Lulu is bad news. Don't believe me? Just take a glance at the couch that resides immediately in front of front row, center, in Washington Shakespeare Company's production of this Nicholas Wright-penned mashed-up adaptation of two notorious Frank Wedekind plays. There you'll find the trail of broken hearts and broken bodies the seductress leaves in her wake, in the form of dead husbands — one per act of this bloody, bawdy play — forced to sit there and watch helplessly after she has heartlessly dispatched them.

The Dead Man's Couch is one of a number of nice touches in director Christopher Henley's highly stylized production, which also includes expressionistic flourishes in the cartoon-surreal set, highly mannered performances, and a backlit scrim where Lulu's costume changes happen in suggestive silhouettes. A soundtrack featuring the Kurt Weill-meets-Billboard Hot 100 stylings of German bandleader Max Raabe tops things off nicely, but none of it seems enough to save a text that is overlong and begins to get repetitive somewhere in the second act as we march past the two-hour mark. Lulu's pattern is well established by this point: marry rich, take on obsessed lovers, and replace the former with the latter when the current husband has met his violent end. Rinse, repeat.

Wright's adaptation takes Wedekind's two Lulu plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, which were adapted for the cinema and the opera in the 20s and 30s) and fuses them into one piece that finds Lulu bouncing from German and French high society to a life of prostitution in London where, for lack of a better way to end her saga, she meets up with Jack the Ripper. Wedekind's work was already boundary-pushing at the turn of the 20th century, and Wright makes explicit some of the material the original author was forced to just suggest. The result is a violent, highly sexualized piece that has Sara Barker, in the title role, writhing around on chairs, chaise lounges, and the floor, in between pouting coquettishly and initiating mortal misfortune.

But for a play with enough blood, love and rhetoric to do Shakespeare proud, Lulu is an oddly tedious exercise. By the time James Finley (as Jack) bursts from a back room fully nude and covered head to toe in blood, what should be an electrifying moment just has the audience stealing surreptitious glances at their watches.

WSC's production employs a huge cast of more than two dozen actors, some of whom must still pull double and triple duty to portray the multitudes that are inexorably drawn to the irresistible Lulu. Barker does what she can with a character possessing rather inscrutable motivations apart from the basic lust for wealth and security. As sexual as she is outwardly, one suspects this is little more than a front to get her what she really desires. She can talk about living for carnal delights all she wants, but her response to the simple question posed by a Countess is far more revealing. "Do you never indulge?" she is asked after turning down a cigarette. "Not for pleasure," she responds.

The play is filled with lines like this, double entendres and buried meanings. The word play provides much of the pleasure for the audience, but there's just not enough to carry a show that suffers from both too much plot and not enough variety. Lulu's character needs to draw us in just as hypnotically as she does her many suitors. Instead, we find ourselves waiting for her to finally join her husbands on the couch.

Lulu runs through December 13 at Washington Shakespeare Company. Tickets are available online.

Filed in Arts and Events and tagged Christopher Henley, Frank Wedekind, lulu, theater, washington shakespeare company

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