Geometry Of Fire

photo: Sandra Coudert

There hasn't yet been a high number of plays to prominently include an Iraqi War serviceman returning to civilian life, so it's especially disappointing that this one, by Stephen Belber, is more pedantic than enlightening. It's also far too tidy and predictable: the subplot, in which the Saudi-American comes to believe that his dying father's blood cancer was caused by U.S. chemical testing in his Virginia backyard, is an instantly transparent device to bring him into inevitable angry opposition to the ex-soldier. Belber's dialogue is natural and believable, but the play lacks a suitable amount of escalating tension, which dulls the power of the characters' confrontation.

Cape Disappointment

Photo/Ryan Jensen

The latest work by The Debate Society, Cape Disappointment, is slightly disappointing, but only in comparison to their previous plays. More is not always better: the two new actors joining writer/performers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen pick up the uneasy rhythms of casual conversation, but the awkward transitions create a lot of dead space. When it's moving though, you'll find that director Oliver Butler still has a wide variety of tricks up his sleeve, and that TDS still leaves most companies in their creative dust.

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The Grand Inquisitor

It's rarely more austere than this: one thin, white raised platform, two black chairs, one actor talking while another listens. And yet for its full 55 minutes the simplicity here makes for an electrifying theatricality, forcing a focus where one actor raising his palms in the air becomes a cataclysmic event. The intensity is not a surprise, considering that Peter Brook has directed and that the text is an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's intellectually staggering tale in which Christ returns to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Bruce Myers, as both narrator and Inquisitor who (in a manner of speaking) puts the silent Christ on trial, is spellbinding, anchoring his performance with a gravity so core-shaking that the stage can barely contain it. Is man's free will incompatible with happiness? Are the edicts of Christianity impossible for its followers to ever achieve? How does evil masquerade as good? These are the kinds of questions I was left with after seeing Dostoyevsky's arguments put on stage and made newly vibrant and disturbing here. In a word, it's devastating.

Cape Disappointment

Reviewed for Theatermania.

Hillary: A Modern Greek Tragedy With a (Somewhat) Happy Ending

Photo/Jim Baldassare

If you think about it--not a lot, but a little--Hillary Rodham Clinton's life somewhat resembles a Greek tragedy. She's undone by the very things she required to get where she was, almost as if she were caught in a battle between the unyielding warrior, Athena, and the free-love queen, Aphrodite. Such is the thought behind Wendy Weiner's Hillary: A Modern Greek Tragedy With a (Somewhat) Happy Ending, which leaps to its own conclusions, knowing full well that the task itself isn't as important as the lesson learned (or the laughs earned). Director Julie Kramer dodges the double-edged sword of the gimmicky premise by indulging in camp, and the mock history lesson gets by on clever usurpations of classic myths. Which part of Bill Clinton do you think his mother forgot to dip into the sacred spring? Where else would the gate to the underworld be but Newt Gingrich's cellar? What's striking is that while Darren Pettie's Bill and the four-person Chorus all go for laughs, we can watch Mia Barron (Hillary) struggle, time and time again, between ambition and humanity, emotion and success. That she fails and may still succeed is a heartfelt gift from the gods.

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Catch-22

Photo/Richard Termine

It's no surprise to find a company trying to adapt Catch-22 for the stage: the Iraq War--for all its paradoxes (e.g., fighting for peace), selfish capitalism, and military glory over individual rights--might as well be a sequel to Joseph Heller's brilliant novel. But it's not easy to adapt a jerky book like Catch-22, so it is a pleasant to surprise to find that Aquila Theatre Company is more than crazy enough--director Peter Meinecke might as well be wearing a straightjacket--to make the necessary cuts while still capturing the essence of the conflict. Theatrical paradoxes establish the mood--with projected backdrops of pure propaganda and low-budget illusions for sets--while the manic, triple-cast ensemble gives life to a wide variety of stock characters that flavor the central character, Yossarian, and his plight. In this role, John Lavelle manages to play both sane and insane, and this enables the show to do more than simply satirize warfare.

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