A story told in fragments of past and present, Rachel Bonds’ unflinching drama Jonah guards its mysteries closely. The play’s fractured narrative, prone to misdirection, coalesces at a careful pace before the pieces, like shards of memory, assemble into a complete picture.
Studio Theatre’s production, directed by Taylor Reynolds (Studio’s triumphant Fat Ham), handily juggles the complicated plot while maintaining a quietly tense atmosphere. The foreboding mood persists even in the lighter moments between introspective teen Ana (Ismenia Mendes) and the boy she allows to sneak in through her dorm window, Jonah (Rohan Maletira).
A day student at the boarding school that Ana attends on scholarship, Jonah starts by lightly stalking her around campus. In scenes that Reynolds has play out around the perimeter of Studio’s intimate Milton Theatre, Ana and Jonah progress from her leading him on the chase, to the pair roaming the campus at night together.
The staging, with the actors loping around the aisles, engulfs the audience in the rush of Ana and Jonah’s young romance. Jonah seems to offer Ana not just affection and a few laughs but a kind of escape.
Per Mendes’ finely tuned performance, Ana is in need of refuge. She’s holding onto something painful. Enter her troubled brother, Danny (Quinn M. Johnson). Scenes between Ana and Danny don’t ramble off the stage and through the rear of the house. Their tête-à-têtes are largely confined to Ana’s bedroom in the house they grew up in under the roof of an abusive father.
Ana’s bedroom, for better and for worse, is ground zero for much of the key action in the play. As with Sibyl Wickersheimer’s set design, and Danielle Preston’s costumes, there’s very little pretense to the portrayal of Ana’s more harrowing experiences in that room.
Disturbing events are rendered with sensitivity and a raw honesty that’s particularly laudable in Johnson’s interpretation of severely abused kid Danny. Down to the minute physical details of how Danny sits, or slumps, Johnson shows us the duality of a young man who has suffered horribly, and can also be manipulative, or worse, in his own right.
Yet, Danny promises Ana he will save her from their awful home life. Years later, she might or might not be seeking a savior when she meets Steven (Louis Reyes McWilliams), who seems unproblematic. Open and cheerful, Steven brings a change in mood that McWilliams projects well through his affably awkward characterization.
In Steven, Ana might find refuge. Bonds’ perceptive writing presents him as a perhaps ideal man if for no other reason than the fact that he sincerely wants to listen to Ana and learn about her for real. In due time, they learn about each other, and he reveals his own trauma to her.
Somehow that sends the play on a separate, less interesting tangent of Steven philosophizing about faith — but, more importantly, Ana’s still holding onto something painful.
Having posited these three relationships as crucial to Ana’s story and character, Bonds doesn’t reveal all her narrative cards, including the true nature of each of these relationships, until the audience has been thoroughly misdirected.
But upon revelation, the missing pieces tumble into place unconvincingly, and, despite the beautiful craft and detail of the production, the whole registers as less than the sum of its parts.
Jonah (★★★☆☆) runs through April 19 at the Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW Tickets are $42 to $102, with discount options available. Call 202-332-3300, or visit StudioTheatre.org.
Intrepid pilots spotting the slimmest strip of runway in a storm, the team behind Signature Theatre's Safety Not Guaranteed aim for a dicey sweet spot between rock musical and concert experience, and land squarely on the money.
Adapting the 2012 sci-fi comedy film directed by Colin Trevorrow, the show's book writer Nick Blaemire and composer Ryan Miller have shaped Derek Connolly's multiple-award-winning script into a narrative that feels natural onstage.
Having not yet seen the film, but just from watching the trailer, it's clear Blaemire smartly kept some of the film's sharpest lines and phrases, as delivered onscreen by the likes of Aubrey Plaza, Jake Johnson, and Mark Duplass. And he and Miller (a founding member and lead singer of the band Guster) also didn't divert too far from the movie's plum premise.
As Vanessa Williams, radiant as ever in sparkling gold, rose to accept her award as Signature Theatre's 2026 Sondheim Award honoree, a question came up at our table: "Do you think they'll hold the plane for her?"
The audience at Monday's black-tie Sondheim Award Gala, held for the fourth year at the Anthem on the Wharf, had already been informed Miss Williams had a plane to catch -- and soon. Currently starring as the ruthless Miranda Priestley in the West End production of the new musical The Devil Wears Prada, Williams needed to make that British Airways flight from Dulles to London in order to go on with the show the following night.
The second half of the theater season always feels like the downhill rush of a roller coaster, a new hill coming into view just as you hit the dip, as local venues begin the time-honored ritual of announcing their upcoming seasons. Still, our focus here is on what's about to bloom -- and this year, that bloom is as big and bold as it gets.
A highlight is Shakespeare Theatre Company, showcasing Hamnet (no, not the movie), Suzy Eddie Izzard in a tour-de-force one-person Hamlet, and the great Wendell Pierce in the title role of Othello. (Pierce joins a notable Othello lineage at STC -- including, for those who remember, Patrick Stewart and Avery Brooks.)
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