More on TBA in Portland, Oregon

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art calls this annual September festival "tba" aka time-based art, and most of the time, the dance and performance art that gets presented under the shrieking labels of "hot," "cutting edge," "on fire," (this year's fifth-anniversary marketing buzz words) is pretty ephemeral and probably intended to be.

Thursday's opening extravaganza, 100 give or take Portland citizens in a movement choir singing songs about the Migration of Birds composed by San Francisco's Rinde Eckert, was pleasant enough, but scarcely worth sitting on the hard bricks of Pioneer Courthouse Square for close to an hour. It was a lovely September evening and the city looked its best, but the music was close to inaudible and while the movement–flapping to remind us of birds for example–was fun, it wasn't something I'd bother to see or hear again.

Certainly "Map Me," seen on Friday night, the contribution of Belgian-born couple Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Kurt Vandendriessche, performed nude, is time based. For one thing, Vanden Eynde is pregnant–slender nevertheless–so the shape of her body will not last. It takes a kind of raw courage or perhaps total self-absorption to stand naked before a room full of strangers, even if you're using your body as a screen for projections, which may account for the nearly clinical detachment with which this pair performed. Still, the work is intensely visual and in some respects rooted in art history: at one point they look as if they'd been sculpted in marble by Phidias; at another, they resemble paintings by Lucas Cranach, minus alas those wonderful hats.

In the end, I found that while I was impressed by the craft, and repelled by some aspects of this duet in the buff–a segment in which the couple attached strings to genitals and breasts in order to, as a Sesame Street style label card read, "Join Me" was one; another in which the sound of power tools and projections of what appeared to be sheet metal workers accomplished "Fix Me" for Vandendriessche was another–"Map Me" ended up being curiously dehumanizing, and its cutting edge decidedly dull.

But on Saturday night, in Portland's most elegant theater, the teal upholstered, cherry-paneled Newmark in the Performing Arts Center, Baryshnikov danced in the beautiful work of Donna Uchizono, and the art became timeless.

"Leap to Tall, " with music by Michael Floyd and Iva Bittova and lighting design by the masterful Robert Wierzel, was commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Center and premiered last year at Bard College. The trio is certainly a vehicle for Baryshnikov, capitalizing on his classical training and skewing it to be about him as a dancer of rare talent and intelligence, one with a truly intellectual bent. At 59, he can no longer do the exuberant grand jetes and multiple (and my God precise) pirouettes that made him a superstar when he left what was then the Soviet Union for the artistic freedom of the West. Nor does he wish to. In this thoughtful, considered work, he "leaps to tall" indeed with the flex of a wrist, angular arms, a rapid, perfectly controlled series of bourrees into the wings, and a small, perfectly timed jump into the waiting arms of Hristoula Harakas and Jodi Melnick, lovely dancers both of them.

There are no fireworks here; just centered lightness and wit, a modest offering that knocks your socks off. Working with Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, as Baryshnikov has done for many years, has paid off–there are no other ballet stars who have ever been able to make the shift from classicism to contemporary work as he has; dancing as brilliantly in their work and now Uchizono's as he did in such war horses as Don Quixote. His body may be time based; his artistry is timeless.

"State of Heads," which opened the program, is arguably more innovative choreography than that of "Leap to Tall," beginning with an explosive crashing sound and a man in a white suit standing motionless stage rear center, bathed in white light Soon he is joined by two women, also dressed in white, moving extremely slowly from each wing. As they join him, they look up, heads tilted, their arms moving stridently, making you wonder what they're reacting to. The piece would seem to be about our uneasy place in the world and our vulnerability to the decisions of our heads of state. Much of the movement for Levi Gonzalez, Carla Rudiger, and Rebecca Serrell is awkward, off kilter, occasionally downright gawky. And some of it, because of composer James Lo's score, no doubt–Uchizono's musicality puts her to some degree into mainstream modernism–has a latino flavor. The dynamics of this rather mysterious trio make the viewer stay alert, you don't want to miss what comes next, and it needs to be seen more than once. Which makes it not so time based.

–Martha Ullman West


Photo: Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vandendriessche, from http://www.pica.org/tba/tba07/default.aspx

Notes from Portland, Oregon's TBA Festival

Reggie Watts

For five years now, TBA (aka Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art festival) has sent viewers scuttling from club to theater to gallery to warehouse and round again. Then at the end of the evening, everyone gathers in and around the Works, TBA's own (temporary) club, for eating, drinking, dancing, and conversation.

Provocative juxtapositions lurk below the surface of much of the festival: grafitti/gallery, street/stage, process/product. The Suicide Kings' In Spite of Everything casts the punch, power, and profanity characteristic of spoken word in the mold of a relatively conventional theatrical narrative. Individual texts address the experience of matters this culture addresses only reluctantly—the spiritual cost of minimum-wage labor, gang life, adolescent alienation, child sexual abuse and adult sexuality—in language of brutal beauty. Quite possibly, we viewers need the fragile container of the larger narrative—the police investigation of a high school shooting—and the piece's conventional staging to render its fearsome, fearful core bearable.

Though equally self-aware and self-referential, Reggie Watts' Disinformation inhabits the world of a very current, socially acceptable topic of discourse—ecological disaster. Sly non-sequiturs, a variety of voices and personas, ad spoofs, and crisp, spontaneous beat-boxing and b-girling create an entertaining, if not particularly challenging, performance.

Next up: Andrew Dickson's Sell Out and The Living Word Project: the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Jospeh, director of In Spite of Everything.

- Cerinda Survant

STAGE: Me and My Shadow

Democracy
By Michael Frayn
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through Aug. 12

By Alexander C. Kafka

A complex, talky drama about German politics and spying in the 1970s. Who needs this? you might ask, and you wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, my three viewing companions at the D.C. area premiere of Michael Frayn’s Democracy at Olney thought as much Saturday night, and I bet others in the audience, which treated curtain calls coolly, were of similar opinion. But I like this flawed but thought-provoking drama in director Jim Petosa's handsome and powerful production.

The play details German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s betrayal by his personal assistant, Gunter Guillaume, who turns out to be an East German spy. It was received enthusiastically in London in 2003, but while The New York Times and The New York Post gave the next year’s Broadway production kudos, most other reviews treated it roughly. “The play is shockingly boring,” wrote Margaret Croyden of New York Theatre Wire in one such pan. “For almost three hours people talk—endlessly—about German politics during the late '60s and early '70s. … It is almost impossible to know what Willy Brandt stood for at all, and what the point of the play is with this mishmash of German politics more than 30 years ago. And do we care? And do we want to sit for almost three hours listening to all this?”

Croyden’s queries were rhetorical, of course. But I would answer them with a resounding, if not an ecstatic, Yes. It’s difficult to understand what Brandt stood for in some matters because he didn’t know himself. As his cabinet ministers point out repeatedly in the play, he’s indecisive and too eager to compromise and try to make everyone happy. But we do know this: After 40 years of fascist, military, and conservative rule, Brandt, as head of a delicate liberal parliamentary coalition, wanted relations between Western and Eastern Europe to warm and for the two Germany’s to at least acknowledge the damage they’d undergone in fracturing, begin to view each other with more empathy, and at least consider how they might begin picking up the political pieces. “Have the courage to show compassion,” he urged his countrymen. The “point,” as Croyden puts it, was a new vision for Europe and a sea change in perception of the Cold War. And if we don’t care about such things, what on earth should we care about?

Let’s go back for a moment to that Croyden review, just because it’s a concise summary of many critiques of Democracy. “The play also tries to show that Willy Brandt was a womanizer, a heavy drinker, and suffered depression and ambivalence, as he tried to steer Germany toward maintaining their newly formed democracy,” she says. “But we do not see a believable character in action. Brandt's dilemma, his personality, and the political conditions during his tenure are discussed and argued endlessly but never dramatized. And the story then becomes impossible to follow with its complicated array of the numerous parties involved, and the varying positions of its members. It is also almost impossible to identify all the cabinet members as they argue, scheme, backbite, and connive.”

Some of those complaints strike closer to the mark, though I would, at the least, amend them. I found Brandt to be a perfectly believable character. In fact, as a number of observers have pointed out, his similarity to two later, charismatic, too-eager-to-please and be-pleased leaders—Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—provides an additional layer of resonance in the play. But it’s true that his conundrums and foibles are more discussed than dramatized, or dramatized so sketchily that they don’t have the impact they should. And yes, beyond a few principals, the cabinet members do tend to blend and blur a bit. Frayn addressed that issue—having a stage with “ten men in suits”—in a 2003 interview. “I hate the idea of writing a play that's entirely male characters; it's absolutely awful,” he said. “But it just is the case that there were very few women in German politics at the time. As I've said in the postscript, if German politics hadn't been quite so closed off from normal demographic reality, Brandt's government might have had a rather better fate than it did.”

That answer seems a little disingenuous. With all the dramatic license Frayn takes, there’s no reason why he couldn’t bring into the telling one of Brandt’s mistresses, or his wife, or Guillaume’s wife (who was also an East German spy), or one of Guillaume’s mistresses, or some composite woman figure. But I think Frayn was right not to. If he had, it would have undermined the at once competitive, invigorating, and poisonous boys' club atmosphere of the administration in Bonn (the program mistakenly says Berlin’s the setting—it’s not). The flow of testosterone is a key part of the narrative, and beyond a core group of players, it’s not particularly necessary to keep track of all the characters in detail, any more than it’s important to know who all those shirtsleeved Post editors are in the movie of All the President’s Men, or all the pawns on a chess board. Visually, the bland, uniform maleness is also effective. It allows for a Magritte-like modernity and interchangeability that jibes well with a core theme of the drama: how utterly dispensable political figures ultimately are, and how they’re at the winds of social and historical changes they can’t fully fathom, much less control.

Fine, so I’m clearly an apologist for eggheaded talky dramas, especially Frayn’s and, even more so, Tom Stoppard’s. And yet there’s a charge that Croyden doesn’t level, but that I would, and that’s less a lack of drama than a lack of moral accountability in the work. As some critics, but more historians, fumed about the Frayn hit Copenhagen, he has a habit, at the end of all his painstaking research, of throwing up his hands and sliding into somewhat grandiose soliloquies about how I could be you and you me, and maybe you’re evil but maybe I am, and maybe you’re a spy, but maybe I’m a spy of a different sort, and how much do any of us really know about our true makeup and intentions and motivations, etc. etc. In some grand sense, all true. In a narrower historical sense, poppycock, especially when concerning (in Copenhagen) Nazis and their sympathizers or (in Democracy) concerning East Germany’s pervasive and ruthless interior and foreign intelligence apparatus.

“Democracy is really what it's about,” Frayn says in that same 2003 interview about the drama’s name. “The play is about how difficult it is for everyone to come to any common policy on anything, not just in political life but … how you arrange the furniture in the living room or where you go on holiday. Anything that involves more than one person involves a type of political debate, compromise, trying to guess what other people's real feelings are, trying to be tactful. It's a difficult process and inevitably involves compromise and error. So, the play is partly about the democracy of all social life, but I think human beings are kind of democracies within themselves. Each of us has all kinds of different possibilities within himself or herself, and getting those possibilities together, getting some practical behavior to emerge from all the possible selves one has inside oneself, is as difficult as public democracy.”

Hmm. Debating where to place the loveseat strikes me as a little different than deciding to commit espionage, and though there are murmurs and squeaks of outrage in the play, there’s not enough for my taste.

Yet more than making up for that are the wonderfully rich ironies that Frayn mines, sometimes quite explicitly, sometimes less so. Among them: that the East Germans and Brandt want many of the same outcomes and become unspoken allies against the more-mundane backstabbing known as representative democracy; that Brandt himself, as a young man fleeing the Nazis, had assumed numerous aliases and backstories as a journalist and left-wing political provocateur; that Brandt, with his depressions and open self-doubts, alienated his son, while Guillaume, who showed no doubts or disloyalties whatsoever but was false to his very core, enjoyed a peaceable weekend father-son camaraderie; and on and on. Dozens of ironies, many relating to Brandt and Guillaume as mirror images, though twisted ones. “Is it him I’m seeing in the half light,” Guillaume asks at one point, “or is it a reflection of myself?” The longer you ponder the historical situation and the play’s distillation of it, the more ironies you find. Even if that were the play’s and the production’s only achievement, it would be a huge one. But there are many other things that Frayn and director Jim Petosa’s team can boast of.


For one, a very good cast, if not an ideal one.

Jeffries Thaiss is a lively Guillaume, but sometimes too lively, verging on hysteric. As the office sycophant early on who laughs too hard and is too eager to please, he’s quite convincing. “I’m the hat stand in the corner,” he tells his spy handler, Arno. But as events unfold, he becomes a pretty ostentatious hat stand, lurching a little into Anthony Perkins-type staring and braying and smirking and idolatry. Far from an inconspicuous mole, this Guillaume would more likely be sent to HR for drug testing—though, under slightly different circumstances, the same might have been said of Brandt.

As Brandt, Andrew Long is dignified and likeable, but doesn’t have quite the crackle, the sex appeal, that literally makes people swoon in the presence of such politicians. And Long’s performance as well as the technical aspects of the production fail to offer the shiver quotient the play requires of such famed moments as Brandt’s kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto or his silent hand gestures on his historic East German tour. We can picture the moments, in theatrical translation if not memory, but we can’t, in Olney’s version, really feel them.

Richard Pilcher as Horst Ehmke, director of the Chancellor’s office in Brandt’s first term, is excellent, radiating competence and savvy in Democracy’s equivalent of the Leo McGarry character of The West Wing. Vincent Clark as Helmut Schmidt, the Social Democrat poohbah who served as defense and finance minister under Brandt and ultimately succeeded him, is interestingly wary and equivocating. Hugh Nees plays “Uncle” Herbert Werner, who does the dirty work to keep ministers and party underlings alike in line. Though also intriguingly Machiavellian, Nees has, for all his growling, an underlying cuddliness that undermines Werner’s sinister intensity. Everyone keeps talking about how ugly Werner is. But like Brandt, you kind of want to hug Nees’s Werner, and if that strange cuteness is part of his dark power, that could be made clearer.

James Slaughter, as Guillaume’s East German spy handler, Arno Kretschmann, is very good in a difficult role. He’s onstage constantly, sometimes just lurking off on a stairway. He prompts and cajoles Guillaume, but mostly just listens to him. To listen intently and meaningfully in such a visible way is an arduous dramatic assignment, but he pulls it off without seeming either tiresome or ridiculous, the way a lesser actor might. Nick DePinto plays Ullrich Bauhaus, the secret service guard whose resentments build as Brandt uses him increasingly as pimp, porter, and bartender. DePinto’s body language, as much as his lines, conveys the little volcano building within him.

James Kronzer’s set is superb. Half is the exterior, and half the interior, of a generic but imposing staircase-lined old building that not only reflects the other facades and interiors of the story, but also works as administrative office, jail, and other malleable holding areas for public figures we don’t look at too closely, or let out of our sight. Daniel MacLean Wagner’s warm yellow-hued lighting serves as a proxy for openness and the West, while his fluorescent pale equals the East, interiors, and fear.

Brandt, early on, says he is seeking “a fatherland of love and justice,” and Guillaume says of Brandt and himself, “Our stars are linked.” Indeed they were, on the rise and in falling. That’s what democracy is, right? The linking of all our stars. For all their failings, I admire Frayn’s ambitious play and Olney’s ambitious treatment of it because they bring the scary truth of that interdependence home to our bruised, fickle, cynical citizens’ hearts.


Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center:
1. Andrew Long as Willy Brandt and Jeffries Thaiss as Gunter Guillaume
2. Center: Andrew Long as Willy Brandt; behind, from left to right, Vincent Clark as Helmut Schmidt, James Konicek as Gunter Nollau, Nick DePinto as Ulrich Bauhaus, Clinton Brandhagen as Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Eric Messner as Reinhard Wilke, and Richard Pilcher as Horst Ehmke

STAGE: Say Amen, Somebody

Godspell
Conceived and Originally Directed by John-Michael Tebelak
Music and New Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
Directed by Eve Muson
Olney Theatre Institute
Olney Theatre Center
Through July 29

By Alexander C. Kafka

In the book of theater history, it is written:

There was a directing student at Carnegie Mellon named John-Michael Tebelak, who had once considered becoming an Episcopal minister. He attended an Easter service in Pittsburgh and found it dour. The congregants, he felt, were glaring at him because he was young and had long hair. He decided to turn the New Testament’s Gospels into a show brimming with joy and spirit. The result, in 1970, was the first version of Godspell, which, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, went on to become an off-Broadway and then a Broadway hit, as well as a movie.

An ensemble piece with a book based on the Gospel of Saint Matthew and lyrics culled largely from the Episcopal Hymnal, it’s a perfect workshop vehicle in which actors can hone their group skills while also developing and shining in individual character efforts. That’s how Eve Muson has used it to generate the current uneven, but energetic and amiable, production at Olney Theatre Institute.

The appealing young cast greets the project with a warmth and spirit that Tebelak, one imagines, would enjoy. (We can’t know, alas. He died in 1985, at 35, from a heart attack.) But Godspell’s workshop aura is, if you’ll forgive the expression in this context, both a blessing and a curse. On a minimal stage, with a bin of wacky dress-up costumes, an anachronistically modern Jesus and his followers act out and sing about parables like that of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, recite beatitudes, and both witness and enact, in a somewhat indirect way, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. Then, a vague, stylized crucifixion. The more wholesome cousin of Hair, the sunnier stepbrother of Jesus Christ, Superstar, Godspell is a Sunday school lesson steeped in clowning and Vaudeville, and anchored in a distinctly 70s soft rock and funk musical essence.

Let us at least briefly nod to the fact that it’s a weird show. Its raison d’etre is to convey the deadly seriousness of Christ’s teachings and passing, and yet it treats (and sometimes, I think, undermines) them with an unrelentingly childlike approach. Its primary message is hope, but it has a deep nihilistic streak in some of the convolutions of the parables themselves, but also in tunes like “All for the Best,” a soft-shoe precursor to Monty Python’s “Don’t Let Life Get You Down” from Life of Brian. And it at once harnesses and shuns its sexual energy.

It has a lot of leeway for improvisation, and Muson and company take full advantage of that, updating the show with distressing news photos and broadcast headlines at the beginning, and photos representing hope and spiritual uplift at the end, making this revival something of a revival meeting. They’ve tweaked the dialogue to include post-70s references to the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” iPods, and so on. And their interactions are colored with a TV comedy sketch show sensibility.

That’s not all bad. It allows them to define and refine their individual mannerisms and physicality, and it keeps them on their ensemble toes. But it also makes for some herky-jerky pacing, stepped-on lines, and sometimes a snarkiness that doesn’t blend well with the work’s underlying flower-child sensibility. (That there is one layer of anachronism in the original script doesn’t mean a production can pile on multiple layers of additional anachronism without harm.)

Some of the costumes, designed by Vasilija Zivanic, have a random otherworldliness that contributes to that era disorientation. Jesus’s white outfit, combining a bowler hat with a sort of warmup-suit looking tux, works pretty well, as do Judas’s pimp duds. (Jesus’s lifeguard shirt, with red cross, and Judas’s “Fight the Power” T-shirt, are clever touches.) But some of the followers look like they’re dressed for the futuristic kids' show LazyTown with Stephanie and Sportacus. With all the acrobatics, there were occasional mic and sound problems, too.

For all that, this secular Jew enjoyed and was moved by Tebelak and Schwartz’s Christian primer. Liturgically, it preaches to the choir, no doubt, but a visitor at a distant philosophical pew can still groove to its basic buzz of good will, even aside from the cast's invitation to the audience to come onstage at intermission for grape juice.

Luke Smith, as Jesus, has a gentle air, a tender but powerful tenor voice, and some guitar chops too. OK, so “Alas for You” took him for a bit of a bronco ride, but man, that’s a treacherous tune. He would have benefited, even as gentle Jesus, from a somewhat more athletic presence, but he reminded me pleasantly of a younger Mark Lynn Baker.

L.C. Harden Jr., as John the Baptist and Judas, has a wonderfully sharp way about him, and a flair for the ironic snap moment, but his singing was weaker than Smith’s in both projection and intonation. Among the followers, standouts were Patricia Hurley in the opening of “Day by Day” (what a sweet voice), and Hurley and Rebecca LaChance in the lovely vocal tapestry of “By My Side.” Boo Killebrew was sassy and saucy in her “Turn Back, O Man,” which amusingly, um, rubbed up against Olney’s general family-show approach toward the script.

The trio of keyboardist Alvin Hough Jr., percussionist Brian Gibson, and guitarist/bassist Neil McFadden excelled in the demanding variety of the score, which ranges from Simon-&-Garfunkel-like soft-strum ballad to gospel to theatrical dual-key modernism.

“Every man who exalts himself shall be humbled,” Jesus said, “but every man who humbles himself shall be exalted.” Godspell exalts in its tuneful humility, and whether or not you feel its theological power, you’re bound to revel in its artistic vitality, as do Olney Institute’s promising young talents.

Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center: L.C. Harden and Luke Smith; Boo Killebrew

STAGE: Cuckolds' Chuckles

13 Rue de L'Amour
By Georges Feydeau
Translated by Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert
Directed by John Going
Olney Theatre Center
Through June 10

At the beginning of a farce by the Belle Epoque French dramatist Georges Feydeau, all is false to the point of revealing much that is true.

That paradox is key to the current film Avenue Montaigne, in which a subplot involves an actress starring in one of Feydeau’s plays. She and other characters debate whether or not Feydeau’s works are purely comical or involve some deeper psychology. In the film, the question is left fittingly unresolved. Because like a cocktail, farce seems bubbly and insubstantial and delightful when done properly, making you think nothing of it. But when you drink one, or see one, that’s been created improperly, you realize how easily the concoction falls short. It’s too sweet, or too light, or too heavy, or too weak, or too strong. Neither the drama nor the drink has fully succeeded if you find yourself mulling whether or not it has fully succeeded.

So I think those on both sides of the film’s argument are correct. Yes, Feydeau’s farces are purely comical, because they are whipped up around elements of falseness that delineate truths about human weaknesses. And yes, they’re deeply psychological, because the spotting of those weaknesses, and the creation of comic vehicles light enough to make their exposition palatable, depend on great insight into human character.

Case closed. Curtain opened—on Olney Theatre Center’s vibrant, tangy production of Feydeau’s 13 Rue de L’Amour, in a translation by Mawby Green and Ed Feilbert, and directed by John Going. As I mentioned, all is false—not just in the action on stage involving a veritable tournament of infidelities, but in the presentation as a whole. (Whether that's the best course is debatable, but this production so commits to flaunting the work's artificiality that I was ultimately sold by that very resoluteness. I suspect not everyone will be, and I could be equally sold, I bet, on a resolute production with a more low-key naturalistic strategy. Let a hundred aesthetics bloom, is my feeling.)

Reflecting the outrageousness of the action is an outrageous set by James Wolk, like a stylized illustration come to life—somewhere between the drawings in one of Ludwig Bemelman’s Madeleine tales and the fantasy dance-sequence sets of An American in Paris. Art nouveau with traces of surrealism and story-book whimsy, all pinks and reds and whites, right up to the ceiling in the form of a false proscenium that frames the curtain.

Costumiere Jeanne Bland matches these improbabilities with goofily gaudy, but strangely snazzy, period dress, which is all the more appropriate because clothing (pants in particular)—misplaced, left behind, and unexpectedly exchanged—plays a prominent role in the story.

Hmm. About that story. Well, let’s give it a try. In and around Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Moricet, a cad doctor, wishes to lure Leontine Duchotel into an affair. She wants to remain true to her husband, Justinien Duchotel, believing him true to her. Moricet plants seeds of doubt on that score, and events soon plant further doubts still. Meanwhile, the Duchotels’ nephew Jean-Pierre, a college student, is having an affair of his own. A series of impossible—and thus in the farce context, inevitable—coincidences bring matters to a head in an apartment building on the Rue de L’Amour maintained by a fallen German countess, Madame Spritzer, who enjoys generating gossip-worthy complications even more than she enjoys gossip. Complicating matters further is Monsieur Duchotel’s not-so-close close friend Birabeau, who is trying to entrap his estranged wife in flagrante delicto, and several Cops de Keystone pursuing Birabeau’s case.

“There it is,” Moricet says to his conquest regarding his apartment on the Rue de L’Amour, “our own little sanctuary away from the world.” Little does he know. After all, the street number is 13.

So, got all that? Not to worry. It really doesn’t matter. I mean, it does to the frenzied stirring of the plot pot, but not beyond that. Of course, that stirring, like a dessert chef’s whisk, is all, and Going’s got a good whisk wrist, as well as fine ingredients in the combination of his assured technical team and a fabulously lively cast.

Ashley West captures Leontine’s many dispositions, from flirty to fiery, and indignant to indulgent. Jeffries Thaiss is a lovable rogue as Moricet, hoisted repeatedly on his own petard as chaos proves even more powerful than his wily bachelor techniques. As the spidery Justinien Duchotel, Lawrence Redmond is a pleasure, wrapping himself ever deeper into the inextricable layers of his silky web of lies. Credited in the program is a dialect coach (Elizabeth van den Berg), and she no doubt spent some time with the hilarious Halo Wines, as Madame Spritzer. The accent, like the rouge and the absurd hairdo and the dress and the performance generally, is a bit thick—and wonderfully so. The Madame is a broad interpreted broadly, in the great tradition of stage comedy’s lesser characters writ large. Vincent Clark's Birabeau is sympathetically bumbling. Nick DePinto as Jean-Pierre and Patricia Hurley as the servant Marie also shine in their supporting roles, which require as exact, if not as sustained, a sense of timing as the principal ones.

The action is superbly brisk, blocking and dialogue spun together like concurrent tops that bump into each other and send off sparks. Lines that don’t generate guffaws of their own accord conspire, as matters unfold, to bring those whirling tops of speech and space into a variety of giddy gyrations and collisions, sometimes literally.

And if at the start of a Feydeau play all is false to the point of revealing much that is true—Remember? That was our beginning assertion.—then by the end the reverse could be said. By the play's conclusion, all is true to the point of revealing much that is false. That's the twist; and the untwist.

See? Pure comedy. Pure psychology. Impure fun.

-Alexander C. Kafka



Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center:

1: Jeffries Thaiss and Ashley West
2: Nick DePinto and Jeffries Thaiss
3: Halo Wines and Ashley West

STAGE: An Unmarried Woman

The Heidi Chronicles
By Wendy Wasserstein
Directed by Tazewell Thompson
Arena Stage, through May 13


The Heidi Chronicles is a play cool to the touch. For all its well-meaning depictions of well-meaning people, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning 1988 drama about a single woman finding her balance through several decades of societal change is hard to emotionally connect with. Maybe that’s why the cleverly conceived and well-acted production currently at Arena could still leave me strangely unmoved.

Part of the problem is that Heidi Holland, an art historian, remains something of a mystery to us. We know what she says, though even that a bit indirectly: that the two men she’s most loved in life have left her adrift, one, the pediatrician Peter Patrone, because he’s gay, and the other, the magazine magnate Scoop Rosenbaum, because he wanted a wife who would subjugate her interests and ambitions to his.

But drama is often the successful dodge of the old literary directive to show, don’t tell, since stage relies so often on tell. And Chronicles suffers for that, because Heidi is so reserved. In a few fairly powerful monologues, she tells of her insecurity, her sense of being stranded not just by the men in her life, but by the women who have abandoned her and her causes for families or careers or (touched on more lightly) a narrow, politically unforgiving feminism or lesbianism.

But those confessions are brief and strained and stifled. Most of the time she sighs and stares and glares. As the out and outspoken lesbian character, Fran, puts it during a Ms.-era women’s rap session, Heidi “has a ways to go, but she’s one smart repressed woman.” Well, exactly. Ellen Karas, under the direction of Tazewell Thompson, plays her with as much flinty vulnerability as I can imagine, but it’s hard to feel one’s way into the outlook of a character radiating distrust, even if she is also ostensibly in love, angry, disappointed, and whatnot, because she can’t show it, and is only barely and partially able to tell it.

Unhelpful, too, is the stagecraft required by the play’s structure. After an opening art-history lecture, most of the story is told in a series of episodic flashbacks from the ’60s on through the mid-’80s, requiring mostly middle-age actors to don a series of wigs, sideburns, and youthful attitudes that, especially in this theater in the round setting, somewhat defy our sense and senses. Again, costumer Merrily Murray-Walsh’s work is superb (dig the Mondrian dress at the Neat and Clean for Eugene party, and April’s skirt suit on her ’80s TV show), as is Jill Kaplan’s wig and makeup design. But the illusion requires a distance and trickery to work its best magic, and the Fichlander Theatre’s not the optimal place for it. Call that a quibble, but combine it with the inherent chilliness of the main characterization, and it’s more than a little problematic.

Then there’s simply the datedness of the script. Its thirtysomething concerns ring a little weirdly now that the fifty- and sixtysomethings are more worried about retirement than about career. A woman’s navigating work/family choices is still all too germane, but—dare I say it?—the fact that those dilemmas are still so relevant suggests that they might be at least somewhat timeless and universal and perhaps not fully resolvable. Heidi seeks a future panacea, indeed willfully martyrs herself to it, whereas a dynamic series of never completely satisfactory tradeoffs has come to seem more likely.

The same could be said of a single, straight woman’s awkwardness around a beloved male friend’s homosexuality. That is, the play’s political setup is that Heidi is in the vanguard generation making drastic personal sacrifices so that future generations of women will have it easier. Well guess what: The Graces of the Will and Grace generation haven’t found that to be true. Yes, the boomers were and are a vanguard generation, but evidence suggests work-family choices and sexual politics in the personal realm are still just as harrowing, if in a somewhat different key, and always will be.

Only the passage of time highlights those truths, but that additional light isn’t flattering. Heidi is admirable, of course, as a career woman advancing the viewpoint of historically neglected and unappreciated women artists. And her sharp, witty lectures on works like Lilly Martin Spencer’s “We Both Must Fade” constitute some of the most skillful writing in the show. But Heidi’s self-centeredness, particularly around Peter during the ’80s early brunt of the gay AIDS epidemic, is unappealing, no less so for his pointing that out. Heidi seeks happiness. She must shield herself from obsolete expectations. Duly noted. But does she have to do it with such relative disregard for the many other kinds of unhappiness around her?

“Bored, depressed, anxious—these are the qualities I look for in a woman,” Peter tells her jokingly around the “ladies’ choice” song of the high school dance at which they meet. And yet the joke’s not entirely funny, because it’s ultimately not what he’s looking for, or if it is then it’s at the expense of looking for deeper soul-mate qualities in women at all. And yet his description fits Heidi Holland a little too well.

But that’s the character! you say. She’s not uninteresting. There are many women like her.

True. I dwell on the point only to explain, guiltily, the chills that didn’t run down my spine during the moments when I think they were supposed to.

It doesn’t help that, beyond the art lectures, the situations and characters are drawn pretty broadly. Doing the Hully Gully at the high-school dance, the McCarthy-era pickup lines and dry-look cocksureness, the ’70s women’s rap sessions, the imbecilic ’80s TV morning show, and so on are all skillfully mapped scenes, but they too often resemble skits based, with the help of period hit pop songs, on dubious decade-divided generalities and stereotypes. Moreover, in these quasi-skits Heidi is mostly reactive. There are any number of clever one-liners and rejoinders. But the whole lacks nuance; it’s a well-worn, effective, but kind of dry narrative shorthand. And lack of nuance in a character study is unfortunate.

And yet … this is a well-paced, handsome production with quite uniformly excellent performances. Karas projects a brittle strength that evolves and matures into a melancholy self-knowledge. “I’ve been sad for a long time,” she says late in the play. “I don’t want to be sad anymore.” Her disillusionment is palpable as she addresses fellow alums of Miss Crain’s School in Chicago on the topic, “Women: Where Are We Going?” As someone who sees that destination always disappearing over the horizon, she memorably conveys harsh truths.

Marty Lodge fills out perfectly—without becoming the caricature that he could—the role of Scoop, the “charismatic creep” who sweeps Heidi off her feet in his ’60s days as editor of the upstart Liberated Earth News, only to keep her debilitatingly off balance as he develops into the Gordon Gekko-dressed founder of the slick periodical Boomer, keeping the world safe from pastels.

Wynn Harmon brings a wonderful combination of tenderness, playfulness, and quiet ambition to the role of Peter. He reflects much of what’s best in Heidi, and what’s best about Wasserstein’s writing. For him, she lets it flow and takes some chances that pay off intellectually and emotionally.

Catherine Weidner, as Heidi’s longtime friend Susan, is an enjoyable chameleon, particularly as she evolves from Montana commune member to L.A. producer. At Susan’s LaLaLand lunch with Heidi, Susan practically bites the head off their young waiter as a side dish to her (as she snarls) “swordfish—dry, no butter at all.”

Susan Bennett also brings bite to her various incarnations, including Fran the combat-dressed rap-session lesbian; April, the flighty, polished New York TV talk show host; and a tipsy pregnant pal at a baby shower.

In the rap session, particularly, Emerie Snyder has a sweet grace as a girl whom life’s pinned to the ropes. And Hope Lambert, as Scoop’s wife, manages to project considerable back story, grit, and intelligence into that somewhat thankless role.

Donald Eastman’s crisp set features a versatile cube suspended above center stage that becomes a multi-screen for film clips, stills, and other era representations. But, with Robert Wierzel's lighting, it also serves as a richly colored abstract planet both illuminating and shading Heidi’s bittersweet experiences. Fabian Obispo provides perky, percussive incidental music and richly textured sound design.

One of the tunes we hear is Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” a recurring motif that signals what’s right and what’s wrong with this play. Wasserstein boldly explores what happens when the prominent people in our lives send or are sent by us, and to those left behind. But she casts that in overly political terms, making even the work’s once-controversial ending, about Heidi’s decision whether or not to start a family of her own, a polemic, based on her forecast of what the world might hold for a child. Whether or not she sends another child into the world, pivoting the decision on such abstractions seems unhealthy. And perhaps it encapsulates the reasons why she’s hard to fully bond with—for other characters, and for the audience as well.

-A.C.K.

Photos, courtesy of Arena Stage: Karas with Harmon, Karas with Lodge, and Heidi and friends rallying in Chicago

STAGE: Evocative Portraits of Iraqi Women

Nine Parts of Desire
Written and performed by Heather Raffo
Directed by Joanna Settle
Arena Stage
Through Nov. 12

By Alexander C. Kafka

Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire has received rave reviews on its path from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003 through London and New York on its way to D.C. What might read like hyperbole turns out to be simply accurate reporting. Raffo's one-woman dramatic portrait gallery of Iraqi women in the midst and wake of two wars is an astonishing theatrical tour de force. Richly imagined, poetically written, superbly acted, and masterfully directed with the aid of a first-rate technical team, it's not to be missed. It will leave you emotionally wrung, politically disoriented, and artistically dazzled.

Raffo, a Midwesterner with an American mother and Iraqi father, started concocting the performance in 1993 on a trip to visit her dozens of relatives in Iraq. Some of these encounters became a master's thesis for her M.F.A. in the acting program at the University of San Diego. She has developed and updated it since, from its New York production under the guidance of director Joanna Settle.

To describe what it is, perhaps it's best to start by describing what it's not. Its approach is not journalistic in writing or interpretation. We aren't hearing transcriptions, but characters; not impersonations—though in voice, accent, carriage, and mannerism, Raffo's portrayals are exceptional—but melded types and histories. Nor is the play just a tribute to heroic women—though it's often that too. These are flawed women—a politically compromised, narcissistic, maritally unfaithful painter favored by Saddam Hussein, for instance; an emigre in London who's fled violence and oppression right into a whiskey bottle.

It's not a plain leftist political cri de coeur, either. "In '58 everyone who was intelligent was communist," pronounces the London emigre. But her politics are more conflicted now, and so, for certain, are the play's. We hear of an American bunker-busting bomb killing hundreds of innocents in a shelter, and of the dire genetic consequences for Iraqis of American depleted-uranium weapons. But we hear just as much about Saddam's sons and henchmen beheading women the dictator made into his prostitutes, or setting dobermans upon a stripped, honey-slathered out-of-favor girlfriend of Uday's, or forcing a mother to see her infant devoured by starving cats. If there's a clear indictment of America, it's more of our blundering gigantism, military and otherwise, our compartmentalized world consciousness, and our self-limiting routine and superficiality. "People they work out to the war on three channels," says the Iraqi-American New Yorker who seems to be at least in part a stand-in for Raffo. Says the painter, in explaining how she couldn't leave her war-torn Baghdad: "What are you creating with your freedom? I am more free than you."

And finally, it's not a linear narrative, though there are traces of story arc spotted fleetingly like the traces of flying shells in night-vision green. The first character we meet—an older woman mending old souls through the washing of old shoe soles in the river—warns that there are holes in those soles, and in her feet, and in her story. And that's true. For, as I said, this is a portrait gallery more than a traditional play. More than a sketch pad, mind you. More like the translucent, unfocused figures of the painter's watercolors (she is among the most vivid characters, perhaps, because she is emblematic of the artistic strategy and vision of the production). She says, "With oil, you just paint over what you've done." (The associations with that oil paint are with an oil economy and heavy-handed foreign and military policy seeking to redo and undo in single bold gestures.) Watercolor, on the other hand, is never black and white. Figures are never utterly distinct from their backgrounds or surrounding people or objects. Nor are Raffo's portrait subjects here.

The title comes from a seventh-century imam: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men." And it is these women's sexuality writ large that unifies them over borders, time, country, sect, and circumstance. In the painter's case, it is sexuality as lust and the freedom to lust. To be free to be with whom she wants, to be free of being taken by whom she doesn't, and perhaps most of all to be free of judgmental assumptions—Arab or Western, religious or secular urbane—about that freedom. She wishes to be free, also, of saintly expectations. "I'm a good artist," she says in her matter-of-factly cape-flinging, cosmopolitan way, "I'm an OK mother, I'm a miserable wife."

A cheerfully forthright Bedouin character's desires are more idealistic—to be with her one true love. And if, in so doing, she has to discard the last couple men she thought were her true loves, so be it.

The woman who gives us a tour of the shelter where more than 400 innocents died is, in this context, sexual in a more fundamentally biological and philosophical way. She gives her name only as the Mother of Tomorrow. Tomorrow was her daughter, one of the victims of the incineration. The dark overtones abound. For in her no-nonsense description of the tragedy, in her remembrance, she is the mother of tomorrow who sustains the images of an Iraqi life that could be sweet and normal, the kind of images that wars erase. But she's also the mother of tomorrow in that others, if not she, might also harbor the bitter resentments that could lead to tomorrow's escalations and retaliations.

My quibbles with the script: One might wish a little less contrivance in the 'N Sync-dancing teen's discovery of her disappeared father's journals, or a little more clarity in the distinctions between the older Baghdad women.

But forgive me as I gush a little about Raffo's talents as an actress.

As that same Justin Timberlake-smitten teen, she evinces a lively girlishness even as the school-deprived character describes her heartbreaking education in the sounds made by different weapons from America and Russia. As a doctor bemoaning the number of deformed babies being born (apparently because of remnants of depleted-uranium weapons) and her legless husband at home, Raffo cuts our consciences to the quick. Contrasting Iraqi healthcare in its heyday to its state now, the doctor says, "What are we now? We're the experiment."

Depicting the Bedouin woman, Raffo's high, quavering voice, heavy posture, and beckoning conversational hand gestures made me think of a young Streep, and "a young Streep" is a phrase I weigh like precious metal. How Raffo has kept up these performances year after year is a gripping mystery in itself—you worry for her even as you applaud for her. Though it doesn't sound, from an excellent profile in today's Post, like that's where she's headed, I can only wish Raffo a long rest around Thanksgiving followed by a dipsy role in a light living-room comedy.

Settle's direction wisely relaxes into the rich moments, and with the virtuoso immediacy of lighting designer Peter West and sound designer Obadiah Eaves, tears through the transitions like the breathlessly turned pages of a quality graphic novel or the scene-change "wipe" of a film. Antje Ellermann's set is authentically artful and artfully authentic, using water, distressed tiled floors, scaffolding, battered and broken soot-bordered walls, sandbags, and rugs to mirror a variety of physical and psychic locales. Kasia Walicka Maimone's layered costumes enable Raffo to grow and shed her textile skins with the necessary alacrity and character conviction.

Whatever most of us Americans create with our freedom, Raffo has created a stunning piece of art with hers. I can only imagine the D.C. run will add to her list of awards and nominations. When the applause dies down, though, will we take all from Nine Parts of Desire that we've been given? The painter character says of America and Americans—with equal parts satisfaction and pity—"We have you chained to the desert." Will we become wiser there—it happens sometimes in books, after all—or merely more dizzy and desperate?

Photo by Irene Young, courtesy of Arena Stage

STAGE: Lost in Translation

The Foreigner
By Larry Shue
Directed by Stewart F. Lane
Olney Theatre Center
Through Oct. 22

By Alexander C. Kafka

Enter the theater for The Foreigner and you'll pass a sign warning that the production involves fog and haze. Does it ever! And that's aside from the effects. The plot's built on fog and haze, and so's the development, and so's the outcome.

Two Englishmen, an amiable military explosives expert named Froggy (Field Blauvelt) and his shy friend Charlie (JJ Kaczynski) come to a fishing lodge in the rural Georgia outpost of Tilghman County. Froggy's in the area on business and has lodging elsewhere, and he's brought Charlie along, supposedly as a research assistant, but really just to give the poor bloke a break from his dire straits at home—his wife is fatally ill yet has urged him (however unselfishly) to take some time for himself. Charlie, who is socially awkward even under familiar circumstances, wants to be left entirely to himself during his stay at the lodge. Froggy arranges this, in a somewhat improvisational manner, by explaining to his pal, the lodge's owner Betty Meeks (Rusty Clauss), that Charlie is a foreigner, but Froggy gives no specifics, hinting that they're top-secret.

Betty, who is getting on in years, hasn't traveled, and is feeling down and not a little provincial, is thrilled by the guest's exoticism. She explains Charlie's linguistic innocence to the ex-debutante Catherine Simms (Lindsay Haynes); to her beau, the goodly Rev. David Marshall Lee (Clinton Brandhagen); to Catherine's slow-witted brother, Ellard (Ben Shovlin); and to the malicious property inspector Owen Musser (Delaney Williams). Immersed in a stew of overheard confidences and intrigues involving family inheritances, municipal skulduggery, religious duplicity, and the Ku Klux Klan, Charlie finds himself at first helpless, then drawn, to make sense of and influence them, acquiring, as he puts it, a personality in the process, and a new pseudo-Slavic language in which gok means yes and blit means no.

This sounds like rich ingredients for an irresistible farce, and nothing would please me more than to report that it is—but it isn't. Shue, a playwright and actor, died in 1985 at age 39 in a plane crash in the Shenandoah Valley, and I wish I could say that he'd left us with a comic gem. If he did, The Foreigner isn't it. That's not to say that it's awful—it's certainly not that either. Its wit hovers at a couple clicks above quality sitcom, and as a habitue of quality sitcoms I don't shrug that off. Whether it merits the undoubtedly handsome, conscientious treatment Olney is giving it under the direction of Broadway veteran Stewart F. Lane, not to mention audiences' time and money, is another question—and one I'm hesitant to answer. When The Foreigner played off-Broadway in 1984, critics were unenthusiastic but viewers gung-ho, enough for a 685-performance run.

It's not too hard to see how that split might have occurred. The Foreigner plays with timeless notions of the innocent, frolics in the seas of constructed language and quick, head-spinning absurdities, and downplays the threats of racism and religious radicalism in a manner that must have been winning in the Moral Majority days of Reagan's first term and that remains pertinent if not fresh. I associate its dramatic tool kit with the British—I'm thinking of Stoppard's Jumpers and Frayn's Noises Off, among other works—and maybe it's telling that it's two Brits that come to Georgia, even though Shue was inspired to write the play by experiences he'd had in Japan. That The Foreigner Osterizes these exotic motifs into a palatable American smoothie might explain why audiences found it accessible but refreshing. That its wit is pretty pallid in comparison to the British imports they were seeing could shed light on critics' coolness. Just a theory.

Beyond—or maybe short of—all that, I'd add the reservations that the work's setup is torturously forced, and that its comedy and menace blend poorly. Would that Klan members and their ilk were as easily freaked out as here, and that xenophobia were so quickly identified, quarantined, and treated.

For all that, I can't imagine a more amiable and sturdy production of the play than this one. The ensemble work is tight, the timing snappy, the tensions roiling. Blauvelt's Froggy is all have a glass on me and Bob's your uncle. Clauss's Meeks is fragile but tough, and pleasantly pixilated. Haynes's Catherine levels her loneliness and disenchantments at us like an air gun. Shovlin, as Ellard, is mighty sympathetic as the innocent's innocent to Kaczynski's Charlie. (They have a fun monkey-see, monkey-do table-manners scene.) Williams's Owen is like the lost scary Georgia cracker brother of George Wendt's Norm in Cheers. And Brandhagen's too-good-to-be-true Reverend is just that, and dives from saintly to snakey in good form. Kaczynski's Charlie, in the center of the real and figurative storms, is also fun. His pseudo-Slavic tongue, with bits of Italian and even a classic French film title thrown in for good measure, sounds, as he "acquires" his English, a bit like Baryshnikov on speed. In general, though, the cast's accents seemed a little Acme thick and sometimes roamed (like when Brandhagen got upset).

James Kronzer's lodge set is grand, and technical director Sean Culligan's storms and explosions also top-notch.

And yet that's a lot of firepower for a few chuckles. So can I recommend it? Blit. Should you seek further counsel beyond the critical agonizing? Quite possibly, gok.


Photos by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center. TOP: JJ Kaczynski as Charlie, Ben Shovlin as Ellard, Field Blauvelt as Froggy, Rusty Clauss as Betty, and Lindsay Haynes as Catherine. LOWER: Delaney Williams (top) as Owen and JJ Kaczynski as Charlie.

STAGE: Naughty and Nice

Cabaret
Book by Joe Masteroff
Based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
Music by John Kander
Lyrics by Fred Ebb
Directed by Molly Smith
Arena Stage
Through Oct. 29

In polite society, one doesn’t discuss sex, politics, or religion. Cabaret is not polite society, thank heavens, more the id to The Sound of Music’s superego, and Arena stage delights in its dour decadence in a wonderfully sensuous, politically charged production featuring a superb cast.

American journalist Clifford Bradshaw (Glenn Seven Allen) arrives in Berlin in the early 1930’s. On the train, he meets the mysterious Ernst Ludwig (J. Fred Shiffman), who—with Cliff’s help—plays keep-away from the customs officer with a briefcase Ernst later explains to Cliff contains funds smuggled from Paris for a worthy cause. In gratitude, Ernst introduces Cliff to Freulein Schneider (Dorothy Stanley), who rents him a room in her boarding house. Ernst also brings Cliff on New Year’s Eve to the Kit Kat Club, the hottest cabaret in town, where he encounters the club’s star—and free-spirited force of nature—Sally Bowles (Meg Gillentine), who is English in Joe Masteroff’s script but American in this rendition. A subplot involves Fraulein Schneider’s on-and-off romance with, and brief engagement to, the kind Jewish grocer Herr Schultz (Walter Charles). The prostitute Fraulein Kost (Sherri L. Edelen) and her steady stream of sailor clients provide for some running gags, but her friction with Fraulein Schneider soon takes on a more sinister cast, as does Herr Ludwig’s secretive political activities.

All this revolves around—and is reflected in—the riotous and raunchy numbers performed at the Kit Kat, showcasing not just Sally and a cadre of scantily clad chorus girls, boys, and yet to be determined, but the boisterous Master of Ceremonies (Brad Oscar).

In such an iconic show, an unfair but inevitable test is whether performances measure up to or bypass the memory of star turns like those of Liza Minelli and Joel Grey in the 1972 Bob Fosse film version—or, for Broadway denizens, perhaps, Natasha Richardson and Alan Cumming in the recent 1998 Tony-winning revival. The principals director Molly Smith has assembled here pass with flying colors. Better yet, they pass the hard way, not by trying to out-Liza Liza or out-Joel Joel, but by making the roles quite their own.


Allen’s Cliff conveys a wide-eyed awe frothed with a coy delight at the Kit Kat’s sexual anarchy and Sally’s omnivorous, though jaded, energy. His Dudley Do-Right looks and casually confident singing complete the endearing portrayal. Brad Oscar, from his first fiery moments, sidesteps Joel Gray’s seductive slither, and adapts the Emcee role to his own more boisterous, vivacious bearing, not to mention the kind of huge singing and speaking voice that would serve well to organize a crowd in the event of an emergency.

And Gillentine doesn’t bother with the hungry-eyed Liza schtick, fab as that was for Liza herself. Gillentine’s Sally is more sad, soused, seductive girl next door gone astringently astray. Yes, beneath her reckless promiscuity she does have a heart of gold, but it’s lax, laden, and saturated like an old olive in a glass of gin. It’s not that she’s only alive, as the maudlin cliché goes, on the stage. She’s alive and kind, in her unerringly manipulative way, most of the time. But in Gillentine’s interpretation, Sally’s only happy on the stage, never mind Cliff’s nasty knocks on her career—and we’re pretty damn happy, too, when she’s up there. Not only is Gillentine a superb singer—controlled while not distractingly mannered, rawly emotional without distorting her numbers’ shape and momentum—she also moves with a delectable abandon. She is, no doubt, sexy and knows what to thrust where and how to shake when. But it’s more than that. Her shoulders and back speak their own languid language of unrequited longings, ambling ambitions, and unspeakable pleasures, both captured and imagined.

Dorothy Stanley and Walter Charles bring a lovely, brittle tenderness to their tentative world-embattled romance. And filling out the cast are the fine ensemble players who bring snappy, surreal life to antic showstoppers like the manic “Money Song” and wistful lyricism to their bittersweet turnabout on the Nazi “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

George Fulginiti-Shakar’s music direction and the Kit Kat band are marvelous. Their timing is unobtrusively Velcroed to the singer’s phrasing, and their tone ranges fetchingly from circus crisp to reedy tender. Anne Patterson has devised a clever minimalistic set enhanced by elevating platforms. The opening curtain and industrial-strength all-purpose “piano” are ingenious touches. Austin Sanderson’s sensational costuming is smart flapper casual, with bursts of outré haute for the club production numbers. And David Neumann’s innovative choreography shines in “The Money Song,” “If You Could See Her,” and “Cabaret.” I’d like to have seen more tight and contrasted lighting from designer Joel Moritz to help intensify, particularly, the love scenes and the framing episodes on the train. And about that train—you’ll see what I mean—I have mixed feelings about a technical gimmick that’s sort of fun initially, but also unintentionally and weirdly belittling at a crucial moment later on.

More broadly, while Smith’s direction is sure-handed and the pace brisk without veering—as it well could—into mindlessly frenetic, her political underscoring, not just on stage but in the entrance hall and the program notes, is a little much. She’s careful to write in her notes that Bush does not equal Hitler nor do his minions equal the Nazis. But the production pretty much says he does and they do. OK, so the shoe search on the train might just be au courant, but those passing Abu Ghraib photo references when Cliff is beat up are just plain heavy-handed. It’s not a question of whether or not one agrees with her viewpoint, but whether the material should be trusted to speak for itself—and it should.


On the other hand, while slinky outfits and raucous tunes are the face and voice of this show, politics surely comprise its heart. Because of Cliff’s sexual, Sally’s relational, and Fraulein Schneider’s political ambivalence, there is no traditional love story to Cabaret, never mind hesitant odes to romance and domesticity like “Perfectly Marvelous” and “Why Should I Wake Up?” and “Maybe This Time.” The show’s real love story is about the love for political, sexual, emotional, and artistic freedoms, and it’s a compelling one that Smith was wise to schedule at this delicate ideological moment.

Any doubt as to its timeliness was quickly dispelled on my ride home. On the radio, Bill Frist was explaining why—even against the judgment of stalwart conservatives in his own party—he wanted to bolster Bush’s tweaks to the Geneva Conventions to ensure that American methods of torture adhere to the letter of at least someone’s laws.

Food for thought, old chum.

-A.C.K.

Photos, by Scott Suchman, courtesy of Arena Stage:
1. (From left to right) Erica Sweany, Julie Burdick, Deanna Harris, Lynn McNutt, Meg Gillentine, Monique L. Midgette, and Hillary Heather Elliott
2. Brad Oscar
3. Glenn Seven Allen and Meg Gillentine
4. Dorothy Stanley and Walter Charles

STAGE: Slipping Away

Christopher Lane as Neil, and MaryBeth Wise as Jennifer in 'In the Mood.' Photo by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center.

In the Mood
By Irene Wurtzel
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through September 24



By Alexander C. Kafka

The D.C. artist Jennifer Workman’s career is taking off. The Phillips is going to feature her work in a show of “Contemporary Women Artists” and interview her in an accompanying symposium. She’s afraid, though, to revel too much in what should be a delicious moment because her husband, Neil, has a way of losing control during delicious moments. Jennifer, he chides, is becoming increasingly like her Aunt Julia, who used to dampen every celebratory occasion with a wary, superstitious two spits. And it’s true, Jennifer fears “too much happiness.” “There is,” says Neil, chilling the champagne, “no such thing.”

Yet, of course, there is, and that is the subject of Irene Wurtzel’s insightful and stirring new play, In the Mood, in its world premiere at Olney Theatre Center's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab. Neil has had bouts with too much happiness for years. A charismatic undersecretary of state for democracy, his visionary euphoria can be constructively contagious when drafting his brilliant and exhaustive briefing papers and cajoling egotistical statesmen into delicate and time-sensitive negotiations. It can also explode into near-messianic grandiosity, with all its accompanying intellectual distortions and horrid insensitivities. His situation has a name: bipolar disorder. And Wurtzel’s drama is at its best when tracing the fine line between the fickle power of mania and the Beltway’s equally fickle mania of power. Also clever is the way the playwright reverses the stereotype of the crazy artist coddled by the sensible, worldly mainstays in her life. After all, Washington's full of unhinged visionaries, and few of them are represented by galleries.

As the booster rockets ignite on Jennifer’s career, Neil is coming off the high of a visit to an unnamed African nation shaking off the bonds of tyranny, a visit that he decides to extend by two weeks incommunicado from his boss Charles, a paternally indulgent but increasingly worried secretary of state who has brought Neil into the corridors of power from Neil’s less glamorous but stable and productive teaching position at the University of Michigan. Neil, we gather from their chats, counterbalances the older Charles’s careful diplomacy with his youthful, idealistic energy and big-picture worldview. But in manic mode, Neil crosses a line, insulting what he sees as his boss’s insufficiently lofty ambitions for his term in office.

Effectively grounded by Charles, who takes understandable umbrage but, more important, can’t trust his loose-cannon right hand to keep national priorities and policies in focus, Neil spins to the other pole of his bipolarity. He hunkers down at home, repeatedly views a football game with its resurrection of a sacked running back, resumes his smoking habit, and is unable to get himself to leave the house to accompany his wife to an important opening. “Neil, you’re slipping away from me,” she says, “…and it’s scaring the hell out of me.” Aggravating the situation is a visit from Neil's mother from L.A., Clara, who's ready for some quality time with the apple of her eye and his wife, on whom she also dotes. Instead, she finds him distant, muted, and rude, asking unenthusiastically how long she plans to stay. Leaving her to her own devices, he says dispiritedly, “Enjoy Washington, Mother. There are those who do.”

Jennifer prods her husband into seeing a shrink, who prescribes meds that keep him from the despondent depths and the orbital heights of an illness Neil is still loathe to admit he has. The pills are supposed to keep him, in the doctor’s words, “blissful and ordinary.” But to Neil, bliss and ordinariness are a despondent depth all their own, never mind the side effects—sexual dysfunction, frequent urination, insomnia. He’s become a zombie and hints unsubtly of offing himself with sleeping pills. His diplomatic skills are intact enough to persuade Jennifer to let him go off the meds. “I love you,” he tells her. “You are the only thing that is right in my life.” She confesses that she too, “wanted him to be alive and alert and a little manic.” After all, this was the man who gave her the courage to quit a job teaching math and to make art more than a weekend undertaking. She lets him abandon the medication, under the condition that they use that date, January 5, as a code for her to signal to him if he’s losing control.

He quickly returns to his old best self, confident, competent, and masterful as an executive and as a husband—if, that is, you don’t make too much of that third glass of champagne he’s slurping down, his quickly accelerating speech, and that sort of thing. Charles finds that he has a heart ailment that requires immediate surgery and gradual recovery, and sounds out Neil and Jennifer on Neil’s fitness to represent Charles at a Mideast summit. Jennifer, though worried, vouches for her husband. It is, she confides to us, “a simple choice between the good of the country and my marriage”—the kind of statement that might sound more melodramatic if you didn’t live in Washington, where such personal forks in the road are encountered by one hapless couple or another just about hourly.

The summit goes well—suspiciously well, both benefiting from and spurring a meltdown on Neil’s part. As he tries to follow up on the progress stateside, Jennifer prepares for a key show in New York. Suffice to say that worlds will collide, and finances, marriage, generational ties, and more are at risk. Whatever an undersecretary is supposed to look like, it’s probably not stalking around his wife’s studio, wielding a hammer and spitting out predictions like “You and I shall probably have a conversation about enlightened sexual behavior.”

Christopher Lane is excellent as Neil, coming off his manic Norwegian energy as Stockmann in Olney’s recent Enemy of the People into his preppier present-day manic incarnation. Lane’s talents are well-suited to Neil’s changes not just from mania to depression, but to those within the manic channels of domestic Casanova, office superhero, condescendingly bullying father, dismissive son, and manipulative whip-cracking boss. And he’s handsome enough, in a smart way, to be plausible as a rising political star and sometime squash partner to the president.

MaryBeth Wise recently excelled in another intelligent and emotionally demanding persona in Round House’s Midwives. Here again she wows us with her wise and wrenching depiction of Jenny, as Neil, Charles, Clara, and Jenny herself all look to her to save a man on the edge of abyss, while also protecting her family and the integrity of her own artistic career.

Leo Erickson is wonderful in the key role of Charles, whose urbanity, humanity, and classic political skills we must believe in for his character to work as the fulcrum between Neil’s personal and professional prospects. We must feel what’s at stake as he gambles that Neil can keep himself in check, and we do indeed believe in his belief in his protégé, even as we squirm at the prospective downside.

Halo Wines excels in the poignant role of Clara, who at first appears a somewhat nebishy stage mom to her darling Washington star Neil, but quickly unfolds as a complex, loving, and long-suffering strongwoman of a sort seen all too often in the families of the mentally ill. Her oblivious denial of her son’s condition—and of her late husband’s—is both tragic and a little heroic. Wines and Tim Spears, as Neil and Jennifer’s college son, Josh, have a sweet connection in their scenes together. And Wurtzel’s dialogue here, as so often throughout the script, is admirably nuanced in the way it alternately targets and swerves around the difficult topics at hand. Spears also holds his own, within the dramatic context and against the practiced dynamism of Lane as an actor, in their confrontational father-son scenes. Therese Barbato makes the most of her small role as Neil’s assistant, embodying the ubiquitous attractive D.C. gatekeeper who can, in the same instant, flatter you and shut you out.

Milagros Ponce de Leon has created a fabulous set—a brick-walled studio with metal balconies and circle-within-circle high windows that resonate visually and psychologically as third-world town square, D.C. jail, and Jennifer's prison of bittersweet memory. Director Jim Petosa, who helped Wurtzel develop the script, has a great feel for its optimum pacing, its prickly pauses, its stops for bewildered breath. With the help of lighting designer Donald Edmund Thomas, unfolding event, flashback, and aside are almost always quickly distinguishable.

As I head to the polls Tuesday, In the Mood will come with me, making me wonder what scenarios are hidden behind the campaign placards and photo-op smiles. I’ll be thinking, admiringly, of Doug Duncan’s candor and wisdom in looking to his health. I’ll be remembering the disheartening headlines about Vince Foster, Sol Wachtler, and about so many other brave, struggling, strong and fragile people in our public and private capital lives.

Along with the appropriate perspective and, if necessary, pills, a night at the theater might be therapeutic for so many stressed out Washingtonians. Perhaps they'll then pause and ponder multiple meanings if their loved ones one day tell them, a little too enthusiastically, “Everything is breaking our way.”

STAGE: A Powerful 'Enemy'

An Enemy of the People
By Henrik Ibsen
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through Aug. 27

Christopher Lane, Jeffries Thaiss, and Tim Getman

By Alexander C. Kafka

“You have an inveterate tendency to go your own way,” says Peter Stockman, the mayor of a small coastal Norwegian town to his physician brother, Thomas, early on in An Enemy of the People. “… Someday you’re going to pay for it.”

Someday soon, it turns out, in this classic dissection of righteousness amid parochial hypocrisy and treachery. The town’s on the verge of becoming a tourist center, thanks to its new spa baths, and Thomas has unfortunately discovered that the water system is full of “reeking waste from the mill,” a veritable breeding ground for gastritis- and typhoid- generating bacteria.

The way the townsfolk treat him and this information still makes, in this centennial year of Ibsen’s death, for powerful drama, particularly in the masterful hands of this committed troupe and its director, Jim Petosa.

It’s a timeless play but an unsentimental one, and as complicated politically as it is dramatically. For Thomas, though heroic, is also a megalomaniac, and becomes elitist and not a little unhinged. He starts off terribly naïve, figuring that once he presents his irrefutable evidence of the pollution, the town will simply “see things right” and re-lay the whole water system higher up. He counts on the backing of Hovstad, publisher of The Courier, the local newspaper, a muckraker who decides the polluted baths are the perfect wedge issue with which to overthrow the town’s establishment. “A journalist of my radicalist leanings can’t let an opportunity like this pass by,” Hovstad explains cunningly to Thomas.

Thomas also counts on the support of Aslaksen, the printer and leader of the local small businessmen. Though moderate in approach, he is nonetheless keen to see the bath problem fixed to secure the long-term prosperity of the merchant class.

Thomas also enjoys the warm encouragement of his wife, Katherine, daughter, Petra, and sons, Morten and Ejlif.

“It’ll all go smoothly,” he assures Hovstad. “We’ll see,” says the latter, his nose crinkling condescendingly.

Of course, instead, it all goes to hell. Peter, whose relations with his brother are obviously strained to begin with, threatens Thomas, who, as the bath corporation’s physician, technically answers to Peter as the corporation’s head. The consummate two-faced machine pol, Peter explains that re-laying the water system would take two years and cost “several hundred thousand crowns.” Bath-caused illnesses can be quietly seen to by Thomas, he implies, adding that this stance is “for the good of the town,” rather than to save his own reputation as leader of the spa's construction.

Thomas has right on his side. But getting back at his bullying brother would feel good too. And his righteous indignation—“I want the opportunity to look my boys in the eye,” he says sympathetically—soon turns to a less healthy kind of feverish martyrdom. Once he’s decided to fight the powers that be, he’s discouraging Hovstad from allowing the townspeople to organize a parade in his honor and equating himself, literally, with truth. “Whatever I do will be in the name of truth,” he declares. He also starts equating all his foes with the invisible filth of the waters, prescribing that “it is the whole society that has to be purged and disinfected.”

Sadly, once Peter explains to Aslaksen the trouncing that local commerce would take were the water system to be redone, Aslaksen, who’s already articulated his fear of going up against local authorities, turns into a veritable Norwegian Grover Norquist. Seeing which way the wind’s blowing, Hovstad, too, deserts Thomas, as does Hovstad’s exuberant right hand, Billing, a would-be Marxist who also has one eye on a cozy little position in the town clerk’s office. Soon, Thomas, so recently the man of the hour, is an utter outcast, his family too paying a terrible price for his singleminded quest to do the right thing. Not only does Thomas lose his job, but so does daughter Petra, a teacher, and their one staunch ally, Captain Horster. Thomas loses his house lease too. All this, it’s repeatedly said, not because their employers and landlord and friends really think ill of them, mind you, but because these decent folk “don’t dare not to” ostracize Dr. Stockmann and his family.

One only needs to read the headlines to see that this is heady and timely stuff—thus its inclusion in Olney’s summer Potomac Theatre Festival, which emphasizes classic scripts with contemporary resonance. It’s also a hellishly demanding role for Thomas—the thespian equivalent of an endurance sport—and Christopher Lane is superb in it. He inhabits Thomas’s being right down to his vocal hem-and-haw ticks and burns through the character’s enormous tirades without losing his momentum or his focus (or his voice, even though it seemed Lane was fighting a nasty cold and hoarseness Tuesday night).

Jeffries Thaiss as Hovstad is also top-notch. “Lay snares for your readers?” says Petra to Hovstad in reference to some subpar romantic fiction he wants to publish as sugar to make the medicine of his radical political content go down a little more smoothly. “You’re not a spider,” she tells him. Oh, but he is, and both she and her father are caught in his silky but ungiving web. The character’s every creepy calculation glints from Thaiss’s lively eyes. James Slaughter is a frighteningly convincing Peter, too. There’s something so square and cocksure about him that you know he’s crooked and desperate to his civic-minded bones.

Other standouts are Kip Pierson as Billing, who practically jumps out of his skin in anticipation of either violent revolution or that tidy civil-service job, whichever comes first; and Tim Getman as Aslaksen, as decent-seeming and completely untrustworthy as any shady chamber-of-commerce president you’d ever run into. Richard Pilcher, as Thomas’s father-in-law, is a little over the top, but in a welcome way given the play’s oh-so-sober context. He has fine comic timing and, in his stage-aged cackle, a real way with lines like, “Make monkeys out of them, I say.” Julie-Ann Elliott and Lindsey Haynes, as Katherine and Petra, have thankless peripheral roles, but carry them off with sweetness and dignity, and a hint of feminist indignation that nicely suits Ibsen’s views and this production.

James Kronzer’s clever set combines grand, oversized wooden doorways with screens that serve as abstract wallpaper or newspaper headlines, depending how they’re back- and floor-lit by Daniel MacLean Wagner. Costume designer Howard Vincent Kurtz and costumiere Jeanne Bland have handsomely outfitted their charges with fine period suits, coats, dresses, and work clothes.

This isn’t fun date-night kind of entertainment. Enemy is brilliant, but it’s also hectoring, and smug, like its protagonist. For all that, it’s too relevant to the big lies of, yes, ours but also every other era. It should be seen and mulled over and discussed, and its insights taken deeply to heart.

Why? Because we don’t dare not to.

STAGE: The Peanuts Gang, Dazed and Confused

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
By Bert V. Royal
Directed by Keith Alan Baker
Studio Theatre's 2nd Stage
Through Aug. 6, 2006

James Manno as CB

By Alexander C. Kafka

Hard times have fallen on Charlie Brown's old gang. His pen pal hasn't written back in years. Sally's gone goth—Wiccan, to be more precise. Linus, traumatized when CB and Lucy burned his blanket, has turned into a stoner. Pigpen's cleaned up his act, but at the expense of becoming an obsessive-compulsive, glue-sniffing, homophobic jock. Schroeder's a terrified, bullied recluse who, it seems, was abused by his now-jailed dad. Lucy is in the loony bin because of an unfortunate incident involving fire and the Little Redheaded Girl. Peppermint Patty and Marcie spike their lunch milk cartons with booze, and there are bitchy insinuations that Frieda is a bulimic Jesus freak.

Good grief, Charlie Brown! We’re in high school.

That’s the hideous and hilarious premise of Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God. But, alas, despite an appealing cast, it works better as a campy thought experiment than it does as theater.

The obscure title refers to a line from Schroeder, who like all the characters, has had his name tweaked (in his case, to Beethoven), no doubt for legal reasons. “They say a dog sees God in his master,” Schroeder tells CB while attempting to console him about the recent death of his beloved beagle. Yes, that’s right. Snoopy’s been put to sleep after contracting rabies and eating Woodstock. And CB, understandably, is in a pretty morbid state of mind.

Linus (or Van, in this show), tries to console CB with his rambling Buddhist-inspired explanation of why nothingness is preferable to reincarnation. That might explain, too, why he recently smoked his burnt blanket. “We all handle grief in different ways,” he muses.

Pigpen, now called Matt, sees the expression of grief primarily as a way to trick girls into having sex with him.

Sally (CB’s Sister) thinks CB’s embarrassing—the way he invited all their friends to Snoopy’s burial. (None of them came, needless to say.) She might miss the pooch, but she’s got other things on her mind, like her one-woman performance-art show (which she’s worked up in her one-woman drama club). It’s called Cocooning Into Platypus.

Fruitlessly taking his friends’ readings on the meaning of death, and in passing recalling the simpler, if not easier, days of their youth, CB makes other key adolescent discoveries too. At some point around the hot-tubbing during an ecstasy party at Marcie’s house, that shakes the whole gang’s world.

James Manno is a sympathetic CB. He looks constantly a little bewildered and terrified—as if A.J. Soprano wandered into A Charlie Brown Christmas. James Gardiner, as Schroeder a.k.a. Beethoven, is wonderful in his sinewy, palpable fright and suppressed eagerness to connect. You suspect he’ll either go on a headline-making rampage or become David Byrne. Lauren Williams stands out as the Sally figure, her cocooning both in and out of drama club palpable in her every hormone-pumped, excitable, neck-craning syllable. Evan Casey makes Linus—er, Van—a sort of philosopher in early-90s Matthew McConaughey mode. (His buzzed rant on the illogic of cafeterias’ Mexican pizza is a hoot.) And Regina Aquino is memorable in her brief appearance as Lucy all grown—and grown psycho—still playing major head games with her pal CB when he goes to visit her in the institution.

But the drama’s pacing is scraggly, and its multi-rectangled Stage 4 set, while geometrically apt for a neo-comic book tale, is too sprawling to give us a sense of intimacy with these troubled folk.
The real problem, though, is a mediocre script that doesn’t live up to its clever initial concept. It takes some gawky, polemical turns. But worse, it doesn’t persuasively connect these characters with the Peanuts gang they were, nor does it flesh them out enough to be interesting personalities in themselves. Adolescence may be a kind of limbo—but not that kind.

Nonetheless, there’s a real emotional spark now and then, particularly toward the end. “I never wanted to feel this much,” CB and his sis intone in unison. But then Charlie Brown always was the sensitive type.

Maybe he thought if he could just be normal enough, he’d outgrow that sensitivity. For all its faults, Dog Sees God makes you glad he hasn’t, and gives the rest of us hope that we too might buck against our story frames and someday reach each other with our sad, lonely little speech bubbles.

Photo by Scott Suchman, courtesy of Studio Theatre