Because they could not stop for Death,
He kindly stops for them. 

“Them” being the five onstage characters in The Comeuppance, the newest dark comedy by MacArthur Fellowship winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. At key moments throughout the play, the lights dim, and each actor takes turns addressing the audience as Death with a Capital D, as poet Emily Dickinson conceived him. It’s as if the theater holds only Death and the audience. 

And immortality.   

It’s not that everybody dies, but in this play about friends reunited for their 20th high school reunion, Death gets to comment on each character’s close brushes, calamities, and poor life choices. And, before they embark by limo to a suburban Washington hotel ballroom, this troubled sextet has plenty of regrets to rehash—from not asking out the right girl to having “too many fucking kids” with the wrong guy.

Woolly Mammoth and Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater co-produced The Comeuppance after the play enjoyed runs in London and off-Broadway last year. Woolly’s newish artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, has continued the tradition of the company debuting new plays by Jacobs-Jenkins, a D.C.-area native who Goyanes first met when he was a New Yorker editorial assistant and she was an associate producer at the Public Theater. The Comeuppance is Jacobs-Jenkins’ first major play set in the DMV, and after seeing his other excellent works set elsewhere, including An Octoroon, Gloria, and Appropriate, it’s fabulous to see him come home. 

The Comeuppance will resonate with many DMV natives, if “resonate” is a euphemism for keeping you up all night. Consider that a trigger warning for people whose coming-of-age memories will roughly align with the characters onstage. (There’s a “content transparency” list on Woolly’s website, which anyone considering attending should review.) Not up for reminiscing about where you were on 9/11, and recalling the sinking feeling in your stomach while you waited to hear if a loved one who worked at the Pentagon was safe? Maybe skip this play about the Class of 2002 from (the fictional) St. Anthony’s High School. That also goes for anyone who has been affected by a mass shooting. These characters discuss at length how teenage life changed before and after two students killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher in Colorado. 

“People were scared! He was totally Columbine…ey?” Emilio (Jordan Bellow), the cool artist in the group, says about a “spookily quiet” classmate who joined the JROTC.

“Columbiney!” his friend Ursula (Alana Raquel Bowers) says.

The instant you hear the invented adjective, you’ll know exactly what Jacobs-Jenkins means. That’s the market he’s cornered as a playwright: so smart, so funny, and so incisive in a way that makes you chortle while worrying if it’s OK to laugh. Other playwrights handily deploy zeitgeisty zingers, including Jocelyn Bioh, whose Jaja’s African Hair Braiding is now running at Arena Stage. What sets Jacobs-Jenkins apart, however, is the completeness of his work; the way he gradually parses out answers to questions dangled in front of the audience. Why is Ursula wearing an eye patch? Are those two characters exes? Who here is going to die? 

Listening for answers fuels the play’s dramatic tension. With the notable exceptions of the big ontological questions he’s asking about life and death. Those you’ll have to wrestle with yourself. 

All the action in The Comeuppance takes place on Ursula’s porch—once her grandmother’s porch, as her friends remember it. (There’s no locale specified other than Prince George’s County; my guess is Greenbelt.) Death has recently stopped for Ursula’s grandmother, and is lurking about as Ursula’s own health declines, worrying her friends. Others have faced challenges tied to marriage and careers. Francisco (Jaime Maseda) and his cousin Kristina (Taysha Marie Canales) both joined the military after watching the planes crash on 9/11, and in Kristina’s case, so Uncle Sam would pay for medical school. The two went from being “the honors kids,” checking on classmates in crisis, to serving on the front lines.  

“You guys are the honors students, you’re in charge,” Simon recalls the principal saying. “As if we weren’t also being traumatized.” (Simon, voiced by Maseda, has bailed on attending the reunion but calls his friends from New York to reminisce.)

Shortly before the quintet is set to depart the porch, Emilio, who has been living in Europe, goes on a tirade about the military industrial complex, eliciting a disturbing reaction from Francisco, who survived multiple deployments and suffers from PTSD. 

At issue—and this may cut deep for local audiences—is that before George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, many liberal-leaning locals had a less complicated relationship with the U.S. military. I recalled driving onto Bolling Air Force Base to visit my friend whose dad was a general, or dropping cookies off for midshipmen pals at the Naval Academy. These things were normal for me and normal for these characters. Today, such actions are politically charged national security issues.

Like attending a high school reunion, the perk and the curse of The Comeuppance is the chance to process memories. That’s a major difference between Jacobs-Jenkins previous plays like Octoroon and Gloria (which I would heartily encourage anyone to run, not walk, to). Both of those shows transition from sharp, situational comedy into broadly applicable social commentary (on racism and mass shootings, respectively). The Comeuppance, by contrast, confronts an onslaught of societal woes, from teen pregnancy and Blue Lives Matter to PTSD, studded with moments of comic relief. And the premise—that Death’s carriage is always lurking in the shadows—certainly casts a pall over the onstage proceedings. 

The acting, it should be said, is stellar across the board—even when a strobe light flashes, freezing everyone on stage except the character whose turn it is to voice Death. 

“Memory, if you don’t know, is sort of like a myth,” Bellow says, delivering Death’s final monologue. “The present is the best part of all things. Trust me. … that’s why I like to watch.”  

Jacobs-Jenkins’ final revelation for the audience is a bit of a cop-out, but what Death says is correct: The present, as in watching this play, is immensely likable. It’s thinking about the past and worrying about eternity that hurts.

Presented by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and the Wilma Theater, The Comeuppance, written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and directed by Morgan Green, runs through Oct. 6 at Woolly Mammoth. Fall Arts Guide Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. woollymammoth.net. $56–$83.

Friday: Munit Mesfin at Lubber Run

Based in the D.C. area, Ethiopian-born vocalist Munit Mesfin is skilled in multiple genres. She plays some gigs strictly focused on Ethiopian music, as well as Roberta Flack tribute shows and family performances with Munit and Z Lovebugs, but she’s a member of global music ensemble Project Locrea. In an email to City Paper, Mesfin says this free gig with her own band at Lubber Run will offer “a mix of Ethio-jazz, both old-school classics from legends such as Mulatu Astatke (‘Yekermo Sew’), Tilahun Gessesse (‘Tiz Alegn Yetintu’), Asnakech Worku (‘Abet Abet’), and Aster Aweke, and some of my own originals (‘Ante Lej,’ ‘Noro Noro’), and songs that have an Ethiopian feel or that we will give an Ethiopian feel … from both the realms of jazz and soul.” Mesfin has noted in previous interviews that many of her influences come from Ethiopian radio and the American jazz and soul records her parents played. But her time living in India and Namibia as a child, and later in South Africa, has also impacted her sound as well. Not to mention her time at Smith College in Massachusetts. Mesfin is currently a project director for Carpe Diem Arts’ Ukes on the Move program, teaching ukulele and songwriting to third and fourth graders in Montgomery County Public Schools. When she’s not teaching, she’s working on a solo album and a recording of her family band. Her vocals in Amharic and English exhibit quite a range—she can sound smooth, lush, and honeyed; deep and passionate; or light and poppy. Expect to hear all of that at the season’s second show of the Lubber Run 2024 summer concert series. Munit Mesfin performs at 8 p.m. on June 14 at Lubber Run Amphitheater, 200 N. Columbus St., Arlington. arlingtonva.us. Free. —Steve Kiviat

Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday: The World’s Greatest Sinner at AFI Silver 

You want an over-the-top performance from a hulking ectomorph? Nicolas Cage is the current go-to guy for your ultra-hammy needs, but once upon a time Timothy Agoglia Carey (1929-1994) would have ordered Cage to hold his beer. Carey had the honor of working with Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes, and boasted about turning down parts in all three Godfather movies. But even though he worked with some of the best directors in the business, he would take on any role, perhaps none lower than the unwatchable exploitation fare of Chesty Anderson, USN. Off-screen, Carey was equally unhinged; while working in Munich on Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, he staged his own kidnapping as a publicity stunt. By the end of his life, Carey was obsessed with the creative potential of flatulence, and among his possessions was a device he called a fart chastity belt. But Carey’s labor of love was the legendary 1963 cult obscurity The World’s Greatest Sinner, which he wrote, directed, and produced. It’s a hot mess, as fascinating and uncompromising as his acting. Carey plays Clarence Hilliard, an insurance salesman who quits his job to follow a strange path: He becomes a rock star (despite having no musical ability) and, calling himself “God,” Hilliard founds his own religion and political party. Sinner’s reputation, and its rarity, was such that even Elvis Presley asked to see it (Carey has an uncredited role in the 1969 Presley/Mary Tyler Moore vehicle, Change of Habit, as a hulking, massive grocery store clerk). Sinner’s rock ’n’ roll cred is further enhanced by the young composer who made his professional music debut with its score: Frank Zappa. The World’s Greatest Sinner was hard to see until TCM Underground rescued it from obscurity. Now, thanks to the Academy Film Archive and the Film Foundation (whose founder Martin Scorsese calls The World’s Greatest Sinner one of his favorite rock films), Carey’s still-shocking vision, more relevant than ever, is screening in a new 4K restoration. The World’s Greatest Sinner screens at 9:30 p.m. on June 14, 9:30 p.m. on June 15, 9:20 p.m. on June 17, and 9:10 p.m. on June 19 at the AFI Silver Theatre, 8633 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. silver.afi.com. $13. —Pat Padua

Ends Saturday: Jo Levine’s Trees 360° at Studio Gallery

Jo Levine’s previous photography exhibit at Studio Gallery was about grasses. With her latest (and much larger) exhibit at the same venue, Levine graduates to trees. A lesson from her previous show still holds, however: Stay close to your subject. At a distance, Levine’s arboreal subjects—spindly trunks in the mist, lazily hanging branches, fall foliage reflected in rippling water—come off as distinguished but somewhat routine. When Levine inspects them from a closer perspective, however, their visual quirks emerge. Some of the trunks she photographs offer mottled, multicolored patches of lichens or isobar-like patterns on textured bark. Fallen leaves flaunt their divergent hues, or collect rain droplets in surprisingly orderly arrangements. Cherry blossoms cast a reflection in pond water that turns into a crazily twisted pattern. An arrangement of fallen, beige-toned leaves is seen encased in ice, covered by an unexpected layer of frozen bumps. Most notably, several images capture the ghostly imprints of leaves on sidewalks. Often paired with actual leaves elsewhere in the frame, the negative leaf imprints of this series spark a dialogue about the interaction between presence and absence. Jo Levine’s Trees 360° runs through June 15 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. Wednesday through Friday, 1 to 6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. studiogallerydc.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Postponed Until July 20: Tekno at Fillmore Silver Spring

Nigerian vocalist Tekno may be best known to some for his vocals on “Don’t Jealous Me” from the 2019 Beyoncé-curated album, The Lion King: The Gift, but he won acclaim with afrobeats listeners back in 2012 for his ability to croon and rap over that genre’s programmed beats. Tekno, born Augustine Miles Kelechi Okechukwu, released his debut album, Old Romance, in 2020, and in 2023 the track “Enjoy” was used in an episode of Ted Lasso. While Tekno learned how to play piano and guitar as a kid in music school and still plays a keyboard at times, his fame has come from the distinctive way he enunciates his tales of romance, love, and lust. Sometimes using Auto-Tune, Tekno’s flow—whether singsong, spoken in clipped phrases, or emoted in a melancholy manner—is what captures our attention. Billie Eilish, no stranger to careful word-bending and oration, once told Vanity Fair that he was her favorite artist. Tekno has also lent his skills to other afrobeats stars. He wrote and produced the cleverly syncopated song “If” for Davido, and appears on Kizz Daniel’s “Buga (Lo, Lo, Lo),” which enthralls with its catchy chorus and staccato beats. On his own hits, Tekno, working with cleverly constructed instrumental rhythms, makes his songs shine with his repeated, warbled recitation and memorable earworm chorus. Due to visa issues Tekno’s June 15 show at Fillmore has been postponed until July 20. livenation.com. $48 to $68. —Steve Kiviat

Monday: Kumbia Queers at Songbyrd

Certain artists sound better in certain seasons. Long-running cumbia punk band Kumbia Queers sound best in warm weather and, lucky for you, it’s going to be hot in D.C. this week. Since 2007, the group from Buenos Aires have released music that’ll inevitably get you to move. Touring regularly across the globe since 2012, Kumbia Queers would fit well on any major punk or even jam band festival. They’re billed as tropical punk and it’s a pretty apt description. Their tunes are head-nodders, some with laid-back vibes, some thick with heavy distortion. Their newer singles are more electronic-based, but the beats will still get you on your feet (well, we should say stay on your feet—we all know shows at Songbyrd aren’t seated). Nearly 20 years as a group, the band is far from their Madonna-inspired lo-fi antics. The sound has increased in quality over the years, both in terms of production and skill. They’re a well-oiled cumbia machine that knows how to move large crowds—there’s a reason they’ve played Pride concerts all across the world. While D.C.’s Capital Pride Weekend may be over, it’s still June, which means the party continues. Kumbia Queers play at 8 p.m. on June 17 at Songbyrd, 540 Penn St. NE. songbyrddc.com. $20–$25. —Brandon Wetherbee

Opens Tuesday: 10,000 Dreams: A Celebration of Asian Choreography at the Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center has not hosted a dance festival on the scale of 10,000 Dreams: A Celebration of Asian Choreography since 2017. The weeklong event brings dancers from four countries and nine companies to Washington for three rotating programs of work by choreographers of Asian descent. Modern-day impresario Phil Chan—a New York-based historian, choreographer, and cultural consultant—cocurated the festival with the goal of bringing high-level dancers and varied choreography to the stage. He chose the name 10,000 Dreams to reference both a popular number in East Asian cultures and the infinite creativity of Asian peoples working in dance around the world. Program A features the Washington Ballet, Utah’s Ballet West, and Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet performing works by contemporary U.S.-based choreographers, including new Washington Ballet artistic director Edwaard Liang. There will be a one-night celebration of the longtime Washington Ballet choreographer-in-residence Choo–San Goh, who died of complications from AIDS in 1987, on June 21. “Goh’s ballets will stand as a testament to the fructifying effect of the cultural blending of East and West,” wrote the late Alan M. Kreigsman, a Pulitzer-winning critic for the Washington Post, praising Goh’s “sculptural” dances that sometimes used arms, hands, and fingers to suggest Chinese calligraphy. Although Goh choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov and major companies around the world, his works have rarely been staged in the U.S. since his death. Chan worked with Goh’s niece and his estate holder to resurrect three for the Kennedy Center stage, including “Fives,” a classic created for the Washington Ballet. The festival wraps with weekend performances of works by two Chinese-born choreographers, Disha Zang and American Ballet Theatre’s Zhong-Jong Fang. 10,000 Dreams: A Celebration of Asian Choreography opens June 18 and runs through June 23 at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org. $33–$126; discounts are available.

Translated literally from German, the word singspiel means “song play” or “song games.” That’s how Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) is listed in the Köchel Catalog, the official list of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s works: as a singspiel. Some of Mozart’s peers in late 18th-century Vienna thought he was slumming around by writing singspiels, a genre associated with low-bar humor and beer-hall music.

But for most of the past two centuries, Die Zauberflöte has been performed in opera houses, just as most of Mozart’s works designated as “operas” are. So what I love most about Shakespeare Theatre Company’s ingenious production of The Matchbox Magic Flute—and there’s a lot to love—is that it takes Die Zauberflöte out of the opera house and returns it to the proletariat, just as the composer intended. As editor Stanley Sadie wrote in the oft-cited New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, everything about Zauberflöte “belongs firmly in the established tradition of Viennese popular theater.”

All that to say, democratizing Zauberflöte, as MacArthur “genius” director and adaptor Mary Zimmerman has done, is a legit artistic exercise. If the idea of an English-language Magic Flute performed with just five musicians, but replete with glorious faux-rococo sets, opulent costumes, and finely tuned comic acting sounds appealing, please try to see this show. It’s terrific.

The Matchbox Magic Flute premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in February. Zimmerman’s creative reimaginings have been on a Chicago-to-D.C. pipeline since 2004, when she directed Pericles at STC. Founding artistic director Michael Kahn invited her back for Argonautika, and the theater’s current artistic director, Simon Godwin, has brought her The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci and now The Matchbox Magic Flute to Washington. (This sort of continuity, unfortunately, is becoming too rare in D.C. theater, as artistic directors retire and their replacements search for shiny new things.) 

Zimmerman’s libretto takes a wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach to Mozart’s plot, a cuckoo mash-up of an extant fairy tale with freemason symbolism. A prince (Billy Rude) is out wandering the forest when he’s attacked by a dragon and rescued by a trio of harmonizing ladies-in-waiting who think he’s a hunk.

“Oh ladies, get a look at him.
Just like a little cherubim.
He must spend hours at the gym!”

Those lines replace original rhyming praise usually translated, “This is indeed a youth most fair, such a beauty in man is rare.”

As the smitten ladies know, Princess Pamina (Marlene Fernandez) has been abducted, and the Prince (no relation) is assigned to rescue her. Along for the ride is Papageno the Bird-Catcher, portrayed by the delightfully comic Shawn Pfautsch, as half avian and entirely birdbrained.

Most cast members are reprising their Chicago roles, which makes sense given the tasks at hand include puppetry, ballet, physical comedy, playing the cello, and singing in a coloratura style. The latter is accomplished with varying degrees of success.

The best voices in the bunch are that of Fernandez and Lauren Molina (Papagena and one of the ladies). Emily Rohm takes on the role of Queen of the Night and her signature aria, usually sung by a marquee soprano, but Rohm and the Queen are not the star attractions here.

There are trade-offs in The Matchbox Magic Flute. It’s understandable that some opera fans will miss hearing a splendid rendition of that aria, which features some of the highest notes in opera. Yet there’s still so much artistry to admire.

Five pit musicians sit just below the stage in costume, where Laura Bergquist conducts from both the piano and celesta. David Lonkevich is spectacular on flute and piccolo, and although the only percussion instruments in Mozart’s score are glockenspiel and timpani, Danny Villanueva has nearly two dozen at his disposal.

Few opera singers have the gifts for physical comedy that Zimmerman’s cast has. In Act II, Russell Mernagh prowls the stage in a hybrid rat/lizard costume as the evil henchman Monostatos. “We’re going to storm the Capitol! I mean, the castle,” he announces, to a crowd that appreciated a little January 6 humor.

Contemporary opera theater productions take varying approaches to the bad guys in The Magic Flute. Monostatos works for the mysterious Sarastro (played by understudy Nathan Karnik), who originally represented something of a tough-love, enlightened freemason leader. Simon McBurney’s critically hailed production for English National Opera, leaned in to that creepy weirdness: “Picture a sooty apocalypse in an almost featureless universe,” a Guardian critic wrote, describing the setting.

Zimmerman’s production, by contrast, is all sunshine and rainbows. Literally. Everyone’s wearing giant sunshine medallions in the finale. A faux proscenium and scallop-shell lights at the foot of the stage reference Sweden’s Drottningholms Slottsteater, one of Europe’s oldest working theaters, where Ingmar Bergman filmed his Magic Flute in 1975. It’s on YouTube, and worth a watch. But it’s been nearly 50 years since the great Swedish director brought The Magic Flute to global cinemas via the traditions of 18th-century theater. Bravo to Zimmerman, the Goodman, Shakespeare Theatre, and all involved for doing the equivalent today. 

Presented by Shakespeare Theatre Company, The Matchbox Magic Flute, written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, adapted and directed by Mary Zimmerman, with musical arrangements by Amanda Dehnert and Andre Pluess, runs through June 16 at the Klein Theatre. shakespearetheatre.org. $39–$175.

“Get thee to a nunnery” is high up on the list of William Shakespeare’s most famous insults. Hamlet lobs the line at Ophelia, his paramour of sorts, when she tries to return a stack of love letters while he’s in the middle of a family crisis. 

The tragic plotline may be familiar—his dad just died, his mother promptly married his uncle, there’s a ghost haunting the castle, etc.—but in Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s quietly mind-blowing new production of Hamlet, directed by Eleanor Holdridge, Ophelia clutches a rosary when she wanders in to dump her boyfriend. It’s a tiny Catholic detail that makes our hero seem like so much less of an incel dick. 

Suddenly, everything tracks. Some scholars think Shakespeare was a closeted papist, and Hamlet is chock-full of references to piety and prayers. (“Heavenly powers, restore him!” Ophelia says as she exits, not leaving for a convent.) The story is set before the Lutheran church overran the Nordics, and regardless, this is a modern dress Hamlet. Why not make the Dane more sympathetic? And why not make it even more apparent that Ophelia is a woman without agency—we all know her father, Polonius, is hiding behind the arras and calling the shots. 

Adding a rosary to the get-thee-to-a-nunnery scene is just one of many revelatory directorial choices in Chesapeake Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Holdridge chairs Catholic University’s drama department and has directed at several of Washington’s second-tier theaters. Oddly, she’s been given bigger stages out of town, including last year’s world premiere of D.C. playwright Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Soprano at the Alley Theatre in Houston. She’ll also direct the play at Olney Theatre next year.

And yet neither of D.C.’s two major theaters historically devoted to the Bard have tapped Holdridge to direct one of his plays. Both Shakespeare Theatre and the Folger are now under new leadership that has pledged to diversify their stages and expand their missions. In the midst of this transition, both have lately looked like Shakespeare apologists, only staging his plays with celebrities (John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, Patrick Page as Lear, both at STC) or major gimmicks (Folger’s Midsummer at the National Building Museum and STC’s Much Ado set in TV studio, both with doctored scripts and neither that well performed).

Here’s the thing: We aren’t even 10 years out from productions directed by men, featuring nearly all White casts, being business as usual at STC and Folger. A decade was not enough time to plumb new depths that are possible with a woman in the director’s chair and BIPOC actors onstage, and I worry that in the rush to expand the canon, it’s going to be harder to find good, show-me-something-new Shakespeare, featuring local talent, in the District.

You might have to get thee to Baltimore. 

Ophelia’s rosary is the tip of Holdridge’s interpretive iceberg. Elana Michelle, the actor playing Ophelia, is Black, as are the actors playing her father (DeJeanette Horne) and brother, Laertes (JC Payne). This is not “color-blind” casting like Hamilton; it’s a fascinating subtext. Holdridge seems to be suggesting that the King’s chief of staff is a marginalized social climber living the Danish American dream, but not entirely secure in his family’s position. There’s good reason for Polonius to warn to his daughter that Hamlet, the White prince, could not possibly intend marriage. Horne’s delivery is very James Earl Jones, hardly the doddering old fool that many productions make Polonius out to be. He’s believable as a wise dad giving his son “the talk,” when he sends Laertes off to university with classic adages such as “neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

As Claudius, Marcus Kyd is as calm and calculating as a prestige TV villain. (D.C. audiences may know him as the ringleader of the Taffety Punk Theatre Company.) Kyd occasionally takes a few moments to stride toward the audience and think, before turning back toward his fellow actors to announce his plan. 

Holdridge also took the liberty of rearranging the order of a few scenes and made judicious cuts. The resulting Hamlet is a fast-paced revenge thriller, aided by great use of quick entrances and exits.

Woolly Mammoth company member Misha Kachman designed the simple, effective sets for the Thrust stage, working closely with lighting designer Katie McCreary to create the ambiance of a castle in a building that once served as a Gilded Age bank. (The building was home to a fairly trashy nightclub before the space reopened as a professional, although mostly nonunion, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company Theatre in 2014.)  

Kyd and Vince Eisenson, who plays the very likable, slightly unhinged, Hamlet, are the cast’s only Actor’s Equity members, but nearly every performance is well crafted. Accusations that Hamlet has gone mad stand in stark contrast to Ophelia’s suicidal ramblings, which everyone at court seems to deny. All of the flowy gowns that costume designer Gail Beach picked for Michelle are embroidered with flowers and look very For Love & Lemons, smartly foreshadowing that in the mad scenes she’ll sing of “sweet flowers” draped across a grave and pretend to pass out columbines and pansies. 

Not every element completely clicks. The soundtrack is a bit overblown, the romantic relationship between Claudius and Gertrude (Lesley Malin) feels better developed than that between Hamlet and Ophelia, and usually comedic roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never really get off the ground. But these are minor disappointments in a Chesapeake Shakespeare production that otherwise fences well above its weight. A hit, as a courtier says, when Hamlet spars with Laertes in the play’s final scene. A very palpable hit.

Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare and directed by Eleanor Holdridge, runs through May 28 at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company Theatre in Baltimore. chesapeakeshakespeare.com. $23–$69.

One really good idea. That’s all it takes to put on a good production of a William Shakespeare play. 

The Folger Theatre had that one great idea: Stage a slightly abridged, family-friendly version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream inside the magically cavernous great hall of the National Building Museum. 

The production of Shakespeare’s comedy about feuding fairies who meddle with human lovers was set for the summer of 2020. But then came two years of pandemic-induced delays and a change in the theater’s artistic directors; under new leadership, nearly the entire creative team and cast were replaced. For reasons that remain unclear, only one act and the set designer remain from the planned 2020 production. But what is apparent is this: Too many great ideas (and a few misguided ones) have been layered onto Folger’s production of Midsummer.

Balloons, magic, modern dance! Peggy Lee’s recording of “Fever,” nonbinary fairy kings, and the harmonica! Gender-flipped roles, yards of fluorescent yellow tulle, and Hawaiian shirts for the star of the Rude Mechanicals. 

Lord, what fools these mortals with too many good ideas can be.

From challenging sound design to costuming and casting, there’s so much going on that the wondrously strange experience of seeing Shakespeare in one of D.C.’s most fantastic spaces has gotten lost. This Midsummer could have been a show for D.C. theater record books—instead it’s a charming summer novelty, not the crowning achievement previous leader Janet Alexander Griffin envisioned, nor the red carpet rollout her replacement Karen Ann Daniels likely wanted. (Griffin retired in the spring of 2021, after leading the Folger for four decades.) 

Daniels joined the Folger last October as artistic director after directing the Mobile Unit at New York’s Public Theater. The best Midsummer decision Daniels made was using her connections to reel in Watchman actor (and Public Theater veteran) Jacob Ming-Trent to play Bottom, everyone’s favorite thespian ass-head. 

Last summer, Ming-Trent starred as the chubby knight Falstaff in the Public’s critically hailed adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. “Playing Falstaff, playing a Falstaff set in Harlem? It doesn’t really get any better than this,” Ming-Trent told the New York Times. 

Onstage in Washington, he’s a gregarious and affable presence. He also depicts Bottom as cruder than the Rude Mechanicals, the amateur troupe putting on a play-within-the-play, are typically portrayed. Ming-Trent grabs his crotch repeatedly and ad-libs jokes about the size of his dick. 

In marketing materials, however, the Folger has stressed that Midsummer at the Building Museum—as part of an annual series of family-friendly summer installations that has also included a giant ball pit—is great for kids. To that end, the rest of the Rude Mechanicals are lovable, harmonic goofballs and the fairies are costumed like low-rent Muppets. The heavily edited production clocks in at 90 minutes. Somebody tell Ming-Trent to stop grabbing his dick.

I say this not to sound prudish—Shakespeare can certainly be a ribald good time—but as an example of the many contradictory artistic choices in this Midsummer. Director Victor Malana Moag, who replaced conceiving director Robert Richmond, rearranged scenes, cut liberally, added contemporary non sequiturs and flipped lines for Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen. It’s Oberon, not Titania who awakes from slumber in love with Bottom, transformed into a half human, half ass. 

This could work! This Oberon is cheekily portrayed as queer, strutting through the forest in a fabulous, flowing fuchsia skirt that Billy Porter should borrow for next year’s Oscars. Oberon and Bottom have an absolutely epic roll in the hay. But by the time Titania rouses her beloved from the spell, she appears more like a cuckold than an empowered woman putting her errant man in his place.

The gender-flipped roles and gender-fluid fairy king—two worthwhile ideas if explored alone—end up canceling each other out. 

Folger’s production also amplifies Shakespeare’s problematic reason the royals are feuding: Oberon desires a young “changeling boy” in the fairy queen’s entourage. The character has no lines, and is rarely portrayed onstage. Regrettably, to contemporary audiences, the scenario sounds like the fairies are engaged in child sex trafficking. 

Synetic Theater’s wonderful, recently staged “wordless” Midsummer smartly cut the changeling boy situation. Washington’s last major Midsummer, mounted by Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2012 and remounted as the summer Free for All production in 2015, was stunning for so many big-picture reasons, but also for its attention to detail, including casting the director’s nephew to play the changeling boy. Putting an actual kid in the show to innocently frolic with the fairies and bounce off onstage trampolines solved the problem. 

So why, if the Folger was going to take so many liberties with Shakespeare’s text, did they not cut the creepy custody battle? 

As is so often the case in Midsummer, “the lovers,” two sets of Athenean mortals, are the least interesting characters onstage. At the Building Museum, they’re exceedingly silly, lack chemistry, and perform an inexplicably serious modern dance sequence. (Also of note: Hermia wears almost the exact same faux-schoolgirl uniform as she did at STC. How rude.)

The significant improvement that a decade has wrought is more diverse casting. While it would be nice to see more local actors in lead roles—most here are from New York and California—there are several in the ensemble. As Daniels moves forward in her Folger tenure, hopefully she’ll get to know Washington’s talent pool better and produce classics with more clarity. As the fairy messenger Puck (more or less) advises in Midsummer’s closing scene: If Daniels’ first attempt at D.C. theater has offended, then think of this, the future, and all is mended. 

Folger’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs through Aug. 28 at the National Building Museum. folger.edu. $20–$85. 

For people with disabilities who can mask their mobility issues, there comes an awkward moment in every dating relationship when you have to fess up. 

My most memorable reveal happened at a hospital cafeteria on a second or third date. We’d been visiting his father, who had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. I went through the salad bar without thinking, realized my mistake and sat down across from him terrified to pick up a plastic knife and fork. Emotions and hormones were already blipping like a vital-sign monitor. And that’s when I looked up from a pile of cherry tomatoes and said I had something to tell him. 

I had a stroke. No, not recently. I was a baby—only 9 months old—but I never regained full mobility on my left side. Yes, that’s why I limp. There’s also a lift in my shoe because my leg is too short. Yes. I’m still partially paralyzed. No, it doesn’t hurt.

We sat in silence for a minute. And then I awkwardly attempted to slice a cherry tomato perched on top of my salad. It shot across the cafeteria and rolled under someone else’s table. 

“My god,” he said. “You can’t even cut a tomato, can you?” 

I felt a rush of relief and a surge of something like love. This is what I’d been waiting for, for someone to observe my body so closely he’d see all my imperfections. 

If only I had seen Ryan J. Haddad’s play, Hi, Are You Single? when I was 23, I might have known better. 

It would take a few more dates, a funeral, and several therapy sessions for me to understand that his “you-can’t-even” reaction was actually a criticism, one of many that drove down my self-esteem like a tent peg into impressionable ground. A compassionate response from someone worth dating would have been, “Hey, thanks for being vulnerable and sharing with me. Do you ever need help cutting food?” 

The tomato debacle has been on my mind since seeing Hi, Are You Single?, a deeply moving, uncomfortably funny one-man show about dating and disability now receiving its first full staging at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. The writer and star has cerebral palsy. To be clear, my partial hemiplegia and other challenges related to stroke survivorship are different from the mobility issues faced by Haddad; he uses a walker and wears custom-molded plastic braces to support his atrophied calf muscles.

“The CP just limits the mobility in my legs and weakens my arms a little,” Haddad says, introducing himself to the audience. He stands, grips the walker with one hand and gestures below his torso. “But everything else is fine.”

When my braces came off at age six, I thought I was “fine” too. My well-meaning parents were relieved the visible reason for kids to mock me as “handicapped” was gone, and did not raise me to identify as disabled, as I do now. Haddad is 30, and though a child of the anti-bullying age, we both found ourselves belatedly processing quite a bit in college. For him, that meant navigating dating as a gay teen, and swiping right for frequent heartbreak. 

“Suddenly I had to confront my cerebral palsy every time I talked to someone,” Haddad explains, in the second scene of Are You Single? “One time I told a guy online he wasn’t my type, and he said, ‘With all your problems, you’d be lucky to take whatever you can get!’”

Haddad turned the insults into art by carrying a video camera into Ohio gay bars and asking men if they were open to dating someone with a disability. Some men were nice, some were too drunk to be filmed and some responses made the final script, which Haddad first staged as a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University. He’s been tweaking it ever since under the guidance of director Laura Savia, including workshops at Williamstown Theatre Festival and a 2018 run at The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival. Initial plans for a full production at Woolly were scuttled by the pandemic, although the theater did release a filmed version.  

Woolly’s long-overdue complete staging proves high production values can elevate an already good one-actor show. Lighting designer Colin K. Bills tucked away bulbs all over the stage, allowing a sofa-and-chairs set by Lawrence E. Moten III to evoke a dozen different bar and bedroom scenes set in both Ohio and New York, where Haddad launched an acting career after college. (He’s a recurring character on Netflix’s The Politician.)  All Haddad has to do is snap and a lighting cue takes us from Tuesday night in Hell’s Kitchen to Wednesday evening in the East Village.

Haddad makes for a “fabulous” (his word) bar-hopping companion: charming, funny, self-deprecating but not self-denigrating. Audience participation built into the show includes one lucky patron (who is tested in advance for COVID-19) coming onstage. Another gives an impromptu reading, and everyone can overshare about the last time they had an orgasm. 

“Raise your hands. I know you’re horny. And you’re horny,” Haddad says, pointing at giggling patrons. The no-intermission show is well paced. Around the hour mark, Haddad becomes surprisingly introspective, asking not what makes his disability a dealbreaker for others, but what factors have made some men a dealbreaker for him. The problem is fear, he suspects, perhaps combined with years of movie-sex fantasies that led him to expect perfect performances from himself and his intimate partners.

“And what about you, darlings?” he asks. “What will you do the next time fear stops you from intimacy with someone new?” 

That’s a potent question, one that takes his very specific dating situation and challenges anyone still on the lookout for a partner. The wrap-up is a touch pat and sentimental—as Haddad puts it, his “happy ending hasn’t happened yet.” But the search for a play that deals frankly with dating and disability? That’s finally over. 

Hi, Are You Single, written and performed by Ryan J. Haddad, and directed by Laura Savia, runs at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company Center until April 10. woollymammoth.net. $15-$65.

Prepare ye the way of the best biblical musical since Godspell.

It’s A.D. 16, as in both the title of this big-hearted, hilarious show and the year when the action is set. Enter our future Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, a Judean teen who tells feel-good stories about lost sheep and frequently visits the local leper colony. 

Then a 16-year-old girl named Mary and her fisherman father move from Magdala to a Nazareth shack across the alley from Joseph the Carpenter. Suddenly loving thy neighbor takes on a whole new meaning. 

Olney Theatre Center hosts this world premiere collaboration by playwright Bekah Brunstetter (who wrote for NBC’s This Is Us) and Schmigadoon! creator Cinco Paul. Why would a streaming TV hitmaker stage his new musical in suburban Montgomery County? Excellent question: A.D. 16 has been in the works for years; Schmigadoon! was Paul’s wildly successful pandemic pivot. Jason Loewith, Olney’s artistic director, saw a 2018 workshop production of A.D. 16 and booked the musical in part because so many mosques, synagogues, and churches are within five miles of the theater, he writes in the program notes. Investing in an uncynical show that celebrates scripture seemed like not only a solid financial move, but a good faith effort to serve the community.

Then came Schmigadoon! Suddenly, the screenwriter previously best known for Despicable Me was a hot theatrical commodity. Multiple Broadway producers attended the same Saturday matinee as me, Loewith confirmed at intermission. I hope they laughed as hard as I did. 

A.D. 16 is no tuneful tear-jerker that climaxes with the crucifixion; it’s a tongue-in-cheek musical comedy set in the early years of the Roman empire. Yet because two dueling musicals about Jesus have been alienating many Catholics and evangelical Christians for 50 years, it’s understandable that some may be hesitant to see A.D. 16. 

In 1971, both Godspell (by Steven Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak) and Jesus Christ Superstar (by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber) became box office hits by questioning the divinity (and virginity) of Jesus. The 50th anniversary tour running at the Kennedy Center through March 13 is as over-the-top as Superstar can get: Herod is basically in drag and ensemble members launch glitter at Jesus to symbolize 39 lashes while electric guitars rage. (I’ve personally always preferred Godspell, with its counter-culture hippie Messiah.)

A.D. 16 is more subtle, and more empathetic. Paul served as a Mormon missionary to Japan, while Brunstetter was raised Southern Baptist. Other than the Sanhedrin (a historic rabbinical class who enforced rules like “no working on the Sabbath”) Paul and Brunstetter never mock their own characters. In fact, observant Jews and Christians (or those raised in either tradition) may embrace the show’s humor more than the average agnostic. When Mary (Phoenix Best) introduces herself to a trio of young women in Nazareth, one retorts, “Ugh. There are too many Marys already. There’s the carpenter’s wife, Martha’s sister, the prostitute…” 

“I hope I won’t be mistaken for the prostitute,” Mary of Magdala quips back. She showed up in town with a sign around her neck that read, “Possessed by seven demons.” Onstage locals don’t appreciate these jokes, but New Testament readers in the audience will.

And there’s plenty of Easter eggs available for those more familiar with Hebrew scriptures too. “No need to make a sacrifice,” Jesus (Ben Fankhauser) croons in his smooth falsetto. “Numbers, Deuteronomy. Love is my economy.” 

Best and Fankhauser each have a handful of Broadway and National tour credits, but bring to the stage equally sincere teen angst (Mary) and teen earnestness (Jesus). While unrequited love is often cloying in musical theater (see: Les Miserables, Passion), Best’s crush comes across as universal; she’s every outcast at school who’s ever liked a popular kid, although there are no educational opportunities for women in the first century, and, as Jesus points out, “most of the guys my age around here were killed by the king when they were babies.”

Standout supporting characters include Da’Von T. Moody as the moonwalking leader of the local leper colony (Katie Spelman, who manages to make dancing in flat sandals look sophisticated and cool, handles choreography), and Jared Loftin as the Sanhedrin leader who’s always ready to throw the first stone.

Scenic designer Walt Spangler created a compact, turntable set that evokes a rambling hillside settlement with anachronistic neon lights. Emilio Sosa’s quasi-historical costumes come with clever nods to the 21st century, including a cold-shoulder dress for Mary and Utilikilts for the Sanhedrin, who rap like first-century Beastie Boys. 

Overall, the A.D. 16’s music is bluesy and still in need of revision. There’s little underscoring; this is one of those shows where the plot stops when the music starts. Some numbers achieve a solid Black gospel grove and others aim for ‘90s hip-hop. No songs, I regret to report, are as catchy as Schmigadoon’s foot-stomping Oklahoma-parody “Corn Puddin’.” Mary could use some back-up vocals and better choreography for her 11 o’clock number, “Better Than This,” and the finale, likewise, would benefit from more dynamic movement. 

Yet the central message of this musical is ready to go and more needed than ever. Loewith tells City Paper his hope was for A.D. 16 to be a musical for the post-Trump era. Although arriving a pandemic later than expected, America still needs a show that gently rebukes moralizing hypocrites while reinforcing the timeless command to love thy neighbor as thyself, whether those neighbors are a family of refugees next door, or that guy down the street with all the wrong yard signs. 

A.D. 16, written by Bekah Brunstetter and Cinco Paul and directed by Stephen Brackett, runs through March 20 at Olney Theatre Center. olneytheatre.org. $64–$99; $20 student rush and other promotions available.

Washington’s larger performing arts organizations may have emerged from the pandemic with splashy shows and poignant plays, but for smaller troupes and freelance artists without homes of their own, finding a way back onstage has been harder. That’s why audiences and performers alike are cheering the return of the Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival. From Feb. 26 through March 13, nearly two dozen local artists and ensembles will perform at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street, including some returning live for the first time in two years. The roster includes everything from amateur dance groups, to youth ensembles, to veteran professionals. Standouts in the latter category include Northern Virginia’s Gin Dance Company, District choreographer Gabriel Mata, and Baltimore soprano Melissa Wimbish, singing on behalf of local opera company IN Series. On Feb. 27, Wimbish takes audiences on a world tour from the rural South to City of Lights in The Many Mirrors of Josephine Baker, a recital inspired by the singer, dancer, and activist. Gin Dance returns to INTERSECTIONS on March 5 with Look Beyond, a program of new dances by the troupe’s founder Shu-Chen Cuff. Mata follows up on his previous explorations of Latinx immigration with a new show about queer Mexican identity. Joteria was created in partnership with local improv theater guru Adrian Gaston Garcia, and premieres March 12. If any of those performances pique your interest, there’s plenty more where they came from. The festival takes place Feb. 26 through March 13 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. atlasarts.org. $20–$35. Proof of vax and masks required.

Change Agent is the best play you’ll ever see about President John Fitzgerald Kennedy dropping acid with a noted artist from the Washington Color School movement. 

It is also likely the only play you’ll ever see about JFK, LSD, and abstract expressionism, but thankfully that qualifier is beside the point: Change Agent is a good play, period. Watching a president and painter hallucinate onstage is a coincidental bonus. 

Arena Stage is hosting the world premiere of Craig Lucas’ enthralling drama centering on Mary Pinchot Meyer, an artist, journalist and longtime friend of JFK who eventually became his affair partner. (I use the phrase “affair partner” quite deliberately. As Monica Lewinsky—another woman well known for her interactions with a president—has pointed out, there is no male equivalent for the word “mistress,” making the term inherently sexist.)

The facts and folklore surrounding Pinchot Meyer are likely better known to theatergoers alive during the Camelot years. There’s no need for those born later to Wikipedia her in advance, however, because the script includes sufficient exposition, and it’s fun to go along for the clandestine ride. You should know that official White House logbooks record Pinchot Meyer visiting many times, usually while Jackie Kennedy was away, and that in 2016, a personal letter from JFK to Pinchot Meyer imploring her to join him for an “unwise, irrational” rendezvous on Cape Cod and begging for “a loving answer,” sold at auction for $89,000.

It seems unlikely he merely wanted to go sailing. 

At Arena Stage, Andrea Abello plays the hard-to-get Pinchot Meyer. Four other actors take on various real-life roles. Our protagonist introduces her character by way of direct address: “It’s 1936. I’m 15, he’s two years older. I am blonde. [We were] both born White and wealthy.” Neither Abello nor her costar, Luis Vega, identify as White. Likewise, actress Regan Linton uses a wheelchair, even though her character, Pinchot Meyer’s BFF from Vassar College, Cicely d’Autremont Angleton, did not. Minimalist sets and a broken fourth wall suggest a non-literal world for the play, like we’re visitors in a dreamscape recapping the highlights of Pinchot Meyer’s life, rather than watching a spot-on reenactment of the real thing. The clever conceit allows for nontraditional casting in a historical drama, and it mostly works. Vega, who is bald and wiry, struggles to convey JFK’s ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you charisma, while Kathryn Tkel, a biracial actress who plays a cheeky Jackie in a black bouffant wig, is easily believable as the long suffering first lady. 

Lucas remains better known as a playwright, receiving Tony nominations for the books of Broadway musicals An American in Paris and Light in the Piazza, but Arena Stage made the correct choice letting him direct his own premiere. The creative team also includes artists worthy of cabinet-level positions for sets (Wilson Chin), costumes (Alejo Vietti) and lighting (Cha See).

The Kogod Cradle, the smallest of Arena Stage’s three theaters, is intentionally dimly lit when patrons enter. The back wall of the theater is encased in what looks like concrete, and a giant rectangle frame hangs from the ceiling. Although Lucas set no action in a Cold War bunker, the threat of international conflict—from World War II, where JFK was injured, to the Cuban Missile Crisis—hovers over nearly every scene. 

In real life and onstage, Pinchot Meyer and JFK’s meet-cute happens at a prep school dance. A teenage future president tries to get the repartee flowing like spiked punch. “You might be just a little too accustomed to assuming you can do the talking,” 15-year-old Pinchot Meyer says, her gloved arms grasping Vega in an Arthur Murray-trained ballroom hold. Her dialogue is hardly age-appropriate when depicting Pinchot Meyer’s teen and college years. But Lucas wrote the script in meter, and as the play goes on, poetic wisdom lands with solid punches. “No nonsense,” she scolds, the night her relationship with JFK transitions to friends with candlelight benefits. Vega embraces her tenderly and responds that sex is “the only thing I don’t think qualifies as nonsense.”

That tryst takes place at a Provincetown cabin where Pinchot Meyer had been studying—and sleeping with—the noted Washington Color School artist Kenneth Noland. In the next scene, set in August 1960, she tees off with Jackie at a golf course. Projections beamed onto the bunker frame make it easy to keep track of the chronology, and genius segues keep the audience engaged. Immediately after the Provincetown “nonsense,” the stage lights brighten, and Tkel wheels a golf caddy onto an AstroTurf carpet that rims the lower-tier stage. Nonchalantly, Tkel hands Abello a pair of golf shoes, a prim cardigan, and a skirt to pull over her negligee. 

Change Agent is full of clever moments like this, where transparent stagecraft feels like theatrical magic. Yet it’s disappointing that the production neither fully embraces Pinchot Meyer as an artist nor salutes her early career in journalism. By 1945, she was an editor for the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, a job she gave up when she moved to McClean with her ex-husband, CIA co-founder Cord Meyer, and the couple had children. Instead Lucas hones in on her laudable activism, from attending an early United Nations conference to opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. An easy way to pay homage would have been to incorporate projections of her work as well as Noland’s and other artists from the Washington Color School movement (assuming rights were available). Instead, projections by Caite Hevner mostly resemble impressionistic knock-offs rather than Pinchot Meyer’s bold paintings and clever collages.

Pinchot Meyer’s work was rarely exhibited during her lifetime, although one exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art received high praise. Had she lived longer, she might have become better known as an artist than a presidential sex partner. At least in Change Agent she is a smart, alluring affair partner with a paintbrush, skillfully wielding her colorful influence over Washington’s rich and powerful men. 

Change Agent, written and directed by Craig Lucas, runs through March 6 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW. arenastag.org. $82–$115. Various discounts available.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

If Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater were a baseball team, its minor league teams would be located in Baltimore and the District. The 64-year-old company’s ranks have long been filled with DMV dancers, in part due to the strengths of programs at public arts high schools that provide quality training to dancers of color. Current Duke Ellington School of the Arts grads include Samantha Figgins and Michael Jackson, Jr., while District native Ghrai DeVore-Stokes did some of her training at the Kirov Academy in Brookland. Star dancer Jaqueline Green had never danced until she enrolled at the Baltimore School of the Arts; now she’s one of the school’s proudest alumni. The local talent pool is a factor, but so is money: The annual Ailey Gala at the Kennedy Center typically raises more than $700,000 in scholarship funding that allows local dancers to attend the Ailey School and related training programs. Coronavirus concerns have canceled that glamorous “party with the purpose” this year, but not the annual Kennedy Center run, which continues through Sunday, Feb. 6. Programs vary by performance, but stand-out offerings include Alvin Ailey’s “Pas de Duke,” set to music by Duke Ellington, and a new work by resident choreographer Jamar Roberts, who is having a bit of a moment—his first dance for New York City Ballet premieres Feb. 3. As is a tradition at the Kennedy Center, every performance will close with “Revelations,” Ailey’s landmark 1960 work celebrating spirituals and the importance of ritual in the Black church, from fan-waving to baptism to joyful dancing that’s fueled by a spirit of resilience—possibly divine, but definitely human. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs through Feb. 6 at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org. $49–$229. Proof of vax and masks required.