Review: A FINE MADNESS at Woolly Mammoth

“It’s not a play,” Justin Weaks declares fairly early in his one-man “A Fine Madness” presented by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. “But we gon’ play,” he adds.

And so we do. A number of games are included among the stories, team building exercises, German philosophy and overhead projections that vaguely tie the planetary greetings of the Golden Record sent out on Voyager 1 with audience reactions to the pandemic.

Sleek in his black garb and stocking cap, and holding a vintage microphone, Weaks  describes waits at doctor’s offices and his own recent diagnosis of HIV and connects it to the Covid-19 virus. 

Borne out of a workshop production in 2024, “A Fine Madness” still seems a little loose, no matter how much the disembodied mission control voices announce segments and count off times for recordings. The idea is that Weaks’ own recordings of the audience, shouting out answers or providing other responses are collected in a manner that suggests there will be a new version of the Golden Record, nearly 50 years after the first was sent out, reflecting on life in D.C. the 2020s.

A couple of times, he plays back what’s been recorded during the performance and mashes it into a little mix. 

There is some community built among the four sections in which he divides the audience for whom he had assigned leaders. When they’re supposed to put heads together to solve a puzzle, Hangman style, as if on “Wheel of Fortune,” they're sometimes solved so quickly, the timer hadn’t even started.

Another game was straight up Mad Libs, with audience-derived suggestions for objects, song titles or emotions fitting into blanks on some prose proposing some healing. 

The lulls in the short show come during the two or three passages of personal history and parable, minus the visual aid. At one point he selects a few audience members to pour and distribute sweet tea and talk among themselves in lieu of an intermission. 

Under the direction of Raymond O. Caldwell, there’s a kind of magical expectation built in the show, with twinkling lighting design of Eli Golding working in consort with Matthew M. Nielson’s brooding sound design. 

Weaks often sits on the floor to dash pictures of the cosmos or jotted down transparencies onto his overhead projector. Other times he’s poetically describing the scene theatrically or walking all the way around the limited rehearsal hall space (Tony Thomas gets a choreography credit).

The dimensions and effect of the performance may well change, though, as “A Fine Madness,” after an opening weekend at the theater, will have its remaining performances in three different sites in the city — the Dupont Underground, Hamiltonian Artists on U Street and The Nicholson Project in southeast. 

I’m not convinced the responses at these different places will be all that different from those preserved at Woolly Mammoth. But if a record of the highlights is indeed pressed and sent into the cosmos, I’m not sure what any alien life force on the receiving end will make of it. 

Running time: About 80 minutes. 

Photo credit: Justin Weaks in “A Fine Madness.” Photo by Cameron Whitman.

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