Christopher Henley and Brian Hemmingsen.
Allow myself to quote myself: Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land is a 38-year-old Rubik’s Cube covered in Rorschach blots, a confounding examination of memory and masculinity that resists easy interpretation like an Aikido master shrugging off an unwanted bear hug. I wrestle with that bear — er, WSC Avant Bard’s production of that bear-hug-avoiding Aikido master of a play, that is — in this week’s Washington City Paper.
Posted in theatre
Tagged Brian Hemmingsen, Christopher Henley, Harold Pinter, Tom Prewitt, WSC Avant Bard
Louis Butelli as Feste in Folger’s TWELFTH NIGHT. Photo by Scott Suchman.
No, Elvis Costello has not embarked upon a mandolin tour with Steve Nieve. That’s Louis Butelli, whose performance as Feste is one of the highlights of the Folger Theatre’s new production of Twelfth Night, which I review in today’s Washington City Paper along with Taffety Punk’s spooky The Golem. Grab yourself a copy wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.
To paraphrase the leader of the free world, let me be clear: I liked Theater J’s premiere of Artistic Director Ari Roth’s long-gestating, heavily autobiographical play, Andy and the Shadows. I liked it a lot. It’s too long, its references too scattered and too many, and at the end you feel like you’ve spent your time in the company of a hyperactive (if uncommonly sensitive and articulate) 19-year-old who just will not stop talking, ever. But these are good problems to have. Overreach is better than undereach. And the cast is just tremendous.
The play, as I note, has been around in some form since nearly a decade prior to the publication of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity in 1995, which means it almost certainly also predates Stephen Frears’ Y2K film version of the book.
Nevertheless, the play’s likeness to the movie is sort of uncanny.
My review of the play in today’s Washington City Paper lays out the evidence. Any resemblance to fictional persons, living or dead, is accidental. Continue reading
Larry Bull & Jordan Baker in the Humana Festival production of “Appropriate.” Woolly Mammoth’s production of the play will open in November.
When it was founded in 1976, The Humana Festival of New American Plays was unique: It was a centralized showcase of new work from playwrights around the country. Decades later, new play development is no longer consolidated in a single spot, but the festival continues to a enjoy a reputation as a major platform for plays their authors hope will ripple out to stages of every size in the years to come.
I’d never been to Humana, so I was excited by an invitation to Louisville to cover the festival’s closing “industry weekend” with 11 other journalists from around the country, including my pal Michael Phillips, as part of a “pop-up newsroom” called Engine 31. This year’s six-play lineup was the first curated by Obie Award-winning British director Les Waters, who has earned a reputation as a midwife for important new plays by directing premieres from heavy hitters like Sarah Ruhl, Caryl Churchill, and Anne Washburn. The slate Waters programmed featured six new plays. Of the four that I saw, three were sufficiently intriguing to make me want to revisit them. Continue reading
I review Mike Daisey’s new monologue, American Utopias, in today’s City Paper.
Also: VANITAS, the new show from Happenstance Theatre Company.
Posted in theatre
I’ve written about monologuist Mike Daisey a lot in the last four years, but especially last year, in the wake of damaging revelations about his show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
He and I met again at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, his performing home here in DC since 2008, last Friday to talk about his new piece, American Utopias, which I review in this week’s Washington City Paper. I’ve just posted an edited, partial transcript of that talk up on Arts Desk. Continue reading
Posted in theatre
Tagged interviews, Mike Daisey, Washington City Paper, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
The Broadway cast of “A Behanding in Spokane” in 2010: Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Zoe Kazan, Anthony Mackie.
In this week’s Washington City Paper, I review the local premiere of Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane and reminisce uncomfortably about the show’s 2010 Broadway debut, which I saw twice on my way to the realization that I don’t like the play very much. I also review Studio Theatre’s terrific production of Amy Herzog’s sublime 4,000 Miles. Read all about it.
Posted in theatre
Tagged Amy Herzog, Colin Smith, Grant Harrison, Joy Zinoman, Keegan Theatre, Mark A. Rhea, Martin McDonagh, Studio Theatre, Tana Hicken
This is why I never wanted to get a real job: Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glen Ross: The Motion Picture.”
No stage production of Glengarry Glen Ross feels complete to me without the speech David Mamet added for the movie version, eight years after his play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984. But Round House Theatre’s Mitchell Hebert-directed version is solid if not revelatory. Reviewed in today’s City Paper.
Richard Schiff and Randall Newsome, neither of whom are “Hughie.”
So I saw Hughie — Eugene O’Neill’s odd, sad little two-hander of a one-act — the other night, hoofed the not-quite-three miles back uptown from the Landsburgh Theatre to headquarters, and was still in by 10 p.m. But I don’t think it was a flush of gratitude for a play that takes only an hour that led me to like it so much. Reviewed for the Washington City Paper.
I reviewed Double Edge’s Theatre’s The Grand Parade (Of the 20th Century) at Arena Stage.
Posted in theatre, Uncategorized
Tagged Arena Stage, Double Edge Theatre, Marc Chagall, Stacy Klein, Washington City Paper
Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré talk hats.
Embarrassing admission: I didn’t realize until after I’d filed my review of Studio’s superb production of The Motherfucker with the Hat that its playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, is the selfsame motherfucker who wrote The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the best thing I saw on a DC stage in 2008.
Also reviewed: Spooky Action’s Kafka on the Shore, DC’s second Frank Galati-scripted stage adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story or novel in four months. This one is looser and more wobbly than the last one. Your mileage may vary. Continue reading
Posted in theatre
Tagged Drew Cortese, motherfuckers, Quentin Mare, Serge Seiden, Studio Theatre, Washington City Paper
Sara Dabney Tisdale and David Zimmerman play half-human half-siblings
There’s at least one good reason to see Rorschach Theatre’s co-world premiere production of Anna Ziegler’s The Minotaur: the eponymous beast his own surprisingly rational, philosophical, well-spoken self. I review the show in today’s Washington City Paper.
Posted in theatre
Tagged Anna Ziegler, David Zimmerman, Josh Sticklin, Randy Baker, Rorschach Theatre Company
In today’s City Paper, I shrug at the competence of Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s one-man, one-cellist take on Homer’s Iliad.
FOUND, in a box of unsorted crap: my ticket stub from a 2010 production of Our Town I saw that featured Michael Shannon, future star of my favorite movie of 2011, Take Shelter, as the Stage Manager. He plays a mean man on Boardwalk Empire (I’ve only seen the first few episodes of the first season), and he’s Superman’s Kryptonian nemesis General Zod in the upcoming Man of Steel. And yet I remember him as the kindly face and voice in what is perhaps the most avuncular and unthreatening role in all of theater. Continue reading
Georges Méliès’ “A Trip to the Moon,” 1902.
I was a big admirer of writer/director/illustrator Natsu Onoda Power‘s Astro Boy and the God of Comics at Studio Theatre earlier this year, and also of Martin Scorcese‘s 2011 film Hugo, which was in part about pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès. So I was excited to see Power’s new stage adaptation of Méliès’ most famous film, A Trip to the Moon – which I found promising but underdeveloped.
I review it in today’s Washington City Paper, along with a Faction of Fools’ A Commedia Christmas Carol.
Scot McKenzie and Brian Miskell.
Wherein I gradually fall under the under the slow-burning spell of Annie Baker’s The Aliens, the pausiest third of her Vermont Trilogy. I reviewed its other two-thirds already: Theater J’s production of Baker’s Body Awareness back in September, and Studio’s production of her Circle Mirror Transformation two years ago.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
Posted in theatre
Tagged Annie Baker, Brian Miskell, Scot McKenzie, The Studio Theatre, Washington City Paper
I reviewed the bio-musical Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie for the Washington City Paper.
Sheldon Best & Manny Brown in Studio's SUCKER PUNCH (Scott Suchman)
I did a follow-up to my Washington City Paper feature about the fight choreography in the Studio Theatre’s current U.S. premiere of Roy Williams’s boxing play Sucker Punch after the play had opened, and after the Washington Post had run their subsequent story on the same topic.
No time to blog, Dr. Jones; I gotta catch a bus up to New York to reconnect with my NEA theaterfolk.
But: Hey, remember that scene from 1992′s admittedly unmemorable Lethal Weapon 3, wherein Mel Gibson and Rene Russo’s two tough LAPD cops fore-play by comparing their battle scars? My review of Woolly’s Gruesome Playground Injuries, which develops that premise into a full-blown “unsentimental, nonlinear anti-romance” spanning 30 years, is right here.
And now I shall return to collaborating with G-Weld on the Broadway musical adaptation of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Happy Memorial Day, God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.
Holly Twyford and Jay Sullivan in Orestes: A Tragic Romp / copyright Carol Pratt/Folger Theatre
Poor Orestes! Ever since he and his sister Electra killed their mom on the orders of a god, he can’t get no relief. Matricide-avenging Furies subject him to violent fits of madness, like a heroin addict trying to cold-turkey, and only a likely sentence of death by stoning waits to end his torment.
But lo, his buddy Pylades has a plan.
Forget the fact that Euripides’s Orestes was first performed more than 2,400 years ago. Anne Washburn’s new “transadaptation,” cheekily subtitled A Tragic Romp and brought to incongruous life in director Aaron Posner’s kinetic new staging at the Folger Theatre, is one of the spriest entertainments in town. Powered by Jay Sullivan’s ashen, bloodshot turn in the title role, and spiked by frequent, floorboard-threatening musical numbers via a five-woman dance-team-as-Greek-chorus, it’s as tonally erratic as it is totally awesome. Continue reading
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