Washington audiences are pretty spoiled when it comes to new
theater this month. Not only does the Capital Fringe Festival
kick off this week, bringing shows about everything from
superhero celebrity rehab to the intricacies of trash collection,
but 90 minutes outside of Washington, five new plays are
running through July 29 as part of the Contemporary American Theater
Festival.
I drove out to CATF on Saturday to catch three of the five shows in the rotation:
Neil LaBute’s
In a Forest, Dark and Deep, which made its debut in London’s West End last year, and the world premiere plays
Gidion’s Knot by
Johnna Adams and
Barcelona by
Bess Wohl. LaBute’s show is undoubtedly the star attraction at this year’s festival—it’s directed by festival founder
Ed Herendeen (read our interview with him here) and stars Broadway regulars
Johanna Day and
Joey Collins as a sister and brother who come together on a stormy night to pack up the contents of a remote cabin.
The production is tightly put together, and both actors are
impressive, but the play itself lacks finesse. For starters, the
pathetic fallacy invoked by the constant thunder and lightning
suggests horror, and LaBute constantly hints that something
macabre is about to happen—the isolated house loses power a
couple of times after a particularly aggressive thunderclap, and
there are several references to a Chekhov’s gun-like filing
cabinet upstairs. An hour and 40 minutes is a long time to devote
to squabbles between siblings, however dark or resentful they
may be. By the time the show’s crux is revealed, it’s fairly
predictable, and almost a letdown after the taut melodrama
we’ve been promised. You get the sense LaBute is banking on his
characters being compelling enough to carry the show, but
they’re rarely realistic or absorbing enough to fulfill the play’s
promise.
The opposite could be said of
Gidion’s Knot, a heart-stopping new show by Johnna Adams. The play is set in a fifth-grade classroom faithfully reproduced by set designer
Margaret McKowen, from the miniature chairs
the audience members sit in to the posters of presidents past and
present on the walls. It’s so
real you can practically smell the dry-erase markers. Adams
gives us very little backstory for either of the two characters
onstage, but we soon learn that Corryn (Robin Walsh) is a parent coming to talk to her son’s teacher, Heather (Joey Parsons), after the latter sends a note home with 11-year-old Gidion.
Adams ekes out the story bit by bit, but the mood is
immediately somber, and the surprise with which Heather greets Corryn’s
arrival is a clue that all isn’t quite right at home. Superbly
directed by Herendeen, the show has pathos and suspense in
bucketloads, as the combative but charming Corryn and the
prickly Heather go from allies to adversaries at the drop of a hat.
Within a lean 80 minutes, the show raises profound questions
about parenting and education and documents the gut-wrenching
force of maternal loyalty.
The last play I saw was
Barcelona, a 90-minute mystery of sorts about an American girl (Anne Marie Nest, as charming as she is an obnoxious cliché) who goes home with a Spanish man (Jason Manuel Olazabal) while on a bachelorette
weekend in the Catalan city. Like Adams, Wohl offers reveals bit by
bit, so much of the show feels
authentically like getting to know a stranger. Olazabal’s
character, Manuel, is handsome but positively sphinx-like in his
reactions to the drunk, belligerent, crass Irene, who vomits in
his bathroom, brags about her cushy real estate job, and attempts
to perform a sexy dance to Puccini.
Needless to say, there’s more to Irene’s character, and Nest performs the metamorphosis fearlessly, going through a range
of different emotional states as she begins to understand the roots of Manuel’s menace. Directed by
Charles Morley, this is an alternately funny and gripping show, even if the final plot points feel far-fetched.
The two shows I didn’t see are
Bob Clyman’s
The Exceptionals, which explores a fertility program designed to create gifted children, and
Evan M. Wiener’s
Captors, based on the real-life interrogation of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann by Israeli Mossad agents. The festival runs through
July 29, so there’s plenty of time to catch one or two shows, or even all five.
Tickets ($55 for a single show or $230 for a five-show pass) and more information are available via CATF’s website.
