Every Halloween season, many theater companies embrace horror. But unlike last  year, Rorschach Theatre isn’t offering the traditional vampires, ghouls, and zombies. With its staging of Steve Yockey’s Sleeping Giant, it evokes cosmic horror, a genre most closely associated with H.P. Lovecraft and defined by a nihilistic cosmos inhabited by ancient, eldritch intelligences of great power who predate humanity. Though Yockey is best known as a television writer and showrunner for The Flight Attendant and Dead Boy Detectives, this play marks his third time working with Rorschach.

It starts with a bang: Ryan (Jacob Yeh), outside his family’s lake house, has just surprised Alex (Sydney Dion) with a fireworks display over the water. But smoke inhalation—and Alex’s shock—causes them to rush inside. Ryan has planned the evening around the courtship rituals described in Lost Palace of the Butterfly King, a book describing “a weird cult in the South Pacific,” though he has notably omitted the human sacrifice and the eating of the in-laws. He dances shirtless for Alex’s female gaze, before segueing into a parody of Rachael “Raygun” Gunn’s much-derided breakdance performance at the 2024 Summer Olympics. (No choreographer is listed; one presumes this dance is a collaboration between Yeh and director Jenny McConnell Frederick.)

Just as Ryan presents an engagement ring, a neighbor bursts in. Local youth Billy (Robert Bowen Smith) witnessed the unexpected fireworks display, but was more shocked by what the fireworks awoke: a many-tentacled titan with one gigantic eye and an otherworldly roar—like thunder with shimmering chimes (sound design by Thom J. Woodward).

Yockey has structured Sleeping Giant as a series of vignettes, a new set of characters, in various living rooms, dealing with the ways their world has rapidly changed since an ages-old Beast emerged from the lake. Occasionally an earlier character is name-dropped or referenced by way of an article of clothing they were wearing earlier. Only in the last two stories do characters reappear onstage. 

In the process, we encounter myriad characters played by a talented cast of four. Erin Denman is particularly memorable as Mabel, a seemingly happy baker, who, despite recent events, assures her panicked friends that life will go on—and that they should eat the cake she’s just frosted.

In another story, Charlie (Yeh) returns home to his lover Dan (Smith) only for Dan to confess an affair during Charlie’s absence. The setup might be melodramatic, except that the encounter was part of the emerging Lake cult ritual. 

The ancient, tentacled creature sleeping beneath the lake’s surface and worshipped by a cult engaged in blood rites seems inspired by Cthulhu, one of Lovecraft’s better known “Great Old Ones.” Though Lovecraft’s work casts a long shadow on pop culture, many shy away from straight adaptation due to Lovecraft’s racism, antisemitism, and misogyny. Instead creatives sometimes riff on his cosmological themes and—as with Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel, Lovecraft Country (and 2020 TV adaptation), or Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ graphic novel series—attempt to deconstruct Lovecraft’s bigotry. Undoubtedly, given his views on race, Lovecraft would be uncomfortable with Rorschach’s diverse and capable cast in a play that so heavily alludes to his work.

Yockey largely keeps the monster offstage, instead showing how its presence causes outbreaks of nihilism, and ritualized violence. Many possible metaphors present themselves: During the opening night’s reception, Yockey noted his surprise that Salt Lake City audiences, many of whom were lapsed Mormons‚ saw Sleeping Giant as a veiled allegory for the Church of Latter Day Saints, and its influence on day-to-day-life in their city.

In D.C., where the local industries are politics and government, one association may be the rise of political demagogues and the cultish behavior of their followers. Another reading might compare Sleeping Giant to the constant dissemination of conspiracy theories and hate on social media—or even terrorist organizations calling for the blood of both their followers and victims.

In a wonderfully directed set piece, a new age couple, Jill (Denman) and Nathan (Yeh), have a full conversation about slow food, farmers markets, and their anti-corporate lifestyle while doing yoga. They’re joined by Jesse (Dionne), whom they’ve initiated into their way of life. She returns the favor with a superfood purchased from the Lake Cult that promises eternal life. The actors give it the appropriate level of disgust and horror. The connection between new age spirituality and far-right occultism may have entered pop-culture consciousness in Umberto Eco’s bestselling 1988 novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, but it feels most recently personified in the horned visage of January 6 insurrectionist Jacob “The QAnon Shaman” Chansley.

The lower level of Rorschach’s current storefront location, a former clothing store, has been transformed by set designer Sarah Beth Hall into a simple living room, easily transformed from scene to scene. Ashlynne Ludwig gives each character distinctive looks, ranging from the bro-ey to the bougie, from casual to cultic, from floral dresses to fascinators. Video designer Kylos Brannon has created colorful and sometimes unsettling animated interstitials in between scenes, but his final digital flourish is an animation that homages one of the more horrific sequences of panels from Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s iconic run on the Doom Patrol comic book.

Sleeping Giant does not rely on jump-scares, but the dread of a world beyond our living room that holds no respect for either our moral sentiments or normative expectations. And yet, this production allows it to be both wickedly and subtly satirical.

Rorschach Theatre presents Sleeping Giant, written by Steve Yockey and directed by Jenny McConnell Frederick, running through Nov. 3 at 1020 Connecticut Ave. NW. rorschachtheatre.com. $20–$50.

Even before the play begins with a bird crashing into the window of a medieval manor with an explosion of black feathers, one is left with the impression that Faction of Fools’ current production of Jen Silverman’s The Moors may be the most ambitious show since Francesca Chilcote and Kathryn Zoerb took over as co-artistic directors of the commedia dell’arte troupe in 2020. 

Johnny Weissgerber’s scenic design is the most elaborate set I have seen in Faction of Fools’ home theater in Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Set inside a house in the moorlands of Northern England, the gray stones of the fireplace are threatening to collapse, but the interior walls and passageways seem better maintained; in the foreground, underfoot as the audience enters, is the low-growing vegetation that’s characteristic of the moors; in the background one sees the coastal cliffs and a few beams of sunlight breaking through the overcast sky. It is as if the entire moody landscape—wonderfully lit by William K. D’Eugenio so that the passing hours and changes in the weather are seen on the stones and in the sky—has been fit into the performance space much as the vast interior of Doctor Who’s Tardis can fit inside a blue box.

In the parlor, Agatha (Arika Thames) fusses with the unruly hair of her more self-conscious, literary younger sister Huldey (Natalie Cutcher), when the parlor maid, Marjory (Rebecca Ballinger), informs them that a new governess, one Emilie Vandergard (Jasmine Proctor), has just arrived by carriage. Huldey is excited at the prospect of a new friend—she imagines herself a writer and wonders if Emilie, like her, keeps a diary and if they might share their pages.

Emilie finds her new place of employment confusing: Master Branwell, the elder brother of the two sisters, with whom she corresponded about the position, appears, as befitting a gothic romance, to be either indisposed due to poor health, dead, or possibly bricked up in the attic. She is not introduced to the child she has been hired to care for. Her bed chambers are indistinguishable from the parlor, and it appears that—except for the hat on her head—the scullery maid with typhus, Mallory (also Ballinger), is indistinguishable from the supposedly pregnant Marjory.

Meanwhile the house’s dog, Mastiff (played by understudy Seth Langer on the evening I attended), is a philosophical soul. When not napping, he roams around the estate in a Victorian era waistcoat (designed by Alison Samantha Johnson) waxing poetically about God, a desire for something he cannot quite name and the expansive moors and overcast sky. The dog is a greater wordsmith than his diarist mistress. He encounters a Moor-Hen (Mary Myers)—an anxious bird, bad at landings and afraid of being eaten— with a short attention span and no mind for theology. Yet the dog decides to pursue a romantic friendship with his new feathered companion. Perhaps because they are animals, their developing relationship is far more honest than anything going on inside the manor.

While Faction of Fools has a history of both adapting classic works to the commedia dell’arte idiom, as well as devising and commissioning original works, Silverman’s The Moors is the first time they have presented an already established work by a contemporary playwright. Silverman’s inspiration for a gothic romance parody stems from the letters of Charlotte Brontë. And while it is unlikely Silverman had commedia in mind when composing The Moors, the idiom’s use of masks and stylized physicality, particularly under Chilcote’s direction and Zoerb’s coaching, it’s well suited to the material. Perhaps we could call it “commedia gotica.” 

Ballinger’s Marjory and Mallory cut a stiff figure, head often tilted to the side, always replying to their mistresses in a sarcastic monotone. As Huldey, Cutcher is zany with her delusions of being a literary star, imagining the people of a nearby village curious about the thoughts in her diary, even though, when read aloud, it appears to be as repetitively dull as the most banal of social media accounts. (Cutcher’s performance reminds me of the self-appointed “People’s Poet” played by Rik Mayall in the British comedy The Young Ones.) Indeed, both Ballinger and Cutcher introduce a staccato back-and-forth comic rhythm every time they walk onto the stage. In contrast to the loopy household and fabulistic animals, Proctor and Thames play a little closer to genre conventions as gothic ingenue and villain, who, up until the climax, concern themselves with the etiquette of class, correspondence, and strolls along the moors.

In the midst of this genre-bending parody, Silverman has also co-written a few songs with composer Daniel Kluger though Faction’s sound designer Kenny Neal wrote the arrangements for this show. There’s a particularly gorgeous song for Emilie (Proctor has a voice to match) and bombastic power ballad for Huldey, given the rock-star treatment by Cutcher.

Tara Cariaso of Waxing Moon Masks, who has been collaborating with the Fools since Chilcote and Zoerb took over, has done some of her strongest work for this show. Huldey’s face is wildly asymmetrical, with a permanently curled lip, her mood seemingly changing depending on which side of the mask faces the audience. Outside of a raised eyebrow, Marjory’s mask is nearly neutral, befitting a servant who is best suited toward observing her employers and anticipating their needs. For the nonhuman characters, Cariaso has created helmetlike masks: The Mastiff is given a face with heavy jowls, deep wrinkles, and floppy ears (which are used at times to cover his eyes) while the Moor-Hen has the bird’s characteristic red and yellow bill.

Since its beginning, Faction of Fools has shown that commedia dell’arte techniques greatly expand the creative options for actors, and has allowed audiences to see classic works from a new perspective. With The Moors, the troupe has demonstrated that it’s also a valid approach to the works of contemporary playwrights. It’s remarkable that Silverman, who like other living playwrights, retains rights over their script, understood that the Fools could be entrusted to give the play such a unique spin.

Faction of Fools presents The Moors, written by Jen Silverman and directed by Francesca Chilcote, runs through Aug. 10 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. factionoffools.org. $15–$35.

In an apartment with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and mismatched layers of paint covering water-damaged plaster, Booth (Yao Dogbe) hovers over an improvised tabletop of thick corrugated cardboard held level by six sturdy milk crates. He’s practicing his patter as a dealer at three-card monte, a confidence game by which many a mark has been separated from their money.

So engrossed is Booth in his practice that, unbeknownst to him, someone has entered his apartment in a long black frock coat, tall stovepipe hat, theatrical beard, and Whiteface.

Booth pulls a gun, but does not pull the trigger.

His elder brother, the titular “topdog,” Lincoln (Ro Boddie) stands in front of him. Lincoln works as an impersonator of his namesake, Abraham Lincoln, at an arcade where customers pay to reenact the 1865 assassination of the 16th President of the United States.

This Chekhovian scene opens Suzan–Lori Parks’ two-hander, Topdog/Underdog. Though not her first play, it established her reputation as a major American playwright with its 2001 premiere. It also made Parks’ the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Lincoln has been sleeping on Booth’s easy chair since he and his wife, Cookie, divorced, but it’s his acting job at the arcade that pays the rent on the brothers’ possibly illegal apartment (it lacks running water and the only toilet is down the hall, presumingly shared with neighbors, whose presence is heard through Nick Hernandez’s sound design, which deftly switches from diegetic to non-diegetic sound). Booth is a master shoplifter. In one interlude Dogbe performs an extended dance revealing that Booth has stolen two entire suits, including dress shoes, but despite his fast fingers, and his insistence on rechristening himself as “3–Card,” he cannot master the confidence game at which his brother excelled.

Before he turned to portraying Honest Abe in his final hours, Lincoln was a talented dealer, often pulling $1,000 a day. He stopped dealing cards after a member of his crew, Lonny, his stickman—the accomplice who plays an innocent—took a bullet. And, as Lincoln attempts to impress upon Booth, a dealer relies heavily on his crew. It’s not a lesson the “underdog” wants to learn.

In between discussing their various scams, the brothers mull over how their mother abandoned them when Lincoln was 14 and Booth was 9. Their father walked out on them two years later. Each brother was left with an “inheritance” of $500 cash, and names that seem to have fated them for a violent end. Both parents also managed to make their children complicit in their marital infidelities, hobbling both brothers emotionally and economically decades later.

While all this is happening, Booth is, perhaps delusionally, attempting to rekindle a romance with his ex-girlfriend, Grace.

Director Jamil Jude has crafted strong performances from his cast of two. Boddie imbues Lincoln with the gravitas needed for an Abe impersonator while also maintaining a dry sense of humor. When Lincoln decides to see if he still has the touch for the cards, we see another way the actors have distinguished their characters: Dogbe’s Booth is bold and impulsive, which may serve him well in acquiring a five-finger discount, but Lincoln reads the room, creating a sense of intimacy and fostering a psychological connection with the mark; the way he moves the cards (Ryan Phillips consulted on card manipulation) is both faster and understated.

When Parks wrote Topdog/Underdog, it was set in “the present” of 2001. But so much has changed since then the play feels more like a period piece. When the brothers talk about a phone, they mean a landline they don’t have, or the coin-operated pay phone on the street. Pornography isn’t viewed on the internet, but in magazines, a pile of which Booth can barely contain under his cot. This sense of time is also extended to the sense of place, with the design elements placing the story in D.C.—and why not? John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre is part of our local history. Costume designer Danielle Preston dresses Booth in a Washington Bullets T-shirt, which references the killing as well as the local NBA team before it was rebranded as the Wizards in 1997. Scenic designer Meghan Raham has used the mostly obscured neon lights outside the windows and the faded lettering painted on the brick exterior of their building to imply that the brothers live inside one of the District’s former Wonder Bread factories. Likewise, local go-go band Rare Essence’s 1998 song “Overnight Scenario” plays during one of the interludes. 

The spectacle of having a Black man portraying America’s most iconic White savior in an arcade game where players pay to reenact the president’s assassination first appeared in Parks’ earlier 1994 The America Play. Both plays may have come after the 1990 premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, in which the first song proclaims “Everybody’s Got a Right” to kill a president, but it’s also prescient in ways Parks may not have intended: Political violence has become increasingly mainstream in American culture, and, at times, a source of entertainment for some. Take, for example, the January 6 insurrection where some chanted “hang Mike Pence.” Though the ironic subtext of Topdog/Underdog’s spectacle is left unexplained, leaving different audiences to make different interpretations with every production, the way our present moment hangs over this already powerful production only deepens the subtext.

Topdog/Underdog, written by Suzan-Lori Parks and directed by Jamil Jude, runs through June 30 at Round House Theatre. roundhousetheatre.org. $46–$88.

Lauren Yee may not be the most performed playwright on a national level, but she has had an impressive run here in the DMV: In less than 12 months, Arena produced her Cambodian Rock Band last summer, King of the Yees ran at Signature Theatre in October, and now her 2013 play The Hatmaker’s Wife has come to Theater J.

Using magical realism to explore the Yiddishkeit world, The Hatmaker’s Wife takes place in one suburban house in two different eras. In the past lives Hetchman, the eponymous hatmaker (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh), Hetchman’s Wife (Sue Jin Song), whose name has been forgotten due to years of either being addressed as “you” or being referred to as “Hetchman’s wife,” and Hetchman’s beloved red velvet Homburg hat. Hetchman has retired from millinery—having locked up his workshop, he’s decided to spend the remainder of his years planted in his easy chair, Homburg on his head, scratching where he itches, blowing his nose and always missing the wastepaper basket, and watching a World Without People on television. All this happens while he ignores his wife working around the house. Ebrahimzadeh does a master class in mining, putting the maximum effort into laziness for physical comedy. One day, his hat falls off his head, and soon after, his wife disappears as well.

Years later, after Hetchman is gone (or is he just napping unnoticed?), a young couple moves in: Ashley D. Nguyen, who played a fictional version of Yee in Signature’s King of the Yees, is an unnamed woman identified in the playbill as “Voice,” a copy editor of safety manuals. (A curious motif of The Hatmaker’s Wife is that the only women in the play with names never appear on stage.) Joining Voice is her boyfriend, Gabe (Tyler Herman), a schoolteacher. The wallpaper has not changed, nor have the portraits that hang on the wall; even the easy chair remains. Scenic designer Misha Kachman has fun dropping clues that the house is strange with slightly angled attic crawl spaces filled with jars, urns, and flowerpots, some of which have mysterious glowing contents. It’s a fantastic world, filled with grime, crumbs, and schmutz.

While other plays have been structured around alternating scenes depicting different eras in a single location—Tom Stoppard famously used this structure in Arcadia, and a recent area production of Beth Kander’s Hazardous Materials used it to explore identity and broken hearts. Yee, however, bridges her two eras with magical realism. The young copy editor picked the house because it spoke to her, literally, the enthusiastic living room wall speaks to her (voiced by performance artist and clown Alex Tatarsky, whose eccentric delivery of such lines as “I am wall-of-truth! So awesome!” are wonderfully mad). As an observer of all that happens in the house, the wall has been writing a story about the love triangle between Hetchman, his wife, and his hat, periodically dropping new pages on Voice, so that she can read and edit the manuscript, thus making her the “voice” of the narrator. Meanwhile, her obsession with the manuscript is causing Gabe to feel neglected.

The increasingly reclusive Hetchman has one last remaining connection with the human world: Meckel (Michael Russotto), his neighbor and childhood best friend. Meckel is an emotionally expressive widower, lover of other people’s wives, and “everyone’s favorite grandparent” who helps demonstrate a principle of the play’s metaphysics: People are grounded by love and without enough of it, they literally float away.

Meckel suggests Hetchman write a letter to his missing hat. In this world the U.S. Postal Service can find anyone or anything for the cost of a postage stamp. Of course, the hat is with Hetchman’s wife, who was not just fed up with doing the housework, but her husband’s refusal to make her a hat. Since disappearing, she has been traveling from hatmaker to hatmaker in search of someone with the skill to copy her husband’s work.

Meanwhile, a golem, played by Herman, unexpectedly shows up at Hetchman’s home. As with most of its representations in Jewish folklore and myth, the golem seems ready to provide assistance and companionship, but it’s inarticulate and unable to explain its purpose, though it seems hungry for the same snack foods Hetchman favors. Since neither Hetchman nor Meckel called it into existence, they can only guess at why it’s been summoned. Herman gives a hilarious, shambling performance underneath the crude form, created by costume designer Ivania Stack in the form of a giant doll made of muck, with depressions where its facial features should be.

King of the Yees, which also makes use of magical realism and absurd comedy, at points casts a critical eye on the gentrification of America’s Chinatowns, but The Hatmaker’s Wife is a little gentler toward that issue. Voice and Gabe, a young couple who recently left the city, are gentrifiers, having moved into a suburb that is still home to a Jewish American community only a couple of generations removed from the now-extinct Yiddish-speaking communities of Europe, but there’s no notion that they are displacing anyone in the process.

The plot structure is a great deal looser, and the political stakes are a great deal lower in The Hatmaker’s Wife than in the other recently staged Yee plays. But here Yee stacks one fantastical element after another: a know-it-all wall with literary pretensions, mustache-wearing architecture, swaddled babies who fly away upon neglect, a snacking golem, glowing jars filled with lost memories, and the most efficient postal system in human history, in order to create a world of increasingly comic absurdities. (Before seeing this, I had not laughed so much at the theater in months). Nonetheless, director Dan Rothenberg, along with the cast, creates a magical world filled with heartbreak and sadness.

The Hatmaker’s Wife, written by Lauren Yee and directed by Dan Rothenberg, runs through June 25 at Theater J. theaterj.org. $39.99–$90.99. 

Thursday through Sunday: Letters to Kamala and Dandelion Peace at Universal National Memorial Church

Voices Festival Productions presents the world premiere production of two plays by Wisconsin-based playwright Rachel Lynett, Letters to Kamala and Dandelion Peace. Directed by A. Lorraine Robinson, the show is staged in the basement theater of the Universal National Memorial Church on 16th Street NW. Letters to Kamala is set in the midst of the 2020 presidential race, sometime between Kamala Harris’ acceptance of the vice presidential nomination and Election Day. Originally presented as an online reading that November, this marks its first staging. Three figurative ancestors come to address the future VP: Charlotta Spears Bass (Kendra Holloway), owner, editor, and publisher of the The California Eagle, and the first Black woman to run for national office as the 1952 vice presidential candidate of the short-lived Progressive Party; Charlene Mitchell (Fatima Quander), presidential nominee for the Communist Party USA in 1968; and Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink (Mariele Atienza), the first woman of color and first Asian American woman to serve in the House of Representatives in 1965 and in 1972. In addressing the future vice president, the three women offer congratulations and criticisms. What did she compromise to advance from California Attorney General to Senator to running mate? What was necessary for her career advancement, and what was necessary to advance the greater good? At what point does admiration and symbolism trump ideological differences? Will other audiences see it before this November? Dandelion Peace, commissioned by VFP as a companion to Letters, is a political satire writ small, showing the most cynical of tactics and electioneering deployed in the seemingly idyllic setting of an urban community garden. Artist Anita (Holloway) has planted dandelions in her plot so that she can make dandelion wine. But Zuri, a history teacher who wants to transform the ethos of the garden, has labeled the dandelions as an “invasive species” to be uprooted. Moira (Atienza), president of the garden’s steering committee, is trying to forge a compromise, and be reelected. In a hilarious dance of comic villainy choreographed by Chitra Subramanian, Zuri continues to escalate matters. Can a compromise be found? Rachel Lynett’s Letters to Kamala and Dandelion Peace run Thursday through Sunday to June 30 at Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St. NW. voicesfestivalproductions.com. $20-$45. —Ian Thal

Sunday: The Crossword Show at Planet Word

D.C. is a city of nerds, which isn’t a derogatory term in 2024. It seems like every person who moves here was at top of their class and flexes those intellectual muscles at thriving and daily trivia nights. We’re a city that loves smart so much there’s a long-running, quite successful pun-based competition show in town, Pun DMV. Sometimes it’s at DC Improv, sometimes it’s at Planet Word, which leads us to this pick. Of course there’s a museum devoted to words and language located in D.C.! We love this stuff! The Crossword Show returns to Planet Word after a successful October 2023 performance. This edition is hosted by Zach Sherwin (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, YouTube’s Epic Rap Battles of History), who will be joined by local funny folks Reese Waters and Kasha Patel, deputy weather editor for the Capital Weather Gang and a very good stand-up. If you’re looking for a funny show that isn’t your typical stand-up or improv and really want to use your noggin, this show is tailor-made for your nerdtastic taste. The Crossword Show begins at 7 p.m. on June 23 at Planet Word, 925 13th St. NW. planetwordmuseum.org $20–$25. —Brandon Wetherbee

Sunday and Monday: Mulatu Astatke at Howard Theatre

Mulatu Astatke is known as the father of Ethio-jazz, arranging songs that seamlessly meld the Middle Eastern-tinged, pentatonic scales of Ethiopia with John Coltrane-rooted hornwork, Jimmy Smith-derived organ, and Latin jazz-originated percussion. Astatke was born in Ethiopia, but his parents sent him to Wales to study engineering in 1959. But his love of music led him to the Trinity College of Music in London, and later the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he was the first African student. It’s also where he developed his vibraphone and percussion skills. His time in New York City led him to combine sounds he heard in the city—Afro-Latin, jazz, and funk rhythms—with traditional Ethiopian music. Atatke’s efforts with Ethiopian groups and his 1973 collaborative appearance with Duke Ellington in Ethiopia led to acclaim in his homeland and within the Ethiopian diaspora, but most of his acclaim elsewhere came later. In the late 1990s a French label released a series of reissued recordings of Ethiopian music that included an entire album of his earlier music, which introduced him to a new audience. One such listener, American film director Jim Jarmusch later placed seven Astatke songs on the soundtrack of his 2005 film, Broken Flowers. Over the decades, the now-80-year-old artist has worked with a variety of different bands, perfecting compositions both upbeat and melancholy to reflect his musical vision, combining his own vibraphone chops with busy bursts from his horn players and danceable chords from his rhythm section. Mulatu Astatke performs at 8 p.m. on June 23 (sold out) and June 24 at the Howard Theatre, 620 T St. NW. thehowardtheatre.com. $35. —Steve Kiviat

Closing June 28: Photographic Images and Matter: Japanese Prints of the 1970s at the Japan Information & Culture Center

The works in the Japan Information and Culture Center’s current exhibit about 1970s contemporary Japanese art straddle the line between photography and prints, buffeted by the era’s artistic movements. Of the exhibit’s 14 artists, some produced painterly works aligned with the abstract expressionists of the previous generation, including Lee Ufan’s and Shoichi Ida’s elemental homages to Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell. Other artists in the exhibit were shaped by 1960s movements. The exhibit’s conceptualists include Satoshi Saito, who photographed what appear to be carefully arranged glass panes placed in various urban settings, and Koji Enokura and Tatsuo Kawaguchi, who experimented with stains on paper (in Kawaguchi’s case, caused by small metal tools embedded in the paper). Still, others artists in the exhibit responded to op art, including Arinori Ichihara, with an image of a dizzyingly textured surface, and Jiro Takamatsu, with a streamlined, sharply receding portrayal of three upside-down park benches. Ultimately, the two most compelling artists are Akira Matsumoto and Sakumi Hagiwara. Matsumoto deconstructed photographic images into colored arrays of Ben-Day dots that sometimes devolve into dreamlike interference patterns. Hagiwara, meanwhile, created repeated images of various objects to mark the passage of time in seconds, minutes, hours, a day, a month, and a year. (The last used an apple that grew ever more desiccated over time). It’s a smart distillation of multiple strands of the era’s artistic trends. Photographic Images and Matter: Japanese Prints of the 1970s runs to June 28 at the Japan Information & Culture Center, 1150 18th St. NW. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. us.emb-japan.go.jp. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Ongoing: Sarah Hood Salomon at Multiple Exposures Gallery

The recent arc of Sarah Hood Salomon’s art began with ethereal photographs of trees, then morphed into the interaction between mutually encroaching swaths of nature and the human-built environment. Her current exhibit at Multiple Exposures Gallery allows man-made structures to replace flora entirely, as Salomon destroys some of the nature photographs she’s made to use them as fodder for resin-encased sculptures. If you look closely at the traces of Salomon’s “purposefully scratched, cut and puréed” photographs, you might make out a shading of light or dark here and there. Mostly, though, you’ll see linguine-shaped strips arranged into organic forms that suggest curled hairs, hanging moss, feathers, and brushy plant matter. Some of Salomon’s more intriguing works use thin, parallel cross sections of photographic remnants suspended within clear, hardened cubes, as if they were prepared microscopic slides. Even more compelling are Salomon’s experiments with “sanded” detritus from photographs, with dust either encased in clear, snow globe-like spheres or piled up in empty lucite boxes like a miniature experiment in land art. Artistically, it’s not clear that the sculptural transformations are more remarkable than Salomon’s original photographs were on their own. (I chose her tree photography as the second-best photography exhibit in D.C. of 2019.) But the process of altering her images is undeniably poignant. As Salomon writes in her artist’s statement, the trees she photographed were about to be uprooted for development, and by sending her images through the blender, she makes sure that they “can’t be reconstructed, just as landscapes altered by humans can’t be reassembled.” Sarah Hood Salomon’s Questioning the Photograph runs through June 30 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Next Thursday: Mdou Moctar at the 9:30 Club

The Nigerien guitarist has come a long way from his first United States tour in 2017, when his whirlwind immersion in Washington culture included a gig at the Library of Congress and a three-day residency at Episcopal High School before culminating in a headlining performance at the Black Cat. In May, Moctar released Funeral for Justice, his second album on Matador Records, graduating from small stages and, at times, restrained folkish rock to a huge, positively head-banging rock sound. And to think he learned how to play on a homemade instrument. Moctar is modest about his distinct musical voice, explaining, “I don’t know what rock is exactly … I only know how to play in my style.” He was born in a small village in Niger and came up through the ranks of intrepid indie label Sahel Sounds, whose catalog includes such pivotal compilations as Music from Saharan Cellphones. Moctar even unofficially remade Purple Rain with the 2016 film Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red In It, a rock ’n’ roll movie whose drama lay not in the typical resistance from his family, but in the daily lives of the Tuareg people. With his latest album, Moctar lends his love for ZZ Top to a crucial message. In his new album’s anthemic title song, he pleads (in translation), “African leaders, hear my burning question, Why does your ear only heed France and America?” Moctar’s band includes Mikey Coltun, with whom Moctar has worked since 2017. Coltun, now 31, grew up in D.C.’s punk scene—at 16, his group Les Rhinoceros recorded for John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Mdou Moctar plays at 7:30 p.m. on June 27 at the 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. 930.com. $28. —Pat Padua

Somewhere, 139 paces from the shore at low tide, near a tree stump, sits a still, an assemblage of sundry parts tended by Mary (Stacy Whittle) and Joe (Robert Sheire). The long-married couple, dressed in faded and threadbare clothing, seem to have divided the labor accordingly: Joe, who built the still, tends the fire, and Mary carefully walks to and from the shore, cupping the brine in her bare hands, to pour into the machinery. Mary and Joe aren’t making moonshine. They’re desalinating water. Climate change has so wrecked the environment that rain no longer falls on land, meaning there’s no water to support agriculture, and as the food and water supply collapsed so has any ability to sustain civilization.

When I wrote for the Boston-based publication The Arts Fuse, my editor, Bill Marx, often lamented how rarely theater paid attention to the threat of ecological collapse. Currently D.C. audiences are fortunate to see the subject receive an absurdist treatment with Australian playwright John Shand’s The Last Drop, currently receiving its world premiere production with Scena Theatre at DC Arts Center. While much of Scena’s reputation is based on presenting neglected classics of the international stage, director Robert McNamara and his longtime collaborators are also the ideal company to present Shand’s challenging new work and provide it such an intimate space that one is never more than four seats away from the end of the world.

After the water apocalypse, if society still exists somewhere, Mary and Joe are far away from it. They live close enough to the sea to use the brine but refuse to move any closer, due to Joe’s fear of being seen by nomads. With little memory of his past and no dreams to remember, Joe is focused solely on water collection. Mary still dreams and remembers for both of them when they first fell in love. The rest, however, is blurry.

Their day in, day out efforts are soon disrupted by the arrival of two more survivors: Valentino (Ron Litman), a self-described “businessman” in an orange-checkered three-piece suit and fedora, and Esmeralda (Danielle Davy), a sex worker in platform heels (not so practical after the collapse), fishnet stockings, and—perhaps the most inspired piece of dystopian chic that costume designer Alisa Mandel made for the show—a formfitting dress made from a burlap sack. The words LOVE ESME ME BABY are painted across the front. Potable water is an essential commodity, and Valentino offers Joe a night with Esmeralda in exchange for some. To Mary’s outrage, Joe, initially leery of the visitors, is quite agreeable to the offer. Mary is then left alone with Valentino.

The scene that follows is at once a dance, a seduction, and debate on what morality means in a world where society no longer exists. Litman and Whittle play it for brilliant satirical comedy. Mary may be revolted that Valentino is a pimp, and while the water she controls is essential for survival, the Scotch and chocolate that Valentino has hidden in his pockets are luxuries. He makes the case that a kiss is a luxury she controls. The blue bucket he has in his wheelbarrow isn’t a luxury but a means of greater productivity for the still.

By the next morning Mary is hungover, Joe is in a pit of self-loathing, and their visitors are gone. But after some recriminations and a wonderfully grotesque physical comedy routine involving impromptu dental surgery, they find a new sense of optimism and cooperation. As Act I ends, they see a new set of strangers walking up the shoreline.

In Act II, a disheveled Esmeralda and Valentino return to the site, finding Mary and Joe bruised and beaten and the still damaged. Contradictory accounts are given, but ultimately, these four characters have to decide whether rebuilding the still, and perhaps repairing the little corner of the world in which they find themselves, is worth it or if it is time to succumb to nihilism.

Back in present-day Sydney, Shand writes theater criticism as well as plays, and as with any critic who also practices the art they review, he has taken in a wide range of influences. His ability to skillfully weave a dramatic tapestry from these influences allows him to adroitly play on expectations. What at first seems like an homage to the apocalypses of Samuel Beckett, gives way to the dialectics of capitalism and morality a la Bertolt Brecht, while also bringing in over-the-top theatrical clowning. Other times the dark comedy is interrupted by even darker tragedy as with a powerfully performed monologue by Davy in which Esmeralda recounts the moment after the collapse that horrified her so much that she might not be telling the full truth of what happened.

Scenic designer Carl Gudenius, who created the titular vehicle for Scena’s adaptation of The Time Machine, has done wonderful work in creating Joe’s still: awkwardly assembled with a funnel, curling copper pipes, spouts, and vats. The contraption nonetheless looks like it might just work, and the simple sheet that hangs from the ceiling before spreading out upon the floor—upon which Kirk Kristlibas projects colors and abstract designs—gives the impression of vast emptiness even in the small and intimate space. The ensemble, along with movement coach Kim Curtis, have crafted a series of strange interludes that lead us from scene to scene.

Too often pop culture addresses our anxiety about the world’s end with outlandish fictions of zombies and asteroids, but a world without safe drinking water is tinged with an all-too-believable reality. Thanks to Shand and Scena, we can view the end of the world just three seats from the aisle.

Scena Theatre presents the world premiere of The Last Drop, written by John Shand and directed by Robert McNamara, at DC Arts Center. scenatheater.org. $25.50–$45.

Considering D.C. is a city with both a vibrant theater scene and lots of museums, art galleries, murals, and working artists, it is not surprising that there is overlap in the audience for both theater and visual arts. Of course, art is not always about aesthetics and appreciation; it’s an industry: Works are not just bought, sold, and donated, but are sometimes produced for specific customers, clients, and markets. While many pieces are kept for the beauty and meaning they hold, others are treated as investments to be stashed away and resold when the market is just right. And, as with every industry, there is always a corrupt underside, or as Scott Bertram (played by JC Payne) observes in Elizabeth DeSchryver’s new play, An Unbuilt Life, currently making its world premiere at Washington Stage Guild, “Art and diamonds: the currency of the underworld.”

It’s 2005 when the play opens in the living room of Agatha Ganner (Susan Holliday), whose art dealer husband, David, died just five months earlier. Scott is a recently hired staff member at the Ganners’ successful gallery, a job he’s juggling while working on his dissertation in art history. He is working through the documentation on David’s collection before the first lot goes to auction. Agatha finds something among the modernist works in David’s workshop that might interest Scott, who specializes in the 17th-century Dutch masters: A painting of a mother checking her child’s scalp for lice. Scott recognizes the subject as a common genre of the time and place. He also recognizes that the signature of Pieter de Hooch is a forgery. The painting is from the right era but some unscrupulous seller added De Hooch’s name to the anonymous work in order to fetch a higher price.

Here, it’s worth interrupting the synopsis to note that the promotional materials for the show are at once thematically on point and also a misdirection. The poster, the playbill, and the website prominently feature a real Dutch painting: “Girl with a Flute.” For centuries many attributed the work to Johannes Vermeer, as the subject seems to be the same young woman seen in “Girl with the Red Hat.” But during the COVID-19 lockdown, researchers at the National Gallery of Art, which has both paintings in their collection, used new imaging technology to examine the work. Their studies confirmed suspicions that “Girl with a Flute” was painted by an anonymous artist who worked in Vermeer’s studio, and was familiar with his style. But centuries of belief that it was a Vermeer was sufficient to make it valued.

Scott’s boss, Paul Carmichael (David Bryan Jackson), David’s business associate of 20 years, initially suggests investigating the fake De Hooch would be a waste of Scott’s time—especially since it is not part of the lot being sold in the upcoming auction.

But as Scott begins to track the historical record of the painting’s ownership, he finds evidence that while David purchased it from the family of an American officer who fought in World War II, a painting of the same description had also been sold in German-occupied Paris to a Nazi officer. It may have been a looted work of art, possibly looted twice-over.

David, a childhood survivor of the Holocaust, took over the art business established by Agatha’s German Jewish grandfather who fled to Switzerland after the Nazis “Aryanized” his previous business. Because Agatha knows this history, her instinct is to identify the family of the prewar owner and return the stolen property. Paul, however, worries about where the investigation is going. What if it uncovers evidence that David had knowingly bought looted property? What if the fake De Hooch is not the only looted property that David had bought or sold? Why was the painting found in the workshop David had behind the house, separate from his gallery? How far back does this go? Only Paul seems aware of the potential storm of legal actions and moral condemnations.

It’s remarkable that in a play about art, there is so little that catches the eye beyond the colorful patterns of Agatha’s jackets (by costume designer Sigrid Johannesdottir) and the small reproduction of Marc Chagall’s “Time Is a River without Banks.” Most of the art decorating the stage wall are black-and-white modernist prints too small to appreciate from the audience. I’m reluctant to blame scenic designer Joseph B. Musumeci Jr. because he’s ultimately working within limitations placed on him by DeSchryver’s script, which sets the play in a conventional upper-class living room with tasteful antique furniture and vintage bottles on the liquor cabinet. At least Musumeci has devised a clever method for quickly making scene changes to Paul’s office, by placing one of Agatha’s walls on a turntable. But the question stands for the playwright: Why not place the action in David’s workshop where he kept his notebooks, did restoration work, and possibly falsified documentation? Or even in the gallery itself?

The subject matter is fascinating, but DeSchryver takes far too long to not fully explore the situation. The possibility that the fake De Hooch is a looted object is not considered until a third of the way through the play and the manner in which it’s done is so polite that it cannot even be called a slow burn. Jackson avails himself well of the material he is given—warning Agatha and Scott that their desire to get at the truth and return the art to its rightful owners can lead to tragedy—the script gives too little for Holliday and Payne to work with. We learn more about what drives Agatha from Paul talking to Scott than we do from the scenes she is in. Ultimately, she and Scott are only slightly less naive at the end of the play than they were in the beginning. In the end, An Unbuilt Life feels like it needed a second or third draft to discover the drama that it could have been.

Washington Stage Guild presents the world premiere of An Unbuilt Life, written by Elizabeth DeSchryver and directed by Steven Carpenter, through May 5. stageguild.org. $50–$60.

“A nickel for a song!” calls out Joe Peltner (Morgan Morse) as he strolls onto the stage with an accordion strapped to his chest. Soon he’s joined by a clarinetist (Jason Cohen) and a violinist (Lauren Jeanne Thomas). They don’t get a coin though, leading Joe to conclude, “Music they love, musicians not so much.” 

The year is 1896 and Lower Manhattan is the home to a crowded immigrant community of Ashkenazi Jews who’ve left the Russian Empire. The neighborhood’s main drag provides the name of Sharyn Rothstein’s new play, Hester Street, receiving its world premiere production, directed by Oliver Butler, at Theater J. (Rothstein’s last local area world premiere was 2019’s legal drama, The Right to Be Forgotten, at Arena Stage.)

Joe’s insight into what makes people give up their nickels has led him to open his “dancing academy”—more a place for mingling than training. One of the minglers is Jake (Jake Horowitz), a tailor who has been in America for a few years yet considers himself a “Yankee” as well as a ladies’ man. Things change when Jake, functionally illiterate even in his mother tongue of Yiddish, has to ask his roommate and fellow tailor, the yeshiva-educated Bernstein (Michael Perrie Jr.) to read a letter for him: Jake’s father has died, and now Jake’s wife, Gitl (Sara Kapner), and son, Yosselé (Katie Angell), are leaving their home in the Russian shtetl of Povodye to join him in New York. Jake borrows money from Mamie (Eden Epstein), his girlfriend, who doesn’t know he’s married.

When Gitl and Yosselé arrive, hair is a point of contention: Yekl, as Gitl knew Jake back in Povodye, now shaves his beard; Jake doesn’t like that Gitl, like many married Jewish women of the Pale of Settlement (the region of the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to reside)—and unlike most New York Jews—keeps her natural hair hidden under a large wig. The contention between the couple grows when Jake cuts off Yosselé’s payot (the long sidelocks of hair worn by men and boys in some traditional communities) and gives his son a more Yankee name: Joey.

Gitl finds friendship with the landlady, Mrs. Kavarsky (Dani Stoller), and Bernstein (who still lives with Jake), both of whom have negotiated a new identity in the New World that preserves the Jewish traditions they care about.

Hester Street’s pedigree is fascinating. Rothstein adapted the play from the 1975 film of the same name written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, which was adapted from Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. It became one of the first novels about contemporary Jewish life by a Jewish author for an American audience. Nearly 80 years later, Silver’s film would be one of the first independent films by a woman filmmaker focused on the immigrant experience (it also earned Carol Kane an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Gitl). While Cahan was a native speaker in Yiddish, Yekl was written for English speakers. However, Silver, as a filmmaker, could’ve had her characters speak Yiddish while offering English subtitles, but didn’t implement them until Gitl becomes fluent in English. Theater J’s production replicates the effect of subtitling in scenes where Jake and Gitl speak Yiddish (Miriam Isaacs is the Yiddish consultant for the show), with the English projected by designer Patrick W. Lord onto curtains and hanging laundry in an elegant serif font.

If there is a single design element most likely to be spoken about it will be the way Wilson Chin mounts the apartment on a turntable, allowing it to be spun clockwise and counterclockwise to signify a scene change. This lets the characters and the audience fully explore the small apartment from different angles. It also achieves something akin to the movements of a film camera, allowing audiences to see the fascinating details of everyday life like Joey peering out the window onto Hester Street below.

Joel Waggoner’s songs, sung by Morse, function chiefly as interludes commenting less on the drama than on the world in which the story takes place. Perhaps the most poignant song is the satirical “How Long Have We Got?” It takes the upbeat form of a freylakh, but the lyrics are pure gallows humor: “How long have we got/ History tells us not a lot/ How long can we stay in the U.S.A./ Until they kick us out one day?” It’s not merely an ironic counterpoint to a story of immigrants making a new home, but a reminder that over the past several years the country has seen a steady increase in antisemitic hate crimes and a normalization of antisemitic rhetoric even prior to Oct. 7. 

The music, does, however allow for some momentary flights from the naturalistic drama and into surrealism: Many of the questions from Ellis Island immigration officer (Cohen) are notes played on a trombone, a merchant of love potions (Thomas) gives her sales pitch by bowing her fiddle, and Cohen, this time as a rabbi, blows his introductory remarks through a clarinet.

The show features a strong cast. Kapner convincingly plays Gitl’s development from being lost in her new life to being a protagonist able to navigate between tradition and new desires. Horowitz still manages to play Jake with an ounce of humanity even when he is being cruel, selfish, and duplicitous, and Angell is energetic and charming as the young Joey. Stoller, however, steals every scene she’s in as Mrs. Kavarsky—a fast-talking and fast-moving force of comedy who knows everyone and has an opinion on everything.

The story’s climax and denouement will contain few surprises, but this production’s attention to acting and design, down to the smallest details and gestures, is engaging and engrossing.

Theater J presents the world premiere of the play Hester Street by Sharyn Rothstein, directed by Oliver Butler, with original music and lyrics by Joel Waggoner, based on the film by Joan Micklin Silver, which is based on the novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto by Abraham Cahan. It runs through April 28. edcjcc.org/theater-j/. $59.99–$90.99.

Since first written down in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE, Homer’s Odyssey has become an enduring part of the literary canon—not just in its myriad translations but in many adaptations and derivative works across every creative medium. While many have focused on the titular hero Odysseus (or his various analogues from Sinbad the Sailor to Leopold Bloom and Ulysses Everett McGill), Homer’s epic also offers other characters who’ve captured our imaginations. This is the premise of composer and lyricist Alex Bechtel’s Penelope. Bechtel, with collaborators Grace McLean and director Eva Steinmetz, wrote the book for the play now in production at Signature Theatre, that retells the story from the perspective of Odysseus’ wife, the queen of Ithaca.

Bechtel and his collaborators are not the first—and likely won’t be the last—to expand upon the story of Penelope (Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a famous example). The Odyssey may be named for her husband, but Homer sketched out a fascinating character in the queen. Though hemmed in by the patriarchy, many of the epithets Homer applied to his hero, from “wily” to “cunning” to “man of twists and turns,” also fit Penelope. They appreciate one another in a way no other couple does in Greek mythology. Even when Odysseus finds himself in the company of island goddesses, first Circe and then Calypso, neither compare to Penelope; and despite the many mercenary suitors who have set themselves up in her palace trying to persuade her to remarry, she would rather wait for Odysseus’ return. But Penelope proves capable of ruling Ithaca for 20 years in her king’s absence, as well as a cunning strategist who has kept boorish suitors at bay and protected her son, Telemachus, from harm. There’s plenty to work with.

Penelope opens with the sound of ocean waves and a breath. When the lights go up on Penelope (Jessica Phillips, taking over for co-writer McLean, who originated the role during its 2022 premiere at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York), she is seated at an upright piano and, after a sigh, starts to play a few chords. “It is morning now,” she says. Her outfit of lime green and ocean blue satin (designed by Danielle Preston) shimmers in the light of dawn. The stage is shared by chairs, music stands, and a drum kit. From dawn to dusk the colors shift over wave crests and mountain slopes—a wonderful effect from lighting designer Jesse Belsky creates upon the relief sculpted by scenic designer Paige Hathaway.

One by one, the musicians take their places on the stage starting with cellist Susanna Mendlow, bowing a bass melody and arpeggios, followed by viola player Imelda Tecson Juarez. Penelope surrenders the piano stool to music director Ben Moss, who begins to play short melodic phrases. Finally they’re joined by violinist Jennifer Rickard and percussionist Erika Johnson. Penelope makes her way toward the front of the stage as the band play the overture.

Bechtel and his collaborators have set this telling as a cabaret in what appear to be the final days of Odysseus’ absence. Through song and storytelling, Penelope fills in the backstory for those who need a refresher in Greek mythology, recounting the causes of the Trojan War—her cousin Helen absconding to the Dardanelles—with an anachronistic whiskey in hand for the song “Drunk Iliad.”

The show’s compositions range from poems set to chamber music, to blues, soul, and pop ballads, but just as often they blur genre boundaries. The ensemble is up to any challenge the score presents, including the moment where, with the help of a change of lighting, and some clever sound design by Eric Norris, who adds the the hooting of Athena’s owl, they become a bawdy chorus manifesting as Odysseus’ patron goddess.

In performance, Phillips is a skilled storyteller, which she demonstrates as she monologues about the famous bargain Penelope made with her suitors: She will decide who to marry once she finishes weaving her tapestry—her fingers illustrate this work with a precise mime as she narrates all the images she renders in thread by day only to secretly unravel at night. Likewise, Phillips is effective as Penelope fantasizing about leaving the palace and having a one-night stand with a traveler, or even taking a ship and leaving Ithaca for good. Whereas Homer showed character through speech and action, Bechtel gives these characters the interiority of imagination.

However, if there is one failing with Penelope it is that Bechtel and company do not grant the queen of Ithaca the final victory that Homer wrote: Upon his return, Odysseus, his son, and two loyal servants slay the suitors, but before Penelope would accept him as her 20-year absent husband, he had to prove himself to not be an imposter and match her in wits. In Penelope, instead, we are given a more sentimental and romantic reunion, which, though beautifully performed by Phillips, nonetheless shortchanges Homer’s queen of some of her agency and intelligence that allowed her to outwit the patriarchy of ancient Ithaca.

Penelope, music and lyrics by Alex Bechtel, directed by Eva Steinmetz, book by Bechtel, Grace McLean, and Steinmetz, runs through April 21 at Signature Theatre. sigtheatre.org. $40–$99.

A news banner crawls across the bottom of the television screen reading, “Police seize 1,000 fake life jackets in Turkey.” Another news brief shows a clip of a boat, filled beyond capacity, capsizing in the Mediterranean. The familiar din of the 24-hour newsfeed is soon replaced by something more symbolic: Footage of ants, magnified by thousands of times and processed through a negative filter, is projected upon every surface, and soon replaced by the the show’s cast dressed as migrants crawling across the deck of a ship, as seen through the same video filter.

The news footage reveals just a small part of the catastrophe that includes the millions fleeing (or who have already fled) civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, as well as the ISIS caliphate, and other forms of social unrest or environmental disaster in their homelands. These are the real-life humanitarian catastrophes that inspire Matei Visniec’s darkly satirical Migraaaaants, or There’s Too Many of Us on This Damn Boat! 

Visniec is the first playwright whom ExPats Theater has presented a second time (last year Karin Rosnizeck directed his The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield). Visniec was born in Romania but during the Cold War he fled to France, where he received political asylum, eventually becoming a citizen. While he spares no one from his satire, every scene is infused with sympathies for those who had no choice but flee their native lands with the hope of starting a new life.

Migraaaaants! is performed in the format of a sketch-comedy show with thematically related stories, ranging from recurring gags to serialized storytelling, with the occasional tragedy along the way. The main plot is set on the “damn boat” of the title, sailing from Libya, which experienced its second civil war in a decade from 2014 to 2020. The boat’s captain, a smuggler (Eli El), addresses the audience, instructing them on the use of the contents of the sealed plastic bags found on their seats. Inside is a vomit bag, as well as a bag intended to keep one’s cellphone dry, and a document outlining the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. El is flanked by two henchmen (Brock Brown and George Kassouf) who hold machetes and signs instructing the audience when to respond with “Yes, Boss.” The damn boat’s captain plans to ferry his passengers 2 kilometers off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa and toss them overboard with life jackets and their airtight plastic bags. He gives them advice on how to stay out of trouble in Europe, but he’s not above tossing overboard stowaways—or others—as required.

A recurring skit is set at the “Cutting Edge Anti-Immigration Technology Show.” A trio of presenters (Vivian Allvin, Irina Koval, and Ege Yalcinbas) in tight black dresses dance to a disco beat, cooing seductively about the latest products border control agencies and individuals can use to repel migrants. These products, which range from heartbeat detectors to more aesthetically pleasing camouflaged barbed wire (both real products), are not just cutting-edge, but if we believe the presenters, they are fun to use! Another story is told in a series of vignettes about a couple in an unnamed Balkan country as they observe refugees passing through their community—most coming from Turkey (which currently hosts roughly 3.6 million refugees from the Syrian Civil War).  The woman (Allvin) is alarmed and suspicious, the man (Kassouf) is curious, even philosophical, as he slurps his soup. The pair return as the denizens of the “The High Office of the Prime President,” in which Kassouf, sporting a wig of disheveled blond hair a la Boris Johnson, plays a beleaguered head of government, and Allvin plays Georgina, his “political correctness coach.” The two game out how different policies (the more ineffective the better), and rhetorical stances will affect the prime president’s reelection chances. 

A darker satire of unregulated capitalism involves Elihu (Brown), an Eritrean migrant in Europe, as he is continually visited by another affably evil smuggler (El again), who carries a small briefcase filled with Coca-Cola. Coke may add life, as the jingle once told us, but the time it takes to drink it gives the smuggler time to propose another business venture. There’s no such thing as free cola, and the man making the offer is not just a smuggler of people; but a smuggler of parts. Does Elihu really need both kidneys?

Brown and El return, in another skit, as a pair of child traffickers giving a family-friendly presentation about how they are a much better option than threats like Boko Haram (a Jihadist militia based in Nigeria and neighboring countries, known for abducting girls as war brides and boys as child soldiers), promising a better future in accordance to the European Union’s human rights laws, along with the veiled threat that, if the traffickers are not paid in full, sweatshops and sex work are available ways to repay the debt. When they lead the audience in a chorus of the Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie-penned 1985 charity song “We Are the World,” the nonsensicality of the lyrics becomes more apparent.

ExPats Theatre’s aesthetic has always included video projections on a sparse stage, and Jonathan Dahm Robertson is up for the challenge of ever-changing graphic styles, ranging from documentary footage and surreal images to the bright colors of commerce. Costume designer Alisa Mandel is busy with six actors each playing several characters, but she gets a chance to be truly outrageous when outfitting the sex workers in one skit.

Visniec, though a postmodernist who gives no easy answers, and revels in the absurd chaos of the scenarios he portrays on stage, nonetheless pauses from the satire to acknowledge the dead bodies that wash up on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos. And yet the playwright’s humanism is always apparent as he mocks the xenophobic fantasies some demagogues promote as they present the future as a choice between a fortress Europe where borders and national identities are firmly guarded, or a nightmare of a fallen Europe, overridden by foreign hordes. Instead the French Romanian dramatist imagines a hybridized future Europe that includes “French Sri Lankans, German Afghans, Swedish Pakistanis, […and] Algerian Romanians.” 

ExPats Theatre presents Migraaaaants, or There’s Too Many of Us on This Damn Boat!, written by Matei Visniec, translated by Nick Awde, and directed by Karin Rosnizeck, runs through April 7 at Atlas Performing Arts Center. expatstheatre.com. $20–$45.