Review: DEMOCRACY at Cafritz Hall @ DCJCC

A quartet of actors gamely worked their way through Robert Kittredge's hour-long Democracy. Intrepid when folding tables and chairs collapsed and togas fell off (nothing a routine Stage Manager couldn't solve with duct tape and safety pins or medium binder clips for quick changes--but no Stage Manager is listed on the Fringe website, so, Director, Lisa Hilling, you're it), the troupe stayed wrong and let nothing, including the script, stop them; someone really ought to see these players well bestowed.

The play quotes Hamlet too; the premise of sketch #2 is that a woman must be tried in court for laughing at a production of it. As a demonstration of the presumed theme of all the sketches that "democracy is in trouble," the farcical court case proved nothing. Sketch #3 comes closest to explicating the mess both humanity and democracy are currently in. It's an Everyman-style allegory in which a character named Earth is the protagonist and Global Warming and Denial are her antagonists. A character named Science tries to help her, but humans have prevented progress. Narrated in part as if it were a children's book, this section works best at carrying the thesis that democracy is under threat. But the play as a whole offers little in the way of what to do about that. The audience already knows that B and T are competing and the country is divided.