Review: Tough NOW COMES THE NIGHT at 1st Stage

You'd hardly identify E.M. Lewis' world premiere, NOW COMES THE NIGHT, opening the season at First Stage in Tysons as a part of the Women's Voices Theatre Festival.

There are no women in the testosterone-charged cast for the wartime drama about a reporter's agony being held hostage in Iraq for 18 months. Even her nome de plume, E.M. Lewis, masks her gender.

Still, it's an example of the variety of plays being produced among the more than 50 original works by women in the two month festival.

Dylan Meyers stars as an anchor for a Hartford TV station who travels to Iraq shortly after the U.S. invaded in 2004, only to be captured in his first two weeks. Back home after a sudden release, he feels he has to issue the anti-American message his captors told him to share - if only to save the life of a woman still being held in Iraq.

His former co-anchor, played by Jaysen Wright, tries his best to get the truth out of his buddy for truth's sake, if not for his big Memorial Day broadcast. A battle of wills ensues over two acts.

There's a third guy in the play, too, Sun King Davis plays a freelance war photographer who was also held in Iraq. He feels remorse that he's the reason Meyers' character was captured in the first place and wanders around in soiled clothes from the desert. Because Wright's character doesn't respond to him (or his co-anchor's discussion with him) the audience slowly realizes he's a ghost, a fragment of the fevered past, still haunting the reporter's consciousness.

NOW COMES THE NIGHT is ultimately unsatisfying - and not just from the rat-a-tat tough-guy dialog that often involves one guy repeating a question before he answers it.

It's actually because it's only the center story of what Lewis hopes will be a wartime trilogy. Two of its characters were previously introduced in an earlier play, HEADS, which featured the woman that is mentioned in NOW COMES THE NIGHT, but whose relationship or full importance in this work is never made clear. Perhaps all will be all revealed in part three some day. Too bad we could never hear from her at a Women's Voices festival.

Lewis says she was working on the play up to a few days before opening, and while it doesn't seem especially reworked, it's not helped by director Alex Levy, who makes characters shout most lines and occasionally pound a hard surface as well. The play would more successfully make its point if the actors dial it down by half.

It's a good looking play, thanks to Kathryn Kawecki's set design, a two-level apartment that uses only one of them.

Lewis chose Hartford as a setting almost randomly. She has the bad luck, though, of a reviewer who spent decades in newsroom of the Insurance City. So I can tell you: Channel 8 is actually located in New Haven, there is no way they'd hire anchors right out of college even if this is a "third tier market," and they wouldn't pair two young men together anywhere outside of "SportsCenter."

We have to assume this anchor made his own way to Iraq, because there is certainly no such thing as international reporting from that city. And if Davis is really the kind of experienced photographer he is portraying, he'd know how to pronounce Gannett correctly (especially a block or so from USA Today headquarters).

It's good to bring important issues to the theater, especially a conflict that even Presidential candidates seem to have put behind them, but one might expect something at a Women's Voices festival slightly less macho than NOW COMES THE NIGHT.

NOW COMES THE NIGHT continues through Oct 11 at 1st Stage, 1524 Spring Hill Road, Tysons, VA. Call 703-854-1856 or www.1ststagetysons.org.

Photo: Jaysen Wright, Dylan Myers and Sun King Davis. Photo by Teresa Castracane.

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