessed how Herzog does it.

You know how lots of playwrights write dialogue so blatantly stagey that it can’t possibly ring true—but the hapless actors still have to inject some credible emotion into it? However much a line might delight or surprise the audience,  you just know the actor had to work to make it work. Maybe because Herzog was once an actor herself, she never foists such “Look at me, I’m writing!” language on her characters. She just seems to have gifted the cast, as if effortlessly, with an amazingly resonant score that if played as honestly and sensitively as she composed it will become on stage so like life that you cannot help but be swept into it.

What makes this production of 4000 Miles all the more glorious, all the more a peak theatrical experience, is that all four cast members—as masterfully directed by Joy Zinoman—play Herzog’s brilliant score pitch perfectly.

Really, truly, the best new play I’ve seen in years.

Smudge

The play is about a married couple who have a severely incapacitated child.. As a result the couple’s marriage is sorely tested. We watch in fear and fascination as the bleak comedy unfolds, and when one of the spouses contemplates murdering their damaged progeny…

Oh wait, that’s not the play I’m seeing. That’s a play I saw decades ago. I’m actually here at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda watching Pinky Swear Productions’ Smudge by Rachel Axler, which is about a couple whose daughter, whom they dub Smudge, is born horribly misshapen. But what’s running through my mind is another play: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, by the British playwright Peter Nichols, which is about a couple whose daughter, whom they dub Joe Egg, was born horribly disabled.

It’s never a good sign when your mind wanders off to another play like that. Especially if the play you wander off to is lots better than the one you’re watching.

Playwrights should not be deterred from tackling themes and setups that have been dramatized before. Artful theatrical imitation can be a brilliant homage. Revisiting storied works from the past can unpack fresh narratives for now. And I do understand why the topic of a botched baby captured Axler’s attention. I myself wrote a play in college about a married couple who tour midway sideshows with their freak child.  The aberration infant is a resonant trope, particularly for young adult ambivalence about conception and parenthood. (See also Rosemary’s Baby.)

But Smudge dies aborning.  The characters are sit-com-y, with nary a credible emotional moment between them. The dialog is archly overwritten when not lame. The device of the defective daughter is presented as a white baby carriage tricked out with tubes, which light up, in sync with sound effects, when the unseen deformity “communicates” to its mother—which gets annoying, and after a while you wish it would shut up. The director, Ryan Maxwell, writes in a program note that Smudge “was one of the smartest scripts I’d read in a long time”—which, if true, I would have advised not acknowledging.

There are two things about this production that make it worth seeing. One is Brandon Cater’s sensitive performance as the young husband. He made the part seem more playable than it was, and I am keen to see him in a real role, Romeo, this summer at Brave Spirits Theatre. The other reason to see Smudge is Brandon Roe’s unnerving but intelligent sound design, which had the uncanny effect of making the production seem more momentous than it was.

Of course you may want to see Smudge to see how creeped out you are by the storyline. And you are anxious about not having a healthy baby. And you’ve never seen or read Joe Egg.

American Utopias

Hugely entertaining theater isn’t usually also profoundly political. Authentic political theater is supposed to be self-important and polemical, right? Like earnest agitprop, loaded with Brechtish messaging and echt alienation. It’s not supposed to embrace you magnanimously in hilarity. So after laughing  so hard throughout Mike Daisey’s not-to-be-missed exuberance of humor now at Woolly Mammoth, you don’t expect to walk away later so transformed, strangely contemplative, and pondering your own place on the world stage. Which in the case of American Utopias is of course just fine, because it tickles us astonishingly…and then really catches us unawares.

Mike Daisey is riotously funny but he doesn’t do standup (see my previous post about his work). Mostly he sits, at a table, and, with a boundlessly playful stage presence, tells stories. In the case of American Utopias, they coalesce into a thoroughly absorbing, two-and-a-half-hour monologue about his trippy journeys to Burning Man and Walt Disney World and his more sobering reflections on the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

The thing is, once we start laughing, we are already players in Daisey’s game, because we are laughing, almost always, in recognition of something. Something Daisey has held up to view for us. But it’s something we hadn’t looked at before, or something we hadn’t seen quite like that before. Something he wants us to see—through his extraordinary probe-through-culture-fog eyes—because once we see it, once we are awake not asleep (as he puts it)…we might, just possibly might, be changed.

It would be reductive to summarize what Daisey opens our eyes to in American Utopias. It might also be a spoiler. But I’ll give a hint: Now that megacorporations are officially persons (per the U.S. Supreme Court), they also get to be among Daisey’s dramatis personnae. Turns out they’re actually the off-stage protagonists, propelling and influencing every tale he tells. Which makes Daisey and the rest of us…what? The pawns? The peons? The antagonists? Eeek! But if we’ve been awakened by American Utopias, we might well find ourselves asking ourselves that question.

FIST (Fighting Improv Smackdown Tournament)

If you’re a fan of the spectator sport that is improv, you’ve gotta check out the cheap treat that Washington Improv Theater offers each year around this time: FIST, in which 67 teams of three compete to move on to the next level. At each show, four teams perform, and audience members vote to pick the two best. (Yeah, it’s got a bracket, just like March Madness, but FIST is goo-gobs more fun.)

Because each show is different, you won’t see what I saw the other night. But I’ll bet you’ll have a hoot. The team members in FIST seem relative newcomers to the game, and skill levels can vary—but the laugh-out-loud payoffs abound. Dozens of times I saw someone do something or heard someone say something and thought to myself, “Wow, that’s so good. Someone should write that down! And perform it again!” But of course, inspired improv evaporates in the instant it’s invented, and you just have to console yourself knowing you were lucky enough to be there when it happened.

I’ve raved about Washington Improv Theater here before. But I have to recommend again the company’s signature iMusical, which is performed at some, but not all, FIST shows. (Yes, they really make up iMusical on the spot, before our very eyes, bouncing off an audience suggestion,  creating original music and lyrics that could give many a Broadway showtune a run for the money.) A troupe of six seasoned zanies (plus musical director Travis Ploeger) sync in mysterious ways, their wondrous bits to perform. Really, it’s as if they’ve hacked into each other’s brains—and it’s giggles in, giggles out.

FIST runs through April 13. Catch it while you can.