Talk about a busman's holiday. When Woolly Mammoth Theater Company's founding artistic director Howard Shalwitz needs a break, he returns to his roots as an actor. With the theater celebrating its twentieth season next year, he's dedicated two decades to providing cutting edge drama (including 20 world premieres), to the evolving Washington theater scene. Although Shalwitz picks his roles carefully, he could not pass up a comic gem like Stanley Rutherford's one-man show, The Chinese Art of Placement.
As directed with exquisite comic intelligence by Lee Mikeska Gardner, Sparky Litman (Shalwitz) is a nebbish with a phone fetish. It's not that Sparky is a non-achiever. Take those military medals, earned behind enemy lines. How proud his folks were, who are now resting comfortably in the basement in urns, arranged in tasteful Egyptian style by their dutiful son, alongside the grandparents and next-door neighbors. So what if he earned the CIA mission as the spook most doomed to failure? "I was born to be a dupe," Sparky sighs.
Sad, too, that his most profound sexual experience should have been a hand job given in plain sight of the passengers on the Trans-Siberian line by "Eva," the beautiful counter-espionage agent -- "like Marlene Dietrich" -- while she was distracting him to steal the information encoded on a ruby and hidden in his pants. Shalwitz loves playing losers, and Sparky ranks right up there. Appropriately, the show shares a set with Billy Aronson's The Art Room, set in a mental hospital. With the grey walls and barred windows designed by Robin Stapley (as a backdrop), Sparky's "oasis" inside his home is his hexagonal grey rug (that matches the stripes on his white shirt and shoes). Just yesterday (literally) he quit his career as a horny poet, whose job was "...to assault people" with words and switched his goal to being a normal person. If only he could "secure the perimeter" of his sacred space by positioning his red wooden chair in keeping with the "flow of the chi" of the room.
As part of his striving for "normalcy," he's planning a party for the next night, "one of those stand-up things...completely non-threatening" where they serve little hot dogs with sweet and sour sauce. Skittishly approaching the red phone on the table like an untrained pilot entering the cockpit on his first flight, he dials his would-be guests. Miss Tina Turner, of course, (whom he will seat in the "position of fame" on the rug) gets an invite because "I'm in love with her." Trauma has frozen each disastrous life event in Sparky's mind, and by time he calls and insults the girl from high school who unknowingly broke his heart (as if the incident were on the nightly news), we fear the party's over before it began. This balding, bow-tied innocent whom Shalwitz portrays with such grace could be the "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing" described by T.S. Eliot in "Preludes." There is hope for Sparky only in Rutherford's compassion, as Sparky plays fool to his own King Lear, frantically spouting insight without alleviating his pain.
