Summer diversions shine: ‘Donogoo and ‘Atomic’

With the weather so uncertain there’s currently not one but hundreds of options you can choose to exchange humidity and flood warnings for serendipity! Among the offerings are two plays that explore vastly different realms of creativity and both equally spellbinding in serving up lessons of perseverance.
At The Mint Theater, which exhumes treasures of yesteryear, “Donogoo,” a 1930 comedy that inaugurated Paris’ famed Theater Pigalle — and saved its spanking new high-tech facilities from becoming a financial disaster—is currently sharing the comic tale based on Jules Romains’s 1920 novel. This blithe laugh-fest explodes the fated meeting of Lamendin, a man on the verge of suicide and Le Trouhadec — a geography professor longing for election to the Academy of Sciences. Together, in this increasingly hilarious spoof they create a stock market swindle of global proportions, which finds, first, potential investors, then clamoring hordes of the same — all lured by the prospect of gold in a far-off nirvana; albeit Donogoo exists only in the increasingly creative minds of the swindlers!
Although created to use the Pigalle’s state of the art (in 1929) technology — the intimate Mint has pulled off the miracle of creating the nonexistent country via Roger Hannah’s inspired sets that bring us a Paris bridge, bar and bank office (where the winds of fraud are set spinning) to a South American jungle where the hordes arrive to pan for gold. Sam Fleming’s costumes are spot-on. So is Price Johnston’s evocative lighting- with Gus Kaikkonen’s direction comically sublime. Perhaps most delicious though, is the way this comedy, via its jewel of a cast serves up a Ponzi prank whose variations have persisted to this day!