Most of Rothe’s play is set in December of 1974, when John Mitchell was on trial for his role in the Watergate cover-up while Martha, barred from the courtroom, watched from her peach-hued boudoir on New York’s Fifth Avenue, tanked on Tanqueray and “blowing her whistle to the wind.” The piece, which premiered in 2006 at Shakespeare & Company, is almost but not quite a one-woman show whose one woman renders her irrepressible subject a Southern belle slightly beyond her shelf life but hardly cracked — and savvy enough that such reliable journalists as UPI’s Helen Thomas relied on her. Timothy Sawyer sits in for stony John Mitchell, mostly brandishing his pipe behind a picture frame but occasionally emerging to flirt with and then clamp down on and cruelly reject Martha. Although most of Martha Mitchell Calling is an entertaining if cautionary history lesson, it turns tragic at the end, less because Martha gets cancer than because she realizes to her dismay than her husband has chosen to fall not for her effusive charms but on Nixon’s sword.
Related:
Autumn garden, Crucibles, Cracking the wise, More 
- Autumn garden
It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.
- Crucibles
There was room for more than one young Jewish diarist in the occupied Amsterdam of World War II. Anne Frank, who died as a teen, is a 20th-century icon. But until recently, her feisty innocence hid Etty Hillesum's fire.
- Cracking the wise
I don’t know that David Mamet’s is a fine Romance , and it certainly doesn’t conjure love at first scene.
- Ducks and dicks
If the American Repertory Theatre is renewing its vows to David Mamet, several of whose plays it premiered in the 1990s, the double bill of The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago will do nicely for something old and something blue.
- Proud to jump the shark
Who but David Mamet would have the macho audacity to name his TV show after the male genitalia?
- A Dark Night with Mamet and a Mad Horse
Circling the central mystery of The Cryptogram are a camping trip, the provenance of a German pilot's knife, and a young boy's "sleep issues."
- Play by Play: May 22, 2009
Boston's theater schedule
- Play by Play: May 1, 2009
Theater around town
- Sox trump comedy
"Being bitter is poison and bitter will kill you. Bitter is a root that will grow a poopy tree of death."
- Interview: Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs
"Opera fans have often puzzled over the fact that Poppea does not appear to have a character the audience wants to root for, since everyone has seriously objectionable traits."
- Booty call!
"Ladies and gentlemen," a cheerful female voice informs the Huntington Theatre audience, "the Caribbean Light Opera Society is proud to present Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder'd)." The governor, she continues, wants to assure us that there is almost no danger of a pirate attack during the performance.
- Less
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Theater
, Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle, Annette Miller, More
, Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle, Annette Miller, Martha Mitchell, Martha Mitchell, Jodi Rothe, Jodi Rothe, John Mitchell, Helen Thomas, Charles Smith, Less
