Cards on table: I love me some Scena. Have for years.

I certainly haven't loved or even responded to everything the company's assayed, but all critics have at least one theater they consistently find themselves pulling for, just that extra little bit. Scena's mine.

I just plain like what Scena brings to D.C.: a chance to guzzle exigent, uncompromising theater straight from the hose, featuring a house blend of new international playwrights alongside more familiar voices of the gloom-soaked, ghost-haunted Old World: Havel, Capek, Beckett, Brecht, Sartre, Kafka. And they can generally be counted on to serve it up with style: Watching their gorgeous, and gorgeously twisted, production of Genet's The Maids back in '07, I kept thinking how much the insufferably pretentious 15-year-old me would have loved the mere fact of Scena’s existence.

Think about it: Right now, there’s an awkward, affected teenage twerp pretending to read Being and Nothingness for the third time in the darkness of his Falls Church bedroom. That kid need only hop on the Orange Line to find his people and get his head fed. This, I humbly posit, is a beautiful thing.

Said teen might eat up their current production of Mother Courage and Her Children with a big ol' spoon, and as a primer on Brechtian style and theme, it serves nicely. But the move to the Clark Street Playhouse, much bigger than Scena's previous digs at Warehouse, seems to have watered down the soup.

How else to explain why what should be a searing evening of theater comes off here as merely mordant and shapeless? Because on paper, it can't miss: You got Brecht's barbed portrait of a woman who prizes the opportunistic and ruthless capitalism of wartime over the lives of her children. It's anchored by Nancy ("Oh, SHE'S in it? I'll call the box office") Robinette. It's directed by the shrewd Gabriele Jakobi, who infused that production of The Maids with its scabrous beauty, and who here has encouraged her perfomers to prize the humanity—and the humor—of Brecht's language over its penchant for the preachy.

Certainly Kryztov Lindquist's milquetoasty chaplain is fun to watch, and Jennifer Belle Deal brings an appealing no-bullshit carnality to camp follower Yvette. As Courage's mute daughter Kattrin, Colleen Delany gets several nice bits of business, none better than the sequence in which she furtively tries on Yvette's strumpety red heels. Robinette's is the kind of rounded, keenly intelligent performance for which she's known; her Courage is brittle, quick to anger and completely oblivious to the fact that the war which is fattening her wallet is eating her soul.

Yet the production itself lets them down by not offering up its own take on the play; we keep waiting for some point of view, some organizing principle to manifest—something, that is, beyond "War is bad."  What, exactly, is Scena bringing to this production, besides throwing all its pieces together on a stage the size of a soccer field? I couldn't tell you. But because the staging lacks an identity of its own, each scene arrives with an equal emphasis—and when you're flatly asserting everything, of course, you're really asserting nothing. Having the actors sing against pre-recorded music (which tends to get swallowed up by Clark Street's Costco-like acoustics) injects a tinny artificiality that Brecht probably would have liked, but it serves only to distance us from the proceedings even further.

Mother Courage and Her Children
By Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Gabriele Jakobi
Misic by Paul Dessau; Additional compositions by Achim Giesler
Produced by Scena Theatre
At the Clark Street Playhouse to July 5

But with no shortage of theater in DC, audiences value quality over quantity.

To woo subscribers, theaters assemble line-ups that include must-see classics, beloved musicals, and Tony-award winners. And then there’s Woolly Mammoth, which on Saturday unveiled an entire season of brand-new shows no one has ever heard of...just as they have done for 30 years in a row. It takes a brave and trusting subscriber to buy a series sight-unseen.

To introduce Woolly’s débutantes, artistic director Howard Shalwitz and dramaturg Miriam Weisfeld led company members in readings from each new play. In trademark Woolly style, these push the envelope on what can be considered a play, but based on the titillating readings, each show promises to be provocative and entertaining.

Shalwitz wanted an anniversary season that engages its audience in a discourse on democracy and “our historic moment.” Of course, as he reassured us, “Comedy is our home. We like shows that don’t take themselves too seriously.”

The season opens with the world premiere of Eclipsed by African playwright and actress Danai Guirira, who astounded local audiences in her Helen Hays Award-winning performance of In the Continuum (2007 HH award for best actress, best non-resident play), about an African woman struggling with cultural mores in announcing she has AIDS. Eclipse continues to highlight experiences of African women by exploring the five wives of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor and the fallout from civil war.

If you can’t take East German censorship circa the fall of the Berlin Wall sitting down, you don’t have to. The actors and audience alike will perambulate Woolly’s theaterspace—so wear comfortable shoes. Playwright Charles Mee’s adaptation of Brecht’s Full Circle is more of an event than a play, featuring seven company members including Shalwitz, and asking the question, “Can a disgraced artistic director restore a nation’s moral bearings?”

The next non-play is a one-man dialogue with Mike Daisey, who challenged Fringe Festival audiences last summer with If You See Something, Say Something. When Woolly commissioned the world premier of The Last Cargo Cult. In preparing the piece, Daisy visited Tanna, an island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where locals worship symbols of American capitalist power—especially cargo left by ships during World War II.

Clybourne Park takes Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun as a point of departure, but changes the perspective to that of a white neighborhood in 1950s Chicago faced with a black family moving in. In Act II, playwright Bruce Norris trains his lens closer to home by peeking in on that same neighborhood in present day.

Woolly was surprisingly furtive about the 5th play of the season, refusing to announce even the title until two weeks from now so as not to steal the thunder from the theater where it will premiere. However it has Mammoth footprints all over it, as the play absurdly follows an “anti-romantic” boy and girl, jumping forward and backward in time throughout their lives.

Perhaps in an attempt to make sure the Obamas don’t get homesick, Woolly has also booked two prominent Chicago troupes. Legendary political sketch comedy group Second City will present Barack Stars as an offering in this summer’s Fringe Festival. In December, the Neofuturists will bring back Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, whereby they stage 30 plays in 60 minutes, choosing plays each night based on the roll of a dice.

As the Mammoth turns 30, Shalwitz remarks that “Becoming an adult is scary because Woolly wants to be youthful, forward learning and provocative.” C’mon Woolly, you may grow old, but you’ll never grow up.

UPDATE ~ 4:45 p.m., 3/5/09: Arena Stage has shortened its 2009-10 subscription offerings in order to prepare for the return to its renovated home in Southwest D.C. The decision was not financially based, but was intended to avoid overproducing during a transition year. When it opens in Fall, 2010, the Mead Center for American Theater will add a third stage, thereby enabling more programming than Arena’s typical eight-show subscription. Thanks to Kirstin Franko for correcting me on this.

Disclaimer: Sheffy Gordon is a season usher at Woolly Mammoth as well as other theaters in DC. The views expressed here are his alone.