Warehouse,

Remaining Performances:

Thursday, July 14, 7:45 p.m.

Saturday, July 16, noon

Tuesday, July 19, 7:45 p.m.

Friday, July 22, 6 p.m.

They say: “Sara – fortune teller & member of the ‘We Bomb Truth Over Lies’ graffiti movement – is haunted. The City eats its residents, exiling their spirits to Sara’s apartment, while Go-Go & its Mayor BirdMan funk eternal.”

Matt’s Take: “You box me up inside your prayers,” says Araba Brown’s Sara Josephine James, as five other characters—all different forces acting on her life—literally surround her with boards, trying to trap her in with all the complexities of being a modern black woman. We learn that she’s already been through much and faces constant judgment for past mistakes, but her travails aren’t anywhere near an end. In fact, they’re about to get a whole lot weirder.

Nina Angela Mercer’s Gypsy & the Bully Door follows its lithe protagonist as she dances, fucks, sings, and suffers through two cities and compounded miseries in search of the way to transcendence. With her believable passion and even more astounding talent as a dancer, Brown steals every scene she’s in (the possible exception comes in a back-and-forth between Sara and her has-been of an idol, Mama Chola, played by a delightfully zany Nicole Brewer).

The audience is first greeted with an electric piano laying down a soft groove. Soon the rest of an exceptionally tight live quintet joins in, and we see a slideshow depicting a Metro station, uptown joint Madam’s Organ, and other scenes from District life. Sara, it turns out, is a D.C. native. But the city hasn’t been kind to her, nor to her roommate Khadijah (Dot McDonald) nor their respective boyfriends Roy (Kahlil Daniel) and Nate (Akil Williams).

In fact, Nate has just returned from Afghanistan, and though he made it through the horrors of war, he can’t escape the police department’s deadly racism, and early on winds up shot down on the street. But he doesn’t disappear, at least not from Sara’s life. It just so happens that Sara can communicate with spirits of the deceased, and sure enough Nate appears, gunshot wounds bleeding through his T-shirt and all, and informs her of her mission: to bomb (read: tag with graffiti) chain restaurants on U Street NW.

Naturally the plan goes awry, spurring Sara to do what she’s always wanted: flee to New York and try to make it as a dancer, her dreams validated by—what else?—a spectral visit from Mama Chola.Roytags along. They change their names (with Sara now calling herself “Destiny Rose”) and start anew; but Roy has dreams of his own, and accepts a white man’s offer to travel the world as part of a touring art exhibition. Meanwhile, Sara’s visit to Chola ends in disappointment, and she settles into a life of fortune telling and hairdressing. Among her clients are a sympathetic white social worker and his frustrated Latina girlfriend.

Everything from Sara’s initial visions to her eventual breakdown and resurrection attempts to capture the summation of the black experience in America. It’s an admirable challenge, but the play suffers from trying to do too much. While only occasionally stopping to focus, Mercer takes on gentrification, police brutality, media sensationalism, sexual double standards, mistreatment of veterans, white guilt, Uncle Toms, commercial art, the power of spirituality, broken promises, shattered dreams, and national politics.

The task’s sheer magnitude works against it. Take one of the play’s most bizarre sequences, in which the actor playing Roy emerges as “Brotha President” (read: Barack Obama), a stiff puppet who dances the soft-shoe to amuse a Southern slave trader. It’s an interesting and certainly controversial idea, but one that demands more polish to have its desired effect. Still, Mercer has an uncanny ear for dialogue and knows how to flesh out great characters. Coupled with Eric Ruffin’s direction—the scenes in which Sara achieves near-bliss through sexual ecstasy are plain gorgeous—and you have yourself a stirring play.

See it if: You like the thought of Toni Morrison, Parliament/Funkadelic, and vaudeville theater having a lovechild.

Skip it if: Thinking about race, sex, funk, or all three together makes you uncomfortable.

‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore

The Warehouse, 1019 7th Street NW

Remaining Performances:

Friday, July 16 at 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 17 at 10:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 25 at 6:30 p.m.

They Say: “A juicy story of secret lovers, betrayal, incest and revenge, among the most controversial plays in English literature — See it onstage: all the romance, all the lust, all the blood! From the theatre that brought you “Jack the Ticket Ripper.”"

Glen’s Take: The historical rap on ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore — the thing to which the Georgetown Theatre Company folks are referring, with that “most contrversial” jazz —  is that the play, written in 1629 or so, revels in debauchery (incest, bloody vengeance, post-mortem dismemberment, etc.) without ever carving out a moral center.

I know, right?  In a post-Tarantino America, the complaint seems kind of … adorable.

Props to director Alia Faith Williams and company for having done the hard, good work of paring a play that usually runs over three hours down to a spry-ish 90 minutes by neatly excising huge chunks of text. The result isn’t as clean as it could be — denied their respective subplots, Frank O’Donnell‘s Richardetto and Nathan Cederoth‘s Grimaldi just sort of hang around as if they’re waiting for the next bus out of town. But as a canny, quick-on-his-feet servant, Terence Aselford gets some nice, oily bits of business in, and Lindsay Duso sinks her teeth into her woman scorned with an unapologetic and at times downright operatic brashness that’s big, yes, but you can’t say it doesn’t fill the stage and goose the energy.

The two leads, Evan Crump and Jessica Shearer Wilson are only given one note to play, though you may wish for a bit more variation in tone from Crump’s Giovanni. Scene to scene, his delivery vacillates between insistent and shrill — and even if you’re prepared to cut him some slack on the forcefulness front, given that his character is both 1. a pompous academic and 2. consumed with boning his sister, it’d be nice to see more of an arc.

Playwright John Ford (no, not that one – but how awesome would THAT be?) wrote dialogue that’s clean, vigorous and often funny, and it’s done good service here.  The fight choreography’s tight, and features characters shouting things like “Have at you!” and “Vengeance!”,  which: Yes, please.

The much-discussed blood doesn’t really show up till the closing minutes, but when it does there’s gouts of it; and the play’s most famous image –a grisly cardio-kebab — will put you off Fort Fringe burgers for a day or so.

See it if: VC Andrews-brand siblings + “Have at you!” + Post-mortem dismemberment = Your winning formula.

Skip it if: You’re unwilling to wait a bit to get your visceral ya-yas out, and routinely eat dessert first.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 8:30pm
Wednesday, July 23 @ 6:30pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 3:30pm

They say: “What the hell were they thinking? The delightfully perplexed characters in this trio of one-acts cope with the unintended consequences that ensue when the INS investigates illegal trafficking in undocumented genies, the Devil issues an RFP for a consultant, and an agenda-less retreat ends improbably, yet inevitably, in romance.”

Glen’s take: The laudable mission statement of the recently formed Senior Moments Theatre Company (“To encourage and support emerging dramatists over 55″) probably had a lot to do with the demographic makeup of Unintended Consequences‘ Sunday afternoon crowd, which, I merely note, skewed a bit more, ah, Applebee’s-five-o’clock-dinner-rush than Fringe audiences generally do.

Look: I get that satire is inherently pushy. It is, after all, just Funny With Something to Prove. But the trick of it — the way you get audiences to swallow your pill — is to spend more time worrying about the Funny than the Something to Prove. Satire goes wrong when its makers are so keen to poke you in the ribs that they neglect to tickle them.

Take the first two playlets in Unintended Consequences, both of which suffer from being overwritten and broadly performed. That, as it turns out, is a near deadly combination, because by insisting so shrilly and laboriously on their central satirical premises (Genies = Illegal Immigrants and Consultants = Satan), both plays reveal how little value they place on things like character, dialogue and recognizable emotion.

But as soon as the third and final one-act starts, something happens. Something surprising, and really kinda great. Even though its satiric premise isn’t particularly fresh (just some familiar pokes at meeting facilitators and org-speak), even though it’s written by the same guy responsible for the genie comedy you sat through earlier, that last play hits you like a revelation, for two reasons: Karen Lange, as a hopeful Arts Administrator, and Washington Improv Theater regular Stuart Scotten, as a hesitant meeting attendee. These two performers concentrate on creating characters — rounded, funny, utterly believable characters — and allow themselves to find the script’s jokes, instead of lunging at them.  Scotten in particular offers a master class in what offhand, unforced comic timing can do for a production; as a result, precisely 33.3% of Unintended Consequences is easily the best thing in Fringe I’ve seen so far.

See if if: You are possessed of both a Zen-like patience and a fondness for jokes about media consultants.

Skip it if: You’d rather catch Scotten at WIT.

Remaining Performances:

Saturday, 7/12, 2 pm
Sunday, 7/20, 2 pm
Saturday, 7/26, 7:30 pm

They say: “In the Rude Mechanicals’ Coriolanus – Man of the People by William Shakespeare, the seldom-performed play is reinterpreted (and trimmed) for a modern audience into a sharp satire about politics and politicians. No establishment is left unlampooned, from the politicians, lobbyists and media – to the followers they manipulate.”

Chris’s take: In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck derisively labels the amateur actors rehearsing to perform for Theseus “a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,” which is to say a bunch of clownish, ignorant workingmen. The plentiful small theater companies that name themselves the “Rude Mechanicals” probably do so recalling the pleasant mayhem of Pyramus and Thisby, and overlooking the mechanicals’ sheer theatrical ineptitude.

The Laurel-based Rude Mechanicals bill their production of Coriolanus as “A Contemporary Satire by William Shakespeare.” Hmm. The thing about satires is that they ridicule institutions and individuals, and that they’re funny. The impulse behind this production was evidently to use Coriolanus to poke fun at the Bush administration. Thus, the citizens up in arms over corn prices carry placards with suspiciously contemporary slogans such as “No Blood for Corn”; Coriolanus speaks in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner; and naturally there are color-coded threat indicators. Sadly, this is the full extent of the “contemporary satire,” which is neither particularly insightful nor apt.

By inference, the director has come up with one gimmick (set the play in the present day) and in so doing didn’t bother to stage the play in a way that genuinely offers an interpretation of the story. In other words, through thoughtful direction, the production might have conveyed that because they blow with the wind, it’s actually the fickle citizens who are most responsible for the political meltdown, or it might have conveyed that Coriolanus is a man genuinely reluctant to pursue power who finds himself in a situation he could not have imagined, or even that he is genuinely a tyrant who deserves his death.

Instead, what we mostly get is an hour and 20 minutes of actors saying their lines, and making their entrances and exits. There are worse things, but there are better things too.

The acting is uneven. Alan Duda plays Coriolanus with military stoicism (think Vladimir Putin with more hair) but without any enlightening nuance. The finest actor, the one whose words flow trippingly on the tongue, is Mike Galizia as patrician Menenius Agrippa. Some of the actors in lesser roles are genuinely miserable. The staging is extremely minimal, which in itself is not a complaint. What is a complaint–and perhaps not the company’s fault–is that the stage creaks constantly, a palpable distraction.

The production ultimately comes across not as a satire, but as an accidental stage adaptation of a late-night, cable B-movie. There are lots of guys wearing fatigues and berets, explosions (if you can call bursts from a fog machine explosions, that is), guns (plastic, of course, and proportioned for children rather than adult actors), gunfire (recorded sound effects), and cheesy synthesized underscoring. As with the original mechanicals, the effect achieved is something other than the effect intended.

See it if: You are a Shakespeare enthusiast. Productions of Coriolanus just don’t come along every day.

Skip it if: You thought this would be played as satire.