Tim Gouran delivers a very naked performance in this show.
Tim Gouran (right) delivers a very naked performance in this show. Chris Bennion

I don't nap. When I ask people who are able to nap successfully how they do it, they tell me they only close their eyes, "sort of" fall asleep for 20 minutes, and then they arise, refreshed and eager to plow through the fat of the day. But my body doesn't have this setting. Every time I "nap," I wake up two hours later, it's dark outside, my stomach hurts, and I'm confused and irritated in an existential way. Not only do I not know what time it is, but, for a few moments, I don't quite know what time is. What is it composed of? Am I of it? Have I traveled through it?

The feeling I have just described is precisely what I experienced during the last five minutes of Washington Ensemble Theatre's production of Linda McClean's Every Five Minutes, a dark play (to start an even darker year) about the effects of torture on the body and mind.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: In order to experience that moment of disjointed time, would you pay to sit through a play that is, on the surface, "challenging," but that is, as presented by director Ryan Purcell, essentially a game of how slowly a playwright can reveal exposition? A sort of ADD Christmas Carol about a man named Mo, whose marriage may or may not be on the rocks, and whose daughter may be dead or just dead to him, and that essentially argues—*takes a huge bong hit*—that this torture-induced psychological state is kinda how it is (at least metaphorically) all the time, even if we're not being tortured by strongmen who become clowns for no other reason than to fuck with us, as they do in this play? *blows out a huge cloud of smoke*

The performances by Nick Edwards (Bozo) and Tré Calhoun (Harpo) don't help the play's case much. They're the torturers who are supposed to be creepy in a sadistic way, but Calhoun was stiff in the performance I saw, and Edwards was one mwahahaha away from projecting eye-rolling, melodramatic eeevil.

One scene, though, is beautiful enough to make the show better than a bad nap—the one that photographer Chris Bennion captures in the photo above. Mo and his daughter Molly (Rebecca Love) sit in a tub in the brightest bathroom with the whitest tiles. Warm light pours all over them, and they manage a sweet father/daughter scene composed mostly of a ridiculous fart joke. In that moment, he's in heaven with his dead daughter, or he's in heaven on earth with his live daughter, or they're in some strange place in-between all of that—submerged in a peace that only exists in a context of chaos, which is certainly the kind of peace we need to cultivate in the coming years.