• Happy Days, August – September 2011
• The Mistorical Hystery of Henry I(V), November – December 2011
• Les Justes, February – March 2012
• The Tooth of Crime, May – July 2012
• The Bacchae, May – July 2012

Performances will take place at the Black Box Theater, in Arlington County’s Artisphere in Rosslyn. Schedule is subject to change due to performance rights conflicts or other issues.

Proving that a show can be amusing without being coherent is this Washington Shakespeare Company production of Moliere’s The Miser.

The play itself is very mid 17th Century France. The adaptation is very early 21st Century America. A romantic farce, The Miser is built on late-Renaissance norms. A master can (and does) beat a servant. A father can determine whom his children will marry. In the event, marriage-arranging proves to be less easy to carry out than servant-beating. A dowry is a make-or-break element in wedding discussions. Horse-drawn carriages provide transportation.

But then there are numerous (and entertaining) incongruences in director Akiva Fox’s staging. For one thing, Fox uses a new English adaption by David Ball. Nothing like Moliere’s formal and elegant dialogue, Ball’s writing explodes with merry indecencies. The F-word is often heard as are frequent and sometimes hilarious references to body parts and their (occasionally implausible) functions. To illustrate the miserliness of the title character, it is said that he has a bowel movement only once every two weeks. Much of the show’s potty humor would be an instant sensation on any playground frequented by 11-year-olds.

Bawdiness bounds. A mild example is an alleged ancient Greek writer referred to a couple of times as “Testicles.” One of the tamer profanities is “Christ on a bicycle!”

Some of Ball’s humor, however, is actually rated G. He can be very ingenious with inoffensive word play, e.g. “She has more chateaus than she has toes.”

The Miser satirizes greed. The central character, Harpagon, is not only greedy. He is also rich. But he hoards his wealth. He also hoards junk like used paper cups and discarded chewing gum wrappers. It pains him to spend anything on anything. His house (set by Tobias Harding) looks like a textbook illustration used to explain the phrase “unfit for human habitation.” Everything is broken. Nothing is fixed. Repairs amount to covering cracks and holes with boards or paper.

Some of the action in The Miser is disagreeable. There’s a lot of bullying, not just by Harpagon but also by a young man who is supposed to be sympathetic and romantic.

Though the scenario in which the actors function can be brutal or archaic, their performances are often fresh and funny. As the blithering Harpagon, Ian Armstrong slides back and forth between appalling and ludicrous. Though a maniacal brute, this Harpagon blithers entertainingly.

As an unstoppable matchmaker, Heather Haney is a hoot with her proletarian Philadelphia accent and her tight-as-a-knackwurst-skin outfit. Rex Daugherty is explosively manic-depressive as the miser’s son and heir. He energetically covets his father’s money but despairs of ever getting hold of it before he’s “too old to spend it.” Dressed in with-it dance club togs his image is at odds with the 17th Century moneyed class’ aversion to anything resembling work. One wants to shake him a yell, “Get a job!” But that sort of thinking would jeopardize the underpinnings of Moliere’s comic universe.

In general, thinking of any kind is not what this production is about. The acting is peppy all around, even gratingly vehement at times. Though often incoherent, the show affords plenty of mindless guffaws.

A Note From The Director

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man’s greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
-John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertaintty

Cast

• Ian Armstrong: Harpagon
• Katie Atkinson: Elise
• Sara Barker: La Fleche
• Rachael Beauregard: Mariane
• Frank Britton: Master Jacques
• Rex Daugherty: Cleante
• Joshua Drew: Valere
• Heather Haney: Frosine
• Joe Palka: Master Simon, Anselme

Crew

• Akiva Fox: Director
• Kyle Jean Fisher: Stage Manager
• Tobias Harding: Set Designer
• Jessi Cole Jackson: Costume Designer
• Jessica Rietzler: Props Designer
• Eric Watkins: Lighting Designer
• Technical Director: Andrew Berry
• Scenic Artists: Tobias Harding, Eileen Garcia
• Master Electrician: Alex Manuel
• Assistant to the Costume Designer: Vlada Kaganovskaya
• Carpenters: Julie Roedersheimer, Sam Rabinovitz, Colin Grube
• Electricians: Sean Doyle, Alex Keen, Melvin Baker, Garth Dolan, Marianne Meadows
• Production Photography: C. Stanley Photography
• Graphic Illustrator: Jay Hardee

Washington Shakespeare Company provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

From time to time a hit of jaunty despair and innocent corruption is bracing. “Bracing” — that would be the word for the current Washington Shakespeare Company’s production of Lulu. As will happen with two and a half hours of even the most clever construct of despair and corruption, the show gets saggy from time to time especially toward the end. But for the most part, director Christopher Henley‘s staging of Nicholas Wright’s adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s tragi-comic melodrama is nervy and engaging.

Wedekind (German, 1864-1918) was one of those splenetic masters of cynicism who flourished in central and northern Europe some 100 years ago. He has been overshadowed by Strindberg, Schniztler and Brecht. His plays are even messier that Strindberg’s, lewder than Schnitzler’s and more nihilistic than Brecht’s. But the recent Broadway musical, Spring Awakening, which is based on a Wedekind play, was so widely acclaimed that the mostly-of-academic-interest author has been getting out and about a bit more.

Like all of Wedekind’s work, Lulu emphasizes character, theme and style over plot. Wedekind was definitely not a master storyteller. Tight plotting was not at all his thing. The Nicholas Wright adaptation is actually based on two sprawly plays, The Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904), both of which featured the peppy but blighted protagonist Lulu. Like the 1929 movie and the 1937 opera adaptations, Wright’s play conflates the texts and prunes the content of Wedekind’s dramas. What he comes up with is definitely not a well-made play but it is a striking example of the expressionist aesthetic.

As befits a production of an expressionist classic, director Henley, his design team and his actors deliver a high-definition, low-nuance show. The set by Eric Grims is black, white and gray. The costumes by Greg Stevens are snappy overstatements of the excesses of years gone by. David Crandall‘s sound design includes jokey underscorings, like clanky, banging sound effects when political or economic collapse are mentioned. The intermission music includes a skanky, snarky male singer version of “Ooops, I Did It Again.”

If the original “Ooops” singer, Britney Spears, had been more into felonies and less into wholesome pretenses, she could stand as as a true descendant of Lulu. Lulu — in her put-upon, pouty way — goes in for murder and blackmail, always with a “Now look what you’ve gone and made me do” attitude. On the bright side, she enjoys seducing men of means. After a stint of education-by-incest, Lulu’s father put her on the street as a hooker when she was 10. Or so we are told. What is clear is that the father continues in a pimp role, sponging off of Lulu whenever he gets a chance.

Sara Barker, in the title role at the WSC, plays Lulu as a resourceful woman to whom things happen. Her resources are pretty simple and exaggerated — seduce, seduce, pout, pout — but that’s expressionism for you. Suitably strident are Karin Rosnizeck as a frustrated lesbian aristocrat who lusts after Lulu and Jay Hardee, Jack Miggins, Angel Torres and James Finley as men who scar, and are scarred by, Lulu. There’s a lot of double and triple casting (one actor playing two or three roles) in the WSC Lulu. As it happens, Finley plays a role that Wedekind reserved for himself in early productions: Jack the Ripper. Fortunately, Finley is one of those guys who looks better without clothing than with it, for he is completely naked for his big bloody butchery scene.

The WSC cast of 23 portrays vivid caricatures on the order of the satirized subjects in the paintings of the German expressionist painters Emil Nolde, George Grosz and James Ensor. The bourgeoisie and its parasitical hangers-on get no mercy.

Even trimmed to about a third of the Wedekind material, the WSC Lulu comes close to being an overdose of despair, even jaunty despair, and corruption, even innocent corruption. The final scenes are padded out with wordy, whiny soliloquies. The mind starts to wander. What was going on in middle and northern Europe during those years? Oh, yeah; Germany was headed toward two world wars. The “best lack conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” as the Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats put it (in a different context, but during those same years). The sophisticated aesthetic and intellectual elites of Germany were getting all blasé, ironical and nihilistic. Meanwhile the desperate poor were being manipulated by nutsy demagogues, always on the lookout for scapegoats and hate objects. Not an unfamiliar scenario, come to think of it.

One definitely does not want to overdose on even the most bracing despair and corruption. They tend to sap the will to resist and struggle.

Disclaimer: Washington Shakespeare Company provided two complimentary media tickets to ShowBizRadio for this review.

Coming to WSC’s Clark Street Playhouse to see Camille (A Tearjerker): one can find them self anxious to see this rendition of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company classic. If you do and you are, you won’t be disappointed.

The Director, also Artistic Director of Washington Shakespeare Company, Christopher Henley has managed to capture the ‘Ridiculous’ style (which Ludlam would counter as being a ‘process’ and not a style) which originally featured Ludlam’s near legendary comic performance in the title role. Mr. Henley was also able to modernize the play with a dance club atmosphere with the actors lip sinking the interludes of the story.

Camille was the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s most popular work. This play best personifies the Ridiculous style. An amalgamation of the Dumas novel and play, more modern music (“Stormy Weather”, brilliantly lipped and acted by Frank Britton as Prudence Duvernoy) and the Garbo film. Taking the fallen woman torn between true love and the fast Parisian life style has opened the door for campy wordplay. The actors gaze at the audience at moments of not-so-poignant playfulness, as if to dare us to respond or react, is a constant throughout this production.

This play falls on the shoulders of Marguerite Gautier, performed by Jay Hardee. Hardee’s performance dares you to accompany his Marguerite into her world of frivolity and bawdiness. Once you do though, you’re trapped as he draws you into her world and her truly emotional struggle between love and lifestyle. You find yourself laughing at all the silliness and in the next moment with a lump in your throat only to be laughing again the next moment. You were superb Jay! A performance, I’m sure, Charles Ludlam would applaud, “Bravo!” and then quip, “Close Girl!”

As mentioned earlier Frank Britton’s performance was truly mesmeric. From his first entrance as the Dressmaker Prudence Duvernoy to his breathtaking torch song to open Act 2 to his final ‘Tearjerker’ embrace with Marguerite. All I can say is, “You had me.”

The rest of the professional cast of: Jay Finley (Armand Duval) was a pleasure. John Kevin Boggs (Baron de Varville), a grin…constantly. John C. Bailey (Nanine, Duval Sr.), Daniel Kenner (Cupid/Joseph/Molnik), Jay Saunders (Nichette Fondue/Gaston Roue’) and Kim Curtis (Venus/Saint Gaudens) were wonderful in this production.

Andrew J. Berry‘s (Scenic Designer) set was a thrust stage with a back lit backdrop. This allowed him to display the Parisian outlines, the bareness of leafless trees and backlit characters. Jennifer Tardiff‘s (Costume Designer) costumes in the true genre of a drag show on a low budget. Kari Ginsburg‘s (Assistant Dircector/Musical Staging) musical staging allowed the viewer gather in all of the “Ridiculous”-ness being thrown at us. David Crandall (Sound Designer), could you crank up the lipped songs a little? I did hear the shuffling of the actors as they moved about the stage. Marianne Meadows (Lighting Designer) was great. She kept us in the mood of each moment and transition. Especially effective through the smoke, whoever had that idea, Henley I imagine, really worked well with your lighting effects.

In closing, let me tell you that on the outside you may believe this style of play is not for you, but I would not miss the chance to see it. If you love theatre, are a student of theatre, or are just a sucker for a good love story, Camille is a play you’ll never forget; a play you won’t see often and a play we all should embrace for its style, its message and its enjoyment. As Charles Ludlam answered the question about some audiences seeing his work as a huge joke, just trashy camping: “They can see it however they like, just come and see it … I dare the audience to have an opinion.” Yes he did and I do. See it!

Director’s Note

Not before this play was first performed, my eye was caught by a headline over an advice column in a newspaper. Dear Abby or Ann Landers was being asked about the concept of “the well-adjusted homosexual.” That was a term of art in those days, sort of like “functioning alcoholic,” the idea behind it being that one ought to expect a gay person to be miserable, self-loathing, and, ultimately, tragic, and one ought to be surprised to encounter a gay person who was not. (The columnist, by the way, opined that she believed that there was no such thing as a well-adjusted homosexual.)

In that climate, it is easy to understand what would have attracted Charles Ludlam to the classic story of the lady of the Camellias. The notorious Marguerite Gautier’s passions and her past define her in the eyes of conventional society. Any attempt by her to move from the margins of society and to hope to achieve happiness and stability with a respectable young man will be thwarted. The constant reinforcement of society’s opprobrium, and her acceptance of the negative self images associated with it, must operate like the disease that ultimately cuts short her life, just as they would for a gay person in the mid-century US. (It’s striking how much gay literature from that era features the archetype of the doomed young man who dies young or simply disappears, eerily presaging the health crisis of the 1980’s.)

Additionally, in the drag subculture, performers and their followers develop cults surrounding artists like Judy Garland and Maria Callas (Ludlam’s other most famous part was in his parody of her life, Gallas), performers whose oversized personas and heightened passions struck even deeper chords because of the public’s awareness of their tortured psyches and unstable romantic lives. With these and other dive-type stars, drag performers found a shared language through which to lament the man who got away and the world to which they were denied entry.

Reading Stefan Brecht’s Queer Theatre, the wonderful chronicle of Ludlam, his colleagues, and his influences, I was struck often by how Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company comrades, lacking the resources, or the desire, to create period accuracy museum-piece productions, took cast-off clothes and furniture form the consignment stores or off the streets of New York City to create an illusion of another time and place, always conscious of artificiality of the constructs. This play we perform tonight calls for a delicate balance, as it references styles such as 19th century melodrama and the golden age of Hollywood films, as well as satirical takes on those idioms — which can seem almost like Carol Burnett Show sketches –and in almost Forbidden Broadway-like awareness of the pop culture of the day. (The hit revival on Broadway at the time was No, No Nanette, which becomes the butt of a few of Ludlam’s jokes.)

Gay culture has always driven mass culture (in the US and abroad), and drag culture has often driven gay culture. Much has changed in the 35 years since this play was written. Instead of debates about whether or not same-sex attraction and activity ought to be considered a sickness, we hear debates about whether same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry. The drag subculture, which was very downtown or underground then, is now in the Top 40 and drag even has its own reality competition show on TV. Moreover, since the emergence of the “Club Kid” scene in the late 80’s/early 90’s, nationally known drag performers such as Ongina (who shuns wigs in favor of a shaved head) and Nina Flowers (who fiercely rocks a Mohawk) have evolved from female impersonators to artist who embrace androgyny, moving from gender illusionists to gender confusionists. Our production is aware of these developments in a way that we hope Ludlam might have been were he reviving his production today. One thing about drag remains constant, however. Even as we watch a drag performance, always aware that a man has created an illusion that is the fabulous persona we are watching, we can still be inspired as we watch her move her lips to the sounds of another’s voice and as she navigates the hairpin turns between delicious camp and genuine feeling.

Photo Gallery

Foreground: Jay Hardee, James Finley. Background: Frank Britton, Daniel Kenner, Erin Kaufman, Kim Curtis, Jay Saunders, John C. Bailey, John Kevin Bog	Frank Britton, Jay Hardee
Foreground: Jay Hardee, James Finley, Erin Kaufman, Kim Curtis, Frank Britton, Jay Saunders. Background: John C. Bailey, Daniel Kenner	James Finley, Jay Hardee

Cast

• Venus: Miss Kim Curtis
• Cupid: Mr. Daniel Kenner
• Baron de Varville: Mr. John Kevin Boggs
• Nanine: Miss John C. Bailey
• Marguerite Gautier: Miss Jay Hardee
• Joseph: Mr. Daniel Kenner
• Nichette Fondue: Miss Jay Saunders
• Olympe de Taverne: Miss Erin Kaufman
• Saint Gaudens: Mr. Kim Curtis
• Prudence Duvernoy: Miss Frank Britton
• Gaston Roue: Mr. Jay Saunders
• Armand Duval: Mr. James Finley
• Duval Sr.: Mr. John C. Bailey
• Mulnik: Mr. Daniel Kenner

Crew

• Director: Christopher Henley
• Assistant Director/Musical Staging: Kari Ginsburg
• Scene Designer: Andrew J. Berry
• Lighting Designer: Marianne Meadows
• Costume Designer: Jennifer Tardiff
• Sound Designer: David Crandall
• Props Designer: Sarah Kamins
• Stage Manager: Patrick Magill
• Assistant Stage Manager: Kelly Hennessy
• Technial Director/Scenic Artist: Julie Roedersheimer
• Board Operator: Jack Miggins
• Carpenters: Van Pham, Scott Richards, Julie Roedersheimer, Andrew J. Berry
• Electricians: Rob Powers, Garth Dolan
• Production Photography: C. Stanley Photography
• Graphic Illustrator: Jay Hardee

• Camille, August – September 2009
• Lulu, November – December 2009
• The Miser, January – February 2010
• The Front Page, June – July 2010

Schedule is subject to change due to performance rights conflicts or other issues.

This will also be WSC’s final season performing at the Clark Street Playhouse. They will be moving to the newly created Arts Space for Everyone facility, formerly the Newseum, in Rosslyn.