Theatre Babylon at Union Garage
Through May 24.There is an unsettling sameness in the appeal of ruthless dictators and virtuous, embattled leaders of faraway countries--perhaps it is the ease with which one can become the other. Hamid Karzai vs. Ayatollah Khomeini, Fidel Castro vs. Che Guevara, Pinochet (1981) vs. Pinochet (2003).
In the lightning-paced information society of slick magazines and Barbara Walters, a few newspaper stories can turn a demon into an angel and vice versa; who knows what truths boil behind the glossy images of the world's most important people? Yussef El Guindi's Finishing School provides a snapshot moment of a high-octane PR firm dedicated to turning exotic autocrats into palatable products for popular American sympathy. Examining the vagaries of opinion polls, approval ratings, and the pulp facts and fictions of journalism, Finishing School wryly ferrets through the amoral territory of primping the images of leaders who need more than spin doctoring--they need spin open-heart surgery. Two friends (who suspiciously resemble Milosevic and Arafat) hang out in the offices of image consultant Tom Hartlee, who polishes PR turds until they gleam like diamonds.
Theatre Babylon's production is intellectually stimulating but extremely rough-hewn, with line garbling and technical difficulties (including a stubborn stage door that refused to stay closed) bedeviling the performance. At times, the play was wooden, giving the impression that it would've made a better Harper's essay than a piece of live performance. Nevertheless, genuinely compelling moments emerge--notably, when Bladivir (Milosevic) and Shams (Arafat) debate the merits of taking their political battles off the streets and onto 60 Minutes.
Telling any more would betray Yussef's narrative twists. Suffice to say that despite its flaws, Finishing School manages to tell an interesting story and pose serious moral questions without being pedantic--a rare achievement among playwrights who wear their contempt for American media on their sleeves. BRENDAN KILEY
Polaroid Stories
Capitol Hill Arts Center
Through May 10.I love me some o' that good old-fashioned stygian gloom. And this show's got buckets of it.
Naomi Iizuka's Polaroid Stories is what we professionals like to call some seriously pointy-headed junk. You know, art-school stuff--classical Greek with pretensions to "an edge," loud ambient electronic music, and a certain skate-punk aesthetic. I can appreciate that.
What Polaroid Stories does is take themes and characters from Ovid's Metamorphoses and merge them with the ostensibly real-life stories and personas of some pretty gritty gutter punks. The play sets the punks amid a shadowy, graffiti-tagged jungle of drug-addled angst, ennui, and trash. Woven throughout is a dark ribbon of moody music (yay for Jake Perine's sound design; if the show had a soundtrack, I'd buy it).
It's not entirely successful, this merging of Greek myth and modern pathos--even with program firmly in hand, it's hard to keep your lines uncrossed. The text has a tendency to sprawl, and there are multiple multiple characters, but these flaws aren't glaring enough to detract from some stirring performances. As the character D, David Hogan, a deeply engaging actor in a sincere leading-man-ish kind of way, delivers an opening monologue that grabs the audience's attention by the balls. John Osebold gives a great performance, as always, and Tammy Taecker's spunky playing made me sad that her feisty yet irreparably damaged character gets gutted in an alley. And I'm not just saying that.
There's a lot of hollering, a beating or 12, and way too many conversations that go, "What the fuck are you looking at?" and "Hey bitch, I'm talking to you!" ("Street Kid," it seems, is a limited lexicon.) But this production, directed by Sarah Shipley, is slick and smartly done, worth a smattering of confusion and a pinch of repetitious potty-mouth. It may not live up to its über-pretentious reachings, but it's an evening of theater I won't forget in a hurry. ADRIAN RYAN
Two Rooms
Shunpike Arts Collective at Odd Duck Studio
Through May 17.In 1988, Lee Blessing wrote this powerfully dramatic study of a hostage situation, based on a series of political kidnappings in the early '80s. In Two Rooms, we follow Lainie (Leigh Simpson) as she attempts to deal with her husband's kidnapping in Beirut while receiving conflicting advice from a reporter (Frank Chiachiere) and a representative from the State Department (Dena Taylor). For obvious reasons, the subject and setting of the play are fairly relevant, and the play is an interesting and frustrating look at how hope and devotion are just a couple of tools in the political toolbox to be used to develop international power.
But the mere act of putting on this play at this time in history is not enough to ensure that the playwright's message will be appreciated fully. Due in large part to the static direction of Eric Schinfeld, this production creates a hostage of its own--the audience. For 90 minutes, the actors stand rigid on Chelsie Hanner's vague set, resolutely failing to engage with their characters and reciting their lines in two manners: falsely reserved or falsely explosive. The actors reveal no progression of motivation that would in any way lead us to care for these people.
Lee Blessing's play attempts to show the power, or ultimate lack of power, one person has in international politics. Lainie is central in dramatizing the compromises we as individuals, and we as a nation, must sometimes make for "the greater good." To fully appreciate the difficulty of that compromise, an audience must be absolutely engaged by the character of Lainie--by all the characters, for that matter. Unfortunately, this production lacks any ability to engage absolutely. GREGORY ZURA
