Performance

Gary Tischler • July 26, 2011

At the end of “Let Me Down Easy,” Anna Deavere Smith’s provocative, shattering play about health care in America now and the hour of our death, Smith stands alone on a stage littered with castoff costumes, clothing, food, props, bottles, pencils, lying on the floor. It looks like the aftermath of a party or a food fight—or an abandoned emergency room where a life-and-death struggle has just taken place.

It’s all that remains of the 20 people portrayed by Smith during the course of an uninterrupted and rangy evening in which she explores, in her inimitable fashion, the arena of our health and bodies, and the pains we sometimes endure because of the way we deal with falling ill, and the moment when we come face to face with the finality of death. By a shift in vocal timbre, a way of walking or sitting, an accent, a laugh, a sprawl on a couch, a way of talking, outstretched arms, a tie, a coat, a cowboy hat, she explores and portrays the geography of our culture.

Smith, an impressively talented, cogent and curious, woman functions as playwright, actress, writer and interviewer for “Let Me Down Easy,” a project somewhat similar to others she is well know for. There was “Fires in the Mirror,” which examined the aftermath of a race riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and “Twilight: Los Angeles,” which focused on the devastating and violent 1992 riots in Los Angeles. But while these previous works also saw Smith portraying dozens of real people alone on stage with remarkable dexterity and even-handedness, they were focused on specific, dramatic and explosive events. “Let Me Down Easy” is much broader in its scope and approach.

While the massive national health care reform legislation, passed amid much bitterness last year, provides a framework for a large extent of what concerns the people in this play, there is a lot more going on than might be contained in even such a sweeping legislative effort.

“Let Me Down Easy” is about specific people, many of them quite well known to most of us for one reason or another. Athletes, like the controversial American Tour de France bicyclist Lance Armstrong, who overcame cancer and rode to greater achievements. Sportswriter Sally Jenkins. A boxer. A rodeo bull rider. Model Lauren Hutton. Television movie critic Joel Siegel, dying on a couch of colon cancer. Playwright and performer Eve Ensler, of “The Vagina Monologues.” Former Texas Governor Ann Richards. There are doctors, medical academics, a musicologist, a choreographer and a physician at Charity Hospital in New Orleans who experiences the terrifying ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

Such a diverse group of voices, of men and women from various walks of life expressing similar and differing concerns, at first produces an unformed, disconcerting narrative, like trying to grab Jell-O with your hands. But the effect, in time, is accumulative, and it arrives with shocking and powerful clarity, and with gentle but undeniable finality. It may not be a definitive destination, an over-arching theory or philosophy, or even ready-made solace, but it is a destination, an arrival, and an ending.

There have been complaints that there are too many celebrities here and that the play is unfocused or mish-mish. Maybe so. Maybe it’s too big a subject to have a definitive story line or conclusion that you can take to the bank or to the church. And it’s fair to say that the better-known people portrayed here add less to the total than those not so well known. While much of “Let Me Down Easy”—a theatrical blues riff with multiple meanings—concerns itself with terminal illnesses and how it is dealt with by hospitals, the medical community and patients, there are sections on the ailments and issues peculiar to athletes, as well as how society deals with women’s bodies and their functions (hence Ensler and Hutton).

But many of the characters share a common plight against cancer, a battle, sometimes successful, sometimes not. And suddenly there is very little distance between women like Richards, the sharp-tongued former governor of Texas dying of cancer, and Smith’s own aunt, Lorraine Coleman, a retired teacher.

There is a surprising bit of laughter in the play—some as a result of Smith’s fabulous work as a mimic, mime and master of comic timing—but the constructed and performed production picks up power as it goes along. A kind of dread aching to be relieved ensues somewhere in there. Smith gives us Kiersta Kurz-Burke, a physician at the New Orleans charity hospital who has been ignored and abandoned for days during Katrina; Eduardo Bruera, of the Anderson Cancer Center, talking about “Existential Sadness”; Joel Siegel, only in his fifties, flat on his back, the face projected dramatically on a wall, dying of colon cancer; and Trudy Howell, the director of a South African orphanage where children deal with the loss of parents and their own impending deaths, entitled appropriately, “Don’t Leave Them In The Dark.”

“Let Me Down Easy” has a restless feel to it, but it also has the sure touch and magic of Smith’s abilities as an actress, that gift of playing many parts convincingly with minimal props. Over and above the identifying tricks of such props, or the brilliant use of her voice and inflections of accents, tone and vocal speed, there is something else that convinces us like a punch to the heart. True, Smith is a terrific actress—you’ve all seen her in films and as a national security adviser on the defunct “West Wing” series—but that’s technique. What makes her work soar is her own empathy toward the people she’s put on stage; it’s as if she’s caught souls in a glass jar. She’s not a chameleon. Some recognizable part of her is always there. It’s not as if she somehow disappears into a person. It’s more like she joins with them.

“Let Me Down Easy” doesn’t function so much as drama; rather the people that we come to know as they swagger, suffer, snack, snort, laugh and dream are a kind of self-portrait of us. What we often hear are sentences we’ve heard, or what we will ultimately say ourselves sooner or later.

We’re left with a salve, like fresh water, And Smith stands alone in a bow, the stage littered with the debris, the left behind stuff of human beings.

“Let Me Down Easy,” written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Leonard Foglia, will be performed at Arena Stage through February 13. For more information visit ArenaStage.org.
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Gary Tischler •

Mary Zimmerman is back. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Zimmerman’s “Arabian Nights” comes to Arena Stage fresh on the heels of the closing days of Zimmerman’s vision of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” at the Shakespeare Theater. The two plays being so close together are an embarrassment of theatrical riches, for which you need heart, mind, empathy and imagination to be working at full capacity to get the full effect.

“Arabian Nights” is no Disney production, nor Richard Burton’s, nor the Frenchman’s who wrote something like it in the 1700s. It belongs to none of the storytellers who might have told the original stories over the centuries. There is no Ali Baba here, no Sabu or Sinbad. The authorship and content of the “Arabian Nights” tales are thick with thumbprints and a host of Middle East and further east cultures.

The program will tell you that this production was written and directed by Mary Zimmerman and adapted from “The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,” as translated by Powys Mathers. This is probably a truth, but to put it squarely, the final author is Mary Zimmerman, as is the case with most of her work, no matter if it goes back centuries. The rambunctiously inventive director-playwright explodes the stage every time out.

“Arabian Nights” at the Arena belongs to Zimmerman; hers is the power and the glory, the credit and the blame—some of which will surely come. Oddly enough, this “Arabian Nights” also belongs to us, if we choose to own it. By us, I mean the members of the audience, but also historical Americans who have left heavy, wrenching footprints in the glorious city of Baghdad, where this night of nights is set.

Picture this: a stage, full of wrinkled, large canvasses, unfurled, deeply pleated. Picture this now in the court of a medieval Baghdad, where a troubled, dangerous king is marrying virginal brides every day for three years and killing them nightly, after finding his first bride in the arms of another man whom he dispatched. He is a man with an awesome fear of women and love. He says “Say not, ‘If I might love and yet escape the follies of loving’, but rather ‘Only a miracle brings a man safe from love.’”

He has almost depleted the kingdom of marriage-age young women by this time, and so picks Scheherazade, the daughter of his closest adviser, the Wazir. Accompanied by her faithful sister, she comes dutifully to the palace and spins a series of stories for the king, cliffhangers of love, death and comedy, so that he’s forced to stave off her execution one day at a time. Just so, her father comes each morning with a shroud for her funeral.

We may know this story already. But we don’t know the story as Zimmerman tells it. You weren’t expecting the tale of the madman and how he got that way. You surely weren’t expecting the burlesque-like routine of “What’s in the Bag,” the contents of which are improvised by the actors each night.

And you probably weren’t expecting to see, with an ache in your heart, an ancient civilization resurrected like a fleshy, musical mirage before your eyes. This is the Baghdad of Harun al Rashid, the city’s most fabled ruler. It is a city where poets ruled as much as sheiks and kings, and women were beautiful, dangerous and impossible to know. Zimmerman’s Baghdad is a city of fable, merchants and musclemen—not the modern city wrecked by shock and awe, where Sunnis and Shiites battle and hand-made bombs are just another roadside attraction.

I could talk about the costumes, and the technical and showy detail that Zimmerman is so good at; lamps descend onto the stage, a man meets himself on the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, ancient musical instruments play loudly and sweetly, and a civilization dies before your eyes.

It has been suggested that there are stereotypes in the show, and it’s true. But Zimmerman addresses this issue with a very important statement, which speaks volumes about the material:

“It is a precondition of war that we view other people as fundamentally different form ourselves; it is a precondition of literature that we view other people as fundamentally the same.”

Watching and responding to a story that depends on its rolling laughter is to remember that something as simple as a fart makes the whole world helpless with laughter. It’s surely a shared experience. But so is the torture of love, and so is the heartbreak of a love song. In these stories, we ought to recognize ourselves, our common humanity, as well as the pungent power of stories.

What’s in this bag? More than it has any business holding. Go hear the stories of “The Arabian Nights.” You will dream about it and talk about it. I guarantee it.
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Gary Tischler •

Sitting in the balcony seats at Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theatre overlooking the stage, I had a disquieting thought as I watched George and Martha go at each other in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

I thought: there are no fictional characters. Everything I experienced at this compelling, raw production, even in its few calmer moments, felt realer than anything called “reality show.” It felt realer than anything on the nightly local news. George and Martha and their unfortunate guests Nick and Honey are famous in theatre history, and they churned up the stage, kick-started your memories, made you grin and laugh. They made you see yourself in their revelations, their brawling, their need to compete, hurt, connect, disengage, wound and understand.

In the more intimate confines of the Kreeger, the only escape is the Exit signs. Unlike the Kennedy Center production at the Eisenhower Theater, which gave you breathing room and distance, or the Liz-and-Dick movie version, witnessing this show at the Kreeger (and I think that’s what the audience is doing, bearing witness) is like being dropped into a combat zone.

The authenticity, the “real,” is not only created by a quartet of terrific actors and actresses, but by director Pam McKinnon’s sharp pacing, creating little puddles of reflections in a roiling sea, before combat begins anew. That pace keeps the play—two acts and well over three hours—from lagging. You may feel punchy, a little beat up afterwards, but you are never disinterested, sleepy or bored.

Part of the reason too is that the set by Todd Rosenthal looks so large and detailed. It’s a living room/disorganized library where steps, stairs a hallway and a door lead off to other spaces unseen, but imaginable. It looks rumpled, lived in, dominated by sprawling, scattered books and a stand-up bar to which the characters retreat to renew. Combat is not too strong a word for what happens during the long, nightmarish all-nighter we see—in fact the play has a fight choreographer and a fight captain listed in its credits (for the record, Nick Sandys and Carrie Coon, respectively).

Meet George and Martha, if you haven’t already. They are the creatures and creations of Playwright Edward Albee, who’s having quite a time for himself in Washington, being honored here with an Albee festival, a reading of all of his plays, and his presence at Georgetown University for part of a Tennessee Williams festival.

George and Martha live raggedly, furiously on the campus of a Northeastern university where George is a history professor married to the irascibly sharp-tongued, combative Martha, daughter of the university president, which makes contact with her a prize for a young biology professor like Nick and his hot-house flower of a wife, Honey.

George and Martha, who appeared to have finessed themselves into a rough marriage full of disappointments, carnage and games, hold court in the wee hours with Nick and Honey for an evening of horrible trash talk and insults hurled in equal parts like stilettos or rocks.

Amy Morton, half-blonde and all fury, with edges even in her hair, is like some sultry, long-striding lioness of displeasure, discontent, and just plain dissing. She’s hungry for the fight, but also hungry for all the lost love between the two. Periodically, she’s looking for physical comfort from George, who turns his back and picks up a book, or wards her off with a biting insult, one of which he repeats often: “I am seven years older than you, my love, and no matter what I will always be seven years older than you.”

The quartet drinks—a lot. And then some more. Honey, who appears to have tricked her hubby into a marriage by way of a false pregnancy, gets sick. The two men spar like intellectual gladiators, Nick using his youth, George his infinite, bottomless gift for expressing disgust with the best of words, wit and viciousness.

These four don’t just sit around. They pace, they hurl themselves at each other, they come close to blows, and they lounge askew on the couch. It’s clear what the games are: the famous “Hump the Hostess” and “Get the Guests” among them.

And in this production we give you Traci Letts as George, the feral historian. We’ve seen diffident, cruelly distanced and impossibly nuanced Georges, but never quite this furious and ferocious a George. Letts, who is also a playwright—with plays full of familial combat in them—gets that just so; he convinces you that this very public, teeth-bared cruelty is somehow just. He’s like Peter Finch in “Network” who can’t take it anymore.

And strangely, you know George and Martha carry around with them every opportunity, every bit of whatever love they had, with them. They are in ruins, full of dried up tears, spent passion, words like war, opportunities lost to the endless abyss of the past.

The title refers to a song she sang at the party they attended that night—giddy, silly and then, like a lost voice in the night, heart-breaking after all. Now that’s a reality show.

Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” directed by Pam MacKinnon, is at Arena Stage’s Kreeger theater until April 10. For more information visit ArenaStage.org.

Gary Tischler •

Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” is probably the most performed opera in America. The Washington National Opera, with two different casts among the principals, is in the midst of a run of 13 performances for this most romantic and tragic of operas.

There are reasons for that. “Butterfly” is the opera that depends greatly on its music, which sounds like a given for any opera, but it’s especially true here. But it also has in its core the most basic and classical themes of theatrical literature—enduring, undying love and the tragedy that arises from it. And let’s not forget the classic East-Meets-West at the expense of East theme.

Clocking in at roughly three hours with one intermission, “Butterfly” would seem to be a bit of an endurance test for the operatically disinclined, but in the end, it is exactly what it’s often describe as: the opera for people who don’t usually go to the opera. Which accounts for the frequent presence of the opera on the season schedule of any company that can provide the singers, conductors and orchestra to do it justice.

The WNO certainly has that in soprano Catherine Naglestad (Ana Maria Martinez is the second Butterfly), who sings with heartbreaking clarity and acts the part of Cio-Cio-San, aka Madama Butterfly, in an appealing style that avoids overstatement and operatic histrionics that are sometimes off-putting to the uninitiated. Clearly, she’s the unadorned heroine of this opus. She has a beauty that combines with humility to create a young woman already used to the woes of the world but who clings nonetheless to an unfounded hope. Her movements around the stage are graceful without ever descending into Western clichés about Asian ways.

We all probably know the story—Lt. Pinkerton (ably sung by the Russian tenor Alexei Dolgov), a young and caddish American navy officer at the beginning of America’s robust foray into the Pacific, is stationed in Nagasaki, in a Japan where the Shoguns and codes of honor reign. He’s paid for a wife (both marriage and contract can be waived by him at any time), the lovely teenaged Cio-Cio-San, and duly marries her in order to taste as many pleasures as he can before settling down. Cio-Cio-San, forced to become a geisha because of her disgraced father, is smitten beyond reason, commons sense and caution. The feelings are expressed in a lengthy duet in Act One, but it’s Act Two that fills the heart with apprehension, and the soul with a kind of devastating glory.

Pinkerton of course leaves off on the ocean blue, and does not return for three years: Butterfly has been forced to sell off almost everything she has merely to survive, and has also mothered a son, a beautiful small blonde boy. She believes Pinkerton will return to hearth and home. He’s back all right, with an American wife in tow. Pinkerton never sees her, and it’s up to the American consul to relay that news and that the Pinkertons will take care of Cio-Cio-San’s son. Like some bereft waif, left with nothing, Butterfly’s left with an impossible decision.

Butterfly is at her most appealing as she waits, the ship in the harbor, with her son at her side. She has already let us know in thunderous soaring terms in the famous aria “Un Bel Di” (One Beautiful day), which everyone has already heard, if only as muzak in an elevator. She soars with love and hope and as the aria begins, so does the audience soar. You can practically hear a collective sigh move through the audience as the familiar music rises, and the audience soars with her, totally, tearfully satisfied.

This is the kind of thing you don’t often get in theater—satisfaction expressed in the audience, especially when in the presence of a significant artist like Nagelstad

But what you also don’t usually get is what happens next when Butterfly waits, her eyes on the ship, her heart waiting for a sight of Pinkerton, a sound of a footsteps. This sequence has Butterfly with her back to the audience, her heart to the front, and it’s accompanied by quietly powerful orchestral music, a kind of fugue leading to finalized disappointment. Nothing happens: lights change, become muted and bright, go dim on the ship, turn dark in her lanterns. It’s an astonishing sequence that you could never do in the theater, which relies so much on movement and words. You shouldn’t be able to do it in an opera either, but it works. It creates a kind of strain and pain that can only be relieved by the familiar but always shocking tragic ending.

Bene, bene. Bravo Bravo. Ciao, Cio-Cio San.

Georgetowner •

Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. The slob and the neatnik. We know these guys, since, like forever. They’re Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. They’re Walter Matthau and Art Carney and or Jack Lemmon. They’re “The Odd Couple.”

Yeah, those guys driving each other nuts like a married couple and delivering sure-fire laughs to thousands, millions of theatergoers, and movie and television viewers.

Neil Simon, until he actually got a Pulitzer
Prize for “Lost in Yonkers,” used to complain regularly that he wasn’t taken seriously enough as an artist. He claimed people considered him just a superstar gag writer and author of hit plays—which in turn became hit movies, and in the case of “The Odd Couple,” hit television series.

He deserved better, but god bless him, he sure could make you laugh.

“The Odd Couple” is often used as Exhibit A of a big laugh machine. The production, now at Theater J at the JCC, is also Exhibit A for the case that Simon had a legitimate complaint. People forget. This production, with two of DC theater’s more gifted actors in the leads, shows again and for sure that Simon was writing about people who struck a chord with audiences, not just because gags and jokes came out of their mouths faster than a speeding bullet, but because they had something to say about who we were ourselves.

Simon, in short, was funny because he struck a nerve—because we men and women, single and married, old and young, all recognized ourselves in his characters. For men of a certain age, that’s especially true of Oscar and Felix, the most polar opposites who ever ended up sharing the same living space (except perhaps for Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman). For them, laughter isn’t just the best revenge, but also the best disguise.

We are so familiar with the plight of Oscar and Felix that we think the play is one joke after another, a barrel of laughs. And it still is in the sure hands of director Jerry Whiddon. The actors are equally commendable. Rick Foucheux plays Oscar Madison, a grumpy, divorced and perpetually broke sports writer. J. Fred Schiffman is Felix Ungar, an edgy, fussy, neat freak news writer who’s just been thrown out of the house by a long-suffering wife.

The laughs are still there—Oscar’s apartment where he and Felix hold a weekly poker game is alone worth the price of admission. When pigs fly, this is where they come to rest. The space, as imagined by designer Misha Kachman, looks like a city dump with a ceiling and windows where old milk cartons, beer bottles, cigarette butts, dirty ashtrays, and frayed couches share space with yesterdays socks and newspapers. It is a man’s cave, a man who’s completely forgotten how to clean up after himself and his friends.

When Felix can’t be found, but does finally show up at the poker game, there’s concern for the forlorn, wounded, almost-but-not-quite suicidal grown waif. Oscar, who hasn’t gotten over his own divorce, takes him in. The rest is basically a pain-filled, funny, destruction derby, especially when Oscar lures two expatriate British ladies from upstairs down for a disastrous couples dinner party.

Often, this material is played almost strictly for laughs: the nuances in the script get trampled by the situations, even when they revived the play with a female cast a couple of decades ago, starring
Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers.

Here the nuances, thanks to the actors, arise out of the situations to the point where you see Oscar and Felix for what they are: a couple of lonely guys, unused to being alone, who recreate exactly the atmosphere that caused their marriages to fail.

It isn’t just that Oscar is the ultimate cigar-smoking, milk-rotting-in-the-fridge slob; it’s become a proud habit with him. And Felix is the ultimate fussy, I-love-to-cook, control-freak type who goes so far as to wash the poker cards. These are ingrained habits that are bound to drive the other men crazy. And they do. And it’s funny. And it’s sad. And it’s just like men get sometimes when all they can do is what they’ve always been doing.

I don’t mean to suggest that “The Odd Couple” doesn’t retain the power to make everyone in the audience laugh. It does. It’s just that this production, thanks also to a great supporting cast, reveals itself to be a terrific play full of characters, instead of caricatures. Watch the two guys together on the stage: Foucheux’s Oscar stands up like a wad of paper unrolling itself; he’s all round valleys and paunches, balding a little at the top. Felix, next to him, often holding a duster or cooking utensil, is all straight lines, white shirt, tie, shiny, perfectly tied shoes, edgy face—you could get a paper cut just touching him. And they can’t help themselves, just as when Oscar drops a cigar butt on the floor in final exasperation and grinds it out with his feet, and Felix guilt trips him or nags him like a fussy mother or wife.

“The Odd Couple” is still funny as all get out. But now, when the laughter stops for a second, we see who Oscar and Felix are. They’re us guys, unfettered by the imagination.

“The Odd Couple” runs through November 28 at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street.

Gary Tischler •

Even while talking with Nicholas Kent on the phone, you could hear the murmur in the background.

Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theater Company in England and the man responsible for putting together “The Great Game”, an ambitious three-play project on imperialism and other forays into Afghanistan at Sidney Harman Hall which ended last Saturday, was delighted by the buzz in the background. That would be audiences from the first two parts of the trilogy, talking it up about what they saw.

“That was one of the concerns about taking these plays on an American tour,” said Kent, who also directs “Black Tulip”, one of the mini-plays in the second part of the trilogy. “We didn’t know how the audiences would react. Obviously, it’s a very timely subject for Americans as well as Europeans, given the state of the commitment of the American military effort there.”

“The audiences,” Kent says, “have been amazing. There’s really a reaction here. It’s not like people are sitting there dutifully taking their medicine of serious or historic drama.”

In Washington especially, that was bound to happen, although it takes theatrical stamina and determination to take in all three plays, which feature the participation and writing efforts of twelve playwrights. The trio of plays actually comprises about a dozen plays of varying lengths. “We basically sent out a call for plays, and we got quite a result.”

Afghanistan looms large in the Barack Obama presidency. It haunts the minds of the U.S. body politics, and the cost of the effort in human loss can be seen almost every day in the small dramas provided by funeral corteges that make their sorrowful way to a plot in Arlington National Cemetery. “The Great Game”, a phrase coined by the eminent chronicler of the British Empire Rudyard Kipling, is an effort to tell the story of three great power efforts — futile on the first two, school’s still out on the last — to control events in Afghanistan. Part One is called “Invasion and Independence” and focuses on the British Empire’s efforts there, some of them ending in major massacres and defeats up until 1930.

Part Two chronicles the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a subject state by way of invasion, and the CIA’s varied forays there, helping the Mujahedeen’s anti-Russian rebellion. The same group would eventually morph into the Taliban. Part Three, “Enduring Freedom”, are the stories of the American presence after 9/11, a story that remains unfinished if not undone. “Obviously, Afghanistan is a hugely important event in terms of the United States,” Kent said. “That’s why we thought it would be an appropriate undertaking, especially in Washington.”

Kent’s Tricycle Theater Company is an odd mixture of a theater, and very much reflects the interests of its director. “I think sometimes people here think we just do plays they see as political, or archival, or documentary,” he said. “We also do entertainments, if you will, like “The 39 Steps”, or straight plays, including “The Great White Hope.” You do want to have an audience – it’s theater after all.”

But the so-called tribunal plays are what sets Tricycle and Kent apart from the rest of the theater world. Kent has staged plays about the war crime tribunals created in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, about the British in Ireland, about Apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Trials, as well as Guantanamo. Much of the dialogue in these plays comes from verbatim transcripts and documents of trials.

Kent chafes when people see him as a left-wing ideologue. “I’m not a lefty, per se. It’s not about lefty, right wing and things like that. It’s about justice, history, not forgetting. It’s about understanding history and its repetition. You shouldn’t really talk about Afghanistan if you know nothing about what’s gone on there for centuries.”

This sort of approach to history and theater can be highly affecting and dramatic in and of itself. During the course of a performance of the play about the Nuremberg trials, which included actors playing Hermann Goring reciting testimony from the trials, an elderly Holocaust survivor in the audience became so distraught that she stood up and shouted at the Goring character , yelling “Liar, murderer.”

“It was quite astonishing, yes,” Kent said.

“I don’t see these plays as political plays,” he said. “I don’t see myself that way. If you’re going to call my interests something, call them humanitarian.”

“The Great Game” is still of great interest to Americans here. Of course in Washington, the CIA, the government, the defense department, the state department, the national security and intelligence apparatus located here could fill several theaters for several weeks at least. It would be nice to think they’re checking out “The Great Game.”

Meanwhile, we can still hear the buzz, the murmur in the background. Though the troupe just left Washington, the first stop on its US tour, it will be in NYC from December 1-19 at the Public Theater. Check the Tricycle Theater website at www.tricycle.co.uk [gallery ids="99202,103429" nav="thumbs"]