Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Stories

Remaining Performances:
Jul 23rd, 7:30 pm
Jul 24th, 6 pm
Jul 25th, 6:30 pm
Jul 26th, 1 pm

They say: “Neofotis performs stories from his prize-winning book, newly published by St. Martin’s Press. With tales of night-swimming lovers, moon-shining old ladies, and gay trials, come witness the 28 year-old love child of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty! (NYC’s Next Magazine)”

Brian’s take: I’ll not mince words: Concord, Virginia, has too many words.

When I’m writing prose, I read my sentences aloud so that I can hear all the over-wrought language I need to banish from the pages. Here, as Peter Neofotis performs aloud two short stories about a small Virginia town, I couldn’t help but wish he’d taken a machete to his manuscript, pruning what are otherwise perfectly compelling stories of thorny phrases like, “She wistfully walked by,” “Helen pointedly replied,” and, thorniest of all, “They ambulated out the door.”

But the biggest problem with Concord, Virginia isn’t the amount of words, but rather its too-heavy reliance upon them instead of character. That’s not to say the characters aren’t periodically attention-grabbing, or even at points well-drawn; but generally, it was a challenge to tell them apart. Not until halfway through the first story did I know for sure which of several college students was testifying before the jury in a case of frat house sodomy. Neofotis’ ability to inhabit multiple distinct characters — already no simple task — is muddied by the energy he has to expend trudging through the narrative as artfully as possible. His characters would be fuller if each had his own relationship with language, his own truly distinct style of speech, and also his own desires for silence. A silence in the theater has huge potential to thrill and enchant. Unfortunately, Neofotis is simply doesn’t leave enough unsaid.

See it if: You don’t mind it when prose turns purple.

Skip it if: My review is already too many words for you to bear.

They Call Me Mister Fry

Remaining Performances:
July 25, 4 p.m.
July 26, 5 p.m.

They say: “Welcome Back Kotter vs. COPS, King Arthur vs. No Child Left Behind. Watch this suburban white boy from Indiana battle the students, the establishment, and himself in a South Central classroom. Laughter, tears and extra credit provided. A true story.”

Brian’s take: All right, so I walk out of They Call Me Mister Fry, and here’s my first thought: “Mister Fry Is The Patch Adams Of Education.” (It appears in my mind just like that, with all the capital letters.) Genius, isn’t it? I’m happy, I’m whistling, I’m skipping, I’m handing out Now and Laters to babies, I’ve got the first line of my review.

Not so fast. Turns out I wouldn’t be the first to make the Jack Freiberger-Robin Williams connection.

Shucks.

So besides a pedagogical Patch, or perhaps Mr. Fry, what shall I call Jack Freiberger, the cuddly and lovable protagonist of this one man show? How about a tearjerker, a laughmonger, or an “awwww”-squeezer. How about a man so endearing you almost want to see him orchestrate some kind of sick and depraved orgy during his lesson, just so you can accuse him of a flaw.

All right, maybe I wouldn’t call him that last thing. It was titillating enough to watch Fry’s classroom foibles as a neophyte fifth grade teacher, particularly his relationship with two problem students, Anthony and Jasmine. As Freiberger tosses his hands and grunts his yos, or clanks his knees and chomps his gum, the novelty of a white, middle-aged teacher standing in front of a room of people and imitating his Latino and black fifth grade inner-city students is magnified. Freiberger dares to play the kids’ stereotypical ticks for laughs, and at first this makes the impersonations a bit uncomfortable. But as his relationships with the students deepen, and the obstacles that confront them escalate, so do Freiberger’s characterizations undergo a sneaky metamorphosis: the belligerent Latino student who says “yo” every other word becomes an 11-year-old who speaks sign language and pulls a cappuccino out of his pocket while he’s in detention, and the nervous, gum-chewing daughter of a single mother becomes a confident — albeit still fatherless — young woman.

But here’s what Freiberger dramatizes most masterfully, and most intimately: that formative instant, which occurs in every child’s life (though earlier for kids with these kinds of troubled lives), when you realize that adults (your parents, your grandparents, your teachers, your Mister Fries) are more terrified of the big-bad-world than you are. It’s a devastating epiphany, and it’s Freiberger’s willingness to relive that moment with his students that makes They Call Me Mister Fry such a triumphant tragedy of self-recognition.

See it if: You liked Welcome Back Kotter and Boston Public, not to mention all those feel-good teaching shows in between.

Skip it if: You’d rather watch the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off marathon on TNT.

The Real Adventures of Tom Mix

Remaining Performances:
July 22, 6 p.m.
July 24, 8 p.m.
July 26, 1 p.m.

They say: “The glamour of Hollywood meets the glory of the Old West in the real life, death-defying adventures of Tom Mix, the first western movie star.”

Brian’s take: Your grandmother’s armpits. The British Open. An assortment of mildly fragrant cheeses. All of these things are wilder than the West portrayed in The Real Adventures of Tom Mix.

Here’s the gist: Tom Mix was one of the first famous Western movie stars. He made hundreds of films — the vast majority of them silent — and the creators of this play have apparently used letters and historical papers and whatnot to construct a monologue for an actor who rarely got to recite one.

A compelling idea, sure: giving voice to the voiceless. But good lord, give that voice something to say — and an hour’s worth of vaguely interesting biographical facts does not count.

Playing the character of Mix, at least as it’s currently written, is a thankless task to ask of Jack Tomalis — or any actor really. And Tomalis doesn’t show the character much love in return. In lieu of their voices, silent movie actors, by necessity, drew upon a deep and dynamic arsenal of expressions. Tomalis, on the other hand, draws upon approximately two — his Consternated Face, and his Wistful Face. I left The Real Adventures of Tom Mix wearing my own version of the former.

See it if: Your grandma’s armpits are unavailable.

Skip it if: Thinking of the Old West inspires your Wistful Face. This failed homage will turn your nostalgia to sadness.

Remaining Performance:
July 19, 2:15 p.m.

They say: “Sara Baartman? In 1810, she became ‘Hottentot Venus’, toured as a sideshow, her large buttocks displayed. When she died, pieces of her were displayed in a museum. In 2009 the booty is STILL on display! Deconstructing creatively explores body politics.”

Brian’s take: I’m a white guy. For all the jeers I got as a chubby kid on the Skins side of the grade school soccer field, my body has never significantly influenced the way I feel about, perceive, or comport myself. So when the cast of Deconstructing the Myth of the Booty asked audience members to yell out our first impressions after the performance, unlike the woman in front of me, I didn’t quite feel the urge to shout, “Familiar!”

Cat-calling, stereotyping, objectification; the hasty, sexual, and shallow first impressions that inspire all three — sure, I’m conscious of this stuff, and in fact I’ll admit I find thoughts of it tangoing through my mind more than I really understand why. But by no means is it familiar to me, and certainly not in the way it’s familiar to the black women who were in the audience with me, or the formidable cast of black women that have adopted a muse named Saartjiee (Sara) Baartman and mounted this pageant upon her shoulders.

In the 19th century, Baartman was taken from South Africa, re-christened “Hottentot Venus,” and sent on a tour throughout Europe as an exotic dancer in the most literal sense, her booty the subject of international fixation until well after her death when actual parts of her remained on display in a museum. But rather than craft the play from Baartman’s biography, the ensemble members weave it from what I imagine to be glimpses of their own — a discordant family reunion, a deflected come-on at a bar, a sequence from a dream or a fantasy or a restless night spent staring wide-eyed at the ceiling above the bed.

This choice — to let Baartman’s story percolate and linger in the shadows, instead of present itself straight — is to the piece’s advantage and detriment. At their weakest, the ensemble’s fables resort to relaying an experience rather than rendering it theatrical, and in certain moments I desired a Saartjie Baartman more character than muse, the shared experience of a race and a gender brought into vivid relief by the singular tale of one woman’s life. But at its strongest — in a tender serenade to a newly-displaced Baartman, or a wrenching exhibition of the naked body that will make you sit rigid in your seat — the cast earnestly and confidently commands the theater, demystifying the black female body (booty and all) while redressing it with a tantalizing mysticism all their own.

See it if: You thought this show was going to be about pirates.

Skip it if: You were hoping for a live-action music video to “Baby Got Back.”

I tell this anecdote to broach an unfortunate matter which warrants only brief mention on this blog — a percolating dispute between two Washington theater companies over a production of The Lost Ones that I reviewed (quite positively) this week.

The current production comes courtesy of Spooky Action Theater. Directed by Robert  Richard Henrich, performed by Carter Jahncke, it’s an adaptation of a short story by Samuel Beckett called Le dépeupleur. Between 1999 and 2004, SCENA Theater mounted several productions of a similar piece, also called The Lost Ones‚ in D.C. and in Europe, directed by Robert McNamara, also starring Jahncke (and at one point showing in the same space it currently occupies, The Warehouse).

McNamara issued a press statement alleging that the concept and several specific artistic elements of Spooky Action’s production were, as he puts it, “pirated” from SCENA’s earlier work.

Unless one of you fine readers has seen both productions, there are no clear answers here, and even then I’m not so sure how clear they’d be. At this point, it’s essentially one artist’s word versus another’s: Jahncke insists the piece is different and new; McNamara finds those claims dubious.

“This is a different production,” Jahncke said to me. “It’s been totally and utterly reworked, and I can only believe that it’s been reworked for the better. Where I was with SCENA, it was incomplete. I don’t spend years thinking about and months rehearsing a piece that’s already as good as it can be. This is an entirely different show.”

When I told that to McNamara, he responded: “I don’t see how it can be any better than what we created, to be quite honest. Things can better after years and years of work. But what I would argue now is that you’re seeing a substandard version of what was created by the SCENA Theater.”

McNamara says he has not seen Spooky Action’s production, nor does he plan to. He has asked Spooky Action for “rightful attribution.” With regards to legal action, McNamara says his theater is “exploring other options.”

While this dispute is a minor blemish on an otherwise extremely convivial festival, it does offer an opportunity to ponder some potentially instructive questions — most interestingly, when a director and a performer collaborate intimately on a solo performance, to whom and in what measure does that intellectual property belong? Is Jahncke being accused of plagiarizing himself? Or just those elements of the production that were not his brainchildren?

The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett

Remaining Performances:
July 15 at 8 p.m.
July 19 at 1:30 p.m.
July 23 at 7:15 p.m.
July 24 at 11:45 p.m.

They say: “Closely held. A Beckett gem. Rarely permitted to be played. With scores of tiny puppets, actor Carter Jahncke enacts a mesmerizing text. Beckett’s haunting vision reaches out, enfolds us in a chamber far outside, and deep within the mind.”

Brian’s take: You may want to take a cab home from The Lost Ones, an extended soliloquy so intoxicating that Carter Jahncke, who as The Aged One is the stage’s only breathing player, has to literally shake the scraggly character out of his body before he’s able to bow. Even after the self-exorcism he still seems a tad afflicted — like a shaman returning from a vision quest, or a child who has just seen his grandpa’s ghost.

What he has seen is a stark and abstract panorama of a society, culled from Samuel Beckett’s short story Le dépeupleur, and constructed for the stage with dozens of tiny human figurines (the non-breathing players) imprisoned inside an imaginary cylinder with a few ladders the only false promise of escape. The arbitrary paramaters of this cylindrical world both comfort and excruciate The Aged One, as he endeavors to describe them with painstaking specificity: the precise angle at which occupants of a certain station must lean; the direction one class of creature must walk, in perpetuity;  the hierarchy of preferences for the ascension and descension of ladders.  Meanwhile, the lilliputian dolls are fragile, frozen, and expressive, and Jahncke cultivates a disturbing rapport with them, relishing opportunities for manipulation, and dreading those moments when, crouching to inspect the figures, it becomes clear that they are created in his image.

Though immortalized as a playwright, Beckett was an accomplished novelist too. Still, he maintained a certain ambivalence towards prose — the fact that readers could close a book at their leisure bothered him. A theater, on the other hand, is an ingenious kind of cage, and Beckett reveled in the possibility that he could trap characters and audience members in there together.

Actors of Beckett, however, commonly find themselves trapped not behind the proscenium, but behind the language. Not Jahncke. He harnesses every twist and turn of a text that is, how shall I put this, not terribly limber. He avoids the frantic compulsion to chase after the words, instead allowing each new thought to creep up on him from behind, crafting a production with director Richard Henrich that, in addition to trapping character and audience, jointly startles, titillates, and terrifies them as well — a realization, rather than recitation, of Beckett’s vision.

See it if: You just don’t see the point of it all. This is the play for you.

Skip it if: You hyperventilate in enclosed spaces. You won’t last 10 minutes.

Also, I’m curious what people think so far of this year’s more densely situated venues.  I work in the Mount Vernon Square-Convention Center node, and it definitely strikes me as more vibrant than last year, when the venues were spread out across northwest.  Then again, maybe it’s just the swarms of middle school tour groups going to my head. (They wear name tags; we wear buttons.)

Leave a comment after the beep.  (BEEP!)

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 12 at 4:15 p.m.
Thursday, July 16 at 5:30 p.m.Saturday, July 18 at 2 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 at 8:30 p.m.

They say: “Robert, a struggling playwright, undertakes a Faustian bargain of inspiration in return for his sanity. Driven by his desire to please his wife Claire and succeed as a writer, he risks his life in return for his Magnum Opus.”

Brian’s take: When he was a kid, my little brother refused to eat eggs. And I remember one morning when, despite his protestations, my mother kept on cajoling him to take a bite — just one bite — until finally he explained, “I like eggs, I just don’t like the taste!”

That’s pretty much how I’d describe my feelings about Magnum Opus, a new opera by the Alterna Opera company. It’s a predictably well-made tragedy: You’ve got your struggling playwright, his casually flirtatious wife, the composer charming her into casual flirtation, and a pair of muses (though they behave more like sirens) whispering some nefarious solutions in the playwright’s ear.

The real playwright should’ve summoned a few siren-muses for himself, because while the show does contain plenty of your daily vitamins and minerals, it leaves you wanting some flavor. Likewise with the performers, who belt a respectable original score but enlist the rest of their bodies — i.e. limbs and facial muscles — with much less vigor than they do their diaphragms.

Not that Magnum Opus doesn’t manage to be pleasing. The cast is invested enough — in its own laconic way — the orchestra tight enough, the production polished enough to make for an enjoyable time. Does it live up to its namesake? Not quite. Maybe if they retitled it “A Highly Palatable 60 Minutes.” But as one specter of a character realizes, after his own maddening brush with the muses, notes on a sheet of composition might resemble raindrops on a window or, depending on your state of mind, flies on a carcass.  Magnum Opus manages to do both.

See it if: That last metaphor does it for ya.

Skip it if: You really should be at home writing instead.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 26 @ 4 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 8 PM

They say: “Master storyteller Mike Daisey’s new comic monologue takes aim at the history of the Department of Homeland Security. Combining eye-opening research and witty autobiography, he bores into the dark heart of America to discover the meaning of security and the price we are willing to pay for it.”

Brian’s take: Got some free time this weekend? Oooh, I’ve got an idea–you should pay $20 to let a man sit at a table and talk to you for two hours about the history of American security!

You might think I’m being sarcastic (two hours of a man sitting at a table, you say?), but I shit you not. That is actually what you should do, as long as the man’s name is Mike Daisey, the creator and comic purveyor of the exquisitely conceived If You See Something Say Something. I’ll leave the sarcasm up to him.

There may be no metaphor in security, as Daisey astutely notes, but he certainly injects metaphor (and simile, and irony, and synecdoche, and peripetea, &c, &c) aplenty into this series of monologues–stories, really–which he weaves with enthralling dexterity of voice, tone, gesture, and expression.  The show is billed as the story of the Department of Homeland Security, but much of the focus is on the history of the atomic bomb.  The piece is obsessively researched, and by interlacing the straight history with his own anecdotes and observations, Daisey is able to infuse a somewhat sterile topic with a folksy, around-the-campfire sensibility.  In some of the most disturbing but memorable moments, Daisey is even able to turn the monologue into something of a ghost story–one minute you’re laughing at the foibles of Bernard Kerik, the next minute Daisey is describing in unsettling detail what would happen if Cohen’s neutron bomb were detonated above the theater, and you feel just a bit sick for joking around only moments earlier.  

Daisey is one of those people (I’ve seen him before) who can make anything scintillating, so even if you proclaim to be uninterested in neutrons and bombs and the Cold War and deserts and Tom Ridge and that kind of thing, go if only to spend some quality time with Daisey.  It’s like taking one of your favorite nonfiction authors–I’ll use Ian Frazier but you can fill-in-the-blank–crossing him with your favorite stand-up comedian–let’s say, oh, I don’t know, Robin Williams–and hunkering down in a bar for a few hours to discuss a subject about which he’s read every book possible.

See it if: You’ve ever been frisked ever-so-scandalously by a security guard.

Skip it if: You are overly paranoid about getting radiation poisoning.