Day 31/365 - Boom

Tonight I went to see the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's production of 'Boom', by up-and-coming playwright (and marine biologist) Peter Sinn Nachtrieb. I did my usual trick of getting my ticket through Ticketplace for half-price, which left me more money to splurge on dinner and drinks before the show at Café Atlantico (two passionfruit martinis, scallops and coconut rice appetizer, jerk chicken mofongo entree, cappuccino, and warm chocolate cake with banana dessert -- damn, it was good).

This was my first time going to see a Woolly Mammoth production. They specialize in quirky, funny, more daring, off-Broadway type plays. I think one of the reasons I'd never been to one of their shows before was because of their ridiculous name. Unlike Smuckers, with a name like Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company I thought they had to be bad and that they would put on pretentious, inaccessible, annoyingly experimental, avant garde solely for the sake of being avant garde, too cool for school type productions. Nope. They just do odd, small, funny, smart plays that you'd be hard-pressed to see anywhere else. The name is still stupid, though.

WMTC has a new theatre in the Penn Quarter section of Washington, DC and it's a very well-designed space. The theatre itself is small but doesn't feel cramped. It's a bit like a modern, cinder-blocks and exposed wiring version of an Elizabethan theatre with a U-shaped seating area (both groundlings and balcony) around three sides of the stage. It's a good space with good sightlines, good acoustics, and good seats and it doesn't detract or distract from the productions in any way -- which is really all you need in a theatre.

Now, onto the play itself. Boom was funny and excellent. Excellently funny, funnily excellent. It's a one-act, 90-minute long play with three cast members -- two of whom (Aubrey Deeker and Sarah Marshall) are brilliant in their roles and one of whom (Kimberly Gilbert) starts out a little awkward and stilted but definitely gets better as the play goes along. The plot involves a biologist who becomes convinced the world is about to end in a catastrophic natural disaster and who then places an ad for a sex partner in order to lure a woman to his lab/apartment/fallout shelter.

The summary makes the plot sound a bit creepy, but it's not. The writing is excellent with sharp and clever dialogue and in 90 scant minutes it manages to serve up a primordial soup incorporating adaptation, natural selection, the Garden of Eden, the persistence of life, the survival instinct, intelligent design, evolution, mutation, fate, destiny, free will, determinism, the nature of sexuality, deism, deus ex machina, the Wizard of Oz, chaos, justice, obsession, sex, love, and dating.

Sticking with the soup analogy, it's 'mmm, mmm good', so go and see it. It runs nightly through December 7th and most days Ticketplace has seats available for $25-30.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)