Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 9

Paula Vogel's 2015 play Indecent, in a production now arrived at Center Stage after stops at D.C.'s Arena Stage and the Kansas City Rep, is a staggering tour de force of playwriting prowess that is also a tour of a largely forgotten world: international Yiddish theater shortly after the turn of the last century. A play about a play about a play, it follows Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance on a circular path, from Lodz, Poland in 1906 to Warsaw, to various stages in Europe, through Ellis Island and various New York theaters, culminating with an abortive stay on Broadway, and thence back to Lodz once more, at the peak of the Holocaust. And then, in a sort of coda, it concludes in Connecticut with the last days of Mr. Asch. All these parts are contained within an initial framing device in which, like Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a stage manager named Lemml (Ben Cherry), introduces the players and musicians, apparently members of a turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater troupe, and identifies the kinds of parts they will play (like male and female Ingenues). Everything that follows, i.e. a play about presenting a play, is presented as a play performed by this troupe.

Most of the characters fail to use words properly to convey directly what is important to them or us. But as I have said, the underlying problem is larger. It is a mismatch of moral paradigms. The possibility of rationally settling the underlying issues by a dialogue among the participants is hard to conceive. This play seems instead to be more about making people grasp, at a gut level, the speakers' personhood,

Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I (1597), now being revived by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, is at its heart a family story. It certainly bears the traditional characteristics of Shakespeare's history plays, but it is, first and foremost, a story of two fathers and two sons, and only secondarily about dynastic struggles.

The play seems to be a retrospective of Shakespeare's career, with a strong note of self-parody. And with a playwright as fecund as Shakespeare, a 'greatest hits album' would have to be full to bursting. And so that's what Cymbeline is: a 'greatest hits' that refuses to take itself seriously, and invites us to participate in Shakespeare's gentle laugh at himself.

A major work of art, in a quintessentially American genre, an important representation of an under-represented group that advances understanding and dialogue, and beautifully produced. Audiences should embrace this production.

Even though sometimes funny, even to the extent of farce, and filled with a manic vitality, Jerusalem is not easy theater, but it is infinitely rewarding. It will be surely be one of the most ambitious shows local audiences see in this new year.

There are few entertainments as popular as Miss Saigon (36 million attendees worldwide since it premiered on London's West End in 1989), and few that have occasioned as much controversy. Despite all that popularity, this reviewer had happened never to see the show until the current national tour surfaced this last week at Washington's Kennedy Center. Miss Saigon's reputation for controversy had preceded it, however, and I was on the lookout for offensiveness. But what I saw was a well-honed crowd pleaser with spectacular stagecraft and spectacle, excellent singing, a few catchy tunes, and a compelling plot. Some of the provocations complained of in earlier productions are no longer in evidence. In other instances, I would dispute that the material was ever objectively offensive. I'll discuss all this below, but first, some basics.

If you go expecting, as it were, wild Wilde, you won't be disappointed.

While basic questions about what the characters are doing or why are never fully resolved (nor do they need to be), the debatable and sometimes contradictory answers each character gives to these questions form the basis of a relationship that dramatically and comically changes as the play progresses.

This industrial Eden will not end well. And end badly it does, as playwright Lynn Nottage tightens the grip of the catastrophe step by slow step. We all know the historical outlines of the story enough to have a general idea what to expect: management ready to break unions to exact wage and benefits concessions, scab laborers, jobs exported abroad, plant closures, mortgage foreclosures, destitution, opioids. But Nottage renders this familiar tale powerful and surprising.

Audiences should approach Stick Fly, with the expectation that they will not understand all of it, fully grasp any character's motives or thoughts and/or playwright Lydia R. Diamond's position on many of the issues she aerates - and that that's okay. The fun is in just watching it happen.

With acting and singing at this level, and with such a strong, moving work, this rendering of Spring Awakening packs a punch, and will reward any evening's theater-going.

Because Williams has so successfully gotten us cheering for Maggie, we in the audience would very much like to see Maggie triumphantly dragging Brick into bed in the final frame, and an interpretation like director Judith Ivey's, which all but promises that, is bound to be a crowd-pleaser. But if a director chooses to make that easy initial choice, that will be about the last easy thing the director will find in this play.

In a short 2016 profile in American Theatre, Russian emigre director Yury Ornov expounded on the freedoms of theater: 'You can hate people; you can do a hate show about Putin, for example, or about your ex-wife.' It seems that Lola B. Pierson's Putin On Ice (That Isn't the Real Title of This Show) is the hate show about Putin that Urnov, a close associate of Pierson through Baltimore's Acme Corporation, had in mind. (That said, Genevieve de Mahy, the Artistic Director of Single Carrot Theatre, on whose premises that show, a joint production with the Acme Corporation, is now playing, claims in a program note that the idea came from Single Carrot.) In the same profile just mentioned, Ornov emphasized how important and liberating it was to laugh at the things that distress us. Putin On Ice is nothing if not funny, though, as my companion on press night pointed out, there was a risk, throughout most of the show, that the laughs would ultimately obscure the seriousness and the threat of its subject.

The play will certainly keep challenging you the way a puzzle does. It begins, no doubt portentously, with a question that it never completely answers (Olivia to Ethan 'Who are you?') and it ends with deliberate lack of clarity over whether the characters have any future. In short, this is theater which keeps the audience on its toes, no matter what label you slap on it.

Bianca Laverne Jones gives us a Berta a man would want to compose a song about. Her face, her eyes, the modulations of her voice, like the song Berta, Berta itself, communicate so much more than the lines she delivers. 'Berta is a voluptuous, stately Black woman with a striking countenance,' say the directions. Just so.

It is plain that Della's resolution of the issue whether to bake a cake for Jen's same-sex wedding will call for a gingerly reassessment of her faith and her life. Realistically, it will not be solved wholesale by Della's discarding of her allegiance to what Macy dismisses as 'a book that's thousands of years old.' If Della is to find a way, it will require more subtlety and compromise.

Alexandra and Frankie are shown tacitly agreeing to steer clear of the secret not merely because such circumspection is calculated to heighten audience interest; once we understand what the secret is, we can see that the characters know that if they address it, a long-buried grievance between them will have to be put on the table, and worse, they will need to rip off the emotional scabs that have formed over a terrible trauma.

There is a thing Terrance can't let go of, like Lear, like Othello, like Richard II. And if you're a tragic hero and you can't let go when you ought to, then bad things will happen to you and those you are close to.

If you come to this show, do not expect to participate in a truly topical think piece about memory in a time of tyranny. You will witness instead a pair of entwined tales about rare mental abnormality and a somewhat overexposed aspect of totalitarianism. It is the telling of the tales, the acting and the scenery and, the evocations of synesthesia, by which Memoirs will work for you, or not.