Sarah Marshall, Delivering Twice the Fun (washingtonpost.com)

Sarah Marshall, Delivering Twice the Fun (washingtonpost.com): "Uncle Joe Stalin doesn't seem like a monster in Howard Barker's political-historical fantasy 'The Power of the Dog,' presented by those lovers of British avant-garde theater, the Longacre Lea company. The play is at Catholic University's Callan Theatre through Sunday.



As a starting point for what becomes a fanciful meditation on war, power and coercion of the masses, Barker uses an actual 1944 Kremlin meeting between World War II allies Stalin and Winston Churchill. Director Kathleen Akerley and her cast viewed newsreel footage of the two men for research.



The play moves between the Kremlin (where a Scottish comedian has been shanghaied to entertain Churchill) and the Eastern front, where a photographer records atrocities, a Red Army unit shoots a propaganda film, a young woman searches for the body of her hanged sister.



'I just thought it was so incredibly wonderfully written,' says Akerley.



'The fact that it hasn't been professionally produced in this country was completely baffling to me. . . . I feel what he's saying is that you can't understand a war until you've looked at it from everyone's perspective. In that sense, I don't consider it a straightforward antiwar piece.'



She tackled the sprawling play with her company of young, gung-ho actors by doubling up on characters. In the troupe's low-tech performance space, special effects are tough. 'The biggest challenge probably facing us was the hanging,' says Akerley. With Adam Magazine's lighting and fight captain Lewis Shaw's expertise, the scene has grim authenticity. Actress Fiona Blackshaw, 'our resident dead woman,' says Akerley, 'was very game about it.' "