Woolly's She Stoops Conquers
Hyperbole can be dangerous, but it’s hard to think of a more laugh-inducing scene that we’ve seen on the DC stage this season than Kate Eastwood Norris’s exchange with, well, herself, during Woolly Mammoth Theater’s uproarious production of She Stoops to Comedy.
Kate is playing two lesbian lovers, Kay Fien and Jayne Summerhouse. The wonderfully self-aware She Stoops is more than conscious of the fact that the actress has been on double duty, and keeps hinting to us that she will be taxed with a scene between the pair of characters, whom up until this point have conveniently always been in different rooms. The deft physical comedian flips quickly between characters, bringing a more and more frenetic energy to the stage as the pair tosses increasingly pointed insults at each other, to the audience’s delight.
Norris is just one member of a more than able cast that director Howard Shalwitz has assembled for this hysterical piece of writing. She Stoops is, if you can keep up, a play within a play within a play. It takes us inside the head of a playwright (Michael Russotto) concocting a humorous take on a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Alexandra Page (also Russotto, who relies on voice and gesture rather than drag to switch genders) and her lover Alison Rose (Gia Mora) are on the outs, but Page gets the bright idea to pose as a man in order to obtain the role of Orlando in the production of As You Like It in which Alison has just been cast.
The work plays out as if an evolving stream of conscious exercise – lines are replayed in order to see which outcome is funnier, characters’ back stories change and then revert to their original form. It sounds exhausting, but we’re too busy laughing to even contemplate how complicated a feat playwright David Greenspan has accomplished. The work is peppered with inside jokes and allusions, some which will fly past even the most educated of theatergoers, but never feels too inside to appeal to a general audience. Occasionally gags seem as if they’re taken to the point of exhaustion, but return to a point of either humor or poignancy that makes the effort worthwhile.
The cast of She Stoops is so adept at improv, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether they’re convincingly covering up an error or just running with the script (it wouldn’t surprise us if Greenspan were toying with us here as well). Norris and Russotto grab the most laughs, but Daniel Escobar as the not-so-silent cast member Simon steals a scene with his own comi-tragic tangent, a character-defining rant that gets a nice jab in at Rent in the process.
The work may hold special appeal for those who get Irma Vep references or have firsthand knowledge of the creative process, but this production engages all and alienates none. She Stoops to Comedy runs though April 22 at Woolly Mammoth Theater. Tickets are available online.