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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.
One of my favorite warm-weather traditions is to take in a double or triple-feature at the Bengies Drive-In, which opens for the season tonight. The area's sole surviving specimen of a once-flourishing movie-exhibition format, Bengies offers the opportunity to see three current films, if your backside can go the distance, for the you-can't-afford-not-to-go admission price of $9 per person. Or roughly 75 percent of what you would pay to see Oblivion, and only Oblivion, at the multiplex this weekend, where you'll enjoy the un-sublime non-pleasure of being distracted by your fellow patrons' glowing smartphone screens throughout the film. (Only those patrons who are pitiable, uncouth savages, of course. But one bad Apple iPhone user can spoil the whole bunch, as Confucius said.)
You need wheels to get there: It's a 2.5-hour round trip from DC to Easton, MD, where Bengies is located. You can make some of that cash back by bringing your own food, though you should buy an honor-system outside food permit for $10 if you do that. Pack a picnic basket; you'll be there for six or seven hours, remember. (Alcohol is verboten, a rule always strictly observed by everyone, just like the 55 mph speed limit posted on Interstate 95.)
Read MoreTo 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.
When it was founded in 1976, The Humana Festival of New American Plays was unique: It was a centralized showcase of new work from playwrights around the country. Decades later, new play development is no longer consolidated in a single spot, but the festival continues to a enjoy a reputation as a major platform for plays their authors hope will ripple out to stages of every size in the years to come.
I’d never been to Humana, so I was excited by an invitation to Louisville to cover the festival’s closing “industry weekend” with 11 other journalists from around the country, including my pal Michael Phillips, as part of a "pop-up newsroom" called Engine 31. This year’s lineup was the first curated by Obie Award-winning British director Les Waters, who has earned a reputation as a midwife for important new plays by directing premieres from heavy hitters like Sarah Ruhl, Caryl Churchill, and Anne Washburn. The slate Waters programmed featured six new plays (plus a closing-night showcase of 10-minute plays, a festival tradition). I caught four of those, of which three were sufficiently intriguing to make me want to revisit them.
Read MoreI review Mike Daisey's new monologue, American Utopias, from today's City Paper.
Also: VANITAS, the new show from Happenstance Theatre Company.
I infer from the official graphic there will be trampolines. I am pro-trampoline.
Tomorrow morning I will fly to Louisville, Kentucky to help cover the final, three-day "industry weekend" of the Humana Festival for New American Plays. I'll be doing this as part of Engine 31, a pop-up newsroom. (Sasha Anawalt, the "motherfucker who found[ed] this place -- Sir"*, answers your eminently reasonable questions about what that is and who pays for it here; thank you for asking.) I'm excited to be a part of it, and to see and work with my old friends Sasha, Michael Phillips, Rebecca Haithcoat and Doug McLennan. And nearly as excited to meet the other seven journalists who're part of this thing. Follow along at Engine 31, and/or via Twitter @enginethirtyone.
I am reliably informed there will also be some basketball thing happening.
*Sasha is not actually an actual motherfucker; she is in fact delightful. I am merely quoting Jessica Chastain's character from the movie Zero Dark Thirty here, as is only sensible and appropriate when discussing a theater festival. Engine 31 contributor Michael Phillips, whose name I used as an FCC-permitted substitute for "motherfucker" on the radio once, but who is also not one, usually, called ZDT the best film of 2012, so context.
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.
Brady Corbet & Mati Diop in Simon KIller.
My review of Simon Killer, writer/director Antonio Campos's second feature film, is in the Village Voice today. Total Recall joke deleted, but the Blow-Up and Taxi Driver and Rushmore allusions (and the Rush Hour 3 joke!) remain. Film critics are terrible people. Read it here.
That said, I'm about to see one of my favorite specimens of that loathsome breed, Mr. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and Filmspotting. Tomorrow I'm off to Louisville, Kentucky, where Phillips and I will both be covering the final weekend of the Humana Festival of New American Plays as part of Engine 31 -- theater journalism's equivalent of The Avengers, basically. More on that a little later.
