My Favorite Theater of 2017

Paul Hilton and Anna Francolini as Peter
Pan and Captain Hook in Peter Pan.
Photo by Steve Tanner.

It's been an odd year (in many, many, many ways). On the theater scene, one of those many oddnesses was the top-heaviness of it - the 2016-2017 season was so jam packed, I can't quite hold it all in my head. And then here at the tail end of the first half of the 2017-2018 season, we've had instead a rather spare (and unfortunately largely uninspiring) autumn. I still managed to find plenty to love, however: my initial attempt at building a Top list started at 35 which I then whittled to 26, then 21 (the task becoming more challenging with each culling), before landing at the current list. Some shows culled from the list made a strong impression on first viewing, but perhaps haven't etched themselves in my memory enough to warrant place here.

Part of why, even with a sparse autumn, the whittling was so difficult, lies in the fact that I hit a personal record this past year: 151 shows total (ho-ly merde), with 16 repeats, leaving 135 unique shows, besting last year by 24 unique shows and besting my highest year (2013) by 13.

So we should probably get started. I've had such a difficult time cutting the list down, and at this point, I don't even know how to rank them, so instead for a change of pace, I'm presenting them in chronological order of when I saw them.

Margin Notes: Pericles: Born in a Tempest

Pericles: Born in a Tempest

Jacques Roy and Kathryn Metzger as Pericles and Thaisa.
Photo by Al Foote III.

Seen on: Friday, 11/3/17.
My grade: A

Plot and Background

A new mother, mourning the death of her father, opens his parting gift: a handwritten story in a leather-bound journal. A story of Pericles and his adventures, a story from her childhood. Her family and friends take on the task of enacting the story within, summoning the spirit of her father to play the role of Pericles on his seafaring voyages, and eventually leading her to a reconciliation of her memories and grief. Hunger & Thirst Theatre, which specializes in modern updates to classic works, reimagines Shakespeare's romance as a story within a story, building parallels from the tale of Pericles and his daughter Marina to the contemporary woman grieving her father.

What I Knew Beforehand

I'd seen a production of Pericles at TFANA, but didn't retain a lot of specifics, beyond the memory of an episodic structure and a father and daughter separated and reunited.

Thoughts:

Play: While the play is a little slow to start, with the grieving characters fumbling for action, shifting boxes and juggling a squalling infant, it bounds into liveliness once Pericles himself joins the party. The spell cast by the storytellers then reaches its full potency, and doesn't wane. Weaving easily together the makeshift playfulness of puppetting dolls to simulate a fight, and a full-out duel, director Jordan Reeves synthesizes what should be disparate styles into the only elixir which could coax this woman out of her grief - the joy of play, and the romantic sweep of the story her father told her so many times. We are wooed as she is wooed, slowly but surely, to see what in the story of Pericles reflects her memories of her father, and her relationship to him. We, too, feel the loss of a great spirit. In addition to its cuts - mostly cinching in of the story to a tight 90-minute narrative - this production makes a few distinct shifts to the story of Pericles itself, outside of its framework of the grieving family telling an old story. Thaisa is not revived and ultimately reunited with her family; and Marina's reunion with Pericles, though achieved, is short-lived - here the play of storytelling crashes into the framework, as the daughter attempts to reconnect with her fading father, a man in the deep stages of dementia. He is able to speak the scene with her, recognizing and embracing her as his child, but the joy is short-lived, and he soon retreats once more into bewilderment and catatonia. While this shift adds a poignancy, particularly to the framing narrative, it is also a deliberate departure from the intention of the source material, and it's perhaps an individual audience member's prerogative to decide whether or not that matters.

Margin Notes: Rhinoceros

Rhinoceros

Eli Rosen and Luzer Twersky as Jean and Berenger.
Photo by Pedro Hernandez.

Seen on: Wednesday, 9/13/17.
My grade: B+/A-

Plot and Background

Berenger, an aloof drunkard, meets his ambitious friend Jean for drinks, but the two are soon interrupted by the shock of a rhinoceros running down the street. The number of rhinceroses in the village grows, and Berenger witnesses his colleagues and friends capitulating one by one to become rhinoceroses themselves. Eugene Ionesco, considered one of the fathers of Theater of the Absurd, lived through the Nazi occupation of France, and wrote Rhinoceros in 1959 as a response to the rise of fascism he observed. New Yiddish Rep, whose mission is to perform "modern treatments of Yiddish classics and Yiddish interpretations of modern masterpieces," presents a new Yiddish translation of Ionesco's play by Eli Rosen (with English supertitles).

What I Knew Beforehand

I studied Ionesco's oeuvre in a Theater of the Absurd course in college. I'd also seen an incredibly powerful production of Rhinoceros at Virginia Tech when I was a teenager that still stays with me.

Thoughts:

Play: It feels not only appropriate but inevitable to see a revival of this play done by a Jewish troupe - the ethnic group most specifically targeted and slaughtered by the Nazi regime. They've been here before, and they know the landscape. Despite, or perhaps because of, its absurd premise - that people are turning into rhinoceroses and stampeding about the town - Ionesco's play is able to make its point so clearly. We know we wouldn't want to turn into rhinoceroses, we know what destruction they're callously wreaking in this village; it's so clear, and yet the villagers refuse to see it. This is the parallel drawn to the rise of fascism - an inevitable destruction so plainly obvious to some it seems foolish to have to point it out, and yet people find excuses to allow, to permit, to try to meet them on their monstrous level. The new translation, both its Yiddish and English versions, is acutely aware of the frightening parallels to be drawn to the political climate today - so Botard, intent on denying the very existence of rhinoceroses, cries "Fake news!" while Jean and the Gentleman deliberate on whether the rhinoceroses had one or two horns - a distinction that not only doesn't matter, but puts further emphasis on wanting to classify between "acceptable" rhinoceroses and ones to be shunned, indicating a racist bias even before conversion to rhinoceroses. Director Moshe Yassur and translator Eli Rosen are aware of the obvious parallels, and so treat them with a light but conscious hand, so that the play feels neither didactic nor trivial. This has happened before, and we should all know the landscape.

Margin Notes: A Piece of My Heart

A Piece of My Heart

Poster design by Rachel Ely.

Seen on: Friday, 9/7/17.
My grade: A

Plot and Background

Shirley Lauro's play, based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Keith Walker, follows six women from different backgrounds who journey to Vietnam during the war - as soldiers, as nurses, as performers - and examines the toll it takes on them, both during and after the conflict.

Disclosure, and
What I Knew Beforehand

I'm vaguely sure I'd seen a ten minute cutting from this play in speech and debate tournaments in high school, so I knew loosely that it was about nurses in the Vietnam War. Disclosure: I am friends with director Reesa Graham (we met when I reviewed another show she directed, May Violets Spring).

Thoughts:

Play: It's easy to think that going to a play about a war over forty years past might feel stale or dated. What's remarkable about this production is how immediately urgent it feels, how presently now each moment is - and how desolating it is to realize how little some things have changed in the ensuing decades. My main exposure to the Vietnam narrative has been history classes, a few films, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Those stories are about the men in combat. The stories here are about the women in a combat zone. They're not getting blasted with grenades, but it's their job to try desperately to repair what's left of the men who are. Director Reesa Graham conducts this symphony of the unsung women - a blending of six women's stories (with help from one All American Man) through words, song, the stamping of feet, the biting clack of the banging of sticks, the stillness of silence - with grace and subtlety. The text of the play is powerful in its own right, without adornment, and Graham doesn't try to gussy it up - she lets the play speak honestly, lets the characters be frank - open and vulnerable, hardened and hurt. These women have been forgotten and ignored. Here they have their space, to remember, to be, and - hopefully - to heal. A Piece of My Heart isn't an easy play to watch - but it is an essential play to witness.

Margin Notes: Cloud 9

Cloud 9

Brandon Walker and Erin Cronican as Cathy and Lin.
Photo by Russ Rowland.

Seen on: Monday, 7/3/17.
My grade: B-

Plot and Background

Cloud 9 follows a family and some of its satellite personalities across what is either a century or only twenty-five years - the first half finds Englishman Clive and his family living in Africa in 1880 as social unrest against the colonizers is on the rise; the second half shows us what remains of the family twenty-five years on, but in 1980s London. Both halves are riddled through with commentary on gender and sexual politics, infidelity, racism, entitlement, and the savages of violence among humans. The Seeing Place is a company which uses Brechtian devices in its productions to confront the desensitized trajectory of society.

What I Knew Beforehand

I think I'd read the play at some point in college. That's about it. I brought with me a friend who'd acted in it, to be my resident expert.

Thoughts:

Play: The performance begins with a narrator explaining that we will be seeing Caryl Churchill's play, not only completely uncut, but with stage directions (particularly those indicating when a role is cast genderbent or racebent) read aloud and the full trappings of theatricality, such as costume changes, on full display. Sometimes these devices are quite powerful - when the narrator indicates a mother slapping her child, and the actors don't even gesture at the violence, but stare into each others' eyes; when an embrace is instructed, and obliged only grudgingly by the players - other times it seems more a hindrance to performance than an enabler, stepping over the dialogue to indicate exits and entrances we can see quite clearly without narrative aid, or robbing us of what is only narrated as a moment of quiet stillness. And I can't quite reconcile how some costume changes still happen out of sight - chiefly those involving two of the men putting on or taking off the wigs when they're playing female. This above all seems to be something they would want to highlight for that distancing effect. Another sometimes powerful element added to performance is the set of chalkboards across the back wall - Survival Tips 1880 and Survival Tips 1980. At various times during performance, a character will walk to one of these boards, select a piece of chalk, and write down a survival tip ("Pretend to be normal," "No pain, always smile"). There's a poignancy to this device, though I could wish for more craft in the framing of it - had it perhaps happened when characters leave the playing space, as the lesson they've taken from the scene, rather than a somewhat distracting motion happening while something else is going on. There's a barely controlled chaos to a lot of the proceedings, which adds charm, particularly to the first half of the play, but I start wishing rather desperately for a moment of honest stillness.