Reviews

Are in for LONESOME HOLLOW. My favorite has got to be a screed from the washington times.

Some nice remarks from the Baltimore Sun:

And an "eh" from the Washington Post.


Two plays running at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival here provide contrasting lessons in the fine art of rhetoric.

Both the controversial "My Name is Rachel Corrie" and the highly pedigreed "Lonesome Hollow" have strong opinions they seek to advance. But the latter does so far more effectively.

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But first, let's give the real Rachel Corrie a break. The 23-year-old native of Olympia, Wash., had no idea she was writing a play when she penned diary entries and wrote emails home to family members and friends. She merely was thinking out loud.

It was only after Corrie died in March 2003 during a protest on the Gaza Strip that her private writings were mined for theatrical release. When members of the Jewish community in the United States protested that the resulting one-actor play was anti-Semitic, it resulted in the cancellation of a planned run on Broadway -- and loud protests of censorship.

The silver lining -- sort of -- is that Rachel Corrie is nowhere close to being a good enough play to endanger the state of Israel. It too often takes the form of a diatribe, especially in the second half. Not only is the play polemical, it often is boring, despite the luminous appeal of actress Anne Marie Nest.

When the script's didacticism is combined with the above-average temperatures in the Studio Theatre and a dark room, the result can be positively soporific.

"Lonesome Hollow," a world premiere by acclaimed playwright Lee Blessing ("A Walk in the Woods") avoids these pitfalls.

The show is set in a futuristic United States in which child molesters are warehoused in special communities. Two inmates of one such town are Nye (a menacing Lou Sumrall), a brutal pedophile; and Tuck (the engaging Sheffield Chastain), a famous artist whose main crime seems to be that he photographed teen-age girls.

"Lonesome Hollow" has echoes of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "A Clockwork Orange," and the argument that the play advances -- that big government can do more damage to average citizens than the criminals it is trying to control -- is neither original nor subtle.

But Blessing doesn't stack the deck. He chooses the worst crime he can imagine against our population's most cherished and vulnerable subgroup: children. The playwright also is smart enough not to divide his characters into angels and demons. The audience later discovers that the sympathetic Tuck slept with one of his models, a 16-year-old girl.

Blessing presents a real dilemma and allows the audience to watch him wrestle with it. The result is both thought-provoking and devastating.

And the washington post: ouch

"Lonesome Hollow," on the other hand, channels an unease that's moral rather than economic. Blessing has conjured an Orwellian future in which sex offenders are imprisoned for life in concentration camps, and where even artists who work with nudity are threatened by encroaching despotism. In the camp of Lonesome Hollow, the gentle photographer Tuck (Sheffield Chastain) rubs shoulders with a pedophile named Nye (the splendidly leering Lou Sumrall), while the tyrannical but sexy bureaucrat Mills (Cirie) patrols with a Taser in her purse.

Although apparently inspired by news accounts of the warehousing of ex-convict sex offenders, "Lonesome Hollow" -- directed by Hal Brooks -- could double as an over-obvious parable about the Patriot Act. Blessing spoon-feeds his audience with an idea they could probably grasp on their own: that creeping totalitarianism -- even if motivated by good intentions -- is, well, a bad thing.

For added profundity, the dramatist sticks in a whopping metaphor: Tuck is building a labyrinth as a tool for spiritual contemplation -- a brick outline that broods in the center of the grassy set. Is society entering an ethical maze it will not be able to escape? If you don't register the question, or spot its relevance to the war on terror, you might need a wake-up blast from Mills's Taser.