Bach at Leipzig
ACT Theatre
Through May 29.
Before I get started, I’d like to register my irritation with the marketing materials for ACT’s new season. Every one of their brochures, fliers, letters, etc., is emblazoned with the words “We’re making a play for you!” and the slogan is making me crazy. It’s theater brazenly marketed to interest groups (in other words: If you like classical music you’ll love this play with Bach in the title!, or whatever). It’s an earnest vow to pander. Plus, the phrase “making a play” is gross. Playwrights write plays, ACT produces plays, gooey newlyweds make babies. But I suppose it’s a smarter marketing scheme than “ACT: So this is why we keep going under!”
Which is not to say that Bach at Leipzig is all bad. It does partake of the suspicious topic-specificity that fits the “a play for you” ploy, but it’s kind of amusing to see a bunch of A-list Seattle actors prancing around in powdered wigs. The Itamar Moses script proves definitively that one should never structure a play after a musical form–the epistolary, fugue-inspired first act is so packed with new combinations of repetition that you’ll feel yourself getting very sleepy–but the meta, postmodern second act is surprisingly smart without being smarmy. You’re expected to keep up with jokes about 18th century Protestant factionalism, for example, while the silly fugue concept is helpfully spelled out later in the show.
The acting is a bit hampered by the necessity of differentiating between very similar characters. John Proccacino, the twitchy, squinty one, suffers most, while R. Hamilton Wright, the short naif, and David Pichette, as yet another superbly rendered anal-retentive villain, come off best. Matthew Smucker’s set design is simultaneously great (the solid-looking organ antechamber at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche) and awful (the scattering of large-scale, smudged composition papers against the back wall, lit up from time to time in horrible jewel tones). I’m not sure whom this play was made “for,” but I liked it all right. ANNIE WAGNER
Kimberly Akimbo
ReAct Theater
Through May 29.
In the opening scene of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo, a woman who looks to be in her early 60s waits in the cold outside a New Jersey ice rink. Eventually her ride arrives–a man in his early 30s who drunkenly apologizes for his lateness and drives her home. The old lady, we soon learn, is Kimberly, and the driver is her father, leading the audience to anticipate a memory play, with a single actress playing Kimberly from her youth through old age. But that’s no old lady, that’s a teenage girl, albeit one whose rare genetic disorder forces her to age at four times the normal rate.
Lindsay-Abaire’s self-described black comedy quickly establishes itself as a Lars Von Trier-esque exercise in ostentatious martyrdom, with the vibrant-yet-increasingly-frail Kimberly besieged from all sides by mind-fucking cruelty, from her tortured/alcoholic father and criminal/lesbian aunt to her pregnant/hypochondriac mom, a Frankenstein’s monster built from history’s worst mother-types, brought to thrilling life by actress Roberta Plonski. Under the direction of David Hsieh, Kimberly’s bleak existence is wisely played like normal life, with the humanity of even the most outlandish cruelties keeping us engaged in Kimberly’s inherently doomed plight. Despite too many stretches of water-treading dialogue and one distractingly mannered supporting performance, the play works: Kim’s headed nowhere but down, but we stay with her, because in Lindsay-Abaire’s world, even the monsters are heartbreakers. DAVID SCHMADER
Handcuff Girl Saves the World
WET at Little Theatre
Through May 30.
Washington Ensemble Theatre is premiering yet another production developed with the help of a former professor–in this case, the New York-based KJ Sanchez–and this one shows that it’s clearly past time to cut the elders off. It’s probably ironic that the production that finally proves the ensemble has outgrown its cherished mentors is a show about personal heroes. But that very idea is what sinks the play.
Then again, you can’t cobble together one-sided reenactments of interviews on heroes (a topic about which almost no one has anything interesting to say)–and fill in the gaps with meetings of a mildly amusing “superhero support group” and some synchronized dance moves–and call it a play. Although its intriguing central character, Handcuff Girl, is a very shy superhero with a superpower that can be variously interpreted as an indication of her pacifism, her masochism, or her highly unusual faith in existing crime-fighting institutions, she basically drops out of the script (if not off the stage) after the first 10 minutes or so. (Her superpower? She can instantaneously handcuff herself to a bad guy on one wrist and a pole on the other.)
Still, the production is slick. The set, by the very talented Jennifer Zeyl, is the kind of tricky-cool playground that a great show about superheroes (whatever that might be) could really exploit. Though the colors and design are fantastic, the real scenic gem is a grassy mountain complete with soft trapdoors, built-in nooks and stairs, and a flexible shell that can squirm and bulge like an animated volcano. The ensemble’s acting is strong (though the guest artists are a bit lackluster), and the play showcases some of Seattle’s most accomplished physical technique and accents. Too bad there’s no such thing as a script-doctoring superpower. ANNIE WAGNER
