BWW Reviews: Forum Theatre Launches 'Forum for All' with Poetic AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP

Forum Theatre, which is the resident company at Round House Theatre's Silver Spring stage, launches its daringly democratic "Forum for Everyone" pay-what-you-can initiative with AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP, a timely portrait of the immigrant experience in the USA. In this play by Aditi Brennan Kapil, a playwright of Bulgarian and Indian descent raised in Sweden and now residing in Minnesota, Forum gives us a fluid, at times mystical, at times cryptic, portrait of an America where the almighty dollar and the American way of life are viewed in the clear light of day. In the process the raggedness of their iconography becomes apparent.

AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP brings us a brief, intimate look at the lives of a handful of immigrants who do the kind of work the larger society renders invisible: home health care aids for the elderly, subway car operators on automated trains, and buskers playing folkloric music from home. The play is a kind of poetic montage of narratives linked serendipitously by circumstance or fate or Karma, depending on one's perspective.

The stories of these 5 immigrants from Liberia, India, and Bulgaria slowly unwind and entwine over the course of 90 minutes, and we see the sorrow there beneath the grand illusion of an America whose streets are still paved with gold. Truth and illusion collide in this portrayal of new Americans reeling under in the grim reality of lost identity and dead-end jobs.

The title character, Agnes--played with magical yearning by Joy Jones--has immigrated to the US from Liberia, leaving her young son behind with his grandmother. In this country, she tells herself she can earn many times the income available to her in Liberia, but she misses her young son and speaks to him often by cell phone, admonishing him to do his schoolwork and obey his grandmother, while teasing him with tales of life's plenty in the USA. Not incidentally, the West African country of Liberia figures prominently in the history of the US, as the country to which the American Colonization Society and later Back-to-Africa Movement leader Marcus Garvey urged free black Americans to repatriate themselves. It is no small irony that Liberian émigré Agnes has returned to the USA, once again doing the thankless work of tending to America's wealthy. Her peevish, elderly employer, Ella, is a lonely, dying invalid; indeed, Agnes herself, we learn, is dying of cancer, and she struggles to find poetic closure to her transatlantic sojourn for both herself and her young son.

Agnes's relief caregiver is fellow immigrant Roza, a one-time stunning circus beauty from Bulgaria who has descended into silence and alcoholism. Nora Achrati plays Roza with understated despair, and we see the terrible price she has paid for leaving her old life behind. Roza's bitterly comic and charmingly fatalistic husband Shipkov, once a renowned circus ringmaster, slogs away as a subway car operator on a self-driving train. Having literally "won the lottery" back in Bulgaria for work papers in the USA, Ed Chrisian as Shipkov expertly guides the audience through the disappointment of it all with profane, incisive wit tinged with the gallows humor for which Eastern Europe is known. Chrisian's Shipkov is the grim realist of the play, whose spot-on and brilliantly funny insights into the flaws of the humanscape of his new country provide much of the bittersweet laughter of the production.

Meanwhile, Shipkov is training his polar opposite in temperament, a young Indian immigrant nicknamed "Happy" who is determined to "make it" in the USA, and spends his time waxing optimistic about one mysterious and doubtlessly sketchy deal or another that will finally make him rich. Jason Glass imbues Happy with a perfect pitch of innocent optimism on a collision course with nihilistic reality. Happy, we learn from a flashback, had actually prank-called the elderly patient Ella long distance from India years back when he and a friend dared each other to test their best "jokes" on overseas strangers. One of their jokes supplies perhaps the best line of the night: "What did Gandhi say when asked what he thought of Western Civilization? 'That would be a good idea, said Gandhi.'" Now in the US, Happy has scored a job as a subway operator trainee, though his dreams continue to loft high above the subway underground. Happy, for whom Karma is a very serious business, finally succumbs to temptation and, retrieving the prank-call list from his pocket, again phones the lonely and talkative Ella, who insists he sell her a fictitious new phone service. Happy takes down her credit card information and subsequently disappears.

The steely rich curmudgeon Ella, whom actress Annie Houston endows with gnashing shrillness laced with helpless loneliness, wastes away in her gilded penthouse where not a soul visits beyond her attendants, and most especially not her only son for whom she leaves countless phone messages detailing the petty annoyances of her life. Bedridden, she sits incontinent in her palatial bed, complaining of The Starlings chirping through the windows and calling for her nursing attendants to change her diaper. The American Dream of wealth and power never looked so bleak.

Laced throughout these narratives is Jon Jon Johnson, the virtuoso busking violinist who provides much of the show's soundtrack. He opens the pre-show playing hauntingly beautiful classical music interwoven with folkloric melodies that sounded to me like Liszt or Bartok or Dvorak (but then, I'm not a musical scholar). Throughout the preshow, the upbeat, energetic press night audience tossed appreciative bills into his busker's violin case, but when the show began Johnson transformed his playing into the mystical sounds of birds chirping and singing and beckoning just beyond view. The genial and versatile Johnson also plays various incidental characters, from the circus clown Bobo to one of Happy's prank-calling partners in mischief.

Throughout AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP, the characters speak of quixotic illusions, of dreams deferred, from the mythical magic of Agnes' promise to fly back to her son as a bird, to the dazzle of the Bulgarian Big Top, to the prophesy of Happy's father that his son go forth and make others happy as he had his parents. Lost in the poetic illusions are the nitty-gritty rationales of realism, and theatergoers in search of believability may be baffled at times. But those happy to surrender to the poetic dance orchestrated by violist Johnson will find in AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP a bittersweet parable of strangers in a strange land.

Director Michael Dove has cast AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP extremely effectively, and mounted it with alley staging-the audience on two sides of the performance space. Set Designer Steven Royal has created a versatile set mirroring the two extremes of a cityscape, from the underground tunnel of the subway to the cloistered penthouse of a high-rise; on one end the exaggerated backboard of wealthy doyen Ella's bed anchors the action, and at the other a life-size approximation of a lead subway car undergirds the intertwining tales. Subtle and effective lighting by Katie McCreary underscores the hidden nature of each point on this continuum of reality. Sound Designer Thomas Sowers has created an ethereal, mythic world where illusion bests reality, and Costumes by Chelsey Schuller gently evoke the place each character now holds in the American landscape. Properties Designer Patti Kalil provides the simple and effective props. Much applause to the actors and director on authentic dialects and accents, with special kudos to Nora Achrati on her fluent Bulgarian.
Indeed, special applause to Forum Theatre on its grand experiment in making theatre financially accessible to all; AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP is surely a show accessible in multiple ways to America's newest newcomers and old timers alike.

Running Time: 100 minutes without intermission.

Advisory: challenging material and some profanity.

AGNES UNDER THE BIG TOP plays at Forum Theatre, 8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, MD, through September 28. For tickets click here.

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