You’d think, having dispatched the Synetic Theater’s sumptuous staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream last week, that a weary critic might catch a break—that local companies might go easy on the adjectival requirements with offerings nice and simple. Some comfortingly wordy Schiller, maybe. Or a cheerful, chewy evening with Mr. O’Neill.
Alas: Local companies not caring much about a critic’s sleep schedule, or his overtaxed vocabulary, the week’s theatergoing schedule served up another riot of excess. Truth be told, though, it’s a pretty damn entertaining batch of excess.
The most intellectually ambitious of this lot is probably 1001, Jason Grote’s dreamy, nested-narratives rethink of the Scheherazade fable, which weaves a strain of modern existential angst into the fabric of those ancient tales. Things get underway in King Shahriar’s Persia, as usual, but once the storyteller lady (a briskly assertive Yasmin Tuazon) starts spinning her endless yarns, several of them turn out to be set in climes even more exotic than Ali Baba’s cave, an island called Man Hat being one of them.
The evening will turn chiefly on an intercultural relationship, this one between an American-born Jewish guy (Rex Daugherty, sweetly expressive as Alan, curious and flummoxed as Shahriar) and the Palestinian-American woman (Tuazon again, intriguingly uncertain as Dahna) he meets during an Alan Dershowitz lecture at Columbia University.
Yes, Dershowitz turns up, alongside Osama bin Laden and Gustave Flaubert (in a brothel, natch) and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose endlessly forked narratives aren’t the least among 1001’s inspirations. And yes, this being an Arabian-rooted fantasia that makes its way to New York, there is a cataclysm—though the playwright, and Randy Baker’s very fine Rorschach cast, handle it so gently that what might have felt manipulative feels instead like a graceful act of public mourning.
But then Grote’s organizing principle is, as Dahna puts it, the notion that “There is only one story…comprised of every word that has ever been or will ever be uttered.” In the version he tells, that’s a unifying principle, a gratifyingly humane way of approaching the impossibly complicated narrative our world makes for itself each day.
Fever/Dream
By Sheila Callaghan; Directed by Howard Shalwitz
At Woolly Mammoth to June 28
Similarly ambitious, if a whit less heady, is Sheila Callaghan’s Fever/Dream, an often uproarious update of Calderon de la Barca’s La Vida es Sueño, originally the thoroughly sober tale of a king who walls up his infant heir in a dungeon for fear of a dire prophecy.
In Callaghan’s reboot, King Basilio is corporate titan Bill Basil (Drew Eshelman), while poor Prince Segismund is just Segis (Daniel Eichner), who’s been chained for a decade or two to the customer-service hotline in the basement of pop’s headquarters. (It says something about the actor’s timing, and about the crispness of Howard Shalwitz’s staging, that the opening-night audience was laughing delightedly before that first hurried “CustomerservicehowmayIhelpyou?” had fully escaped Eichner’s lips.)
The antics only intensify as Basil, struck by a fit of remorse (and a guilty dream or three) arranges for Segis to take a drug-fueled nap, during which dad’s right-hand man (an irresistibly unflappable Michael Willis) gets the young man cleaned up and installed in the executive suite. That’s right: Much to the distress of the Armani-clad hyenas (Kate Eastwood Norris and KenYatta Rogers) who’ve been Basil’s seconds-in-command, Sonny Boy will get a shot at running things to see if he can maybe live up to his heritage. As you might imagine, a certain amount of chaos ensues.
Too much chaos, some might say: Shalwitz’s production, designed to the hilt by Misha Kachman (sets), Colin K. Bills (lights), Franklin Labovitz (costumes) and Veronika Vorel (sound), looks and sounds like a carnival, and sometimes it seems as distractingly busy as one, too. And once the evening’s relationships are outlined, it’s pretty plain where things will be going, so all the noise can be a little wearying as you wait for the show to get there.
Still, there’s Kimberly Gilbert to bump up the knife-edge comedy quotient, plus a flat-out hysterical turn from Jessica Frances Dukes as a sort of accidental übertemp, whose eventual fate helps underscore the playwright’s critique of a ruthless corporate culture that’s come to think of human resources as just another office supply. And when Shalwitz gives the play’s soberer moments space to breathe, they begin to make a frame for all those high-octane antics, and a glimpse of something like a solid comedy comes into focus.
A Sleeping Country
By Melanie Marnich; Directed by Gregg Henry
At Round House Theatre Bethesda to June 21
Would that I had as much hope for A Sleeping Country, but despite a promising cast (Marcus Kyd, Susan Lynskey, Bridget Cleary, Connan Morrissey) and the tantalizing possibilities of a plot involving a magic-realist quest, Melanie Marnich’s comedy comes off as overwritten and obvious.
There are laughs, yes, but the language sets out for poetic territory and arrives too often in platitude-land. And surely, if a playwright is going to conclude that X is the cause of her heroine’s agonizing, weeks-long insomnia, she ought not have another character ask, in the first scene, whether X is in fact the cause—and then have X himself ask it again in the next bit, as well.
Because by then, the audience will have figured out how the play ends, despite the heroine’s stubborn refusal to get it, and everyone will find the second act pretty trying, even if your ensemble of gifted comedians is doing its level best.
Looped
By Matthew Lombardo; Directed by Matthew Ruggiero; Produced by Arena Stage
At the Lincoln Theatre to June 28
Least substantial of all the week’s options, and every bit as predictable as A Sleeping Country, Matthew Lombardo’s Broadway-bound Looped invites the audience onto a Hollywood lot for an afternoon with Tallulah Bankhead, who’s doing her best to re-record (or “loop”) a line of dialogue for what the outré-classic record tells us will be her final film. Trapped with her, as she flubs and filibusters and hoovers up the cocaine, are a patient sound engineer (Michael Karl Orenstein) and an increasingly annoyed film editor (Jay Goede), whose secrets Tallu clearly covets and whose skin she’s determined to get under.
There is no question that she will, and there is no surprise whatsoever in what she eventually teases out of him. What is a surprise is how much fun the damn evening is anyway: Valerie Harper, she of Rhoda and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, sinks her teeth cheerfully into the persona of one of mid-century Hollywood’s biggest, baddest broads, preening and parading and knocking back the whiskies like she’s landed in one of Scheherazade’s oases after a fortnight among the Bedouins. The vulgarities come like clock-ticks, the punch lines like a sly boxer’s check-hooks—and while the fastidious will surely point out that it’s not much in the way of theater, it certainly is a hell of an entertaining night in the theater.
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