Theater on the TV: Discussing Stupid Fucking Bird and The Hampton Years on WETA's Around Town

In the unlikely event you've nothing better to do on this rainy Friday afternoon than watch Robert Aubry Davis and Jane Horowitz offer insightful comments about a couple of current plays while I blink my eyes and wobble my head around and emit words, then by all means: Gawk away as we discuss Stupid Fucking Bird and The Hampton Years on Around Town.

Watch Stupid F---ing Bird on PBS.

Watch The Hampton Years on PBS.

ALSO: I reviewed Stupid Fucking Bird in the City Paper this week.

It Takes a Lotta Gull: Stupid Fucking Bird, reviewed

The A-List: Cody Nickell, Kate Eastwood Norris, Kimberly Gilbert and Rick Foucheux in Stupid Fucking Bird.

Of the stage productions that've moved me most in the five years or so that I've been semi-professionally paying attention to theatre in DC, a suspiciously high percentage of those have been directed by Aaron Posner. (His 2009 version of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Folger Theatre remains my favorite thing that I've ever seen in a playhouse.)

Posner is the playwright, not the director, of Stupid Fucking Bird, his-flippant-but-faithful rejiggering of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, which opened at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company this weekend. (Woolly Mammoth founder Howard Shalwitz is its director.) The result is pretty goddamn delightful, as I aver in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

My Life as a Getty Image

I wish I'd taken my socks off before the photographer got there.​

Great Scott! I like attention as much as anybody but I do wish that one of the roughly 170 pieces I wrote for the Washington Post between 2006 and 2012 had generated a response like this photo did when it ran on the Post site yesterday. Here I am in uniform (though the cargo shots are not exactly regulation, as has been observed) as Neptune, Roman god of the sea, one-eighth of a clue in the 2013 Post Hunt.

Relevant keywords for your @ctklimek stock photo searches: "Trident" "Crown" "Abs" "Those Shorts Your Uncle Wears To His Rotary Picnics"

— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon) June 3, 2013

"Earth" was the answer to the riddle the eight of us embodied. The 12,000-plus (says the Post) participants who showed up were instructed, via a sandwich-board sign, to FIND WHAT'S MISSING. A lovely girl from the Post's investigations team named Amy was dressed at the sun, in bright yellow shorts and a top, along with clown-sized yellow sunglasses, and seated in a plastic chair near the western boundary of Pershing Park. One at a time, the rest of us walked -- or stumbled over our diving flippers -- into the crowd to do an "orbit" around her.

Mercury - A fellow dressed as a thermometer, with a giant red sphere suspended via lots of tape over his crotch. I kept thinking of the codpieces worn by Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

Venus - My dear pal Liz, wrapped in a sheet, arms tucked inside her T-shirt to approximate the Venus de Milo. Which Liz, with her sense of serene entitlement, already does anyway. Which means we probably didn't need to cover her face with toxic white paint to sell the illusion, but I'm glad I got to do that nonetheless.

Mars - Roman god of war, as indicated by his plastic helmet, chest-plate and sword.

Jupiter - My buddy Derek, wearing a pink yarmulke and brown trousers, and exclaiming "Oy vey!" with a decidedly un-semitic fervor each time he missed a (pretend) golf shot with his (real) putter. A Jew-putter, do you see?

Look, you: The guys who wrote this puzzle, Dave Barry, Tom Schroder and Gene Weingarten, have at least three Pulizers among them. What do you want me to say? Derek also MacGuyvered together the box-top and tree-branch trident I carry in the photo after the prop promised by Post Hunt organizers failed to materialize.

Saturn - My friend Alexis, who blew both hips out hula-hooping around the square all afternoon to depict the rings of Saturn. She'll never walk again. The Washington Post Company thanks her for her efforts and reminds her she is an independent contractor.

Uranus - Annie Mueller, long-suffering housemate of my friend Rachel, who roped all of us into this, wearing a gigantic, strap-on butt with backpack straps.

Neptune - Hi! My Getty image is now available in a variety of sizes, formats and licensing options.

Prices start at Really?! and go as high as You Must Be Fucking Kidding Me. I am entitled to a royalty of 0.00% of all sales, so please give generously. My eyes are up here, by the way. Jerk.

Pros and Khans, or Star Trek into Dorkness: How the new movie reflects a 32-year-old battle for a 47-year-old franchise's soul.

I once attended a midnight screening of the Cadillac of Star Trek films -- that would be numero dos, The Wrath of Khan -- wherein the projector bulb burnt out right in the middle of Mr. Spock's heroic death scene. If the theater hadn't given us four free movie passes to compensate for this effrontery against all that is good and decent, I would have suspected an especially cruel prank, perhaps orchestrated by a partisan of the bloodless, squeaky-clean Next Generation-flavored Star Trek, which I suppose is okay if vanilla is what you like.

Naturally, I had to dig up my Khan DVD at home and watch the final 10 minutes before I could go to sleep that night. Spock's grand and tragic expiration would soon be reversed in a not-so-good movie with the surprise-negating subtitle The Search for Spock, but whatever.​

All of which is to say that my love for The Wrath of Khan is mean and true. And it fascinates me that that film, more than any other of the hundreds and hundreds of subsequent Star Trek items (a great number of which -- like the entire Deep Space Nine and Voyager and Enterprise series, for instance -- I've never seen or read), remains the primary source document that continues to guide the cinematic Star Trek universe, especially in the heavily Khan-indebted new movie Star Trek into Darkness.

J.J. Abrams' second Trek film  takes a generation-old, backstage fight over the meaning and purpose of Star Trek and drags it right to the center of the camera-flare-buffered frame. I make my case today on NPR's Monkey See blog.

​On further reflection, I guess The Wrath of Khan is really more like the Toyota Corolla of Trek than the Cadillac. It was the lowest-budgeted of the theatrical films by a good margin, and yet it's proven, three decades on, to be the most reliable one.

Oh, and I really wanted to quote John C. McGinley's unforgettable, rhymed description of Keanu Reeves' character in Point Break to describe Chris Pine's portrayal of the young horndog Kirk in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek pictures. Unsurprisingly, that didn't make it past Standards & Practices at NPR. But I tried, you guys. I tried.​

Poor Me, Pour Me Another: WSC Avant Bard's No Man's Land, reviewed.

Christopher Henley and Brian Hemmingsen as Spooner and Hirst.​

Allow myself to quote myself: Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land is a 38-year-old Rubik’s Cube covered in Rorschach blots, a confounding examination of memory and masculinity that resists easy interpretation like an Aikido master shrugging off an unwanted bear hug. I wrestle with that bear -- er, WSC Avant Bard's production of that bear-hug-avoiding Aikido master of a play, that is -- in this week's Washington City Paper.

Wrecks & Effects: Folger's Twelfth Night and Taffety Punk's The Golem, reviewed.

(Scott Suchman/Folger Theatre)​

No, Elvis Costello has not embarked upon a mandolin tour with Steve Nieve. That's Louis Butelli as Feste, whose performance is one of the highlights of the Folger Theatre's new production of Twelfth Night, which I review in today's Washington City Paper along with Taffety Punk's spooky The Golem. Grab yourself a copy wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

Shane Black Like Me, or Fear of a Shane Black Planet

Naturally you'll be rushing out to see Iron Man 3 this weekend. I'm afraid that film won't make one lick of goddamn sense to you if you do not study up by reading my Village Voice rewatch of the filmography of Iron Man 3 cowriter/director Shane Black.​