College Try: Theater J's The Hampton Years, reviewed

Crashonda Edwards & Julian Michael Martinez play real-life artists Samella Lewis & John Biggers.

This week's City Paper theater column was supposed to include reviews of Theater J's new The Hampton Years and American Century Theater's revived Biography. The Sunday matinee of Biography I attended was cancelled due to a power failure 30 minutes into the show, and there wasn't another performance scheduled before my Monday-evening deadline, regrettably.

So I ended up with a few more hundred words of real estate in which to unpack what I consider be the very earnest and honorable Hampton Years' very earnest and honorable shortcomings. And also the rather less honorable shortcoming of my published review, wherein I reported that the artist Elizabeth Catlett, a character in The Hampton Years, is still alive. In fact, Ms. Catlett died last year. I apologize for my stupid, sloppy error.

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.

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.

A Bit of the Old Albrecht Von: Wallenstein, reviewed

​Colin Carmody and Steve Pickering in Wallenstein.

My enthusiastic review of the Shakespeare Theatre's ironicized and much-slimmed-down new version of Wallenstein, an epic of the Thirty Years War first performed in 1798, is in today's Washington City Paper.

Personal is Heretical: Theater J's Andy and the Shadows, reviewed.

To paraphrase the leader of the free world, let me be clear: I liked Theater J's premiere of Artistic Director Ari Roth's long-gestating, heavily autobiographical play, Andy and the Shadows. I liked it a lot.  It's too long, its references too scattered and too many, and at the end you feel like you've spent the the time in the company of a hyperactive (if uncommonly sensitive and articulate) 19-year-old who just will not stop talking, ever. But these are good problems to have. Overreach is better than undereach. And the cast is just tremendous.

The play, as I note, has been around in some form since nearly a decade prior to the publication of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity in 1995, which means it almost certainly also predates Stephen Frears' Y2K film version of the book.

Nevertheless, the play's likeness to the movie is sort of uncanny. 

My review of the play in today's Washington City Paper lays out the evidence. Any resemblance to fictional persons, living or dead, is accidental.

Peter Marks's review of Andy and the Shadows from yesterday's Washington Post is a fine piece that does an exceptional job of elucidating the rarer attributes of the play's structure and key performances.  I found myself nodding along with his notice as I read it.

FURTHER READING: I interviewed High Fidelity author Nick Hornby in 2009. That's in two parts, here and here.

The Tyranny of the Written Interview: A Transcribed Conversation with Monologist Mike Daisey

Mike Daisey. You can trust the man who wears the beard, as long as he isn't singing.

I've written about monologuist Mike Daisey a lot in the last four years, but especially last year, in the wake of damaging revelations about his show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

He and I met again at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, his performing home here in DC since 2008, last Friday to talk about his new piece, American Utopias, which I review in this week's Washington City Paper.  I've just posted an edited, partial transcript of that talk up on Arts Desk.

FURTHER READING: Hoo boy.  My 2009 review of Daisey's How Theatre Failed America. My 2010 preview of The Last Cargo Cult. My initial reaction, from March 2012, to The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs controversy, and my reaction to Daisey's reaction.  Finally, my July 2012 City Paper cover story about Daisey's return to Woolly Mammoth to perform a revised, fabrication-free version of Agony & Ecstasy.