The Washington Shakespeare Company has just opened a very funny anti-war comedy at the Clark Street Playhouse. It makes all the points you would expect of a piece decrying the horrors of war and praising the virtues of peace, but it does so with a long-range view of history. How long? Well, say about twenty-four centuries.
The play is "Peace" by a local playwright who has recently moved to New York City to broaden her reach. She’s Callie Kimball and her last play to appear at the Clark Street was her stage adaptation of Shakespeare’s epic poem "The Rape of Lucrece." Again this time, she takes a work of the long-ago past and attempts to make it accessible for today’s audiences. This time it is with a flippant wit that ridicules human foibles.
Playwrights have been using humor to drive home opinions on such touchy topics as war and peace for millennia. Take Aristophanes, whose lampooning comedy came in second in the Dionysian Festival of Athens at the height of the Peloponnesian War. His play envisioned a farmer flying to the home of the Gods at the peak of Mount Olympus where he hoped to convince them to return the goddess Peace to Earth.
He called his play "Peace." So does Kimball whose own "Peace" was commissioned by the Washington Shakespeare Company and is being given a premiere that features some highly literate readings of low comedy, providing a number of belly laughs as well as an evening’s worth of knowing nods and appreciative chuckles.
She retains the concept of a mortal off to petition the Gods but switches the mode of transportation from Aristophanes’ flying dung beetle to a hot air balloon – one powered by methane in a politically correct nod to fighting global warming. The cast makes great hay out of such details.
Brandon McCoy and Matt "Slice" Hicks team up as a pair of farm hands whose conversations cover a wide range of topics with the sharp barbs of Ms. Kimball. At one point McCoy questions how Cain could have been held accountable for Abel’s death if he’d never been exposed to the concept of death in the paradise that was the Garden of Eden. At another point, Hicks holds forth in an abortion policy debate saying that "I don’t want no government telling my women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. That’s my job!"
Sara Barker doubles on the roles of the mortal’s trusting spouse and "the administrative assistant to the Gods" who breaks the news to the mortal that the Gods don’t happen to be in residence upon his arrival. No matter, however, for Peace isn’t available to come down to earth having been declared an enemy combatant and locked up.
Peace, played by a nearly silent Anastasia Wilson, has her own ideas about how to improve the future, ideas that include the marriage of her daughter. The ceremony may be a bit strained since the bride-groom is a married man, but the reception following is a kick presided over by DJ Joe Brack whose patter is a pastiche of all the clichés you can think of.
Through it all, John Geoffrion is an earnest mortal who keeps his goal of world peace in mind.
The foolishness runs its course and the cast milks all the puns and gags with a sense of energetic enthusiasm.
<i>Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a Web site covering theater in the region (<a href=http://www.PotomacStages.com>www.PotomacStages.com</a>). He can be reached at <a href=mailto:Brad@PotomacStages.com>Brad@PotomacStages.com</a></i>