The Passion of Persephone

Remaining performances:
Friday, July 25 @ 6 PM
Saturday, July 26 @ 11 PM

They say: “Hades has captured the Goddess Persephone and tied her up to keep her from leaving the Underworld. When her mother Demeter discovers why Zeus won’t rescue Persephone, Demeter wreaks a terrible vengeance . . . Greek myth updated to modern times: A work-in-progress, presenting the last two scenes of Act I.”

Suzyn’s take: As the blurb notes, Passion of Persephone is still a work in progress, so perhaps it’s appropriate that it has the feel of something that’s still deciding what it wants to be. The advertising materials play up the S+M focus, suggesting those mediocre Anne Rice S+M novels about Sleeping Beauty. There’s some of that in this show, which is also a rock opera, and at times there is a bit of winking farce.

Primarily, however, the show seems to exist as a vehicle for the leading lady/librettist/composer/instrumentalist/producer Rosanna E. Tufts. Tufts plays Persephone, and is at the center of the show. Tufts’ performance showcases her voice, which is indeed very good. That said, her acting leaves something to be desired. She has little chemistry with Hades and they frequently sing about how attracted they are to each other, yet have bored-looking expressions while doing so. At one point Persephone sings about Hades when he’s offstage and she achieves a quiet fire in that scene that was absent when Hades was actually there. It is as if she finds the idea of Hades more striking than the reality, which in a sense is the most accurate part of Tufts’ portrayal of a naive young woman in love. Also, Tufts is a bit past the maiden stage. A male friend of mine described her as the “MILFiest Persephone I’ve ever seen.”

The music is fine, though the songs sound very much alike. I found myself wishing a little bit more had been done with the direction. The lights could have gone down a bit as Demeter sings about the sun fading, for example. Also, there’s a lot of standing in this opera. Some of that is because they have a large cast in a small venue, but even when individuals are on stage alone, the actors don’t move around much. A notable exception is Sara Stewart, whose Demeter moves very naturally. Stewart chewed the scenery in a satisfying way that suited her character, particularly after she took off a large goofy hat that obscured her face for much of her first scene on stage. Her voice was impressive as well, and I will look for her in future shows.

Michelle Mullany, Lily Fay Tufts Prothuro and Ayana Fenton do an excellent job as the dead children in the underworld, singing with charmingly sweet voices and appearing convincingly dour.

Again, the show is a work in progress. I suspect a lot of the problems will be ironed out by the time it is a full length show. I saw it with three friends and two of us were interested in coming back when the show is performed in full. Still, like Persephone’s Hades, right now this show is a lot better in theory than it is in reality.

See it if: You’re into Greek Drama, Rock Opera or the combination of the two, which works surprisingly well.

Skip it if: “Dick Cheney” is your safe word. The show takes itself a little too seriously for that.

They say: “A one man show that focuses on pioneering African American actors and athletes, B.A.D takes the audience on the journey as the artist tries to honor the struggles and challenges many African Americans faced. As he tries to do this, the spirits of Bill Pickett, Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, and Jack Johnson enter his body and speak through him to speak about their life, hardships, and accomplishments.”

Suzyn’s take: The concept of “edu-tainment” is like the concept of “dinner theater.” When the two elements are combined, one expects that neither of them will be particularly good. B.A.D (Black And Defiant) is a show all about overcoming stereotypes, and it defies this one as well. Stephan Collins-Stepney takes on the roles of rodeo cowboy Bill Pickett, comedian and actor Bert Williams, boxer Jack Johnson and singer, lawyer and all-around impressive guy Paul Robeson. He portrays each figure in turn and does a very good job giving them distinctive voices and ways of moving. He engages his whole body in the performance, which is particularly effective when he portrays Johnson. His transitions between the characters are obvious, yet smooth, giving the show a professional feel.

But Collins-Stepney is most striking in the role of Bert Williams, a vaudeville comedian whom W.C. Fields described as “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” As Williams, Collins-Stepney sits at a table and talks about his life while putting on blackface, then performs some of the physical comedy Williams was known for as he talks about the obstacles Williams overcame. The humor was certainly funny, though the audience was too caught up in the pathos of Williams’ having to perform in blackface to laugh. It would have been easy to watch an entire play about Williams alone. The other three figures aren’t quite as fascinating, but still it is a solid show all around. A few technical issues were somewhat distracting, the audience participation elements were a bit clumsy, and Collins-Stepney’s voice wasn’t quite up to Paul Robeson’s deep bass. But on the whole it is a compelling look at four pioneers about whom I knew very little, and I left the theater considering the personal costs these men paid for their greatness.

See it if: You’d like to spend an hour with four interesting people who changed the world in subtle ways.

Skip it if: You prefer your tainment edu-free, or at least a little lighter.

Abe Lincoln: A One-Man Show
at Cole Studio

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 3pm
Friday, July 25 @ 7pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 8pm

They say: “You probably know that Abe Lincoln was the 16th US president, but did you know he was a joke teller? See Abe tell his amusing anecdotes and relate some of his historical decision-making moments before your very eyes, moments before he leaves for Ford’s Theatre to meet his fate.”

Suzyn’s take: I’m fairly new to theatrical reviewing, but I’m certain it’s never a good thing when a reviewer of a comedy act has “Fozzie Bear” underlined multiple times in her notebook. Regrettably, this is the case for my notes on Scott Renz’s “Abraham Lincoln: A One-Man Show.” From the first minutes of the show, when Renz told a joke about how a lady with a feathered hat who fell down reminded him of a duck because she had “feathers on her head and was down on her behind,” I was exchanging what-the-fuck looks with everyone else in the room under the age of forty.

The old people, however, laughed consistently throughout the entire show.

I was sitting in front of a cranky-sounding couple in perhaps their late fifties. Moments before the show, the husband had looked around the performance space, which is essentially a room with chairs and benches, and observed:

“We could turn our sub-basement into a theatre.”

His wife blandly responded “They’d have a heck of a walk from the metro.”
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Self Accusation at D.C. Arts Center Theater
Remaining performances: Schedule “varies” (?!)

They say: Who are you? Are you what you should have been? How did you become who you are? Can you face your inaction, your culpability, your own judgment? Peter Handke’s 1968 “speak-in” becomes an aural spectacle invading your awareness and permeating your experience.

Suzyn says: When I don’t understand something, I try to apply the best advice I ever got about law school. “When you think you’re drowning,” my favorite professor once said, “Grab a board. Just take something you understand and hang tight. Then try to get another board, and try to build a raft from there.”

The thing of it is, ‘Self Accusation’ doesn’t lack for boards. I understood every sentence. Indeed, I understood every word, except “orthography” and I looked that one up when I got home*. The play is essentially a recitation of acts and misdeeds the two everypeople (or two aspects of one everyperson) have committed, the vast majority of which are mundane “I ran towards something…I ran away from something” though a few are extremely odd, i.e. “I dealt in expired meat.” A few of the acts are patently evil, but most of them are violations of petty rules of society. (Oddly, “I eulogized Milosovic” didn’t make the list, but it would have fit right in.)

The delivery varies. It’s never quite in unison, even when the actors are speaking the same lines. The default delivery is reminiscent of the Lord’s prayer as recited by a congregation, though the tone varies substantially from this at times, with the characters lip-synching one another one minute and fighting sometime later. There was quite a bit of stage business with an umbrella, a pipe and a magazine, as well as a few bits of clothing the actors put on and later took off. I assumed that was more to break up visual monotony than anything else, and it did the trick.

I felt bad for Jerry Herbilla and Kris Roth, who struck me as the two hardest-working actors in Washington. (Present readership excluded, of course.) This was fifteen pages of dense, repetitive, filibuster and they made it entirely watchable. This was probably the only point in my day that I went 50 minutes without checking my cellphone, or having any desire to do so.

See it if: You were a philosophy major, or you’d like to know what it’s like to be that chick from “The Closer”

Skip it if: Seeing a guy put on a sweater and shoes while delivering oddly obvious lines with strange cadence will give you Mr. Rogers flashbacks.

*The study of writing in a particular language correctly, according to a particular method. Voilà!