Review: How Will the World End? Fire, Ice or Water? In Flood at Shattered Globe, the Answer Is Water

By Nancy S Bishop for Third Coast Review

Shattered Globe Theatre’s new play, Flood, is about family issues—parents who don’t understand their children, children who never call home, elderly parents who ignore the realities of today’s world. There may be nothing new about that, but the clever script by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen starts a smart, lightning-quick conversation about the looming climate disaster. The result is an entertaining play that will make you wince in recognition of its righteousness.

Flood is skillfully directed by Kenneth Prestininzi. His staging creates dueling scenes between parents Edith and Darren, apparently living in the 1950s, and adult son and daughter Edith Junior and Darren Junior, in today’s world—or in the future. In their world, the water is rising, rising, rising but Edith (Linda Reiter) and Darren (H.B. Ward) can’t see that from their 19th floor apartment. Darren is obsessively building his wooden matchstick masterpiece and ignores Edith’s pleas for him to finish so they can have a cup of tea, sit side by side, and look out the window at their beautiful view. 

Meanwhile, Darren Junior (Carl Collins) and Edith Junior (Sarah Patin) call home on the available tin-can phone system and desperately ask to talk to their father. But Darren is too busy and will call later, after he finishes his masterpiece.

Linda Reiter and H.B. Ward. Photo by Liz Lauren.

Playwright Deen’s script features plenty of examples of theater of the absurd and may even remind you of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth with its climate disaster theme. His stage directions specify that Darren wears a mask that covers most of his face; the playwright notes that the mask is “something we see and he does not.” At times during the play, the wall behind Darren’s worktable becomes a window that displays clouds, a heavy rainstorm or other inclement weather. (Projection design is by Smooch Medina.) 

Chicago theater veterans Reiter (London Road, Rose) and Ward (Rock n Roll, Chimerica) provide compelling, realistic performances as Edith and Darren. (I almost didn’t recognize Ward without his mustache.) Collins’ and Patin’s roles are smaller but give them the opportunity to display their comic talents. 

Lauren Nichols’ scenic design perfectly represents a mid-century living room (that starburst wall clock!), properly lit by Jared Gooding. Danny Rockett’s sound design, which we always appreciate in his role as resident sound designer at Trap Door Theatre, brings eerie and watery sounds as the flood approaches. Yvonne Miranda’s costume designs are especially clever in preparing Edith and Darren Junior for the watery end of the world. I also admired her choice of Edith’s spectator pumps.

Carl Collins and Sarah Patin. Photo by Liz Lauren.

Deen’s script shows his talent for sharp, witty dialogue and realistic character conflict. His other plays include The Betterment Society, The Vessel and The Shaking Earth. Director Prestininzi directed Flood in its world premiere at Kansas City Rep in 2022; Chicago actors Laura Fisher and Matt DeCaro starred. He teaches at Connecticut College and the National Theater Institute and has directed plays across the US and in other countries. 

Flood by Shattered Globe Theatre continues through March 9 at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont. Running time is 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are $15-$52 for performances Thursday-Sunday. Buy tickets and get more info at sgtheatre.org or call the Theater Wit box office at 773-975-8150,

For more information on this and other plays, see theatreinchicago.com.

Psalmayene 24 Set to Direct Arena Stage’s World Premiere of Tempestuous Elements

Kia Corthron’s new play explores the trailblazing career of Black feminist Anna Julia Cooper.

By Molly Higgins for Playbill.com

January 17, 2024

Playwright Kia Corthron

Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage has announced the cast and creative team for the world premiere of Kia Corthron’s Tempestuous Elements. The production will run at the Mead Center for American Theater’s Fichandler Stage February 16-March 17, 2024. 

Tempestuous Elements explores the trailblazing career of Black feminist Anna Julia Cooper, who served as principal of D.C.’s historic M Street School at the turn of the 20th century. While facing sabotage attempts from colleagues and neighbors, Cooper fights for her students’ right to an advanced curriculum and greater education equity. Psalmayene 24 will direct.

Psalmayene 24, set to Direct

The cast features Kelly Renee Armstrong (Our War), Peter Boyer (Holiday), Renea S. Brown (Change Agent) Gina Daniels (Roe), Jasmine Joy (POTUS), Paul Morella (All My Sons), Kevin E. Thorne II (Seven Guitars), Renee Elizabeth Wilson (Seven Guitars), Joel Ashur (Confederates), Ro Boddie (The Mountaintop), Jonathan Del Palmer (The Winter’s Tale), Brittney Dubose (The Window King), Yetunde Felix-Ukwu (Nollywood Dreams), Lolita Marie (The Brothers Paranormal), and Monique Paige (Breath, Boom).

“I was researching my play Fish, about the contemporary public school system, when I came across legendary writer/activist/speaker and primarily educator Anna Julia Cooper,” Corthron says. “She was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and lived to be 105, so had a long career. I was especially interested in her tenure as principal/teacher at D.C.’s renowned M Street School in the years around the turn of the twentieth century. So, when Arena Stage offered me a commission for a new play (the subject matter was up to me), I was eager to explore this Washington treasure.”

The creative team includes set designer Tony Cisek, costume designer LeVonne Lindsay, lighting designer William K. D’Eugenio, hair and wig designer LaShawn Melton, choreographer and associate director Tony Thomas, dialect and vocal coach Lisa Nathans, text director Anita Maynard-Losh, dramaturg Otis Ramsey-Zöe, casting director Joseph Pinzon, stage manager Christi B. Spann, and assistant stage manager Jalon Payton. The production also features original music and sound design by Lindsay Jones.

Tempestuous Elements is presented as part of Arena Stage’s Power Play Initiative, which commissions original works on politics and power in American history. The initiative focuses particularly on works which emphasize presidential, African American, and/or female voices; musicals that celebrate political ideas and events; or plays that present an exclusive perspective on the complex workings of American institutions or cultures. 

Visit ArenaStage.org.

THE HAPPIEST MAN ON EARTH by Mark St. Germain Wins a Berkie

Playwright Mark St. Germain
Kenneth Tigar as Eddie Jaku

The seventh annual Berkshire Theatre Critics Association Awards, known as the Berkies took place this week, where a total of 27 awards in 22 categories were presented for shows that were produced between Oct. 1, 2022 and Sept. 30, 2023 at theaters in and around the Berkshires.

The Sally and Robert Sugarman Award for a world premiere of a new play or musical was presented to playwright Mark St. Germain for The Happiest Man on Earth, produced by Barrington Stage Company. Kenneth Tigar’s performance in St. Germain’s play as concentration camp survivor Eddie Jaku earned him the award for outstanding solo performance.

Winners were announced Monday, Nov. 13, in ceremonies at Zion Lutheran Church on First Street, hosted by BTCA president J. Peter Bergman and Macey Levin.

In a new D.C. play, Lincoln’s head goes missing. Cue the laugh track.

‘Monumental Travesties’ at Mosaic Theater Company makes the vandalism of a controversial statue a source of comedy

Review by Peter Marks for The Washington Post

From left, Louis E. Davis, Jonathan Feuer and Renee Elizabeth Wilson in the world premiere of Psalmayene 24’s “Monumental Travesties,” by Mosaic Theater Company. (Chris Banks)

What says ally-ship quite like a White man with Black Lives Matter emblazoned on his tighty whities? It’s a question you’ve probably never thought of asking. But playwright Psalmayene 24 nevertheless seeks to answer it — er, cheekily — in “Monumental Travesties,” the entertainingly transgressive comedy getting a world premiere by D.C.’s Mosaic Theater Company.

Psalmayene 24 (nee Gregory Morrison) has written an absurdist three-character satire poking fun at all the pieties about race, especially as espoused by White liberals looking for absolution from their Black friends and associates. The subject is as ripe for ribbing today as was sending up Archie Bunker’s bigotry on “All in the Family” in the 1970s. Some of Psalmayene’s plot contrivances, in fact, reflect the blatantly cringe-making pivots of vintage sitcoms.

But the conventions of bygone TV comedy provide a surprisingly safe space for a subject around which thoughtful people still tread lightly (even if Psalmayene and Reginald L. Douglas, his skillful director at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, might rethink the 90-minute play’s ending, which lands with a confusing thud).

“I grew up in a house that used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad!” protests Jonathan Feuer’s Adam, the overbearing White neighbor desperate to establish his worthiness to the Black couple (Louis E. Davis and Renee Elizabeth Wilson) next door. It is in the becoming D.C. home of Davis’s Chance and Wilson’s Brenda — brightly rendered by set designer Andrew R. Cohen — that “Monumental Travesties” takes place. And that’s where the story begins when Chance, a local activist/performance artist, bursts in the front door, bearing the head of Abraham Lincoln.

A real-life controversy inspires the mechanics of “Monumental Travesties”: Chance has severed Lincoln’s head from the Emancipation Statue in D.C.’s Lincoln Park, a monument dedicated in 1876 that in recent years has been decried as a humiliating depiction of White savior mentality. (Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s delegate in Congress, has introduced legislation to have it removed.) The statue features a godlike Lincoln astride a kneeling, formerly enslaved man in a loincloth — his servile gratitude could not be more apparent.

Renee Elizabeth Wilson and Louis E. Davis in Mosaic Theater Company’s “Monumental Travesties,” directed by Reginald L. Douglas. (Chris Banks)

The giant head, by props designer Deb Thomas, sits on Chance and Brenda’s coffee table like an emblem of history’s ossified portrait of slavery from a White perspective; Chance’s vandalism is part of his campaign to “deconstruct symbols of White supremacy.” At one point, he enlists the compliant Adam in reversing the postures of the statue, having Adam prostrate himself before Chance in his living room. “So this is what it feels like, huh,” Chance remarks, “being White in America?”

The sharpest junctures of “Monumental Travesties” involve Chance and Brenda bearing witness to Adam’s outrageously self-serving platitudes. He’s so evolved, he insists, that he considers himself “un-White,” whatever that means, and so attuned to the injustices against people of color that he can recite from memory testaments to the indigenous Anacostan people on whose land his pricey townhouse sits. Chance and Brenda are not, for their part, above using Black victimhood to gain social and economic advantage: Brenda, for instance, concocts for Adam a shameful lie about a relative’s murder to explain the money she got to buy the house. (The truth, Psalmayene 24 implies, would be harder for a White person to believe.)

What’s also implicit in “Monumental Travesties” is the notion that conscientious people both Black and White still have to “act” for each other, that what they say in each other’s presence is a varnished version of what they really think. (Although the dramatist also points out that Brenda and Chance harbor problems and secrets, too, that they’re not willing to confront.) Chance’s absconding with Lincoln’s detached head is, in a sense, a cut to the chase about race: Talk isn’t good enough, he’s declaring, not even about the father of emancipation. Only action matters.

Davis, Wilson and Feuer demonstrate their acumen concerning broad comedy; their roles are archetypes, somewhat short of three dimensions, much the way sitcom characters are defined by a single trait recycled in one episode after another. Costume designer Moyenda Kulemeka gives pleasing pizazz to Brenda’s outfits, particularly the historic garb devised for the play’s final movement, when Brenda introduces another factual detail that complicates Chance’s facile rationale for his crime.

Under Douglas’s guidance, the actors amiably navigate the plot turns, which become ever crazier. The dramatist packs in so many curveballs that some are inevitably going to be wild pitches. (“Monumental Travesties” has to be the first play to use the brain fog resulting from long covid as a pivotal narrative point.) But even with some bumps, Psalmayene has paved a way for comedy to be another dramatic tool for understanding.

Monumental Travesties, by Psalmayene 24. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Set, Andrew R. Cohen; lighting, Alberto Segarra; costumes, Moyenda Kulemeka; sound Nick “the 1da” Hernandez. About 90 minutes. Through Oct. 8 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. mosaictheater.org.