Woolly Keeps the Audience Running Full Circle
The dangling apartment setting of Woolly's Full Circle.
This is a show where the audience relocates from separate rooms to a central location, from the complex lobby to the main theater. All the movement helps contribute to the chaos in which the show is set – in East Germany, just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It's also, frankly, a lot of fun to move from space to space, wondering what setting Shannon Scrofano has in store for us next (a tightrope bridge suspended across an abyss? A catwalk apartment?). The variety is key in a 2.5+ hour play with moments of pretentious meandering.
Full Circle is most focused on what's going to happen to the baby of ousted political leader Erich Honecker (a wheezing, sputtering, committed performance from Sarah Marshall) and his mistress (Kate Eastwood Norris, dizzy but enraged) when it ends up in the hands of a self-absorbed socialite and a young would-be revolutionary. The journey puts the pair at the center of the action, and the two performers are fine company – Naomi Jacobson is poised, regal and airy as high-society Pamela, while Jessica Frances Dukes is heartbreaking with a side of crazy as her instant "au pair," Dulle Griet.
The two encounter some strange roadblocks and saviors along the way, including the show's most comical couple, Dulle Griet's white trash brother and his wife (Marshall and Norris again). Marshall takes great relish in her drag roles, and is particularly winning as the gruff brother, while Norris gets the chance to have some frenetic fun with her star-struck character, making the most of entertaining guests in the bizarrely suspended apartment (she laments how they really should get some clips for those chairs – for the guests!).
But even as the show delights with these little vignettes (a raucous wedding, a goofy chef-sung parody of "Puttin on the Ritz"), there's still the sinking suspicion that it isn't adding up to something cohesive. The play's closing scene, in a Brecht-inspired Chalk Circle (everyone's Brechtian around town lately), does little to ease these suspicions. A theater artistic director's (Woolly's own Howard Shalwitz, meta-cast) self-justifying and self-condeming monologue drags, and randomly thrown-in plot twists (look! a proposal!) don't contribute to any great understanding of what writer Charles L. Mee hopes to accomplish. Still, at least we had the chance to wander – much of what the audience stumbles on is worth a look.
Full Circle runs through Nov. 29 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Tickets are available online.