Mini Reviews

Mini Reviews

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

Newly Reviewed

ANTIGONE

(By Forum Theatre at H Street Playhouse through Dec. 30)

An MFA-program earnestness permeates this staging of "Antigone." Sensibly arranged on a trim Grecian set, the actors do their darnedest to channel the play's philosophizing and to give the plot's grim patterns the requisite grandeur. But their painstaking effort always looks like just that: effort. The performers never elevate the Jean Anouilh play past the nose-to-the-grindstone stage, to where the scenes might live and breathe. Admittedly, Anouilh's 1944 script is mannered to begin with, and Jeremy Sams's translation, used in this production, doesn't mellow out the formality. A revisionist take on Greek myth, the play reprises the familiar story of Antigone, Oedipus's strong-willed daughter. As many of us remember from reading Sophocles in high school, Antigone wins herself a death sentence by defying the Theban ruler, Creon, and burying her brother. But in Anouilh's ironic version of the tale, traditional notions of duty and heroism crumble: The title character turns out to be a dyspeptic self-aggrandizer, while Creon is an eminently reasonable ruler who's anxious to spare Antigone's life.

-- Celia Wren

* KAFKA'S DICK

(By Washington Shakespeare Company at Clark Street Playhouse through Jan. 13)

Once you're a celebrity, everything means something, from the cut of your suit to how much you loved your mum. And that nauseates English playwright Alan Bennett, who two decades ago wrote a wickedly funny play that lays bare our obsessive need to know. The comedy hasn't been seen much stateside -- could it be that puckish title? -- but the Washington Shakespeare Company is having a jolly run at this scattered but lively play. Bennett's intellectual farce is driven by lickety-split dialogue and the cute idea of shooting the perpetually miserable Kafka into the 1980s, where he's been completely undressed by literary biography of the most gossipy sort. Allusions and pranks run cheek by jowl as Kafka initially arrives in the modern British suburbs as a turtle and as Bennett melds literary satire with hints of bedroom farce. It's all very antic and jampacked, and not the easiest thing to perform, as actors juggle accents and the brainy punch lines that the script produces at a rapid rate. The machinery sometimes clatters more than it hums, especially come pell-mell physical business and arch asides that don't clarify and delight so much as add to the jumble. But by and large, the jumble is gleeful.

-- Nelson Pressley