The Woolly, wandering 'Full Circle'

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The audience wanders during the multi-room staging of "Full Circle." Unfortunately, so does the mind. Director Michael Rohd hatches a whimsical scheme for experiencing Charles Mee's overstuffed play about a chaotic clash of ideologies and principles in post-communist eastern Germany: He turns practically every nook and cranny of Woolly Mammoth Theatre into a performance space.

So some of us start in a Woolly rehearsal room and some in other makeshift screening areas, to watch the actors on film. Then we move to the lower lobby, as those same actors come to life on a platform looming over the bookshop. Next, it's a shuffle into Woolly's actual theater, where most of the seats have been removed, for a sequence that plays out on ropes suspended over the lip of the stage.

It's different. But where Mee's frantic, exclamation-point style of narrative is concerned, it doesn't make all that much difference. In a restless quest to dress up his story in ostentatious froufrou -- the plot ropes together everything from Bertolt Brecht's "Caucasian Chalk Circle" to the folklore character Dulle Griet to financier Warren Buffett -- the dramatist ladles on less in the way of insight than pretension.

And allowing these histrionics to carry on for more than 2 1/2 hours comes to feel punitive. Rohd's approach in this instance plays no clarifying role. If anything, it adds to a sense of incoherence. The director, who runs Sojourn Theatre in Portland, Ore., was responsible last fall for Georgetown University's premiere of "The Race," a snazzy, resourceful audience-participation piece that sought to incite debate about the nature of political leadership.

On that occasion, too, the audience moved around the theater, congregating in groups onstage to communally consider the questions the show's student actors were raising. It seemed entirely appropriate in a work that used the technology of the moment to explore the mechanics of democracy and to make the peanut gallery a partner in the process.

In "Full Circle," why we're being forced to march from space to space -- and stand for long periods in the lobby as the actors cavort in wavering European accents -- is never justified. It's not as if the stages created outside a traditional performing area illuminate anything about Mee's elliptical tale except its eccentricity.

The satirical story concerns the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fate of a baby born to a mistress of the last leader of the former East Germany, Erich Honecker (Sarah Marshall). A rich American tourist, modeled transparently on the late socialite Pamela Harriman -- and portrayed with a buoyant air of entitlement by the always-polished Naomi Jacobson -- finds herself in the care of the infant and in the company of a young East German protester (Jessica Frances Dukes). The journey they go on is one focal point of a convoluted vaudeville of ideas about the breakdown of a society and the new order replacing it.

A frenetic level of acting energy is triggered in the very first movement of the production, which takes place live and on a jokey film that's set in the theater of the iconoclastic East German director Heiner Muller, played here by Woolly's own artistic director, Howard Shalwitz. The unrelenting comic intensity of this interlude sets the show on a course that's ever less amusing.

Full Circle by Charles L. Mee. Directed by Michael Rohd. Set and multimedia, Shannon Scrofano; lighting, Colin K. Bills; costumes, Ivania Stack; sound, Veronika Vorel; choreography, Elizabeth Johnson. With Daniel Escobar, Michael Russotto, Kate Eastwood Norris, Michael Willis. About 2 hours 35 minutes.