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Simpson’s funny and moving tale is more successful, though its ambling pace and episodic structure may exasperate lovers of tight narrative. Directed by Nicole A. Watson, the play depicts a cathartic cross-country road trip taken by four New York City-based friends. They stake a rightful claim to America, visiting such diverse spots as the Grand Canyon and the Kansas home of (purportedly) the world’s largest ball of twine. Along the way, June (Erin Margaret Pettigrew), Frankie (Cristina Pitter), Rain (Afua Busia) and Willie (Dezi Bing) banter, fret and commune. Ever present is the awareness that being Black, and femme, as they are, can be a dangerous business in this country.
Trimming is needed, but the characterizations are vivid, and the fine cast makes hay with them. Pitter is particularly irresistible as the brusque Frankie. Adding lightness are stylized touches — including a spaghetti-western-style scene, one of several canny pop-culture nods — helped along by Tosin Olufolabi’s catchy sound design and Lawrence E. Moten III’s ebullient highway-vista set.
There’s timeliness to “We Declare You a Terrorist … ,” but the heavy-handed script and miscalculated high-tech staging disappoint. Directed by Ryan Rilette, Round House’s artistic director, and Jared Mezzocchi, a multimedia designer and expert in digital and hybrid theater, the play is based on the 2002 Dubrovka Theater crisis, in which Chechen militants, reacting to the war that Vladimir Putin’s Russia had waged on their homeland, seized a Moscow theater during a performance of a musical and held its audience hostage.
Lord’s play imagines the musical’s Writer (Cody Nickell, overemphasizing guilelessness) still struggling to process the trauma a year later. During an interrogation by an officer of the Russian security services (Elliott Bales, nicely menacing), the Writer remembers Dubrovka, including his conversation with a Chechen militant, Kayira (Ava Eisenson), and a teenage theatergoer named Masha (Bekah Zornosa, splendidly intermingling flippancy and fear).
The script etches the ideological conflicts in blunt fashion, and Kayira seems less a person than an idea. Then there’s the bold but dramatically problematic multimedia element: The Dubrovka scenes unfurl as projections, splayed across Moten’s aptly dingy detention-room set. Eisenson and Zornosa are in an offstage film studio, performing live, enabling their projected characters to converse in real time with the Writer, who in these sequences is both embodied onstage and visible as a projection.
Though it underscores the haunting power of memory, the approach saps vigor from the Dubrovka scenes: Clear as they are, the projections elide nuances of facial expression, body language and distance, clouding how the characters relate to one another. As a result, the hostage sequences feel less real and immediate than the plodding interrogation. One longs to see Kayira, Masha and the Writer interact in three dimensions.
If not satisfying, the visuals are arresting. When giant eyes stare out eerily from a proscenium frame, it’s a picture you can’t quickly unsee.
National Capital New Play Festival, featuring “It’s Not a Trip It’s a Journey” by Charly Evon Simpson (intimacy/cultural consultant, Dane Figueroa Edidi), 2 hours 15 minutes, and “We Declare You a Terrorist … ” by Tim J. Lord (multimedia design, Jared Mezzocchi; sound designer/composer, Matthew M. Nielson; fight choreography, Casey Kaleba), 1 hour 40 minutes. Costume design, Ivania Stack; lighting, Amith Chandrashaker; properties, Andrea “Dre” Moore. $55-$78. Through May 8 at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Hwy., Bethesda. roundhousetheatre.org.
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