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By: Walter Ruff

Low Level Panic by Clare McIntyre, currently mounted at The Playbill Cafe by Open Circle Theatre, seeks to examine the rolls sex, pornography and personal identity play in women’s lives. Three young women (Jo, Mary and Celia) share not only a home, but also a bathroom, where they express their feelings about their lives, loves, dreams, and fantasies while preparing for an evening out.  

Examining how fantasy affects reality, Low Level Panic probes how we as a society view women and more importantly how we view women with disabilities. Not just an exercise in lip service, Suzanne Richard the Artistic Director of Open Circle Theatre seeks to help us understand that women with disabilities have all the same desires, feelings and emotions that women without disabilities have. Open Circle has succeeded in bringing overdue issues to the stage and the stage to everyone.

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By: Luke Edward

Much Ado About Nothing Nick Hutchison of Folger Shakespeare Library got it right. “[There is] a misconception that Beatrice and Benedick… meet wittily, argue wittily, fall in love wittily, and married wittily at the end. Such parity is not what Shakespeare presents on the stage.” In a Folger’s presentation of Much Ado About Nothing, it is Hutchison’s respect for the character’s of Benedick and Beatrice compounded with an understanding of “presentation” as a fundamental aspect of theatre (indeed, it is the very intention of any playwright) that results in Much Ado’s hilarity. Folger’s selection of a work encompassing perhaps the greatest battle of the sexes in the english language, appropriately set post war (in Hutchison’s vision, World War II) melds fittingly with a season entitled She Said/He Said. Much Ado About Nothing orbits a word war, a gender war, and the volatile mistrust Benedick (played to perfection by P. J. Sosko) and Beatrice (an astounding Kate Eastwood Norris) hold toward each other and the opposite sex at large. Amidst the humor of their quarrels, Dean Alai’s childish (and unfortunately forgettable) Claudio and Don Pedro (James Denvil), the noble leader of this military outfit, are decieved all too easily by the treacherous and devilish Don John (Jim Jorgenson), Pedro’s brother.

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Hapgood 

By: Walter Ruff

As Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart Again fades into the background WSC’s newest production Hapgood opens in the men’s changing rooms of a public swimming pool where a complex trade of top secret information is taking place. Briefcases slide under this door then that door so many times it takes quantum physics to explain it. The exchange goes bad and Hapgood (Kathleen Akerley) our heroine could be the spy to blame. Kerner (Bruce Alan Rauscher) is a Russian defector and double agent who is working on a Star Wars weapon based on quantum physics. After the botched exchange he can no longer be trusted so the Russians kidnap Hapgood’s son (Brandon Thane Wilson) and hold him for the obvious ransom. It will take a savvy plan, some cloak and dagger antics and big chrome hand guns to ensure his safe return.

The story is rather dated — a Cold War play in a post-Cold War world. It is challenging for us to recall the “Evil Empire” as it was during the early 80’s. Good stories though, stand the test of time and this one has stood up quite well. Multiple plot twists, double and triple agents, kidnappings, twins and more twins, quantum physics, love affairs and anti-matter all make their way into this cold war spy thriller by Tom Stoppard. Clever plot twists keep us guessing and quantum principles help explain (or jumble) them.

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By: Walter Ruff

James Lee Burke wrote: “New Orleans isn’t a city. It’s a Petrarchan sonnet. There’s no other place on the planet like it. I think it was sawed loose from South America and blown by trade winds across the Caribbean until it affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States. Every antithetical element in the New and Old Worlds somehow found a home in New Orleans. For a writer, the city was a gift from God.”

While I am not so sure I would label Keegan’s mounting of A Streetcar Named Desire a gift from God it is the closest thing to Jax Beer and Po Boy sandwiches in DC. Blanche, Stella and Stanley come alive at Church Street, you can feel the sweat, hear the jazz horns and feel the tension in the back of your neck just as if you knew these depressing and angry but colorful characters created by Tennessee Williams. Heartbreak and desire usually go well together and as you well know this oft-produced play has plenty of both.

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By: Walter Ruff

MisterMan is forty five minutes of Dan Brick and that alone is enough reason for anyone to see this one man show at DCAC.  Mr. Brick is able to take command of an audience with great skill. His has an ability to bring a smile to your face while knowing full well that his character should be bringing fear to your heart instead.  Boyish grins, wide, brilliant shining eyes, Dan pulls you into his character Thomas McGill and once you are comfortable with him lets you in on the little secret that he is keeping – Thomas is mad!.  He also has a goal — he wants to share God with his fellow townspeople.  Aided by just a radio, Thomas walks you through his small town in Ireland to meet some interesting characters – he even lets you know his intimate feelings for a newly found love interest.  But then there is that pesky secret, you see…  Thomas is a bit violent and when his female interest spurns his advances Thomas gets more than a bit out of sorts.   (more…)

By: Walter Ruff

When Will Shakspere’s wife (Valerie Fenton) exclaims that it really doesn’t matter who wrote Shakespeare’s plays we really have the essence of The Beard Of Avon.  It is the love of theatre and how that love propels the artistic process that is really important.  This mounting of Amy Feed’s whodunit comedy, while done on a budget, is a feast for the senses. Brilliant colors, exuberant voices and flamboyant costumes all combine with the cast’s enthusiasm to provide a great evening of smart, funny theatre. Literally everything in this production is a sum of the whole and the whole doth shine! The “tribe” at Rorschach Theatre, with zealousness that clearly makes a difference, brings bawdy laughter and sassy displays of comic brilliance to Casa Del Pueblo, an old Methodist Church in Columbia Heights.

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By: Walter Ruff

Meat and Potato Theater’s production of Poe 2000, a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works mounted at the Playbill Café is just in time for Halloween. Playwright-director-actor Tobin Atkinson has succeeded in bringing something different and exciting to the stage while preserving the aberrant and ghoulish nature of Poe’s poems and writings. Previously Atkinson wrote, directed and appeared in Meat and Potato Theatre Company’s Infantry Monologues “an insider’s look at America’s armed forces and the effects of September 11 on our shared culture”. Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door! Neon glasses, black lights, and a stuffed raven are featured in Meat and Potato’s vision of The Raven certainly Poe’s most well known work and one of Poe 2000’s best portrayals. The spooky, glowing visuals and Atkinson’s eerie reading start the evening off on the right foot. Lucille Ball meets Edgar Allan Poe is up next in Atkinson’s whimsical and stylish take of The Tell Tale Heart. Featuring Katie Taylor-Rollins as a 50’s housewife, Atkinson uses an easel and one word cue cards to tell the speechless story that held some of the evening’s most entertaining moments. The Cask of Amontillado (1846) gets a modernization that works very well and The Bells gets a Hip Hop treatment that had the small black box jumping to a rap beat. All told the troupe performs ten vignettes; all incorporate various masks, puppets, storytelling, farce and audience participation true to the company’s mission. Atkinson and Taylor-Rollins with help from Jeffrey A. Wisniewski create amusing original theatre that is ambitious and edgy. The staging is imaginative and intelligent and the performances are enthusiastic but respectful of the material. Do yourself a favor and see this show, it is fine fall fun and 1409 is a great place to have dinner or drinks.

Adapted from the writings of Edgar Alan Poe and directed by Tobin Atkinson. Cast: Tobin Atkinson, Katie Taylor-Rollins, Jeffrey A. Wisniewski

By: Walter Ruff

Every generation reinvents child rearing, thinking they have new insights the previous generation did not, almost as if their generation was the first to raise brilliant scientists, authors, painters, inventors and statesmen. The current breeding class puts an immense amount of pressure on themselves to find the BEST preschool, getting put onto waiting lists and using acceptance into a good program like Bright Ideas as parental bragging rights.. Didactic Theatre and this play’s Director, Christopher Carroll, have mounted Bright Eyes, a very funny, thought provoking comedy at the DC Arts Center in Adams Morgan. This play is all the more relevant because of the wave of young successful couples moving back into the upper North West area of the city near Adams Morgan where the DC Arts Center is located. Every Saturday one can see couples making their weekly stroll to the grocery pushing “Maggie” or “Seth” in an expensive baby carriage to the Whole Foods Store near Logan Circle. Didactic Theatre has captured the blissful family experience and twisted it ever so carefully to portray the darkly funny side of finding a good nursery school. Murder? 45 Caliber Hand Guns? All Natural Poisons? All that and more makes up the dark comedy in Eric Coble’s play that is as sarcastic as it is funny. Big ABC baby blocks, colorful and happy, become the minimal stage design, while cool children’s tunes and nursery sounds make up the excellent musical montage.

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By: Juliet Moser
Mirrors. We use them every day, find them in all sort of obvious locations. One could almost say that we even take mirrors for granted, simply assuming that they will always be there when we need them. But what if you were never to see a mirror again – could never glance at a reflective surface as you walk past, making sure your tie or lipstick is straight, nor spend hours perfecting your hair? Surely you would be self conscious at first, but we can assume that if no one had a mirror, we could let things like crooked ties and stray broccoli crowns bother us much less.

Estelle Delaunay is not one of those people. Remove her mirror and you have removed her soul. Remove her mirror and she becomes uncontrollably panicked. Estelle, as the great philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre might have explained, exists, but her essence is in her mirror. The critical tenant of Sartre’s existentialism is, of course, that humans exist first and then define their essence. Estelle is one of three characters is Sartre’s classic work in the theatre of the absurd, “No Exit,” now at the Warehouse Theatre, staged by the Scena Theatre Company. Portrayed with prim snootiness by Maura Stadem, Estelle at first refuses to accept her new situation, and requests that her roommates refer to their present state as “absence.” “If we absolutely must give a name to this state of affairs,” she sniffs, “let’s call it ‘absence.”
But her companions have no such illusions, immediately accepting the fact that they are indeed, in hell – even though it looks like a sitting room furnished with Second Empire furniture. Inez Serrano (Elle Wilhite) was a lesbian postal clerk, while the sole man, Vincent Cradeau (Regen Wilson), was a journalist who treated his wife with ultimate cruelty. The banality of the room in which they are placed emphasizes Sartre’s belief that hell is not a specific physical location, but a state of mind. Sartre wrote and first performed “No Exit” in 1944, 3 months before the liberation of Paris by Allied Forces and surely, living under Nazi occupation must have seemed a hell on earth to him.

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Quite a few years ago I lost my mother to cancer and to this day I wonder what it might be like to see her one last time. What would I say? What would she say? What would I feel? All these thoughts came to mind after seeing Michel Tremblay’s play For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again currently mounted at MetroStage in Alexandria, Virginia. Mr. Tremblay, one of Canada’s most popular playwrights and certainly one of its most respected has written a wonderful tribute to his Mother whom he lovingly refers to as Nana.

The play takes us through the Narrator’s (Bruce M. Holmes) life with his mother Nana (Catherine Flye), from his early years of pranks in the streets of Montreal, through his teenage years when he receives gifts from his mother that guide him down the paths his life would take as a playwright and a man. They discuss their different tastes in literature (her thoughts on French orphans are hysterical) and the mechanics of the family wringer washing machine (that always sucks in arms up to the arm pit) with equal amounts of humor and motherly wisdom. When Nana has to face cancer Ms. Flye gives her best performance, comparing the act of giving birth to the growing cancer inside her. It is when she falls to the stage in pain, giving “birth” to her death, that our Narrator reveals a wonderful send-off for the woman who guided his life. Through the translucent screens and misty fog we see a golden swing that waits to carry her to her heavenly reward. As she pulls herself up into the swing there is not a dry eye in the audience. Moments later, the lights dimmed, I could only think how fitting such a send off was for such a colorful character.

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