Tiny Kushner

Tiny they may be, but there's a lot going on in these five playlets by Tony Kushner. Yet while they leave you feeling faintly bedazzled, by the time you've finished rubbing your eyes, you find yourself wondering what it all adds up to. Real-life characters and events receive typically surreal, freewheeling treatment from the playwright, while Tony Taccone's Guthrie/Berkeley Repertory Theater production zips along, even if there's little emotional depth beneath the surface glitter. The result is a quirky combination of biography and political and social history, in which the most colourful details often turn out to be true (Geraldine and King Zog, for example, really did set off on their honeymoon in a red sports car that was a gift from Hitler). Picking through the zaniness is fun, in a cryptic-crossword kind of way. But the characters are mostly shallow stereotypes, and it's only the final piece, in which former First Lady Laura Bush begins to count the human cost of her husband's foreign policy, that has lasting impact. The cast manages to negotiate the manic demands of the material with focus and precision. But this is a fireworks display of invention and erudition, bright, noisy, and quick to fade away.