Busboys and Poets, 5th & K Streets NW

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 9, at noon and 8 p.m.
Saturday, July 10, at 10 p.m.
Sunday, July 11, at 6 p.m.

They Say: Poet, critic, author, activist and member of the infamous Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker delighted in skewering the culture of early Twentieth Century. This original one-woman show is a dynamic exploration of the life of America’s first lady of wit.

The Real Mrs. Parker, delighted as always to see you.

Trey’s Take: Dutiful, sure, and clearly affectionate; dynamic, I don’t know about. The lady’s “last call” — not a bad title, that, given that it’s about a famous drinker with a serious writing problem — is framed as a kind of press conference from beyond the grave, with brief barroom digressions, and I guess that makes as much sense as any other approach. In something less than the advertised 70 minutes, a solo performer (who’ll go nameless, as there’s no playbill) deploys dozens of Parker’s best-known quips, along with passages from her light verse, as she sketches out the highs and lows of a life famous as much for the latter — two husbands and three suicide attempts — as for the former. Not that the highs were chopped liver. Gigs at Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, a bit of playwriting, a Hollywood screenwriting stint, and of course that famous seat among the Vicious Circle: nothing to sneer at there, unless of course you’re the perpetually self-scorning Parker, who notes bleakly in the show’s most touching moment that she’s no Hemingway, no Fitzgerald. “They were the giants,” says a woman who roared her way through the Twenties and who ran with them both. And you want to say, “Sure, but you wrote tighter, and got more out of almost every word.”

See It If: The mordant witticism is mother’s milk to you — or you simply need a fond introduction to the lady who observed that “Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

Skip It If: You’ve seen Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s version — “Me ow, too,” she improvised when a cat wandered into a scene — and liked it.

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.