In the darkly comic mythological fable Cracking Zeus, playwright Christopher T. Hampton brings a vengeful goddess down to earth. But while the play, inventively staged by Reginald L. Douglas, reaches for divine comedy, Spooky Action Theatre’s production remains earthbound.
The angry deity in question is Hera (Nicole Ruthmarie), who deigns to set foot on Earth for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on one of her husband Zeus’ many mistresses by punishing the progeny of their affair.
That mistress would be Momma Jo (Lolita Marie), the founder, owner, treasurer, and pastor of a street corner chapel in the ’90s inner city, and her son Baniaha (Charles Franklin IV), the congregation’s youth group leader, is the ill-fated son of Zeus. Although, Baniaha doesn’t know who his father is.
He also doesn’t know that, like many a Bible thumper, Momma Jo didn’t use to walk the straight-and-narrow. But Rufus (DeJeanette Horne), the so-called “crackhead” who squats on the sidewalk outside the church, he knows. He claims to know a lot about Jo’s life before she found Jesus, while she does her best to keep the church youth far away from him and whatever truth he might reveal.
Still, drug-addled Rufus winds up holding court on the chapel’s new marble steps, pontificating sometimes wisely about the blights ravaging the city, and about the goddess who, at first, appears only to him. In a dynamic performance, Horne spins Rufus’ street philosopher revelries into a rich portrait of a mind and soul lost to addiction, though perhaps not irrevocably.
Marie’s jittery, domineering Momma Jo similarly offers a dense, colorful palette of tics and emotions that fill in some of those blanks she keeps buried in the past. In their vital supporting turns, Horne and Marie amp up the tension.
Playing the youth choir members, Bowie State’s Jacobie Thornton, and Howard U. acting students Destiny Jennings, Dupre Isaiah, and Christina Daniels as the most kindhearted of them, bring vibrant comedic energy to their roles as a veritable Greek chorus.
The emotional weight of the piece falls on Hera and Baniaha, however, and, in those roles, respectively, Ruthmarie and Franklin register the intention without the full force of feeling behind it.
Gorgeously costumed, if not that originally, in goddess white throughout, Ruthmarie conveys Hera’s haughtiness, expressed in her plummy, eloquent speeches. The language rolls off Ruthmarie’s tongue and sits there, a mellifluous sound signifying disdain and displeasure, but disconnected from the hurt and humiliation that might motivate this queen to plot something so evil as getting someone hooked on crack.
Douglas’ production realizes Hampton’s fanciful depiction of the crack-ridden ’90s with astute design and details — like the Washington Bullets jersey and FUBU tee on the kids — that also evoke the story’s nods to ancient Greek myth. From the chapel’s marble steps, to the Greek drama-masked figures whose haunting dance interludes signal a descent into a crack high, ancient and modern religion meet on Momma Jo’s corner.
There, Hampton lands the play’s surest insight, that crack didn’t just happen to the hood, but was a deliberately wielded weapon of mass destruction.
Cracking Zeus (★★☆☆☆) runs through Oct. 13, at Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St. NW. Tickets are $15 to $38. Call 202-248-0301, or visit www.spookyaction.org.
"As a kid, I heard a lot of sad stories about women."
Those words appear early in Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir, which the pop superstar released in 2017. As she tells it, Lauper was especially distraught hearing stories in which her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt were each dissuaded or denied chances to pursue their individual dreams or opportunities -- and all solely because of their gender. "I could never undo the wrong done...because of a ridiculous mentality that kept women back," she wrote.
What she could do was to commit herself to changing that narrative, and to not let similar limits get in her way, particularly when it came to pursuing a career in music. Her drive was at least in part motivated by her mother, the Brooklyn-reared daughter of Catholic immigrants from Sicily.
Like a love letter to the audience, everything about the Shakespeare Theatre Company's unabashedly joyous and funny Comedy of Errors says, "We're glad you're here." You will be entertained as if adored, yelled at with affection, and there will be no need to actually follow Shakespeare's ridiculously convoluted shenanigans surrounding the reuniting of two sets of separated twins, although a pre-curtain read of the synopsis will help.
Even better, you will be treated to Shakespeare delivered with a kind of natural energy, meaning you don't have to be a die-hard fan of the Bard to fully understand the gist of what's being said and why. Put simply, director Simon Godwin and this top-notch cast are out to give a warm and lovely embrace to anyone and everyone -- and that's a lot harder than it looks.
Life imitates art, and not favorably, in Josh Sticklin's uneven staging of The Woman in Black at the Keegan Theatre. The play, by Stephen Mallatratt, based on Susan Hill's gothic horror novel, opens with older Englishman Arthur Kipps (Robert Leembruggen) reciting the tale of a past incident that still haunts him.
Kipps, alone on the stage of a Victorian theater, meekly reading from a script, is critiqued by an actor (Noah Mutterperl) watching from the empty house. Planted among the Keegan audience, the actor tries to coax from Kipps a more compelling delivery, coaching him to try to bring his words to life so vividly that his intended audience might visualize every detail, and experience every emotion.
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