Posts Tagged ‘Play’

An Evening of Ambiguity

Harold Pinter’s Moonlight—on stage through October 18 at Studio Theatre—is more like a poem than a play. No resolution exists, little happens in terms of plot. Awkward laughs prevail as the audience leaves the theater, as duos try to decode “what in the hell they just saw.” I was right there with them: confused and a little relieved for it all to be over.

Per Studio standards, the acting and set are excellent. Pinter’s phrases have moments of brilliance too, especially when they parallel your own emotions. Just as I was starting to think I couldn’t possibly handle this crazy play any longer—the character Fred says, “I’ve got a funny feeling that my equilibrium is in tatters.” Um, yeah! Me too!

The performance deals with such themes as dying vs. living, memory vs. reality, and the gray matter that lies between. It’s all very “osmotic,” to use one of those stellar Pinter adjectives. The protagonist, Andy—played by the ridiculously talented Ted van Griethuysen—is an old crotchety man who is dying. In this liminal stage between his life and death, there is no difference between what is real and imagined, who’s alive and who’s dead, what is past, what is present, what is future. He exists on a horizon, a border, someplace between light and dark—he exists, both literally and figuratively, in moonlight, as we are constantly reminded by the circular mirror on set and the pale blue light that illuminates the stage. “Death is your new horizon,” says Andy’s wife. And he replies: “That may be. That may be. But the big question is, will I cross it as I die or after I’m dead?”

While the play centers on the banter between Andy and his wife—as he writhes and gesticulates on his death bed—we are also introduced to several other characters: Andy’s two sons, a daughter who is supposedly dead, and a married couple that’s intimately connected to Andy and his wife (as in, they may have had sexual affairs with one another). We are never really sure whether the scenes that take place among the other characters are memory, imagination, or reality. And I suppose Pinter’s point is that it doesn’t matter. Sound Beckettian? If Waiting for Godot comes to mind, you’re not far off.

Bottomline: This play is not easy to watch, nor is it easy to digest. But it’s certainly interesting. And as Patten said, “I didn’t mind it, cause it was only 70 minutes.” Unless you love the ambiguous and feel like delving into those English-major roots, I wouldn’t recommend spending the 40-plus-bucks on a ticket.

Monologue that Sticks

I never thought I was much interested in watching just one person on stage for an entire play, but this play has me rethinking that notion, as well as everything else. Fact is, I saw this two weeks ago and still can’t get its plot, themes, and clean/clever dialogue out of my head. Have you ever had that happen? Something seemingly unrelated happens in your personal life, and it somehow becomes intimately connected to the play/movie you just saw? Well, these unrelated, yet pertinent things keep happening and I keep getting drawn back to the Year of Magical Thinking. I suppose that’s one thing that makes its author and protagonist, Joan Didion, so special.

In short, the play is about Didion’s loss of her husband—and how she balances (not always so well) her grieving with caring for her sick daughter. The play is more like a great storytelling experience vs. a production—i.e. you’re paying for beautiful words spelled out by a talented actress, not the dancing, singing, and staging you’re used to with many of the Studio’s performances. Bring a tissue, but be open to laughs—Didion gets quite cynical while mourning. The play’s run ends on Sunday, July 12, so try to squeeze in the show sometime this week, before the onslaught of the Capitol Fringe Festival.

The Year of Magical Thinking; Studio Theatre, 1501 14th Street, NW; Buy tickets here, or call 202-332-3300.

Chekhov meets Theater J

It’s tough to critique an adaptation when you haven’t seen the original, so I won’t try. (Though scrolling over the Seagull on Google Books, I’m noticing how closely this production adhered to the original script). As a work of its own, P and I thoroughly enjoyed The Seagull on 16th Street: it’s funny (yet tragic—appropriately Chekhov), full of well-weaved themes, and impressively acted. There were few moments that my mind drifted, a compliment to the artistic director, considering the play is almost 150 minutes long. There were times that P and I didn’t get the Jewish allusions, which I suppose is to be expected from two “goys,” a word used in the play (and one I had to look up when I got home!). We were particularly impressed with the acting. Both Jerry Whiddon as Trigorin and Naomi Jacobson as Arkadina were outstanding  (pictured below)—there’s a PG-13 scene with the two of them romping that will certainly have you appreciating the art of stage performance. Tip: For those of you under 35, all tickets to Theater J performances are half price, which means that on the least expensive night, Sunday, you can get in for $15.

The Seagull on 16th Street. Theater J, 1529 16th Street, NW. Runs through July 19, 2009.

A Disservice to Calderón

In short, I was really disappointed with Fever/Dream. Produced by Woolly Mammoth, the play is a modern adaptation of Calderón’s Life is a Dream. While the playwright, Sheila Callaghan, successfully modernizes the plot (swapping a king for a CEO; a dungeon for a firm’s customer service level; a sword for a fancy pen), she fails to adapt, er capture, the essence of the play: the WORDS, the THEMES! It’s the dialogue and the philosophy held within such dialogue that makes Calderón’s play important, not the plot, which is, like many of his contemporary’s plays, over-dramatic and predictable: We don’t love Shakespeare for his story lines—we love him for the eloquence in which he tells the stories and the themes that surface through such a telling. Same with Calderón’s Life is a Dream: The plot is not interesting. It is his wording—his clever turns of phrase—and his themes that lovingly connect us to his work.

Callaghan’s dialogue is trite and forced (”I feel like she’s trying to write like a hip teenager,” comments one of my friends), and she hardly dwells on the significant themes of the original play: freewill vs. fate and dreams vs. real life. I saw Journeymen’s production of Life is a Dream last year. I left excited and felt connected to the characters. In my blog post, I wrote:

Do the stars and heavens determine the nature of our existence? Or are we our own masters, deciding our fate through our own free choices? And, is there any difference between a dream and real life? Does it matter? I thought I’d stepped back into my postmodernism class with all this talk of fiction vs. reality, yet this play was written 300 years before the pretentious literati coined the term. Over the course of the two hour play, which kept my attention at every turn, I realized my plight in life is absolutely no different from the life of Segismundo, the barbarian prince. I too question my life in, frighteningly, the same way he questions his.

Unfortunately, my feelings after this production were far different, as were the feelings of the three friends that were with me. They knew nothing of Calderón, so were viewing the play as a work of its own. It didn’t work so well in that sense either. I must give kudos to Woolly Mammoth for the staging and set design, which was the play’s redeeming quality. The distorted skyscraper backdrop was creative, and the choreography for the firm’s dancing accountants was quite entertaining.

I left frustrated, mostly because this could have been excellent. The themes in Calderón’s play are just as relevant today as they were in the 17th century—and Callaghan’s modern plot (business empire, the disenchanted CEO, the disenfranchised employees) would have enhanced those themes beautifully. What a bummer! A successful adaptation captures the essence of the original work. Here, with Fever/Dream, we get a playwright who’s so focused on modernizing the plot that she forgets about the big picture.

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; 641 D St., NW; Runs through June 28, 2009.

Weekend To Do’s

Assuming you don’t have tickets to the sold-out Cake concert on Fri and Sat nights (cupcake included), here are some other ideas for keeping busy this weekend:

* Friday

4 p.m.-1:30 a.m. It’s finally here: The grand opening of Artomatic. This month-long, 9-floor art exhibit-cum-bar/music/dance party opens tonight with about 2,000 artists and a gazillion bands showing off their stuff. We took a sneak peak at the space during Ignite DC—it looked super cool and that was in the early, early stages of set-up. The event is free and is located about 10 steps away from the Navy Yard Metro (green line). This is a must do people!

* Saturday

8 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tie-up your tennies for one of 120 free walking tours of the city. The biannual event—Walking Town DC—is hot ticket item in this city. We tried the Dupont tour last year, and gave up after standing on our tip toes behind 200 other people trying to see/hear the tour guide. Your best bet is to reserve a spot online for one of the reservations-required tours, which caps the number of walkers. Many are already “sold out,” so as Patten would say, get to gettin’.

* Sunday

Enough of that free stuff. Sunday offers a few worth-it splurges. Pick the one that fits your budget:

$20 3 p.m. DC Theatre Scene’s review of Crazyface at the Source has me chomping at the bit.

$30 (plus ZipCar) 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sip unlimited samplings of Virginia wines at the Vintage Virginia Wine Festival in Centreville.

$80 5 p.m.-8 p.m. Attend Couchon 555 with the local foodies to watch local chefs slice and dice 200 pounds of pork. Oink, oink! Wine included.

Photo by Rock Creek

The Stupendous (yet Pretentious) Stoppard

The last time I saw a Tom Stoppard play I was in 8th grade, and I swore I’d never go to another one. The dialogue in Arcadia so perplexed me—with all its spitfire literary and scholarly allusions—that I nearly left in tears. I felt stupid and frustrated. Eleven years and a college education later, I revisited the esoteric Stoppard, excited at the promise that I might actually understand why people love him. The good news: I got it this time, and liked it. Studio Theatre put on an excellent performance, using a theater-in-the-round to showcase the script. Dramaturg Sarah Wallace writes:

“…the audience is invited to truly listen to the artistry of Stoppard’s language, to penetrate the play’s complexities. After stripping away everything except the play’s most essential images, an accentuated emotional core shines through.”

I liked the staging; I liked the acting (save for the lead’s inconsistent Czech accent); and I liked the plot, which is, at its essence, a love story. I liked the script too, though only because I had taken an Eastern European literature class in college, wherein I learned all about communism, the Prague Spring and Velvet Revolution, Václav Havel and Perestroika. I had no previous knowledge of the Plastic People of the Universe or the musician Syd Barrett or the themes of Greek poet Sappho, but my knowledge of the other stuff proved enough of a frame-of-reference to make sense of such unknown allusions.

My opinion: Studio Theatre’s production of Rock ‘n’ Roll is solid and I recommend it, BUT only if before you enter the theater, you spend 30 minutes or so reading up on the topics/people I mentioned above. That way, instead of spending the whole play trying to figure out who this Dubcek guy is, you can relax and really appreciate Stoppard’s use of language. (The program gives a decent amount of background info, but if you’re like me and show up 5 minutes before the play starts, you don’t have time to read it.) The fact that we have to do some pretty thorough background reading or be some crazy academic who knows everything about everything is what still frustrates me about Stoppard. His language is so good, but audible only if one can navigate through his maze of academic excess. It’s a prentious style of writing, but there’s genius within.

Rock ‘n’ Roll runs through June 7, 2009. Click here to buy tickets. (Don’t worry about seat location since it’s a circular stage)

La-di-da, la-di-da, la la.

Antebellum reminded me just how much I love theater (and how lucky we are to have great performances here in D.C.), so I’m on a stage binge. Next up? Tom Stoppard’s Rock N Roll, which P and I are going to tonight. But first, some thoughts on Theater J’s performance of The Rise and Fall of Annie Hall, which I saw on Wednesday night:

First thought: Fun. Second: Well-written. Third: Okay, so maybe I do like Woody Allen. As to that last idea, the play is essentially a modern evocation of Allen’s humor, named after and very loosely following the storyline of his most famous movie, Annie Hall. Its postmodern plot works: a play about writing a musical. More specifically: an adaptation of Annie Hall about a guy who wants to write an adaptation of Annie Hall for Broadway.  (Think: Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, but easier to digest). We watch the main character, Henry (played by Josh Lefkowitz, who looks and acts like Josh Radnor), struggle to come up with an idea for a musical, and once he does, can’t seem to write it because he’s always talking about it. Like Annie Hall, we get that talking-directly-to-the-audience/camera thing; the awkward, yet realistic dialogue; and the plot parallels (spoiler alert: the Annie in this play does the same thing as the Annie in the movie—moves to Cali!). To make it modern, Facebook, Wikipedia, and text messaging play important roles. WaPo and DC Theatre Scene go into much more detail in their reviews, but I’ll keep things short and sum it up now: I really enjoyed this performance. It had me laughing and tearing-up. It’s smart and creative, and definitely worth your time and dollar. And best of all—if you like to take a play with you when you leave—this is made to stick. I’ve been thinking about it for the past 36 hours.

The Rise and Fall of Annie Hall. Runs through May 24. 1529 16th Street, NW. Buy tickets here.