Mini Reviews

Mini Reviews

A star (*) denotes a show recommended by our critics.

Opening

CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO

(At Studio Theatre through June 25)

This is an agonizingly realistic ride in the cockpits of six doomed aircraft that crashed between 1985 and 1996, based on the transcripts of recorded conversations among pilots and air traffic controllers, grimly reenacting the final stages of each of these real disasters, in which pilots are confronted with friendly skies suddenly becoming harrowingly hostile. The play -- whose title comes from industry lingo for "cockpit voice recorder" -- is fascinating in the way that a car accident seems to be. Virtually all the airline employees depicted here are engaged until the last seconds in a methodical effort at trying to solve problems of bewildering complexity. It's cathartic but by no means entertaining. You might be glad you saw it, although it's also likely you'll never want to see it again.

-- Peter Marks

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR

(By Washington Shakespeare Company at the Clark Street Playhouse through July 2)

In this desiccated, Southern Gothic staging, director H. Lee Gable marinates Lillian Hellman's right-minded 1930s melodrama in postmodern sexual politics. He unconventionally repopulates Hellman's saga of a homophobic panic and its consequences, most notably putting men in two critical female roles. The play takes place in a girls school that a little devil named Mary brings down through vicious innuendo and blackmail. Miffed over not much, Mary whines to her influential grandmother that Martha and Karen, the women who run the place, are, well . . . you know. There's nothing subtle about the casting gambit. Jay Hardee is a towering, physically majestic young Rosalie, the nervous girl whom Mary blackmails into confirming her ruinous lie. As Martha, who's in a crippling funk over the impending marriage of Karen to good-natured Dr. Joe Cardin, Christopher Henley is reedy and doomed-looking. Radical recalculations come with additions and subtractions, and these are the casualties of Gable's absorption with the second part of Hellman's brokeback play (the tale of Martha and Karen), as opposed to the first part (the tale of Mary, the bad seed, Hellman's original inspiration). That preference is understandable: The end of the play, when it works, is what wrecks you.

-- Nelson Pressley