2015 Contemporary American Theater Festival

Playwright Johnna Adams (Gideon’s Knot) makes a strong case for unfettered imagination in the quirky, intense World Builders, a world premiere rom-com at the 25^th anniversary of the Contemporary American Theater Festival.

Max (Chris Thorn) and Whitney (Brenna Palughi) meet un-cute—in the psych wing at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He’s tense and inward; she’s a major sharer and all kinetic arm gestures and florid bursts of chatter. Unlikely comrades at first glance, they are bound together by shared psychosis—bipolar disorder—and being participants in a drug trial.

Both have landed in the drug trial at the urging of parents and doctors who wish for them to be “normal.” However, it turns out there is much more at stake than the calming of unquiet minds. Initially prickly and defensive, “We have to talk to the doctors and nurses—we don’t have to talk to each other,” Max gives in to Whitney’s manic charms and they begin to connect, as only supremely self-involved schizos can. (read more)

– Jayne Blanchard
Highly Recommended

Fashion is pain, beauty is suffering and thin is in in the chic black comedy Everything You Touch, playwright Sheila Callaghan’s faboo-looking treatise on body shaming, art and finding your identity.

Like other works by Callaghan—That Pretty Pretty; Or the Rape Play and Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) – this one is dreamlike and trippy, flip-flopping between time periods and perspectives.

Her setting for Everything You Touch is the narcissistic world of fashion, going between 1974 New York (where punk couture was just starting to make waves) and the present day, where a self-loathing cyber coder named Jess (a radiantly engaging and fearless Dina Thomas), tries to figure out how to be happy in the skin she’s in. But she also wants more—to be the kind of woman people look at, as if staring into the sun. (read more)

– Jayne Blanchard
Highly Recommended

The saying goes, all you need to become a punk rock band is three chords and the truth.

Russian performance artists and feminist activists Pussy Riot couldn’t play three chords but their truth—spoken loud and proud in a Moscow church in 2012—incited the wrath of Putin and the Orthodox Church and turned them into a social media cause celebre.

Their story blisters to life in We Are Pussy Riot, an in-your-face mix of ripped-from-the-transcripts dialogue, performance art, improv and fourth-wall shattering by Barbara Hammond and directed with rebel verve by Tea Alagic.

No sitting at a polite distance in this production. Pre-show, you are herded into the lobby where stern Soviet security guards prowl menacingly. All of a sudden, a gang of young women in colorful dresses, combat boots and ski masks—Pussy Riot—come roaring in, shouting blasphemous manifestos and profanity-laced chants. (read more)

– Jayne Blanchard
Recommended

Who better than a feckless linguist with commitment issues to be a live-in counselor for a nice couple from Missouri having marriage problems?

That’s the situation in Michael Weller’s (Moonchildren) affable romantic comedy, The Full Catastrophe, a world premiere at the Contemporary American Theater Festival snappily directed by festival director Ed Herendeen.

Film buffs may recognize the title as a line from “Zorba the Greek,” when someone asks Zorba if he’s married and he replies “Wife, children, house—the full catastrophe!” That somewhat pessimistic line is the best part of the movie for Jeremy Cook (Tom Coiner, perfectly puppyish as the hapless academic), the linguist protagonist in the play. In the mind of his girlfriend, Paula (a whip smart and beguiling Helen Anker), his favorite line speaks volumes on how he feels about matrimony and responsibility. (read more)

– Jayne Blanchard
Highly Recommended