Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 4

Bright Half Life is presented in a totally nonsequential fashion, and at nearly breakneck speed much of the time. We are left to piece together the whole story from dozens of fragments that appear and pass quickly, which can be both exhausting and exhilarating. And not just for us in the audience; this calls for enormous flexibility on the part of the performers too. Moments of ecstasy are juxtaposed with moments of terror, joy and sadness arrive cheek-by-jowl, and certain incidents are repeatedly revisited. The two performers must be emotional quick-change artists, and I found myself amazed watching as Ayesis Clay and Katharine Vary worked their way intrepidly through those changes.

The title Perfect Arrangement refers to the compact of a male gay couple and a lesbian couple to hide in plain view from the disapproval of the world in 1950 by posing as two straight couples living in adjoining halves of a Georgetown duplex. The two halves are secretly connected through the residences' respective front closets, a passage that enables each real couple to reunite at night, unnoticed by the world outside. Such a setup is custom-made for farce.

Keeping us gasping is what Cabaret in all of its incarnations has always been about. Gasping at the opulence, gasping at the decadence, gasping at the heedlessness and the horror. It is intentionally strong stuff, and if it delivers, then it succeeds. And by that yardstick, this version, whatever it may or may not owe to its predecessors, is a smashing success.

Support Group for Men will send you away happy. There is nothing profound or challenging in this show: just a well-crafted and very funny comedy of manners, specifically the manners of the male of Species Homo Americanus, youthful to mid-life, as observed in a middle-class Chicago habitat.

Dougherty unspools the stories of Chester and Dr. Cotton, his treating physician, with novelistic skill. The feeling of truly being in the World War II period never lifts. The stories reel us in: Chester's of the way he deals with his injury, and Cotton's of hospital life in wartime, with its politics, scandals, and sexual misbehavior. This show is the whole package: a polished, intriguing, thematically-consistent but otherwise dissimilar pair of stories well-told, leaving one profoundly moved.

Then the government, represented by its functionary Lucius (Michael Rogers), brings in Shimeus (Wade McCollum), a derelict of another sort, whimpering and traumatized by an arson that killed everyone else in his family. Lucius orders the Browns to harbor Shimeus as a guest. Almost immediately, however, Shimeus stops whimpering, and, more importantly, stops behaving like a guest, and more like an invader - well maybe not a declared invader but a lot like a space alien whose intentions toward neighbors aren't entirely clear but don't seem encouraging, a la the plant in Little Shop of Horrors.

It's an old trick, but a good one: Set two contrasting dramatic tones (usually domestic comedy and dread) against each other and let them fight it out throughout a play. It's the trick playwright Greg Kalleres employs to advantage in Wrecked,

The drama works because of the intriguing way the characters' ideas about how to act in response to Marian Anderson's two provocative exclusions (first from Nassau Inn and then from Constitution Hall) shift repeatedly in response to new information, so that consensus is almost impossible to achieve, at least until the play's very end. Anderson seeks progress through song, unimpeachable behavior and an avoidance of politics; Albert Einstein wants an end to both racism and antisemitism, and by the end is very worried about the Bomb; Mary Church Terrell embraces confrontation because all else seems to fail; and Abraham Flexner tries hard to protect the Institute as a means of keeping the Holocaust from consuming absolutely all Jews, even though he can save only a few.

And now of course we are into the story of Antonio's family of origin, and the world of his origin, which has conditioned him to behave this way, which implicitly and explicitly looks to its men to solve problems with violence.

Berowne gloomily foresees: 'Necessity will make us all forsworn Three thousand times within this three year's space.' And by 'necessity' we can be sure he means not simply the logistical necessity of dealing with women but what we might call Jurassic Park Necessity: Life finds a way. As Shakespeare himself wrote in a similar context: 'The world must be peopled.' And for peopling, you need relations between the sexes.

A thinly-disguised parable of the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui may have been written in 1941, but it may as well have been addressed directly to Americans of 2019.

Disaster! lovingly pokes fun at two staples of 1970s popular culture: disaster movies like Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure and the disco-heavy pop music of the era. Whether to go is not going to present any great dilemmas. This is a perfect summer evening's smart-alecky entertainment.

The strange thing about this lyrical cornucopia: it doesn't stick in the mind much as one departs. There is a deliberate effort to craft just such a song, 'I Feel So Much Spring,' as the closer, and it feels and sounds good, but by the time the song finishes, there have been so many harmonic variations sung by the various characters that the core melody has largely been overwritten mentally. What will not be overwritten is the joyous feeling that the song, and the ending, bring about.

The only thematic message, apart from the goes-without-saying affirmation of LGBTQ life choices, is that we should not 'be afraid to play,' which is about as anodyne as they come. But since when need hilarity justify itself with a message?

For Prince Hal to attain his destiny, he like all sons must replace his father, and if in this case there are two fathers, it simply means that there are two to surmount, surpass and survive.

Indecent is about the power of theater to dazzle and uplift. Playwright Vogel has discussed plays that make the hair stand up on her neck. That is exactly what Indecent does: makes the hairs stand up on the back of the neck, and we may be at a loss to explain.

Paula Vogel's 2015 play Indecent, in a production now arrived at Center Stage after stops at D.C.'s Arena Stage and the Kansas City Rep, is a staggering tour de force of playwriting prowess that is also a tour of a largely forgotten world: international Yiddish theater shortly after the turn of the last century. A play about a play about a play, it follows Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance on a circular path, from Lodz, Poland in 1906 to Warsaw, to various stages in Europe, through Ellis Island and various New York theaters, culminating with an abortive stay on Broadway, and thence back to Lodz once more, at the peak of the Holocaust. And then, in a sort of coda, it concludes in Connecticut with the last days of Mr. Asch. All these parts are contained within an initial framing device in which, like Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a stage manager named Lemml (Ben Cherry), introduces the players and musicians, apparently members of a turn-of-the-century Yiddish theater troupe, and identifies the kinds of parts they will play (like male and female Ingenues). Everything that follows, i.e. a play about presenting a play, is presented as a play performed by this troupe.

Most of the characters fail to use words properly to convey directly what is important to them or us. But as I have said, the underlying problem is larger. It is a mismatch of moral paradigms. The possibility of rationally settling the underlying issues by a dialogue among the participants is hard to conceive. This play seems instead to be more about making people grasp, at a gut level, the speakers' personhood,

Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I (1597), now being revived by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, is at its heart a family story. It certainly bears the traditional characteristics of Shakespeare's history plays, but it is, first and foremost, a story of two fathers and two sons, and only secondarily about dynastic struggles.

The play seems to be a retrospective of Shakespeare's career, with a strong note of self-parody. And with a playwright as fecund as Shakespeare, a 'greatest hits album' would have to be full to bursting. And so that's what Cymbeline is: a 'greatest hits' that refuses to take itself seriously, and invites us to participate in Shakespeare's gentle laugh at himself.