Based on the Michael Pollan work by the same name, Prof. Natsu Onoda Power’s adaptation of The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a fresh take on a rotten food industry.

The two-hour experience–bookended by two on-stage portions and anchored by a middle third of interactive vignettes staged throughout the Davis Performing Arts Center–deftly illustrates issues ranging from the abuse of industrial cattle to the gas-guzzling habit of shipping out-of-season produce.

I’m generally wary of interactive theater; as a rule, the audience can’t act. But quality staging and spot-on comedic timing keeps the interactive portion from straining the dramatic tension.

“Meal of Fortune” is a hilarious illustration of the income disparities in access to quality, healthy food. The audience members draw tokens and a fascinating rally of human pinball ensues: kudos to Justine Underhill (COL ’11) for the roller skate acrobatics!

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This weekend there’s a lot happening on the performing-arts front, from Shakespearean classics and a reimagined Sabrina Fair to Pauly D of Jersey Shore fame. (His hair counts as performance art, right?)

Friends, Romans, Countrywomen

Never read the play? Maybe Mean Girls can jog your memory.

An all-female cast takes on Ancient Rome in a gender-driven spin of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Taffety Punk Theatre Company puts on a fierce interpretation of the tale of Rome’s most famous emperor, with actresses clad in all-black street clothes working amidst sparse décor, set to electro-punk background tunes.

Julius Caesar, which closes this weekend, is performed Wednesday through Saturday. $10.

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Kevin Bender (COL ’09) as George

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town,”a play about the little things,” as it is often described, is so ubiquitous among small theaters that one can reasonably expect any new production to be an attempt to “make it new.” The collaboration between the Georgetown University Theater and Performance Studies Program and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, which Vox saw yesterday as a open rehearsal screening, is no exception.

For their purposes, directors Sarah Marshall and Derek Goldman have thrown the cast list to the wind and distributed the parts of Our Town‘s two main characters among several different actors, who make a habit out of butting in or butting out mid-scene. Every actor plays the Stage Manager, the play’s narrator, even as they simultaneously play the milkman, the organist, or a mom.

The switcheroos are executed well enough, and there is enough continuity between actors that this doesn’t turn out to be the quite as distracting of a gimmick as it could have been. But with so many actors interpreting them, the main characters lose all their nuance and fail to develop. And for a play that’s in part about growing up and change, that’s a pretty flagrant failing.

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