It’s a U.S. Supreme Court argument like none you’ve ever seen: justices scooting around on their chairs like whirling dervishes, advocates pushing their lecterns back and forth, one lawyer even orating and dancing — briefly — without benefit of clothing. At one point, two justices hold a side conference that looks a lot like making out.
That is how the play “Arguendo,” which opened April 1 and runs through the end of the month at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, holds its audience through the inevitably dull stretches of a high court argument. The play’s script, after all, is drawn verbatim from the 1991 argument in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, a dispute over nude dancing.
