Review: MY CALAMITOUS AFFAIR... at The Corner At Whitman Walker
Ari Roth written and produced for Voices from A Changing Middle East Festival
Voices Festival Productions' presents My Calamitous Affair with the Minister of Culture and Censorship or Death of Dialogic in the American Theater by founder and playwright, Ari Roth as its season opener. My Calamitous Affair...is directed by DC theatre veteran and six time Helen Hayes Award Nominee John Vreeke.
Is a roman a clef autobiographical appeal to the ego of AD (Founding Artistic Director Until Recently) examining the events that lead to his resignation as Artistic Director from a fictionalized theatre in a place that "looks like" Washington, DC. The play opens with a Land Acknowledgment projected onto the only wall and an endorsement by Ilasiea Gray as fictional Executive Director, Virginia B. Lawrence, who asserts that the work is not evasive or "tone deaf", emphasizing Roth's intent to "bring us close. By Being personal", and insisting that "This is Everyone's Story. Not just a Patriarch's Pain at having his Power and Privilege checked - but the Injury that preceded it. We're accounting for all of it. A hearing on all sides. On a path towards Restorative Justice."
We then witness Virginia for the next two and a half hours navigate the minefield of opposing viewpoints on an issue to which she is mostly foreign in an attempt to see to completion an adaptation AD has undertaken of a play written by a White Jewish Israeli TV and theatre actress, Eilat Herzog (Anat Cogan) about a Palestinian-Muslim actor of stage and screen, Samad Hussein (Hassan Nazari-Robati) both of whom are against colonial occupation of Palestine embodied by Right-Wing Minister of Culture & Sport for the State of Israel, Miri Rekev (Lisa Hodsoll). Hodsoll's Rekev is as charismatically entransing as the colonial power she represents, speaking for and through AD as a character he has written into his adaptation and a figment of his imagination.
What is most interesting about this production is its design. It feels participatory with players circling in and out of the audience, shouting from corners and even encouraging that they "join in" at the most inappropriate moments. But it is not. It is a presentation that holds you hostage. The mind boggles and tensions boil as the projected background fills with buzzwords until Samad "takes over" the production and dramatically posits the first and only revolutionary idea just before intermission.
The second act is more of the same, eventually leading Virginia to her breaking point. Thus giving Eilat and Samad leverage to force AD to write Rekev out of the adaptation. The ending lands us all in a soft place
My Calamitous Affair... is quite the event and is at times funny but it is mentally exhausting, especially for someone less interested in scandal than in the art of theatre.
My Calamitous Affair with the Minister of Culture and Censorship or Death of Dialogic in the American Theater runs through October 23rd, 2022 at The Corner at Whitman-Walker which is located at 1701 14th Street in Washington, DC.
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