by  CHARLOTTE JONES
Directed by John Vreeke

AMERICAN PREMIERE

Featuring Woolly company members Kimberly Gilbert & Sarah Marshall with Tiffany Fillmore, Beth Hylton, David Bryan Jackson & Tony Nam

"Vreeke's ANTIC staging brings out the weirdness [in] the CRACKPOT characters…a FIRST-RATE CAST" - City Paper

"RELENTLESSLY FUNNY…brisk, convincingly performed & wholly absorbing"- Express

ABOUT THE SHOW: From the internationally acclaimed author of Humble Boy comes an eccentric and hilarious collection of Bolton, England misfits. Josie, a dominatrix who feels ready to hang it all up, is dreading her 40th birthday - so her favorite client Lionel throws a party with a special musical guest! But the real surprise comes when a ghost from the past barges in, propelling this outrageous mix of edgy comedy, heart-throbbing humanity, and sheer ridiculousness - about the sort of love that gets you all shook up. RUNNING TIME: Approx. 2 hours, 20 min.

From Artistic Director, Howard Shalwitz: "What a quirky, original, and endearing play this is! Charlotte Jones has created a memorable collection of eccentric characters -- a dominatrix, an obsessive compulsive, a Chinese Elvis impersonator, and more -- but she has the empathy and sense of detail to make them totally human," said Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz. "The play is hilariously funny, but what comes through, above all, is its sense of compassion for people of all kinds, and its belief in their potential. Woolly Mammoth is thrilled and honored to be launching this unique holiday treat to American audiences."

At Woolly, Odd Birds Of a Feather

They would make for an unusual guest list, the characters in British playwright Charlotte Jones's 1999 comedy, "Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis": Josie, a prostitute-dominatrix; Brenda-Marie, Josie's mentally challenged adult daughter; Timothy Wong, a gay, Vietnamese English Elvis impersonator; and Martha, an obsessive-compulsive housecleaner. The play, now in previews, opens Sunday at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and runs through Dec. 10.

"I knew I wanted to have an Elvis impersonator and a dominatrix," Jones e-mails from London. "But I wanted to see the domestic world of the dominatrix -- so Brenda-Marie was born. I never thought of the characters as dysfunctional -- or at least I was always interested in what lay beneath the dysfunction. I did want to write a comedy, yes, but a comedy with heart."
     
She mentions that one theatergoer said she "started off thinking, 'Who are these collection of weirdos? I wouldn't want to sit next to them on a train,' but she ended up by thinking, 'I want to invite them all to my house for Christmas dinner.' I have treasured that remark."

Jones, who has been in rehearsals in London for her new show, "The Lightning Play," which opens tomorrow at the Almeida Theatre, says she can't help mining family foibles for dramatic fuel. "Sometimes I think a writer has no control over their subject matter -- you write to scratch an itch, to get something out of your head -- and I think I, for my sins, write about parents and children."

John Vreeke, who is staging "Chinese Elvis," recognizes the pitfalls of a piece wearing its heart on its sleeve -- an unusual choice for Woolly, which leans toward comedies spiked with apocalyptic tragedy. To avoid what he calls the "over-saccharine," Vreeke says, the lines of the play must be plumbed "to find a kind of psychological reality and truthfulness for each of the characters. . . . If you can find that and anchor all of the comedic lines within that, then you'll avoid it being overly cute or sweet or sugary."
Jones, 38, wrote the script for Andrew Lloyd Webber's recent musical "The Woman in White," but is best-known for her much-awarded play "Humble Boy." A London hit in 2001-02, it ran in New York in 2003 and here at Washington Stage Guild in 2005. A modern riff on "Hamlet," "Humble Boy" is about a nerdy physicist, home for his father's funeral, who learns his mother had a longtime lover.

In "Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis," the family nearly implodes as unexpected arrivals and revelations salt old wounds. Yet it ends on a redemptive note. "This play is set on the Feast of Epiphany, and I wanted all the characters to have some sort of epiphany," Jones writes. "I think there is hope for them all. This is my most joyful play, I would say."
Woolly is having a come-dressed-like-Elvis performance Saturday at 8 p.m. Those who take the challenge will get discounted tickets.

How to Impersonate an Elvis Impersonator

November 17, 2006

Return of the Kink

By Bob Mondello

Everything old is new again, and for situational comedy that goes double. When Kaufman and Hart introduced audiences to their xylophone-playing, ballet-dancing, tax-evading, dart-throwing, basement-firework-making Sycamore clan in You Can’t Take It With You some 70 years ago, their farcical model was Plautus—by way of Shakespeare.

Today, when Brit playwright Charlotte Jones mines comic eccentricity to animate the Butting family of Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis, the influences range from Kaufman and Hart to Michael Frayn, with just a touch of Joe Orton thrown in. The domesticity is still warm, though the character-based laughs are a tad racier: It says something when a dominatrix is the most unremarkable creature on stage.

That would be Josie, a down-to-earth, family-oriented sex worker who sends her learning-challenged but imaginative daughter, Brenda-Marie, out to play in a backyard tent whenever a client requests a bit of discipline with his tea. When she’s not cracking a whip, Josie’s a sweetly devoted mom, and her home is inviting, warm, and absolutely immaculate, which doesn’t stop her obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, Martha, from polishing surfaces constantly.

“Look at this mess,” says Martha, gazing around the pristine living room. And once she has knocked five times, turned the doorknob five times, taken five steps, and distributed five towels, she’s ready to begin eliminating all manner of imaginary dust.

Today, as it happens, there will be more dust kicked up than usual, because one of Josie’s clients, an amiable, cross-dressing dry cleaner named Lionel, is throwing her a 40th birthday party. He’s mixed up a big pitcher of Catastrophes (a blue-green libation that looks about as lethal as its name), and to entertain he’s hired an Asian Elvis impersonator who’s brought his own smoke-machine, as well as a few changes of costume (deft work by Kate Turner-Walker, who also supplies the leather ’n’ lace discipline wear) so he can burst upon the scene as a svelte, studly hip-swiveler and morph into a flabby, rhinestone-encrusted King. This Elvis has come prepared, in short, for most eventualities and is flexible enough to continue smiling gamely even when a command performance of “The Wonder of You” requires him to croon while handcuffed to the coffee table.

Also on hand by the time he’s cuffed is Brenda-Marie’s twin sister Shelley-Louise, who more or less upends the festivities by returning from the dead (or at any rate, from self-imposed exile) as a birthday surprise for her mother. Since mom long ago convinced Brenda-Marie that her twin had died, this creates a domestic disconnect, and a few tears later, with Elvis acting as family counselorÉoh, you get the drift.

Now, apart from the fur-lined handcuffs and the cracking of the occasional whip, most of this would not have been terribly out of place in the sort of family comedy that thrived on Broadway in the ’30s. So what, you may ask, is Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis doing at Woolly Mammoth, D.C.’s house of the avant-garde? Truth be told, it’s not a perfect fit. The play’s sweetly insubstantial and hasn’t got the edgy eccentricity audiences have come to expect from this adventurous troupe. But if Jones’ just-be-yourself message is conventional, the crackpot characters are right up Woolly’s alley, and John Vreeke’s antic staging brings out the weirdness in the first-rate cast that embodies them.

Start with Sarah Marshall’s compulsive Irish housekeeper whose obsession with the number five is so persuasive that you half expect her to take that number of curtain calls at evening’s end. Counting softly to herself, she roams the stage scouring tables with her gaze, unnerved by dust, appalled at fingerprints, frantic about dirt-based infelicities of every stripe. Marshall’s eyes are among the most expressive instruments on a Washington stage, and when she sets them to vibrating after an unexpected compliment, she’s a flat-out riot. Leave this woman on an empty stage with a pitcher of Catastrophes, and you hardly need a playwright.

Kimberly Gilbert, meanwhile, is making Brenda-Marie the brightest dim bulb around. With restless fingers ever in motion and a fiercely engaged way of looking at the world (especially when racing around the room as a figure-skater-in-training), she seems less learning disabled than a gifted literalist. Told that someone has “skullduggery written across his face,” she makes puzzlement seem the only reasonable reaction. It’s easy to see why Tony Nam’s athletically gyrating, deep-voiced, comically Chinese Elvis might describe her as possessing an “ageless wisdom” before joining her in her tent to escape the escalating madness.

David Bryan Jackson, downright fetching in his fishnet stockings and frilly black-velvet French maid outfit, is likewise pretty out there. And if Beth Hylton’s whip-cracking dominatrix and Tiffany Fillmore’s wounded prodigal daughter seem more conventional, well, the playwright imagined them that way so there’d be some ballast when the going gets sentimental.

The Woollies have given the show’s American premiere a solid, two-story Tudor home that grounds the proceedings persuasively in the real world. Dan Conway’s chintz-wallpapered setting could do double duty for a Noises Off revival without so much as a shifted sofa. And sturdy as it looks, its walls turn effortlessly transparent at evening’s end, when Colin K. Bills looses a few nifty lighting effects to create a starry, Christmas-evoking snowstorm—which seems a fitting conclusion for a cheery little trifle that stands a decent chance of running right through the holidays. CP

A CurtainUp DC Review

WASHINGTONIAN

Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis

Reviewed by Chad Lorenz 

A comedy with equal parts absurdity and tenderness, is at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Restraint can be a talent. When you have a play about an aging dominatrix and her mentally disabled daughter and you add in a cross-dressing client, an obsessive-compulsive Catholic housekeeper, and an Asian Elvis impersonator, a playwright might be tempted to let things careen into chaotic absurdity.  Not Charlotte Jones.

In Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis, juicy characters pulled straight from a Jerry Springer script thinly mask a tender family story, rife with clever metaphors and hearty laughs. It’s a credit to Jones’s writing that it all comes together smartly and evenly.

On her 40th birthday, also the day of Epiphany, Josie has become tired of being a professional madame. Her life in England has become one of domestic comfort—you’d barely know she was in the sex biz. Her twenty -something daughter, Brenda-Marie, is sweet and loving and, by her own admission, “too simple.” She lives in an imaginary winter fantasyland where she yearns for snow and gives sports commentary on imagined ice-dancing competitions.

Longtime client Lionel is willing to forgo a spanking and set aside his petticoats for an evening so he can cheer Josie up by throwing her a birthday party. It also gives him a chance to make his move on the high-strung maid, Martha, who in her obsessive-compulsive behavior does everything in sets of five: turning doorknobs, walking up steps, dusting, and making the Sign of the cross.

One surprise of the evening—an Elvis act—turns out to be a ridiculous delight for the party; another, more personal surprise doesn’t go over as well, especially for Josie.

The rest of the well-paced play is spent fitting together these oddly shaped puzzle pieces of people into a complete picture. Before long the characters endear themselves to the audience.
All the while, secrets are revealed, metaphors pop, and revelations erupt. The use of Elvis, for instance, is more than a cute gag; there’s a surprising larger message about the mythology that lives on after death, and the running soundtrack of the King’s songs is particularly apt.

While Jones has penned the smart plot and dialogue that makes the characters work, director John Vreeke and his cast also deserve credit for animating them so well. Kimberly Gilbert skillfully balances the comedy of her role as the mentally challenged Brenda-Marie with a sensitivity that avoids the condescending stereotype; she proves to have the most enlightened perspective at all. Tony Nam plays Elvis impersonator Timothy Wong with charm and has the hip and vocal acrobatics down. The always-funny Sarah Marshall is a hilarious Martha, but her fumbling with an Irish accent distracts from most of her lines.

As Josie, Beth Hylton is the strong, nurturing mother with a hidden vulnerability. She was convincing as such except in the one scene where it counted most: Her attempt to reconcile with her past felt rushed and lacked the tenderness the moment called for.

Where Chinese Elvis succeeds most is in its honesty—honest emotions, honest wisdom, and honest laughs. All three culminate in the play’s satisfying ending, a funny, heartwarming scene capped with a little magic. Just right for the holidays.

Holiday Trip

Woolly Mammoth takes on the holiday season with a strange and brilliant 'Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis'

Ah, the holidays, a time when all the old theatrical chestnuts come out. There's The Nutcracker and A Christmas Carol. And don't forget this other tale as old as time, set on The Feast of the Epiphany:

Dominatrix/mother of a mentally challenged adult daughter turns 40 and begins to doubt her chosen profession. Client of the dominatrix/single mum, a suburban dry cleaner with a fondness for being humiliated while wearing women's clothing, throws a party where the guest list includes the birthday girl's ultra-religious housecleaner and a Chinese Elvis impersonator-in-training. Oh, and the housekeeper suffers from a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder that causes her to count to five when anxious. And the daughter dreams of becoming a world-famous ice dancer. And the Chinese Elvis is actually Vietnamese. And gay.

And there's a tent. And snow. And an aptly named lime green drink called ''A Catastrophe.''

Okay, so it's not actually a well-worn holiday chestnut, but with its production of Charlotte Jones' Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company has turned the holiday show on its head to spectacular results. From its jewel box of a set to a cast that shines brighter than the silver tinsel tree in the center of the stage, Woolly has taken full advantage of this strange but brilliant play.

While there is an urge to rush forward and give proper praise and applause to the actors, full ovations must be given to playwright Charlotte Jones. Best known for her award-winning play Humble Boy (2001), Jones also wrote the book for The Woman in White (2004), an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. A deft writer with the ability to take an audience from flat-out humor to genuinely heartfelt sadness, Jones offers an original and compelling voice. After all, it's not every show that ends a bitter mother-daughter battle with a line like, ''I'm sorry Elvis. This has nothing to do with you.''

Everyone in Director John Vreeke's cast is wonderful to watch on stage, although there is occasionally a desire to feel that some are in better control of their character.

Sarah Marshall plays Martha, the housekeeper, with a dryness and restraint that makes her a sheer delight to watch. Marshall has a keen sense of her audience and knows when to play a gag a bit longer or reel it in short. One is tempted to refer to her as a great comedienne but that would dismiss some of the lovely dramatic turns she takes during the show. In the end, Marshall is simply a great actor.

Beth Hylton, as dominatrix Josie, appears to be having a great deal of fun in her performance, which would seem to be an easy task when one is playing a dominatrix suffering her way through a midlife crisis. Kimberly Gilbert is Josie's daughter Brenda Marie, who dreams of ice dancing for Canada (despite the fact that she lives in England). Here again is an instance where an actor's ability is seriously tested and absolutely proven. It would be easy for Gilbert to play Brenda Marie's disability for quick laughter. But Gilbert takes great care with her performance. The audience most definitely laughs with the young woman and not at her.

Tony Nam's Chinese Elvis is a marvelously written character whose true heart is sometimes lost beneath the sight gags. And David Bryan Jackson's Lionel wobbles a bit between being lonely and sweet, which appears to be Jones's intention, to coming off a bit lecherous and frightening. None, however, should feel anything but pride in their performances.

It is highly unlikely that Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis will become an annual holiday fixture. All the more reason to take advantage of this gift D.C. theater audiences have been offered by the people at Woolly Mammoth.

Christmas Cheer and an Elvis Impersonator

by Rachel Baird
Hatchet Reporter