Woolly Keeps the Audience Running Full Circle
The dangling apartment setting of Woolly's Full Circle.
This is a show where the audience relocates from separate rooms to a central location, from the complex lobby to the main theater. All the movement helps contribute to the chaos in which the show is set – in East Germany, just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It's also, frankly, a lot of fun to move from space to space, wondering what setting Shannon Scrofano has in store for us next (a tightrope bridge suspended across an abyss? A catwalk apartment?). The variety is key in a 2.5+ hour play with moments of pretentious meandering.
Full Circle is most focused on what's going to happen to the baby of ousted political leader Erich Honecker (a wheezing, sputtering, committed performance from Sarah Marshall) and his mistress (Kate Eastwood Norris, dizzy but enraged) when it ends up in the hands of a self-absorbed socialite and a young would-be revolutionary. The journey puts the pair at the center of the action, and the two performers are fine company – Naomi Jacobson is poised, regal and airy as high-society Pamela, while Jessica Frances Dukes is heartbreaking with a side of crazy as her instant "au pair," Dulle Griet.
The two encounter some strange roadblocks and saviors along the way, including the show's most comical couple, Dulle Griet's white trash brother and his wife (Marshall and Norris again). Marshall takes great relish in her drag roles, and is particularly winning as the gruff brother, while Norris gets the chance to have some frenetic fun with her star-struck character, making the most of entertaining guests in the bizarrely suspended apartment (she laments how they really should get some clips for those chairs – for the guests!).
But even as the show delights with these little vignettes (a raucous wedding, a goofy chef-sung parody of "Puttin on the Ritz"), there's still the sinking suspicion that it isn't adding up to something cohesive. The play's closing scene, in a Brecht-inspired Chalk Circle (everyone's Brechtian around town lately), does little to ease these suspicions. A theater artistic director's (Woolly's own Howard Shalwitz, meta-cast) self-justifying and self-condeming monologue drags, and randomly thrown-in plot twists (look! a proposal!) don't contribute to any great understanding of what writer Charles L. Mee hopes to accomplish. Still, at least we had the chance to wander – much of what the audience stumbles on is worth a look.
Full Circle runs through Nov. 29 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Tickets are available online.
Filed in Arts and Events and tagged theater, theatre, woolly mammoth
This play was....horrible. Ok, not horrible, just really bad. Kudos to the actors who did a wonderful job for without their outstanding efforts I would have left long before it finished.
I hate to say it but my opinion of this play was art at its worst. It showcased the director as using artistic means as a way to showcase his preceived "brilliance". Making matters much worse was his 30 minute diatride that seemed like it had no place in the performance other than to showcase him.
There was no connectivity in the story, a "full circle" was certainly elusive. And this thing could have been cut by a good half hour.
Kudos to DCist for a dead on review in the last paragraph and unless you go for free my suggestion would be to find any other possible way to waste 2.5 hrs of your life.
true story—i got to witness honecker leaving flowers at JFKs grave when i was a kid, here in the DC area on vacation.
The moving around was certainly what kept things interesting. I thought, as I was walking home from the show last night, if I had had to sit there watching a play conventionally for 2.5 hours, I don't know if I could've gotten through it.
That said, I went because I really enjoy Kate Eastwood Norris, Sarah Marshall (who was TOTALLY fun to watch), and Naomi Jacobson. And all three were excellent. And the set - especially the tightrope - was inventive and fun. The last half-hour was awful. I kept wondering what the score of Game 6 was in the Series.