Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Lynn Nottage’s most recent play By The Way, Meet Vera Stark has arrived in Los Angeles for it West Coast premiere this week at the opening of the fall season for the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. The play is a distinctly light-hearted follow-up to Nottage’s last stunner of a play, Ruined about the atrocities of war faced by African women on this very planet in these very days. But even though we are making the acquaintance of Vera Stark for the first time, Nottage is treading territory and a certain light-hearted tone familiar to her audiences in such works as Intimate Apparel. Vera Stark is an actress in a time and place, 1930s Hollywood, where African-American women rarely get the opportunity to do any work at all in their chosen profession. In fact much of the evening deals with Stark’s relationships with the white folks she works with as she struggles to find her place in a town where she and her friends are largely unwelcome outside of serving in a variety of domestic and supporting roles both on screen and off.

But Stark, a sharp sly Sanaa Lathan, perseveres landing a large role, though it is still as a maid, in the fictional 1930s classic film “The Belle of New Orleans” opposite her white friend, cousin, starlet and employer Gloria Mitchell, played here by Amanda Detmer. This film will end up establishing Stark’s name in cinematic history and serves as the substrate for the play’s second act ostensibly set during a modern–day film conference where fake scholars debate the legacy of Stark while also revisiting her last filmed interview as part of an appearance opposite Mitchell in a 1970s TV talk show guest spot. If it sounds like the play gets “meta” it does. But not necessarily successfully. Filmed segments are mixed with live action here including a live performance recreation of the video interview segment from the 1970s. While the first half of the show has an almost madcap sitcom feel to it with Stark and her friends desperately trying to finagle roles in a big Hollywood film, the second half portends to be far more sophisticated. It rarely succeeds in getting there, though, as director Jo Bonney burdens the academic conference framing device with stock cartoon faux-academic caricatures that grouse and mug for comic effect in what struck me as an unintentional parallel to the minstrelsy that Stark and her friends find themselves constrained to recapitulate in an effort to work breaking down walls in their own chosen field.

It is the confused tone that makes By The Way, Meet Vera Stark most frustrating. The show goes deliberately for cheap laughs when in range of making its biggest points. Nottage also seems uncertain of how to balance this content against the drama of the interpersonal relationship and history of Mitchell and Stark, which at times is offered up as a mystery only to be abandoned in favor of other pursuits and never revisited. The play does cover territory worth considering, though, and despite its faults and the missteps of an overly jocular production, By The Way, Meet Vera Stark does manage to give voice to a particular moment in American cultural history with respect to African-American women that doesn’t always make it way on real life stages. The show continues at the Geffen through the 28th of October.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse

William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist and the subsequent 1973 film adaptation by William Friedkin is perhaps best remembered for some of Friedkin’s most bracing side effects. The spinning head of Regan, in a career defining performance for better-or-worse by the young Linda Blair, moments of levitation, and spewing vomit still come to mind for an entire generation of movie audiences for which Friedkin’s version of The Exorcist was synonymous with horror. It seems an unlikely choice for a stage adaptation, but when Blatty entrusted the project to playwright John Pielmeier, he was most taken with the plans to treat the story differently than it was in that most famous of films. Peilmeier, working with stage director John Doyle, wanted to craft something more organic, intense, and visceral than what audiences might remember from the film. And they have managed to do so with The Exorcist, which is now receiving its world premiere at The Geffen Playhouse in L.A. But while the play may manage to get out from under the film's shadow, it simultaneously doesn’t necessarily offer the strongest argument for why this particular story matters in a contemporary context.

Pielmeier has updated the action of the story to more contemporary times and filled the show with modern references to ethnic wars in Africa and other recognizable headlines. He and John Doyle have also largely done away with much of those touchstone special effects. While Emily Yetter, the young actress playing Regan, gets a workout with acrobatic flailing throughout the show, the levitation and contortions of the possessed child are more implied than explicitly expressed. Doyle has also gone for his trademark concise staging contained in a small area surrounded by the entire cast around a central table. Those actors not participating in a scene often provide the dramatic vocal effects of the possessed Regan from the other side of the partitions that delineate the central area where scenes flow together, one into the other with only minimal demarcation. It’s like Doyle’s Sondheim shows without the musical instruments.

This stripped down look does provide the show with a narrative intensity that sometimes comes on too quickly. The concluding sacrifice of Fr. Damien Karras, a quite good David Wilson Barnes, seems almost a postscript to the action, it comes and goes so quickly. But at the same time, the leanness of the show provides for a shift of focus in thematic content. Pielmeier’s version provides more space for the spiritual and moral themes of the piece to take center stage. The show becomes less about the specter of the demonic child, and more about how we process and rationalize all the day to day horrors in this world. Some of the best dialog on these topics come from Richard Chamberlin who takes over the role of Fr. Merrin famously played on screen by Max von Sydow. Opposite him the show’s other big star, Brooke Shields, plays Regan’s mother, Chris MacNeil. Shields has the toughest job in the show charged with giving a convincing portrayal of a woman who—we are to believe—comes to feel an exorcism will be the best course for addressing her daughter’s increasingly bizzare behavior despite her modern disdain for the thought of such a practice. She almost gets there, but it’s a fairly thankless stretch for a character to ask the audience to identify with her even as she launches into a campaign for the most fantastic and unbelievable aids for her daughter.

But despite some good things here, I still couldn’t help feeling that the show had completely shaken off the past. It’s one of these shows where one wonders about what the story has to tell us that is actually new or insightful. It’s familiar to the point of being taken for granted at times despite the shift in focus. But it is tightly constructed overall with well paced performances that might make those who miss those heady days of early 1970s horror films shiver a little bit.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse

Great plays don’t have to be about great questions. But, it doesn’t hurt when they are. David Lindsay-Abaire’s recent New York success, Good People, which opened this week in its West Coast Premiere at The Geffen Playhouse, opts for this approach to greatness in an unpretentious way with a variant on the fate or free-will debate. More accurately, the issue at hand is whether or not people succeed in their lives due to good luck or by hard work and good choices. Sometimes that central premise in the play gets cluttered with any number of other concerns including the tropes of the American situation comedy. But at heart, Lindsay-Abaire is aiming for questions close to the heart of much contemporary American political debate and thought. Can those with little succeed simply by the force of their hard work and ambition, or are the cards stacked in a way that everything that rises must do so by the shifting tides of fortune.

There are two sets of candidates for the titular good people in Lindsay-Abaire’s story. Both have roots in Boston’s historically Irish-working class South Boston neighborhood. Margie, an excellent Jane Kaczmarek, has just been fired from her job as a dollar store cashier quickly bringing the wolf and an eviction notice to the door she shares with her adult physically and mentally disabled daughter. Her escalating desperation serves largely as a backdrop for good TV jokes with a dash of blue language until she's made aware of a former flame, Mike, played by Jon Tenney, who has recently returned to town. Mike grew up in the projects and is as much a Southie as Margie by history. But Mike, who is now an OB/GYN with a family and an expensive home has had much different fortunes. Margie noses her way into his office looking for work, but only finds a Pandora's box of thinly veiled resentments bundled up with reminiscences of summers long ago. She eventually finds herself invited to Mike’s upcoming Birthday party, which she decides to attend in hopes of hitting up a colleague of his for a job even after he calls to tell her the party is canceled the following day. She arrives to find the party is truly cancelled and spends an emotionally momentous evening with Mike and has young wife where all those prejudices and histories again bubble to the surface leaving the audience to decide if it is Margie and her friends or Mike and his family that are the good people.

The answers are not simple or especially clear even when the curtain falls, and Lindsay-Abaire has packed his drama with complex multi-faceted characters that can feel very real even when they do yammer on at times. The scenes between Margie and Mike, representing a good 70% of the evening, are the show’s strongest points and argue much more strongly for Lindsay-Abaire’s prowess as a chronicler of contemporary lives than his prior big success, Rabbit Hole. There are still some soft spots here. The scenes between Margie and her friends Dottie, a remarkable Marylouise Burke, and Jean, an equally fine Sara Botsford, can be a bit too comically pat. Not that the jokes aren’t funny. They are and there are many of them. But it’s at these moments Good People most sounds and acts like a play. But the bigger fish do swim back around in this tank, and director Matt Shakman gives the cast latitude to explore the complexities of these lives in a way that both draws the audience in even when we’re learning things that aren’t so nice about them and perhaps about ourselves. It’s a strong showing for the Geffen and comes recommended. Good People runs through May 13.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse, LA Theater Reviews

When Molly Ivins died in 2007 at the age of 62, she left behind a pretty big hole in a lot of lives. The firebrand liberal journalist had many friends, and among them was actress Kathleen Turner who has been honoring that connection by playing Ivins in Turner’s one-woman show Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins that opened late last week at The Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. It’s a lovely heart-felt performance from Turner whose gravelly broken voice fits in well with the Texas twang she affects in recreating Ivins' speech. The show itself, at just over 70 minutes in one act, is lean and simple. Turner as Ivins recounts the major landmarks in her life with a dollop of psychological reflection. Ivins' own words are used by authors Margaret and Allison Engel more often than not, which helps capture not only her wit but the cadence of her writing. All of this takes place in a newsroom office where Ivins sits at a desk in front of other desks and chairs that have been packed up or removed and placed along the back wall. There’s a screen at the back that fills with faces and images from the writer’s past as she goes along until her story comes to its inevitable conclusion.

Ivins' writing is quite funny and the show does contain its share of laughs. But perhaps the most admirable thing about the show is that it captures Ivins’ undaunted moral and political spirit as well. The selected writings name some of the names Ivins made her career by calling out in the pages of newspapers, and the show is filled with the kind of rousing pleas the author made to her readers over the year about the importance of public political life and her advocacy for progressive causes. Her attacks on both Reagan and Bush are revisited here and the Los Angeles crowd responded in kind. Granted all of these elements - the social criticism, the autobiography, and homespun humor - can get in the way of one another. There is a real lack of dramatic development in the show outside of Ivins’ biographical timeline and some of the personal psychology revisited in the script can seem forced. Neither of the Engel sisters are playwrights but have spent their entire careers as journalists and Red Hot Patriot sounds like a magazine article and can be particularly clumsy with some of its framing devices. But while the show may not work on the level of a unified dramatic experience, it does serve as a rather painful reminder about how much this country has changed over the last 30 years. Gone is Ivins’ world of newspapers and journalists who viewed their primary role in the world as questioning the truth of what people in authority tell us. It sounds simple, but Ivins’ brand of insight is a rare and precious commodity when so much of the media work largely to pass on approved talking points. Red Hot Patriot reminds us of that world and and asks the audience not to just nostalgically memorialize its passing.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse, LA Theater Reviews

At the heart of Geoffrey Nauffts’ play Next Fall which is currently receiving its West Coast Premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is real-life premise worth considering. How do couples, and gay men in particular, process big conflicts over issues of faith in their relationships? This may seem like a rather rarefied concern, but it resonated with a broader audience enough that the show received a Broadway run and eventual Tony nominations in 2010 and continues to live on. In the play, Adam, a forty-something struggling neurotic agnostic writer, meet-cutes Luke, a significantly younger would-be actor and fundamentalist Christian. They fall in love, and spend the next four years working out “the Jesus thing” until tragedy strikes and Luke’s fear of coming out to his homophobic family takes on greater significance. And yet despite the contemporary currency of the questions Nauffts raises, Next Fall never really achieves all it could due to some rather pedestrian scenarios and dialog that more often than not rely more on cliche than insight.

The play is best when the focus in on Adam and Luke and the story of how they struggle over Luke’s expressions of faith in the relationship. Unfortunately the story is cluttered with a rather predictable framing devise with Luke being injured in a car accident and all the family and friends gathering at the hospital with the romance unfolding in flashbacks as all the dramatic tension is funneled into a by-the-numbers hospital drama. The audience learns what they can about the lovers through flashback where Luke is played by the devastatingly handsome and believable James Wolk. Adam, is played in this run by the play’s author, Nauffts, which in practice cuts both ways. Nauffts certainly looks the part, but I often found his Adam overly removed and ambivalent in moments of the highest emotional intensity. Adam appears almost nonchalant about his lovers' landing in the ICU and is paradoxically more worked up about the potential conflicts with Luke's family and friends in the waiting room. There’s a clutter of characters including a female best friend Holly (Betsy Brandt who has a great speech at the end), a bigoted father (Jeff Fahey), and an almost completely irrelevant repressed gay best friend Brandon (Ken Barnett). Most of these characters do little more than provide excuses for exposition and can make the show tiresome at times despite Sheryl Kaller's clean direction. One bright light among the supporting cast is Lesley Ann Warren who plays Luke’s long-estranged mother. She packs real star quality here and gives the most nuanced and wholly convincing performance in the show.

But Next Fall is still a play worth considering for what it has to say about the way gay men live now. The play is aware of its past, and the references to predecessors like Harvey Firestein’s Torch Song Trilogy and any number of AIDS-related plays of the 80s and 90s. The play is also a fitting reminder of the great work of the Geffen Playhouse’s Producing Director and Hollywood legend, Gil Cates, who died on Monday, two days before the show opened. Cates has always maintained the Geffen’s commitment to bringing out some of the best new and recent work from New York to Los Angeles audiences and he’ll be greatly missed.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse, LA Theater Reviews

Terence Archie in Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. Photo: Michael Lamont

I did not watch the debate between the hopefuls for the Republican presidential nomination on Wednesday. Besides my general distaste for hate mongering, I find those things too predictable and phony to hold any serious interest. Like many other people, it’s a sentiment that I’ve held towards professional wrestling as well over the years. So who would have guessed how much I would enjoy Kristoffer Diaz’ The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which opened up the 2011/2012 Geffen Playhouse season in Westwood on Wednesday. The wonderfully titled Deity is set in the world of professional wrestling, but it had just as much to say about that concurrent televised debate as it did about the big-money television entertainment based on the idea of sport. While Diaz’ characters are professional wrestlers, what they’re really talking about is the American spirit - its hope as well as its darker sides.

Terence Archie and Desmin Borges Photo: Michael Lamont

The protagonist of the play is not the titular Chad Deity, a heroic champion wrestler with the THE Wrestling organization. Instead the star is one Macedonio Guerra, Mace for short, a Bronx born man of Puerto Rican heritage whose childhood love of the art of wrestling has led him into the part of a bit player in the THE organization headed by flashy executive Everett K. Olson, or as his employees call him EKO. Mace makes the winners look good by losing in the most dramatic and compelling fashions. Mace fills the audience in by addressing them directly throughout most of the play explaining how the designated winners and losers of these simulated battles work together to produce simulated struggle and victory. Mace is played by the superb Desmin Borges who manages to portray his character's complicated and conflicted love of his “art” with a real complexity. But Mace is looking for something more than being a bit player, and when he meets Vingeshwar Paduar, VP, in Brooklyn, he initiates a collaboration to rise to the top of the heap in their organization.

Justin Leeper in Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. Photo: Michael Lamont

The down side is that doing so will mean portraying two villains who are broad based amalgam’s of most of the racist stereotypes you can think of. Paduar becomes “The Fundamentalist”, a stoic Muslim terrorist bent on destroying America and hero Chad Deity. Mace is now an invading Mexican revolutionary replete with cigar and bongo drums. The two strike a hateful nerve in the wrestling audience and soon find themselves on a meteoric rise as adversaries on their way to the big pay-per-view bout against Deity at the end of the month. But the price of reiterating the very racist stereotypes that have been used against them in their own lives starts to take its toll when VP and Mace splinter over matters of strategic planning.

Terence Archie and Usman Ally Photo: Michael Lamont

What’s most admirable about Deity is the play doesn’t take any of the easy ways out from this point. The play is not only an indictment of the bigotry used to create the stories for the wrestling shows, but of the audience's own insistence on the repetition of the same stories over and over again as entertainment. It's not unlike the political debate where candidates strive to say the most outlandish things, regardless of whether or not they believe them, in order to placate and provoke an audience in ways that they expect to be. People may bemoan the lack of of honest politicians, and yet most voters have no interest in hearing what such an honest forthright person would actually have to say in such a situation. We want lies, on some level, and we get what we ask for.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity mines the complexities of American ideals of community and justice in surprising ways that aren’t easily prepackaged or easily resolved. It has a masterful ending and the crafting that led to the play’s accolades are easy to recognize. (You may recall that this is one of the 2010 finalists for the Pulitzer Prize when the recommendations of the drama jury were ignored by the Pulitzer executive board after receiving comp tickets to a non-finalist days before the final decision.) But best of all, Diaz manages these feats while keeping things very entertaining throughout. A ring dominates the stage with two sets of video screens on either side. Wrestling competitors enter through the theater aisles while accompanied by loud music, light shows, and their own elaborate video entrances. Director Edward Torres manages an artful mimicry of the kind of excitement pro wrestling provides its fans, and the audience soon involves itself in the mawkish drama of the ring with their own clapping, whoops, and calls. The show is quite funny and the cast, many of whom were imported along with this production from an off-Broadway run in New York last year, were as fun to look at as they were to listen to. Terence Archie is the muscular, scantily clad Deity and Usman Ally is the smart talking Paduar. This is a play with the gift of gab, and the talky characters never bore but crackle and pop with riffs on all facets of modern day life. There are more than a few body slams in the play's action as well and the show contains large amounts of physical choreography. Yes, sometimes the characters' monologues can seem a bit pandering to the audience, particularly early on in the show. But this is an easy play to like despite its sometimes dark heart and the weight of history on its mind. The show runs through Oct 9 and is well worth seeing.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse, LA Theater Reviews

Gary Cole and Edi Gathegi Photo: Michael Lamont/Geffen Playhouse 2011

How do you follow up writing a Great American Play? Well, if you are Tracy Letts, you write Superior Donuts, which is now receiving its Los Angles premiere at the Geffen Playhouse in a very well done production. Letts' Great American Play, of course, is August: Osage County, and after having won every major award he could, a new direction was called for. Superior Donuts is a far more modest, less ambitious work. It's a surprisingly genteel comedy about reconciling our American pasts. This is not a completely different project from August. Letts is digging for something deeper in the American character and how we got where we are. But Superior Donuts has far fewer sharp edges than its predecessors and it achieves its goals without a daunting ideological framework.

Superior Donuts is set in a contemporary Chicago neighborhood. Arthur, played by an excellent Gary Cole, is an ex-hippy and draft dodger who now runs the decaying and not very successful neighborhood donut shop he inherited from his father. The play opens after the shop has been vandalized and Arthur has lost his only employee. He soon hires Franco, played by Edi Gathegi, a young smart alec from the neighborhood. The two become an unlikely odd couple despite the difference in their races and agesl based in part on their mutual histories of uniquely American traumas. Franco's efforts to revitalize the business fail to win over Arthur who is mired in his lifetime of losses. Soon Franco's own demons arrive, forcing him to reevaluate his future prospects as well.

This is not new or unique material, and there are more than enough buddy picture tropes to go around, but Letts' sharp writing, particularly for the effervescent and witty Franco, is a powerful draw. And there are some humorous set pieces, including a geriatric brawl. And, while it's a nicer world than Letts has offered in the past, the themes of American cultural change are still prominent. The great chemistry between Cole and Gathegi make the play. There is an admirable restraint to the performances that relies on the characters' nonverbal interactions. The several members of the supporting cast were also quite good as the handful of remaining customers and friends Arthur sees in his store. And there are genuine laughs as well. Director Randall Arney has put together a wonderful version of this more accessible version of the Letts's America, and it's worth seeing at the Geffen where is runs through July 10.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse

Maggie Siff and Polly Draper Photo: Lisa Petereson

Jane Anderson has developed a reputation for writing smart and funny plays that skewer the presumptions that hold together our pleasant everyday lives. Thus, it is no surprise that her latest collaboration with the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, The Escort, which opened on Wednesday night, delivers significant laughs amidst a text that presses some buttons both for the characters on stage and the audience. As the name promises, The Escort concerns a woman who trades sex for money. Whether or not you want to call Charlotte a prostitute or a sex worker is one of the many contentious issues Anderson is taking on in her new play. But to be fair, the escort of the play’s title, marvelously played by Maggie Siff, is less the protagonist of the play than the catalyst for change in others, particularly a gynecologist who’s treating Charlotte, Dr. Rhona Bloom. Dr. Bloom, played here by the wonderful Polly Draper, treats Charlotte with a professional and respectful if somewhat curious manner, when she first enters her office. It's not unlike what most of us would expect and hope to emulate in a similar situation.

But what start's out as a light-heated consideration of Charlotte's professional career, soon gets more complicated. The doctor-patient boundaries are gradually dropped over Charlotte's subsequent visits with Dr. Bloom and a friendship forms. Eventually, Dr. Bloom is cajoled into meeting with a male prostitute in light of her own ongoing worries about her desirability and her frustrations with both her ex-husband, a urologist, and their 13 year-old son. It's really the gynecologist, and not the escort, that the play turns around. Dr. Bloom's own misgivings about the social and sexual development of her son, her unresolved emotional conflicts with her ex, and her own sense of self-worth are brought into new relief by this patient, who has a very different, though initially not objectionable, view of the world. The rub of the play, though, is that Dr. Bloom soon finds herself at odds between an arguably more fulfilling vision of herself à la Charlotte, or the more morally determined self she has always known. On the one hand she's concerned about her son looking at pornography on line. On the other she's rethinking her own attitude toward sexual promiscuity. And while this is not entirely new ground, Anderson sharply questions the stories and falsehoods we tell ourselves in order to create our own moral subjectivity. This works both ways for both women in The Escort who initially fantasize that they have far more in common than what they come to discover. Anderson is taking on liberal notions about pornography, sex, and women's work here under one big umbrella and leaving very big questions open for the audience to consider in a group of characters with a high level of complexity.

This makes the play sound much more serious than it is, however. There are great one-liners throughout. Anderson also expertly crafts an introductory monologue for Charlotte who speaks directly to the audience about the body suits she and a male prostitute character wear in the play, given the large amount of nudity and sexually explicit activity portrayed or implied on stage. Charlotte explains that onstage nudity can be distracting in and of itself, and Anderson wants the audience, whom Charlotte addresses several times directly, to concentrate on the events at hand. There are also several wonderful comic moments from the men in the cast. Dr. Bloom's ex, the other Dr. Bloom, is played by James Eckhouse and their 13 year old son is played by an adult, Gabriel Sunday. Mr. Sunday also doubles as the male prostitute in the play in a bit of deliberate overlapping casting that fleshes out some of the parent's issues in the script.

If there is anything disappointing in The Escort, it's Anderson's haphazard, poorly realized ending. I don't want to say too much and spoil the show, but the final scenes have the feel of a show that isn't sure where it wants to go. It knows where it doesn't want to go, but isn't exactly sure how to prevent that from happening entirely. On balance, though, The Escort is a strong show, and good ideas are often much more than one gets from any play, well scripted or not. The Escort runs through May 8.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse

Kevin Anderson in The Break of Noon
Photo: Michael Lamont/Geffen Playhouse 2011

Neil LaBute’s latest stage effort made its way West this week to the playwright’s L.A. stage of choice, the Geffen Playhouse. The Break of Noon, which debuted last Fall at The MCC Theater, arrived with two new cast members but the same director, Jo Bonney. And if it is anything, The Break of Noon is recognizable LaBute through and through complete with one very bad boy, female characters said bad boy uses to define himself, and the thorny relationships that ensue between them. The focus of the play, however—the origins of faith and its place in today’s world—is an unusual central theme for LaBute. That being said, though, his treatment of it is not entirely original. The central character, John Smith, we learn is the sole survivor of a horrendous mass murder. He gets religion, feeling he was saved after hearing the voice of God, and just as quickly obtains significant fame and fortune in part from a rather gruesome photo he shot of the killer and at least one bloody victim. The following 90 minutes deal with the aftermath of these events and Smith’s struggle to live up to the holy task he now believes he has been called to do. Of course, he turns out to be not quite as changed as he may have initially thought, and we soon see Smith dealing with some of his old, womanizing, cheating, and lying ways. But LaBute never lets the audience or Smith forget that Smith does in fact have a new-found faith that he wishes to spread and that there is sincerity in his urges to do good.

The old chestnut of the troubled and perhaps disingenuous man of faith doing some real good, however unintentionally, has populated more movies and plays than you may care to remember. But this is LaBute’s world, and despite the familiarity of the set up, nothing in the play sounds quite like your typical Hollywood film. Smith travels through eight scenes encountering four women and two men in between his long monologues that start and finish the piece. Each outsider challenges his new found perspective on life by recalling some of his not too pleasant past in different ways. Each outsider appears only once before moving on, but all contribute to a building narrative along the way. The cast is quite good including Kevin Anderson in the title role alongside Catherine Dent, Tracee Chimo, and John Earl Jelks. (The latter two appeared in the New York run of the play.) LaBute’s biting view on male-female relationships is again on display as Smith meets up with his ex-wife, ex-mistress, and a prostitute. But these interactions are always more about him than the women. All the scenes are sharply written with smart dialog except for a TV interview segment that reads more like one of those unfunny sketches that populates the last 10 minutes of a Saturday Night Live broadcast. There is a fair amount of humor in the play, though it often seemed a little hard to decipher in The Break of Noon, considering some of the material that immediately surrounds it. Still, it’s a good effort and highlights many of the best qualities of LaBute’s writing. It may not be new, but you could do worse than simply being familiar. It continues at the Geffen Playhouse through March 6.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse, LA Theater Reviews

Condola Rashad and Russell G. Jones Photo: Chris Bennion/Geffen Playhouse 2010

On the recommendation of my friend Jim, I went to the Geffen Playhouse on Sunday for one of the preview performances of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined. Yes, I had just seen the play not but a week ago in a superb production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. However, given that the Geffen has brought director Kate Whoriskey and virtually the entire cast of the play from its prior incarnations at Seattle’s Intiman Theater and the Manhattan Theater Club, I thought it might be worth another visit. It was. And to be honest, there’s something about seeing two different productions of a new(ish) play in such close temporal proximity to one another. Undoubtedly, Nottage’s powerful, if eager to please Pulitzer Prize winning work has enough depth to make it worth a second viewing in a short amount of time. But these two different versions brought out different subtleties in the work that I might not have appreciated with only the first viewing. Ruined still brought tears to my eyes here in L.A. and it continues to leave one almost beside oneself with the knowledge that this is the world we live in today. That Nottage’s characters experience such unthinkable violence and poverty in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the same time our day-to-day lives proceed in their comparably trivial concerns is almost too much to absorb.

And while Whoriskey has a bit of a different take on Ruined compared to director Liesl Tommy and her excellent Ashland cast, this is no less of a production. Certainly the Geffen’s space and equipment are less generous than those in Ashland with its less constricted home for Mama Nadi’s bar in the New Theater. Whoriskey’s staging mines a different kind of dramatic tension. In Ashland I felt a constant sense of an unexpected catastrophe awaiting the characters at every turn, as if the differences between past and present were irrelevant and prior traumas were likely to recur at any moment. In the Geffen’s current production, the sense of time is more linear. The characters more clearly battle past demons, but the here-and-now is contested on terms not only of danger, but of family and love.

Whoiskey manages a much brisker pace shaving almost 15 minutes off of the OSF running time. This has the benefit of making the play seem much less indulgent in its brighter and warm-hearted moments. The performances from many of the cast are more reserved suggesting the work the characters have done to bury the unthinkable and go on living. These differences are felt most in the biggest roles. Portia plays Mama Nadi with a steadier keel and a little less steel. She is less removed in both age and attitude from the young women she supports including Condola Rashad's Sophie and Quincy Tyler Bernstine's Salima. Salima in Whoriskey and Bernstine's hands comes off as less angry and more mentally unstable, which makes some of her actions toward the end of the play more believable. Perhaps the most interesting performance for me here, though, was Russell G Jones’ Christian who anchors the action more directly in this version. Jones infuses Christian with a more global male consciousness suggesting some of Nottage's larger targets about the politics between men and women, even in a war zone. Ruined, despite its heart of gold, is an excellent play and the form it has taken at the Geffen Playhouse makes it highly recommended.

Labels: Geffen Playhouse, LA Theater Reviews