C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, APRIL 1 , 2022
BY PETER MARKSTo Mona Pirnot, author of
Mosaic Theater Company’s ab-
sorbing dystopian dramedy, “Pri-
vate,” I make this simple request:
More, please.
That is to say, more play,
please! “Private” excavates the
up-to-the-minute terrain of what
about us digitally belongs to us.
But you’re just getting settled
into Pirnot’s intriguing premise
and characters when, 75 minutes
into the story, the playwright
pulls the plug. It isn’t often that a
serial playgoer, worn down by
other, wordier dramatists, watch-
es the lights come up and hopes
they go back down.
This sizzling one-act is a com-
pact exploration of the increas-
ingly nasty Big Tech habit of
reaching into corners of lives in
which it has no business nosing.
Staged with muscular authority
by Knud Adams — director of
off-Broadway’s recent critical hit,
“English,” at Atlantic Theater
Company — “Private” skillfully
zeroes in on one young aspira-
tional couple and the deeply un-
dermining manipulations of an
overbearing employer.
The play, mounted on Luciana
Stecconi’s sleek set in the Atlas
Performing Arts Center’s
Sprenger Theatre, christens the
leadership era of Mosaic Theater
Company’s new artistic director,
Reginald L. Douglas. The produc-
tion is an auspicious reset for an
organization traumatized in late
2020 by the resignation of its
founding artistic director, Ari
Roth, after staff complaints
about his management style.
(Roth is now busy devising a
festival of plays and also develop-
ing a play of his own, inspired by
his own Mosaic experiences, ti-
tled “My Brief but Calamitous
Affair with the Minister of Cul-
ture & Censorship, or the Death
of the Dialogic in the American
Theater.” It will have a reading at
Philadephia’s InterAct Theatre
Company on April 10.)
The 2022-2023 season will be
Douglas’s first opportunity to
program an entire roster of plays;
a director himself, Douglas re-cently staged a bracing version of
Suzan-Lori Parks’s “White Noise”
at his former home, Studio Thea-
tre. “Private,” though, prefigures
a ferocious embrace by Mosaic of
new American drama. Next up
will be Jackie Sibblies Drury’s
“Marys Seacole,” a powerful ac-
count of a Jamaican-born nurse
who worked with Florence
Nightingale during the Crimean
War.
“Private” anchors Mosaic nim-
bly in a disturbing near future,
and in the clash of values that
ruptures the relationship of
Corbin (Eric Berryman), a prod-uct engineer, and Georgia (Temí-
dayo Amay), a budding musician.
The start-up recruiting Corbin is
offering to double his salary, but
its unseen megalomaniacal head,
Raina, requires he consent to
round-the-clock monitoring of
all of his and Georgia’s comput-
ers and phones. “Threats of cor-
porate espionage,” explains Rai-
na’s creepily upbeat office stooge,
Abbey (Sophie Schulman).
Amay, one of the ensemble
members in Jocelyn Bioh’s
smashing “School Girls; or, the
African Mean Girls Play” at
Round House Theatre in 2019, isa superb channeler of the misgiv-
ings anyone might harbor about
this invasion. “I told you I did not
want to be under surveillance,”
Georgia tells Corbin, but as one
might expect, the sacrifice does
not seem a dealbreaker to the
partner for whom the job oppor-
tunity feels irresistible.
Berryman’s Corbin bends per-
suasively with the wind, thinking
he’ll be able to distract Georgia
with the material things she de-
sires — the tangible gains repre-
sented here by the shrink-
wrapped couch that arrives in
their flat, a handsome emblem ofCorbin’s betrayal. Pirnot, though,
builds a compelling case for the
toxic suspicion that spreads like
an oil slick over a relationship
after corporate Big Brother ag-
gressively inserts itself in person-
al affairs. That poisonous trend is
illuminated in the discord sewn
after Corbin becomes aware that
Georgia has shared with her ex,
Ben Katz’s Jordan, the extent of
her discomfort.
One of the ironies of “Private”
is that it takes the overreach of an
external entity to prompt Corbin
and Georgia to a more profound
magnitude of honesty with each
other. With its elegant plotting
and direction, “Private” lulls you
into such a satisfied state of
expectation for delving further
into the paradoxes that the play’s
sudden end comes as a disap-
pointing jolt.
Perhaps it’s the attractive en-
ergy the couple exudes, as they
progress through a particularly
meaningful encounter, that
leaves me wanting more. And
maybe Pirnot has said all she
intends to. I guess I’ll have to live
with that, and with the caution-
ary limbo in which this short,
smart play suspends us.Private, by Mona Pirnot. Directed by
Knud Adams. Set, Luciana Stecconi;
costumes, Danielle Preston; lighting,
Masha Tsimring; sound, Kenny Neal.
About 75 minutes. Live
performances through April 17 at
Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H
St. NE. A streaming version begins
April 4. 202-399-7993 Ext. 2.
mosaictheater.org.THEATER REVIEW
In ‘Private,’ we ponder where to draw the line on corporate surveillance
CHRIS BANKS/MOSAIC THEATER
Georgia (Temídayo Amay) and Corbin (Eric Berryman) i n Mosaic Theater’s “Private,” which explores what about us digitally belongs to us.Foreign Service, she (Sarah Lan-
cashire) a minor celebrity about
town after the publication of her
first book, the best-selling “Mas-
tering the Art of French Cook-
ing.” According to this version of
events, Julia comes up with the
idea of a show where she teaches
the housewives of Boston “how
to taste life,” as the (mostly)
adoring Paul puts it, via butter,
cream and wine.
Created by Daniel Goldfarb,
“Julia” knows exactly what kind
of show it’s supposed to be. On
offer are mouthwatering close-
ups of food, endless variations on
Child’s breathy warble and food
and sex puns galore. (My person-
al favorite: “It’s meant to be
vigorous, boys!” grins Julia as
she whisks eggs on set in front of
her nearly all-male crew. “How
else does one achieve stiff
peaks?”) The show maintains an
ahistorically pop-feminist and
comfortingly gentle tone —
enough that the series could air
on PBS, were it not for all the
jokes at public television’s ex-
pense. When Paul displays a
knee-jerk reluctance about his
wife being on TV — a medium
he’s convinced is a loathsome fad
— her book editor Judith Jones
(Fiona Glascott) reassures him
that public television’s “mandate
is to educate,” adding, “It hasn’t
figured out how to do that with-
out putting people to sleep.”
We’re also treated to a mini
“Frasier” reunion between Pierce
and Bebe Neuwirth, who plays,
with a mixture of affecting grief
and sly sarcasm, Julia’s widowed
friend Avis DeVoto, whose volun-
teer work at “The French Chef”
TV REVIEW FROM C1 keeps her from becoming “an-
other grandmother with a drink-
ing problem.” And as Julia’s suc-
cess grows, she runs into fellow
luminaries such as James Beard
(Christian Clemenson) and Betty
Friedan (Tracee Ann Chimo), the
latter of whom questions, several
years before the Second Wave is
to begin in earnest, whether
Julia’s show offers women a
window into a new world or
simply chains them to their
stoves to make more time-con-
suming meals. (After acknowl-
edging the book royalties and
family money that funded “The
French Chef” in its first year, the
show somewhat disappoints in
its hesitation to acknowledge
that Child’s prime audience was
women like her — ones with
enough leisure time, disposable
income and open-minded family
members to whip up elaborate
and sometimes unfamiliar dish-
es.)
Like so many White-women-
centric shows in recent years,
from “Girls” to “GLOW,” “Julia” is
much better at tackling gender
than race. At Julia’s side from the
start is Alice Naman (played by
winsome newcomer Brittany
Bradford), a character based in
part on Child’s producer Ruth
Lockwood. Alice is a Black wom-
an in a sea of White men at her
network, but the show doesn’t
really grapple with her race in a
way that conveys the series’s
early-1960s Boston setting. (At
least Alice exhibits layers denied
to many of her counterparts; her
scenes with her convention-
hewing mother, played by Adri-
ane Lenox, feel truly lived-in.)
Still, based as it is on historical
events, “Julia” retains an aspira-
tional, even escapist quality —
it’s meant to be a confection.
Sexists and snobs are put in their
place with elan and a smile.
Everyone gets their just desserts.
Thankfully, Goldfarb balances
all this sweetness with a few
notes of resignation and terror.
Paul Child, who’s become a pop-
cultural symbol of husbandly
support, especially after Stanley
Tucci’s embodiment of a fantasy
of uxoriousness in “Julie & Julia,”
feels complicated again with this
iteration; an excellent Pierce
projects his character’s strenu-
ous efforts to channel his profes-
sional disappointments into
serving as his wife’s right-hand
man. For her part, Julia is re-
vealed to have romanticized the
more burdensome aspects of
their of-its-time marriage, such
as her need to strategize around
Paul’s (understandable) desire
for a sense of control.
Early in the pilot, Julia re-
ceives a diagnosis of menopause,
a milestone that unearths inse-
curities and heralds a possible
new phase in her affectionate but
dual-bedroomed marriage. She
starts to keep secrets from her
husband, anxious that “The
French Chef” might be her last
opportunity to pursue a dream,
however outlandish. Lancashire
is much more naturalistic than
Streep, giving us her character’s
fury and self-doubt as well as her
scheming and charisma. Even in
a show as sugarcoated as this
one, she lets us sample the tang
of fear just under the surface.Julia (45 minutes; eight episodes)
First three episodes now on HBO
Max. New episodes will stream
weekly.‘Julia’ takes on gender, sexism with whisk in hand
SEACIA PAVAO/HBO MAXSarah Lancashire
and Jefferson Mays
in “Julia.”
Lancashire gives
the character fury
and self-doubt, as
well as charisma.asset in her chosen career, fiction
writing. But though Krouse’s first
story collection, “Come Up and
See Me Sometime” was well-pub-
lished and well-received, and she
was seeing her work in places like
Granta and the New Yorker, none
of this was paying the bills. So,
when Grayson offered her a job as
a private investigator, she signed
on.
Krouse spent the next several
years investigating what became
a high-profile case, amply covered
in the national media, centering
on sexual assaults at a party dur-
ing a college football recruiting
weekend. (Krouse doesn’t name
the school, but it is easily recog-
nizable as the University of Colo-
rado at Boulder.) She interviewed
victims, perpetrators, witnesses
and even a local madam, ap-
proaching each of them with not
just her seemingly magical face,
but her equally impressive skills
of empathy and discernment. She
can usually tell when people are
lying and developed additional
tricks of the trade as she went
along, for example, learning to
mirror the language of her sub-
jects.
“We’re just talking here, right?”
was a phrase players often inter-
jected into their accounts of their
behavior. So she began using it
herself, finding that it helped peo-
ple open right up. She also
learned to divide her subjects into
two types. “Yes-witnesses” like to
agree, thus should be asked ques-
tions like “So you were expected
to get the recruits drunk?” To get a
“no-witness” going, it’s the oppo-
site. “So you didn’t hear what
happened that night?” “No, I did... ” they will protest. It’s fascinat-
ing to see these skills in action in
her detailed accounts of her inter-
views.
As the investigation progress-
es, Krouse unfurls a storyline as
compelling as any detective nov-
el. “Lawsuits are about stories,”
Grayson tells her. “Sad stories. We
still have to create a narrative, but
a bigger one, the story of a system.
Focus your lens wider, on the
program as a whole, how it’s run.
Recruiting. Football.” To pros-
ecute the case using Title IX, they
would have to prove not only that
the alleged rapes occurred, but
also that there was persistent ha-
rassment of women, that the
coach knew about it, and that the
university was “deliberately indif-
ferent” to the problem.
From the moment she began
investigating the rape case,
Krouse knew she was taking a
personal risk. Having been sexu-
ally abused starting at a young
age by a man she calls only “X,”
the details of this investigation
triggered her pain and trauma at
every turn.
“The deeper I sank into my
work, the more I wanted to see my
mother. It seemed like all the
people in the case — survivors,
players, witnesses — were in con-
stant contact with their mothers.
... They relied on parents for
help, advice, comfort, perspec-
BOOK WORLD FROM C1tive, advocacy. I knew my mother
would not give me those things,
but I still felt a blistering need to
see her, to understand her denial
of me.”
Krouse pleaded with her moth-
er to visit; because of X, who
remained close to her mother,
Krouse had not been home in 10
years, nor would she ever return.
Unable to escape the delusion
that her mother could become a
parent like the ones other people
seemed to have, Krouse became
increasingly unmoored. It’s hard
to imagine how badly things
could have turned out if she
hadn’t developed an intractable
case of ringworm in her armpits
contracted from a Brazilian jujit-
su opponent who worked with
tigers. She was sent to an acu-
puncturist named JD who
promptly cured her, fell in love
with her and stuck by her side as
she navigated the parallel hell -
scapes of her past and the investi-
gation.
By 2004, the scandal had hit
the national media, students were
protesting on campus and “a hid-
den world of athletic money” had
been unearthed by auditors. Yet
the school’s head football coach
was voted Big 12 Coach of the Year
by the Associated Press. But what
had been sacrificed in pursuit of
his 8-5 season and Big 12 North
championship? Without absolv-
ing the players for their actions,
Krouse lays a steaming bag of
blame at the doorstep of the coach
and his organization. “Perhaps by
ghettoizing these men, isolating
them, removing consequences,
delivering regular blunt force
trauma to their brains, and teach-
ing them daily to hurt people, the
university was molding an elite
group of potential perpetrators
for its own financial gain.”
As gifted as she is at listening,
Krouse is equally good at telling a
story. There are many memorable
characters in “Tell Me Every-
thing” — from the plus-size sex
worker to the beady-eyed coach to
the incomparable Mr. Fixit that is
JD — but it’s Krouse’s own perso-
na, with her supernatural powers,
her supersize wounds and her
spiritual speedball of courage and
vulnerability, that makes this
book mesmerizing on every page.Marion Winik, a professor at the
University of Baltimore, is the author
of numerous books, including “First
Comes Love,” “The Big Book of the
Dead” and, most recently, “Above Us
Only Sky.”W riter’s skills unlockedtestimony in assault caseCOURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Author Erika Krouse.