Skywriter

Remaining performances: July 25 at 9 p.m.; July 26 at 4:45 p.m.

They say: Frank Fletcher has a tough job as a DC public school teacher. He also thinks he’s a superhero. When another teacher uncovers his secret identity, Fletcher weighs whether his alter ego is a force for good or a dangerous delusion.

Annie’s take: It is tough to come up with more frustrating realities than the state of public education in American inner cities. One such reality, however, might be a poor attempt at satire of this problem. Set in a middle school that struggles to make Annual Yearly Progress, Angry Young Theater Company’s Skywriter posits that it takes a superhero to uplift the minds of the degenerate urban youth whom the school is struggling to serve. While the play’s resolution congratulates the hard-working and inspirational teacher (as well as an earnest principal with a letter of resignation stewing in a desk drawer), its trite portrayal of how one class-skipping, bad-mouthing pest can achieve academic transformation at the hands of an English teacher wearing superhero spandex under his tweed blazer comes off as mildly offensive.

To boil down the plot: Elizabeth Finch (Genevieve James), a perky, young, white teacher’s aide, is assigned to assist Frank Fletcher (Christopher Michael Todd), an English teacher who can both quote Henry V in its entirety and stand up to the most terrifying of his students, Lorena Cooper (Lynn Bandoria). Additionally, he has some unclear ability to rewrite bad things that are being written throughout D.C. and thus to avert bad things from happening. Turns out Finch cannot take full credit for this power: the Grim Reaper (Ricardo Frederick Evans, who also plays Principal Cooper), in the form of a D.C. metro train, has endowed him with it.

Thus unravels a myriad of confusing scenes, which skip to and fro in time and feature the four actors in different roles in a way that renders the story inconsistent. James, as both the peppy teacher’s aide and a peppy nurse at G. W. hospital, is a one-track actress: as Finch, she delivers a ranting monologue or two with comedic panache. However, throughout the rest of the show her bag of tricks is limited to a sarcastic sideways glance and a nervous tucking of hair behind her ears.

Aside from the shortfalls of its premise, plot structure and mostly passable acting, Skywriter contains moments where the satire actually works, in that the play’s treatment of its subject’s flaws comes off as so ridiculous that one cannot help but laugh—when Fletcher asks Lorena to come up with a proposal for how to fix the school, she comes up with an apt racial joke that sent the audience into hysterics.

If the plot were more cohesive and the stock characters not so overdetermined, the production would give due justice to these moments of comedic success. At the end of the school day, however, it would require more than a superhero to make Skywriter a play worth seeing.

See it if: You have never stepped inside an inner city public school classroom and thus are content to allow yourself to be led through a shoddy parody of one.

Skip it if: You have.

Remaining Performances:
July 18, 9:30 p.m.; July 19, 1 p.m.

They say: “Jamaica. Revolution. Visa. Impossible. CIA. Seduction. Desperation. A dream. Heartbreak. Handsome. American. Customs. Million dollars. Duffel bag. Machetes. Goats. Prostitutes. Bullets. Adrenaline. Kerosene. Run for your life. Based on a true story.”

Annie’s take: No doubt you have at least a couple of friends, relatives, etc. who are known for their proclivity for extensive and often exhaustive storytelling. Whether these stories sprout up during your dinner conversation, your lunch break or your experience of that third dirty martini, they hold the potential to lull you to the brink of unconsciousness or inject you with a hearty dose of insight into the human condition. You can almost smell an “extensive and exhaustive” story from its opening words: take, for example, “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus,” or, if it’s been a while since high school Lit, “This one time, at band camp…” Whether the yarn-spinner be Homer or American Pie’s red-haired hussy-in-disguise, there exists a dangerously fine line between compelling and mind-numbing storytelling.

That being said, signing on for an 85-minute one-woman show presents the ticket-holder with a doubt or two. I’ll confess that I had my reservations. However, may it be known that Jamaica Farewell, Debra Ehrhardt’s narrative about her immigration from Manley-era Jamaica to promise-holding America, is a story worth sitting through. From the get-go, there is no uncertainty as to how the story will end: it begins in a Starbucks, which, in a journey-to-America story, signifies success as clearly as the Statue of Liberty. Like any story whose outcome is already known, it is the middle that counts. In Jamaica Farewell, the degree to which Ehrhardt fantasizes about life in America works as the comic frame and, as such, maintains the freshness of each bump along the road.

If the show has an Achilles heel, it is the possibility that its central character, an optimistic immigrant, might feel worn-out. However, Ehrhardt manages to survive that threat. Zipping across the bare stage in a pink shirt and jeans, she secures the audience’s affection with her Jamaican accent, astute physical comedy and rapid-fire jokes that manage at once to poke fun at and profess love for her home country.

Tales of immigration, and certainly those that clock in at over an hour, can rightly be termed “extensive and exhaustive.” Yet, like the bards of yore, Debra Ehrhardt possesses a rare ability to mesmerize that would have kept ancient Grecians sitting around the fire for hours.

See it if: Your facial muscles are supple enough to smile continually for 85 minutes.

Skip it if: The fact that you left your Adderall at home might present a problem.

Goethe-Institut Mainstage

Remaining performances: July 11 at 3 p.m.; July 12 at 1 p.m.; July 25 at 8:30 p.m.

They say: How many butts do you have to sniff to claim top dog in Hollywood? John Patrick Shanley’s fast past romp through Hollywood’s flea-bitten underbelly.

Annie’s take: Entering a play that paints a warts-and-all (quite literally—I’ll get to that later) portrait of four megalomaniacal Hollywood prototypes in a humble-ticket-prices-and-all Fringe Festival smacks, at first glance, of self-righteous finger-pointing. However, when the script is outstanding and the acting can do it justice, the production inspires a rather fresh rumination on both the craft of making theater and its participants’ often harebrained motivations for doing so. Throw a couple of tables, liquor bottles, makeup cases, and low-res, scene-establishing screen projections into a tiny theater, add four characters spouting metaphor-laden lines intended to screw one another over, and you’ve got yourself a pretty compelling show.

John Patrick Shanley, whose mantelpiece might or might not display his Oscar (Moonstruck, 1988), Pulitzer (Doubt, 2005) and Tony (also for Doubt), delivers a script that both toys with and ultimately, subverts the audience’s conceptions of the four characters. Upon first acquaintance, each of them seems a bit shopworn: the sleazy producer, Bradley; the fame-hungry young seductress, Brenda; the neurotic screenwriter, Victor; and the ingenue-turned-character-actress, Collette. Together they attempt to make a movie that will launch them into the coveted galaxy of Hollywood stardom. Of the four, the latter is the least intriguing: predictably, the realization that her wiles have failed to produce the desired outcome propels her into a hair-yanking hissyfit.

The most compelling action comes to circulate around the interplay between Victor (Graham Pilato)—who deserves additional props for a fine drunken drawl—and Bradley (Keith Waters), plagued throughout the play by a crustaceon-sized sore in his nether-regions. Initially painted as the sincere puppy in the dog pen, Victor’s writerly obligations—to comely Brenda, to the necessity of working through some Freudian family issues—are shaken as Bradley insinuates that success, in Hollywood, comes at the price of integrity. Sounds clichéd, yes? Fair enough, but the superbly acted dialogue between the two that ends the show manages to leave a central question unanswered. “It’s not about the money,” Bradley proclaims, without offering a closing alternative. Walking at once of a staged Hollywood office and a cramped Fringe venue, the question tends to linger….

See it if: Having lived under a rock for the past few decades, you have yet to discover that Hollywood is home to some smarmy, duplicitous douchebags.

Skip it if: The sight of a used dressing for an internal sore “the size of a Dungeness crab” in an onstage trash can could potentially turn your stomach.