Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Los Otros, the new musical from Ellen Fitzhugh and Michael John LaChiusa now onstage at the Center Theater Group’s Mark Taper Forum, attempts to grapple with a number of contemporary struggles including immigration, race relations, sexual politics, and singing in key. And while there’s a lot of battling in this 90 minutes, it’s the audience that is losing the war. In fact, more pointedly Los Otros raises the question of whether or not anyone at Center Theater Group was involved in vetting this material during the development process before it landed on stage in a full-scale production. There’s a lot wrong with Los Otros, and it’s hard to believe that no one thought this show wasn’t going to be anything but dreadful.

The concept is an exploration of the interactions between Anglo and Latin cultures in the personal lives of Southern Californians during the 20th Century. The single act is divided into two parts, each focusing on a lengthy sung monologue by a different character. The show opens with a white woman, performed by Michele Pawk, who recounts how as a young girl, she and her friends fed a family of illegal immigrants living in a nearby cave. If that’s not enough disturbing cross-cultural whimsy for you, don’t worry. It’s just an appetizer for the woman’s drunken seduction of an 18 year-old virgin Mexican day laborer in the 1970s. He’s kind enough to have her damaged car fixed up after the tryst, which is observed by many of his fellow laborers. No, I’m not making this up. Pawk has a free and easy association with pitch, which makes this bit a constant source of surprise. The mildly less offensive second part is told from the perspective of a 75 year-old first generation American son of Mexican immigrants, played by Julio Monge. The man now lives with his white male lover, but he’s got heart-warming childhood fieldwork stories to tell. Still, much of his time onstage is occupied with hand wringing over storage of the couple’s expansive art collection. Monge is more vocally assured with a text that is mostly sung-through with few self-contained songs.

Michael John LaChiusa’s music for Los Otros is pleasant enough. The ambitious long musical arc of each part is impressive. Fitzhugh’s book and lyrics are bewildering at times in their ham-handed dealings with complex real-life cultural issues. All of this transpires on a sand covered set with a junkyard full of chairs, dolls and other debris suspended above the stage and audience for some unknown reason. The desert set is filled with debris that serves as props, but often makes the show look like it transpires in a garbage dump. Director Graciela Daniele shows her choreographer side by giving her performers plenty of graceful movement to perform, but the show is too far gone from the outset for her to be able to accomplish much. Los Otros attempts to connect with the real multi-layered lives of Californians, but few in the audience recognized much that was familiar in this off-kilter blunder of a new musical.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, Mark Taper Forum

Ben Vanaman was out and about this weekend catching up on some notable local theater productions wrapping up their runs and sent in this report.

A pair of provocative new plays that just completed their L.A. engagements –Danai Gurira's The Convert at the Kirk Douglas Theater, and Cornerstone Theater Company's production of Lisa Loomer's Café Vida at LATC- explore the essential and eternal human question, “who am I?” Though the two plays take place over a century apart, their narratives and themes are eerily reflective of one another. Each play features a woman of color as protagonist. Both women emerge from fraught social contexts and are forced to determine their place in the world while confronting and/or combating multiple forces acting against them. The actresses portraying these characters undergo an emotional workout that is as harrowing as it is cathartic.

The Convert –a co-production with the McCarter Theater Center and the Goodman Theater- takes place in the late-1890s at the time of tribal revolts against Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company. At issue are land grabs and steep tariffs imposed on the Africans working British-controlled mines. Such matters, however, weigh little on the mind of young Jekesai (a thoroughly committed Pascale Armand), who seeks shelter from an arranged marriage in the home of an assimilationist African Christian minister named Chilford (LeRoy McClain) who dreams of entering the priesthood. Chilford agrees to harbor Jekesai on the condition that she submit to a Christian conversion under his tutelage in scenes, of occasional levity, that have a faint “Pygmalion” air about them.

Chilford gives Jekesai the Christian name Esther, and so thoroughly does she submit to his indoctrination, so unquestioning is her seeming devotion to Christ, that she quickly forgets that she was once an orphan from a polygamist tribe. In her attempts to convert others –Chilford’s “savages”- Esther/Jekesai is branded a traitor (“bafu”) by her uncle (Harold Surratt) and cousin Tamba (Warner Joseph Miller), an epithet set to rights when she must choose between “blood” and her newfound salvation as the past she shut the door on becomes present once more in a brutal turn of foreshadowed events: the tribal insurrection against British authoritarian rule, having hovered in the background of the action, takes center stage in the tragic but poignant conclusion. Jekesai/Esther commits a vicious attack of retaliatory honor that precipitates her seeking Christ’s salvation. Yet, clad in tribal costume again, no longer wearing the corseted dresses that Chilford made her wear as Esther, Jekesai paradoxically refutes Western culture in favor of her own heritage, delivering a riposte to Chilford’s ambivalently-Anglicized friend Prudence (Zainab Jah), who had earlier accused Esther/Jekesai of lacking a clearly-defined identity. In fact, Jekesai and Esther have become whole.

If The Convert ends with its heroine committing a crime, Café Vida begins with the fallout created by its protagonist’s criminal past. The production, a joint venture between L.A.’s community-based Cornerstone Theater and The Latino Theater Company in partnership with Homeboy Industries and Homegirl Café, is part of Cornerstone’s “Hunger Cycle,” which they bill as “nine world premiere plays about hunger, justice and food equity issues.” Though one might expect such a mission to produce polemical writing, playwright Lisa Loomer circumvents heavy-handedness in favor of a loose, free-wheeling style in her telling of the story of an ex-con, drug addict gang member named Chebela, a character based on the life of Lynette Alfaro, the non-professional actor portraying her. In fact, Loomer’s play is predicated on a series of interviews she conducted with various young men and women who form the basis of her characters.

Chebela has many strikes against her, but like Jekesai, her life is transformed via the intervention of a man of God, here a character named Father Tim (Peter Howard) who is based on Father Gregory Boyle, the L.A. priest who created Homeboy Industries as a means of giving ex-gang members the chance to go straight by working their way up from janitors in his café to waiters and chefs. The theme of food, both as sustaining agent and locus of excess, is embodied in Chebela, who introduces herself in a monologue where she plainly cops to being overweight. But this is the tip of the iceberg vis-à-vis her poor self-esteem. Painful memories of incest and the shattering reality of ongoing domestic abuse compete for Chebela’s mental and emotional attention as she seeks to start over and hopefully regain custody of a daughter given up for adoption.

During the course of the play, Chebela parries and bonds with two other Father Tim acolytes, precocious Rafi (Felipe Nieto) and fibrous Luz (Sue Montoya), whose fealty to a rival gang lands both her and Chebela in trouble before matters are sorted and Luz touchingly offers Chebela shelter against the brutal ministrations of her husband. Chebela is additionally abetted by her unbowed spirit and utterly disarming self-deprecations, and Lynette Alfaro delivers one of the most heart-wrenching performances I’ve seen on stage in recent memory. She is in fact so unflinchingly honest in her delivery that I sometimes forgot that I was watching a performer with little professional training. Virtually the same might be said of her fellows.

Both plays investigate the loaded topic of race and, to some degree, the disenfranchisement of women, but at the service of questions of identity -how it is shaped by one’s origins and ties to family and community- that are universally relatable. Can one escape one’s past, or transcend the expectations imposed by it? How are we to be fed: literally, emotionally, spiritually? The social inequity of 19th Century Rhodesia evokes parallel to life in the barrios and ‘hoods of contemporary Los Angeles. Chilford, self-exiled from his “witch doctor” father, and Father Tim, self-styled practitioner of “liberation theology,” are ultimately reconciled in service to man, yet their supplicants, Jekesai and Chabela, draw on tremendous inner strength in determining the outcome of their quest for self-actualization and enlightenment, even if in Jekesai’s case, the weight of the past can never be entirely lifted. Both plays merit attention, but though Café Vida feels more overtly like a message play, The Convert is given a more melodramatic treatment, at the occasional detriment to dramatic effect. Its most powerful moment is the quiet final encounter between Chilford and Jekesai, who stands before the crucible of her own heart, a plea for mercy that is granted to Café Vida’s Chabela in the form of grace.

Labels: Cornerstone Theater, Kirk Douglas Theater, LA Theater Reviews

Not able to get out to New York during this Tony Awards season? Well for once, if you want to sample a bit of what might garner an award on June 10 this year, you need go no further than the Ahmanson Theater downtown where James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies have been imported almost perfectly intact following its recent Broadway run. (And for those of you old enough to remember, this may seem familiar in that almost the exact same circumstances followed the Broadway production of the original production which subsequently ran mostly untouched in L.A. in 1972.) In addition to being nominated for best revival of a musical, the show has (count them) four of this year's nominees in the cast, Jan Maxwell, Ron Raines, Danny Burstein, and Jane Houdyshell. Oddly enough the most marketable star from the show’s Broadway run, Bernadette Peters, is the about the only one who didn't make it out to L.A., leaving the role of Sally Durant Plummer to another Broadway star and prior Tony winner, Victoria Clark. Peters was one of my major caveats to liking the show when I saw it in New York last year, and Clark fits much more naturally into the role of dowdy Sally who may well be losing her mind in her pursuit to rekindle a three decades old adolescent fling.

Often when Center Theater Group imports shows from New York, which sadly represents the majority of their production output these days, the shows often come out watered down or decidedly less focused and smaller in scale. Not so this time around. This production of Follies, which originated at Washington’s Kennedy Center is brasher, tighter and much more ferocious than before. Everyone of those Tony nominees is a winner. Jan Maxwell’s Phyllis is graceful, lean, and worldly. She delivers a scorching version of "The Story of Lucy and Jessie" complete with all the male dancers one could ask for for the heavy lifting. Your heart breaks for her almost as much as it does for Burstein’s Buddy who’ll never fulfill the dreams of the wife he desperately loves. He's vocally warm and provides an excellent complement to Raines performance as Ben, which seemed more comfortable and certain here than I remember. The smaller roles abound with treasures. Soprano and opera star Carol Neblett has joined the cast here in L.A. in the role of Heidi. Elaine Paige still delivers a show-stopping rendition of “I’m Still Here." I'd say it's a unique moment, but it isn't. This show is filled with numbers that elicit tons of enthusiastic time stretching applause. It's loaded with Sondheim's best music sung unforgettably well by a first rate cast.

That Follies arrives amid an Ahmanson season of musicals and plays targeted at people who watch teen movies or music videos is reassuring. The show is an old-fashioned one with its many musical tributes to a bygone era of the theater. Each is a gem with a melancholy heart that gets worn more or less on the sleeve of each performer. The central conceit of the show with its many ghost-like show girls wandering among the living characters underscores the pervasive passing of time that all of the characters are singing and talking about in the show at the most basic level. It's an adult entertainment and admittedly may not be your cup of tea if your idea of a musical demands teen cheerleaders or brooding young rock stars. It's about a generation coming to grips with the passing decades and the choices they've made to get where they are. My advice—see it early, because you'll likely want to go more than once.

Labels: Ahmanson Theater, LA Theater Reviews

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

How much do I love Ayana Hampton? Let me take a stab at answering that one. Funny, gutsy, and dare I say outright sexy, Miss Hampton is doing what might be described on RuPaul’s Drag Race as “serving up cabaret realness” right now in Los Angeles and you, dear reader, should pull yourself away from the TV and get over to the Bootleg Theater for her Friday and Saturday night performances this weekend of The Morning After Show. Hampton is a comedian, actor, singer and all around performer, making her way in the big city for years now, and The Morning After Show is the latest incarnation of her cabaret act that last surfaced here during the CalArts REDCAT New Original Works Festival in 2009. But this year’s model is a different beast with a sharper, more organized look and feel to her performance. The boundless energy of the hour is the same, but now the material flows more systematically through any number of the issues Miss Hampton sees outside her window. She's joined in this performance by a three-person band and directed by her longtime collaborator and savvy provocateur Clayton Farris.

There is no lack of clever commentary about issues of sex, class, and race that give the show its bite. References fly fast and furious, so the slow and methodical should be warned to listen up the first time because this isn’t The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. (Don't believe me? Check out these free samples.) Hampton hits on the questions everyone is asking themselves these days: What were those American Apparel models thinking to begin with? How does one go about getting a supporting part in a Tyler Perry movie? And what would the lives of Mimi and Roger from Rent be like today without all the drugs and AIDS and stuff? Perhaps the high point of the evening is B.Y.O.B.G.Y.N., a love letter to low-cost women’s health services and doing self exams that revisits the tune of Elton John’s “Your Song.” Hampton is up and down, back and forth, dancing and singing throughout the whole show with hardly a pause for breath and is incredibly engaging as a performer.

Best of all the characters she plays on stage are beginning to coalesce into a more unified whole. The influence of Sandra Bernhard’s work is clear, but Hampton delivers something less brooding whose sometime thematic bleakness is packaged in a deceptive smile and giggle as well as all that comes with the glitter and feathers and glamor. She’s less starstruck, but has no trouble demonstrating that sexy women are very capable of being very, very funny. Catch her now on the way up this weekend.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews

It was a shrewd move on the part of L.A.’s Center Theater Group: providing local audiences a chance to see Lorriane Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun right alongside Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer-Prize winner, Clybourne Park. While Norris’ comedy, which will make its play for a Tony award later this spring on Broadway, is by no means an outright sequel to Hansberry’s masterpiece of American realism, the two plays are unquestionably related. Specifically, Norris follows the story of the unseen white family referred to in Raisin whose former home the Youngers will soon occupy at great personal cost. How that home has come to market is the story at the heart of Clybourne Park and seeing the two plays in close succession, as I did on a recent Sunday, helps highlight the subtle ways in which Norris riffs on Hansberry’s theme from a contemporary perspective. Of course this also invites a more critical look at Norris’ play and points out another relationship between them in their current stagings for CTG: on the one hand Clybourne Park is a great production of a good play, while across town, A Raisin in the Sun proves to be a good production of a great play. And while this may sound like the two experiences are similar, the distinction is a critical one.

The one character the two plays have in common, Mr. Linder, is ancillary character in A Raisin in the Sun. He attempts to buy the Youngers out of their contract to purchase a new home in the heretofore all-white neighborhood of Clybourne Park. In the first act of Norris’ play, he arrives with his pregnant wife, at the home of Bev and Russ, played here by an excellent Christina Kirk and Frank Wood, having failed in his attempt to convince the Youngers not to move. Events move tangentially away from Hansberry’s story at that point, and an awareness of the events in A Raisin in the Sun are not necessary to get everything in Clybourne Park. Soon a whole different set of broken promises and the failure of some American dreams unfurls as Mr. Linder tries to persuade Bev and Russ not to move. As the pleasantries of 1950s suburban life soon recede to reveal a more unpleasant underbelly to this suburban Chicago community, the emotional scope of the play deepens. Bev and Russ’ maid, Francine, and her husband, Albert, are also present for much of this brewing confrontation and Norris revisits some of the points about racism and racial politics of the period Hansberry so eloquently laid out over half a century ago. And while the politics of the period may be familiar, the words can still sting and the play can generate a fair amount of discomfort at times. (This is a popular strategy on Broadway right now and viewers may be revisiting Other Desert Cities again over the course of the evening.) But the project is different from Hansberry's, and the African-American characters in Clybourne Park often play a secondary role to the unfolding events in Norris' play.

After an intense and devastating first act, Clybourne Park shifts and the same set of actors now play two different couples. Jeremy Shamos and Annie Parisse who were previously Mr. Linder and his wife, are now Steve and Lindsey, a young, wealthy white couple who have just purchased the same now dilapidated house in Clybourne Park in 2009 and have made plans to tear it down and build a new home on the same lot. A married African-American couple played by Crystal A. Dickinson and Damon Gupton, Lena and Kevin, have come from the local neighborhood group to discuss a petition filled with the city’s planning commission with them. Lena is a great niece to Lena Younger and she expresses objections over the expansive construction plans for the site with an interest in maintaining architectural integrity to a now predominantly black neighborhood undergoing its own gentrification process. Norris revels in the many inversions and parallels between the two scenarios and makes wry use of the recasting of the actors in roles that diverge in ironic and unexpected ways such as when Brendan Griffin who plays the local priest, Jim, in Act I is now a gay community housing advocate in Act II. Soon the conference begins to unravel in a similar fashion to that prior meeting some 60 years ago. And while Norris wraps up the play with a stunner of a conclusion, the second act feels more conversational and unstructured than the first half. The characters hash out the contemporary veneer that disguises the underlying tensions about racism and economic disparities and Norris takes some glee in doing this in a progressively more blunt fashion. But the whole scene feels contrived and reaching with less natural dramatic development than the searing punch in the gut that precedes it.

Norris still takes an optimistic tact at the end though, which is an appropriate homage to a similar sense that ends A Raisin in the Sun. As the Youngers leave for their new home, there is sacrifice ahead, but they have their pride an their family intact. Center Theater Group invited the Ebony Repertory Theater in Los Angeles to revive its recent production of A Raisin in the Sun at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City after a well-received run last year under the direction of Phylicia Rashad. The play is virtually indestructible with poetry that still amazes at nearly every turn. One almost gasps to hear Berneatha proclaim that all the tyranny in the world will never put a God in the heavens. Hansberry's play is filled with so much, and so much that is so well written that one still sits almost agape at the play's quality and working.

But as good as the play is, Rashad and her cast don't always rise to its level. Mostly they do and Kim Staunton's Lena Younger and Deidrie Henry's Ruth provide two formidable anchoring performances that seem to keep the rest of the cast on track when they are around. And much like the characters they play, when they are absent some of the smaller parts veer off into more pedestrian realms. But the show gets the job done, filling these characters with the kind of life that leaves them haunting you while watching Norris' Clybourne Park and seeing the world they are about to step into. Though oddly, despite the quality of CTG's Broadway bound production, Norris' characters don't ever enter the mind when watching A Raisin in the Sun. Clybourne Park is a formidable edifice, but undoubtedly one that is at its best due to the foundations on which it was built.

Labels: Kirk Douglas Theater, LA Theater Reviews, Mark Taper Forum

Now in their sixth year, Los Angeles’ Porters of Hellsgate Theater Company has had a near religious devotion to the works of Shakespeare. This very young company, both in terms of the organization’s age as well as that of many of its resident artists, has touched on most of the major comedies and dramas and has kicked off this year with the famously thorny and relatively infrequently performed Troilus and Cressida. The thorniness comes from a text filled with often incongruent broad comedy and far weightier material about the transience of love, peace, and other aspects of the human condition. Not that Shakespeare didn’t balance these themes well in most of his plays, but here the combination can seem off. The lovers in the title, Trojans both, have relatively less stage time than the ongoing machinations and complications in the long standing war with the Greeks that’s going on around them. Hector’s battles with the likes of Ajax, Achilles, and Agamemnon and the debate over the merits of their conflict and the moral laws that define it take up far more territory. It’s interesting and surprisingly contemporary material, but Shakespeare has placed it in a rather cumbersome package.

The Porters’ Artistic Director, Charles Pasternak, who helmed this production, decides to go with the stronger cards the author has dealt him by emphasizing a particularly testosterone driven tale of war. The warring Trojans and Greeks posture and shout. And everything is wrapped up with an underlining gesture to make it clear this is first and foremost a play about the tragedy of war and moral ambivalence that it can spring from. Romance and heartbreak, though present, are given a back seat and the comedy is whittled down to something a little bleaker. The fool Thersites, played by Gus Krieger, spends most of the play in a leather half-mask strapped to his head which makes much of his dialog a bit more creepy than outright funny. The fight scenes between the young handsome actors playing the soldiers were some of the more convincing I’ve seen in this size of a production with Matt Calloway’s Achilles and Napoleon Tavale’s Hector bouncing off of the walls during their hand-to-hand combat. In this case, having a young and particularly attractive, athletic cast overall paid off in terms of physicality.

And despite some odd choices, like a mincing, effeminate Pandarus and a just two notches over the top Ajax, the show as a whole works well, maintaining focus and smooth pacing. And there were a number of very engaging performances as well, in particular from Thomas Bigley as Ulysses whose portrayal of the thinking and strategizing Greek warrior quickly became the centerpiece of the whole evening. He commanded attention through voice and manner in a show where action was more typically the order of the day. I was also taken with the space that many of the women in the cast managed to carve out in the show even when they frequently are put in the position of reflecting on the horrors of their men’s war. Taylor Fisher’s Cressida was sensible and believable, and Eliza Kiss’s Helen, who also served prominently in both the Prologue and Epilogue, was memorable. Does the Porters’ production milk everything it can out of Shakespeare’s play? Probably not, but then never being able to do so is part of the glory of Shakespeare. Pasternak and his fellow Porters deliver a solid, watchable, and compelling war story with Troilus and Cressida that deserves to be seen by a wide audience. It runs in the valley through February 19.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, Porters of Hellsgate

With all the negativity that’s been heaped on the current revival of Porgy and Bess on Broadway recently, one might forget how great a playwright that show’s collaborator Suzan-Lori Parks is. Well luckily for us in Southern California, there’s an excellent reminder of Parks’ talents that has just arrived at South Coast Repertory where a revival of her 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning drama, Topdog/Underdog opened last week. The play is filled with multiple, complicated layers of meaning and is steeped in mythology, both American and more ancient. Two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, share a dilapidated apartment. Lincoln brings in what little money they have through his arcade job where he dresses as Abraham Lincoln in white-face for visitor to pay money and mock-assassinate him with blanks. Meanwhile, the unemployed Booth, periodically interrupts his fantasies of his own animal magnetism with efforts to cajole his now reformed brother to re-enter the hustle by teaching him the ins and out of dealing three-card monte. The lengthy dialog between these two characters unfolds to reveal much about their history, including their abandonment by both parents as children and the wounds, both imagined and real, that they continue to nurse from those days.

This is powerful material and, though it can be very comic, there is always a sense of menace, particularly considering Booth’s penchant to stay armed at all times. Like all good mythology-based stories, the ending seems inevitable and it’s the points that Parks wants to make about history and in particular African-American history in the U.S. that are the glue that keeps the show together. The chemistry between the leads in the show is crucial and both Curtis McClarin who plays Lincoln and Larry Bates, who plays Booth, managed a believable interaction. But in other ways this production is not what you might expect. Director Seret Scott has gone for an exceedingly naturalistic, almost sentimental take on the story. The staging plays down the more abstract and symbolic parts of the story toning down much of the menace that exists between the brother in an attempt to make a real or at least identifiably conventional relationship between the two. It’s a markedly different approach from the 2004 staging offered at the Mark Taper Forum and has its good and bad points. On the one hand when conflict does boil over between the brothers it is more surprising and unexpected. However, it can also make some of the comedy in the script feel very much like a sitcom. Still, the substrate here is an excellent one and SCR manages to remind us why Suzan-Lori Parks still matters even a decade after this major success with a worthwhile and still provocative statement about America. The show continues in Orange County through the 29th.

And one other note - SCR, a leader in new play development in the region, has just initiated another new and exciting program called "Studio SCR," which will bring in an array of local artists with more off-beat material in its Nicholas Studio space. There are short weekend runs, but there are two shows recently seen here in L.A. already on the schedule that deserve mention. Steven Connell and Sekou Andrews' hip-hop, spoken word meditation on language and race, The Word Begins, which was last seen as part of the RADAR LA festival in 2011 will appear Jan 19-21. Further into the spring, Robert Cucuzza's twist on Strindberg's Miss Julie, Cattywampus will return. The show was the highlight of last year's NOW Festival at REDCAT and I would highly recommend you catch it in June 22-24.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, South Coast Rep

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

It’s never a bad idea to bring back a hit. And if you’re A Noise Within, Pasadena’s new repertory theater company you’ve had a number of those to choose from over the years. The company has revived successful productions of Waiting for Godot and Arthur Miller’s The Price in recent years, and for just two weeks, the company has brought back Michael Frayn’s evergreen Noises Off. It looks great, especially in their new Pasadena home. The backstage/onstage comedy calls for a comparatively large set involving two stories that can be seen from both front and behind with 7 doors, a stairwell and all those boxes, bags, and plates of sardines. To look at it, you might not realize that the set for the revival is the same one used in the troupe’s former Glendale home. It looks huge by comparison when not wedged at an angle into a much smaller space. Here with room to spread out, the show seems larger and more physical than before.

Of course, the play is supremely funny. I’d seen the show just recently in a London revival at the Old Vic directed by Lindsay Posner with a number of well-known British actors. To tell the truth, outside of the understandable issue of accents, A Noise Within’s current production was significantly better. Directors and founders Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott have wisely taken a bit broader approach that helps offset some of the more mechanical aspects of Frayn’s staging. There is an immense amount of stage direction here and all of it must look unplanned, which can distract from character development and other important qualities. But Geoff Elliott’s portrayal of director Lloyd Dallas bristles with an unspoken rage and stays completely out of sight for nearly all of the first Act making his eventual arrival from the dark all that more pronounced. Emily Kosloski meanwhile gives Brooke a more clueless edge that heightens the comedy of her character’s complete lack of improvisational skills. Of course, it’s an ensemble cast with many other strong turns and as is usually the case with ensemble comedies, it succeeds mostly because everyone onstage appears to be having as much fun as everyone in the audience ends up having. So, if you haven’t yet seen the show, or are ready to revisit an excellent comedy, you don’t need to get on an airplane, but you do need to act before January 15.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

Fela returned to Los Angeles earlier this month. Or more precisely, Fela! the musical that bears Fela Kuti’s name along with the requisite exclamation mark opened the Los Angeles leg of the show’s current national tour at the Ahmanson Theater. The show is a return of sort in that Fela Kuti, the person, spent some developmentally critical time in Los Angeles in 1969 where his exposure to activists in the Black Panther movement helped fuel his own political leanings and viewpoints. These events, including Kuti’s meeting with Sandra Iszadore, are depicted in the semi-autobiographical story line, which just as frequently veers off into exuberant dance, powerful live music, and a dash of magical realism thrown in for good measure. Which is good since the dance and musical numbers are frankly amazing and far more interesting in the end. There’s a musical education to be had in Fela! and the show is vitally compelling theater.

I first saw this show in January of 2010 in New York and thought very highly of it then and still. Choreographer Bill T. Jones and Jim Lewis assembled the book with Kuti’s own music for a product that is far more idea-oriented than its average jukebox music brethren. The show has suffered its own share of slings and arrows as well, including Charles Isherwood’s charges of minstrelsy and the more general criticism that the overall image of Kuti constructed by the show glosses over some of the less-than-noble aspects of its subject's life and personality. But this is art, and most audiences have been sophisticated enough to appreciate that all art, and especially theater, is about making inherently unfair decisions to create something that is inextricably bound up in particular social and political perspectives. Jones and Lewis have created as valid an image of Fela Kuti as anyone might. It isn't the only possible one. If there is any crime in Fela!, it’s that American theater hasn’t provided for a dozen shows just like it on the same topic all from different perspectives. Maybe Fela! wouldn’t have to say so much to and for so many if other voices were given more opportunity and space to speak.

All that being said, this touring production of Fela! does suffer some unavoidable set-backs at the Ahmanson. The show critically relies on interaction between the audience and the ensemble members, often moving around the auditorium which in prior incarnations is highly decorated, blurring the line between stage and seats. The large, aisle-free Ahmanson refutes this, constraining the motion and activity to the stage and a series of call-and-response audience participation moments. This distance can take a big bite out of the finales of both acts where the intensity and actions of the ensemble seem far less encompassing and the political bite of Kuti's music is blunted.

One of the things I was most excited about in revisiting the show, though, was the strength of its cast, many of whom had appeared in the original production. Sahr Ngaujah, who appeared again in the title role in the show I saw, gives one of the most remarkable stage performances I’ve seen in the last few years and deserves far more recognition for this performance than he has sometimes received. He manages a character with very fine lines between humor and rage with real nuance. The show also preserves the thrill of having a red hot live band on stage. Fela! gets that a musical is about music, and having the flesh and blood players to make that sound on stage conquers the whole evening. It's a great show even in this somewhat lesser carbon-copy performance at the Ahmanson; and if you haven't seen it, you should before it ends on January 22.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews

How many star vehicles for Olympia Dukakis can one theater-going year contain? Well this year I’ve seen two, and they were remarkably similar experiences. She is undeniably a fine actor and I understand the impulse to put her at the center of a show. Both times I’ve seen her on stage this year, I was impressed with her ability to communicate so immediately with her audience. Yet on both occasions, she was ultimately let down by odd or lackluster material that didn’t do her justice. In February, she starred in an Off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, a heavy-handed psychoanalytic tragedy about an artist-drifter who comes to act as a grim reaper for an elderly woman coming to the close of her days in a European villa. I didn’t write about this show at the time, but it was largely unsatisfying and provided a template for Dukakis recent stage appearances here in Los Angeles.

This weekend she wraps up a run in Morris Panych’s Vigil at the Mark Tape Forum downtown. It’s been one of the weakest season’s for the Taper in many years with five productions (one of which was actually on the Ahmanson stage) virtually all of which were either solo or small cast star-vehicles or half-baked revivals. (The exception was Theresa Rebeck’s world premiere Poor Behavior which gave the season its only real comic bite.) Panych’s odd-little dark comedy doesn’t change the season’s overall course. Vigil is a two-hander about a man, played by Marco Barricelli, who has come to see his dying aunt at her request. The aunt, played by Dukakis says almost nothing throughout the whole evening. Dukakis has a total of nearly 5 lines with the entire two hours taken up with a monologue delivered by the nephew. He’s a neurotic fellow whose relentless unanswered questions and stories end up telling us all about his own life and family. Dukakis, who has only one line in the entire first hour, meanwhile gives a wonderful, nuanced performance that is entirely about her body language. It’s a testament to her craft and it certainly the best part about the show.

Unfortunately, the play is fairly weak overall. Panych strings together short, staccato scenes punctuating them with morose punch lines often emphasizing the neurotic nephew’s desire for this whole episode to over and done with. There is an element of surreal absurdity to the play and the nephew’s unplanned visit soon stretches into months and months rather than days. His eagerness to see the aunt dead soon gives way to a sentimental story about loneliness and friendship in the face of death. Barricelli delivered Panych’s one liners with some zing, which one would hope for since Panych also severed as the director in this run. But I often felt the whole show was holding back, taking the easy way out of resolving what are some troubling scenarios and questions right down to those about suicide and our universal mortality. Panych is so wedded to the clever structural elements and turns of events that make up the story that the show feels forced and less funny than it might be otherwise. He fortunately has a very fine actor in Dukakis who can help carry the weaker parts of this material. But she deserves somehting a bit meatier than this outing.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews

I caught up with A Noise Within’s second production of the Fall, their second in their new Pasadena home, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms on Sunday. It’s a very good production of a 20th-century play that isn’t the kind of thing that most contemporary audiences quickly gravitate to. It’s filled with the kind of overt psychoanalytic thinking and references to Greek tragedy that can come off heavy-handed. Recent productions of Desire Under the Elms like the one Robert Falls recently took to New York, have dealt with this by running with the outlandish aspects of the story and doubling-down on them with surrealism. Perhaps the greatest achievement of director Dámaso Rodriguez in his staging for A Noise Within is his ability to keep the play relevant despite taking a far more naturalistic approach to the material.

Rodriguez also takes a traditional tack with the material, focusing heavily on the relationship between elderly Ephraim Cabot’s son, Eben, and Ephraim’s very young, brand-new wife, Abbie Putnam. Eben’s long standing desire to inherit the family farm is soon challenged by his new-stepmother’s plans until it is supplanted (and conflicted) by their desire for one another. Before you can say Oedipus, tragedy ensues. But this central relationship works with two young increasingly well known local faces, Monette Magrath as Abbie and Jason Dechert as Eben. Magrath strikes just the right tone of menace and desperation in Abbie while Dechert comes off as beautifully bruised in as believable a way as possible given the circumstances. William Dennis Hunt portrays an Ephraim more damaged than deadly here, but the combination of these three occupying the majority of the play’s action works quite well.

Better yet, the production itself suggested ANW’s continued adjustment to their new surroundings. John Lacovilli’s two story set, the Cabot family farm, expands to fill the available space more naturally than the concurrently running Twelfth Night. The overall feels was more relaxed and intimate, drawing the audience in from a greater distance into the thrust stage area. Sightlines at the Pasadena space are greatly improved and the cast is far more exposed from every angle demanding more from everyone. The cast and crew delivered all this on Sunday. Luckily, you’ve got two more chances to see Desire Under the Elms this weekend before it and Twelfth Night close for the holidays with the company returning in January with a short revival of their hugely successful production of Noises Off.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

Charlayne Woodard is no relation to Alfre Woodard. But ironically the former Ms. Woodard’s solo show, The Night Watcher, which recently opened at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City, begins with an unexpected phone call from her more famous namesake. Charlayne Woodard, as she describes herself in this largely autobiographical work, is a “blue collar actor” living and working in Los Angeles. The phone call is a surprise solicitation from Alfre for Charlayne and her husband to adopt a baby that is about to be born in a nearby hospital to a young mother who will be unable to care for it. Charlayne contemplates the offer briefly, but then turns it down after reflecting on the real responsibilities of raising a child. In the following two hours with intermission, Ms. Woodard repeats related scenarios in a number of variations. While she and her husband remain willfully and happily childless themselves, she is repeatedly drawn into numerous relationships with other young people as a godparent, family friend, or “auntie”. She becomes a parent by proxy as one of the key villagers involved in raising these particular children.

The vignettes that make up The Night Watcher, which had a New York run in fall of 2009, revolve around the often traumatic and always emotional stories of these children and Ms. Woodard’s attempts to help guide them in moments of poor behavior or severe crisis. The material can be tough at times, but not graphic. And it is often touching, outright tear-jerking material. I'll defer from saying much more since the stories have the most power when they're fresh. But let it be said that abuse and social ills lurk around most bends in the road.

Ms. Woodard is excellent in this. She shows mastery of the essential skills needed to pull off a solo show. She is engaging and an expert storyteller. She manages multiple characters simultaneously with ease. But the material, as heartbreaking as it is, doesn't always make for great theater. The vignettes take similar courses and by the time the audience arrives at the last one. the resolution of it can be easily predicted. The stories of the children in Ms. Woodard's life often work much better than the larger narrative about her own life choices and psychological make up. Although the material that proceeds the final story of Ms. Woodard's confrontation with an African man on the New York subway attempts to answer questions of her motivation that have been strangely absent earlier in the work, the final explanation comes off as defensive and ironically unnecessary. But there is beautiful storytelling here and spending two hours in Charlayne Woodard's warm, glowing and captivating presence is far from unpleasant.

Labels: Kirk Douglas Theater, LA Theater Reviews

On Saturday I headed over to Pasadena to see the new kid in town. Although already 20 years old, A Noise Within, is changing the theater landscape in L.A. again by transitioning from being Glendale’s premiere repertory theater company to being Pasadena’s with their move to the historic Stuart Pharmaceuticals building on Foothill Blvd. The powers that be in Glendale, unable to realize when they are about to lose a good thing, dropped the ball allowing A Noise Within to make a move from a dilapidated and cramped space on Brand Boulevard into a new, more permanent home that is the theatrical equivalent of winning the lottery. That’s not to say the company didn’t work incredibly hard to make this move happen, having raised million of dollars in the most inhospitable economic climate to make this dream a reality. They and their many supporters have worked long and hard for this move and the contrast between the new and former sites is immense.

Remember those cramped miniscule restrooms? Gone. Recall climbing those flights of stairs or waiting for the unpredictable elevator? No more. How about the uncomfortable, tiny seats? The new space has double the capacity with modern, comfortable and closer seating all around the thrust stage. The new location also boasts Edward Durell Stone’s mid-century modern façade complete with its fountain and beautiful clean lines while vastly increasing the space for virtually everything the company could want to do from storage and dressing rooms to ample space for audience services. If you’ve attended ANW performances in Glendale in the past, your jaw may well drop at the transformation, which makes the company seem less like a scrappy start-up and more like the seasoned troupe and educational powerhouse they are.

But A Noise Within is still a theater company and they kicked off their season at the end of last month with a new production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It’s an exuberant and joyful comedy that comes as a celebration for the company and its future. Director Julia-Rodriguez Elliott has moved the action of the play from Illyria to an imagined mid-century Cuba at Carnival time. It’s bright, colorful and filled with dancing. But like any organization that has undergone a major transition, this Twelfth Night is a reminder that A Noise Within will also have to take some time to artistically adjust to the new space as well. The Glendale site may have been cramped, but it provided for, an albeit forced, intimacy. The Pasadena auditorium is by comparison cavernous and drawing an audience in may not involve or require all of the tricks it did previously.

Rodriguez-Elliott’s direction and her cast were on emotional overdrive on Saturday with everything pitched just a few levels higher than necessary at times. The energy sometimes overwhelmed the poetry and natural humor of the text. The anachronisms set up by the change of setting were mostly handled well. While it was somewhat odd watching sword fights replaced with machete battles, the voodoo ritual complete with (fake) dead chicken in Act IV when Sir Topas taunts the imprisoned Malvolio, played by the company’s co artistic-direct Geoff Elliott, was priceless. There were some lovely performances from Deborah Strang as Maria and Anthony Mark Barrow as Feste among others. So much bodes well for A Noise Within in their new space. The company has great talent resources and has proven over the years that it can come up with inventive and creative solutions under tight constraints. It's certain that they'll continue to excel now that they have much more room to maneuver.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

I’ve seen a lot of Shakespeare this year. I guess that’s true every year, as well, but this year seems particularly brimming with everything, from King Lear in New York (on two different occasions) to Julius Caesar in Oregon. So, with all the competition, who would guess that the home of consistently the best Shakespeare I’ve seen all year is at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica? They hosted a smashing Merchant of Venice last winter from Theater for a New Audience and on Saturday, the venue welcomed back Shakespeare’s Globe Theater for their third visit in as many years, this time with their recent production of The Comedy of Errors. The troupe has been beloved here going as far back as Mark Rylance’s days with the company, but the Globe’s association with The Broad Stage has been very fruitful with satisfying touring productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Perhaps most striking about Shakepeare’s Globe is how physically little it takes to get it right. This point was driven home after seeing the elaborate reconstruction of the Globe Theater at The Park Avenue Armory this summer under the auspices of a residency from The Royal Shakespeare Company. A huge edifice, big casts, and elaborate sets rarely amounted to good theater there. But the Globe players, who are often traveling light, manage to impress with their focus on the best parts of Shakespeare – the language and desire to connect with the audience. The Comedy of Errors was directed by Rebecca Gatward and with its simplicity creates the deception that the show might be some summertime backyard lark. The set consists of little more than a large wooden pallet set upon the stage with a canvas-covered shack just behind it. Some chairs and a handful of props complete the physical stuff of the performance outside of the eight members of the ensemble and their costumes. It’s not Elizabethan dress per se, but evokes a 20th-century Turkish look with fezzes and sandals.

And yet the production feels large with its outsized comic performances. A single actor is cast for each pair of identically-named and unwittingly separated twin brothers. Antipholus is played here by the debonaire Bill Buckhurst and the servants Dromio are embodied by Fergal McElherron. This is not an unusual strategy given that there are only two scenes (one being the finale) that involve both twins in the same scene at the same time. Of course, having a single actor dash back in forth in those moments adds to the hilarity, and true to form, the Act III confrontation where one pair of Antipholus and Dromio are barred from entering their own home by the other pair, is particularly well done as the actors dash back and forth to either side of a free-standing door deftly donning and removing the few props—like a pair of glasses—used to communicate their different identities to the audience. But Gatward ups the ante in this production by having almost all of the rest of the cast take on multiple roles as well. Emma Pallant plays both the Abbess and the Courtesan in a particularly artful twist further muddling the social relationships Shakespeare is parodying. The Globe company and Gatward also strike just the right note with the numerous slapstick and low-brow elements of the play. The cast provides their own sound effects with slide whistles and drums for the pratfalls. But the whole thing is done with such a keen eye for the text and language that it never feels cynical. There is no effort to update or transform references using modern cultural ones. But there is an expansive sense of the stage and surroundings with the cast often entering, exiting, and delivering dialog from various points in the Broad Stage’s intimate space.

The show, which runs through the 27th, is perfect for older kids and just about everyone. It’s also another big success for Shakespeare’s Globe and The Broad Stage here in Los Angeles, which leaves one wanting more. So how about a two month residency sometime with the company here in Los Angeles at The Broad with five or six plays running in repertory. We could show New York how it’s done (again) and we wouldn’t even need to build a replica of the Globe Theater inside.

Labels: Broad Stage 11/12, 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

Recapturing theatrical magic can be a tricky thing. Take Austin, Texas’ own Rude Mechs. The theatrical troupe created a sensation in Los Angeles this spring as part of RADAR LA, the first installment in the West Coast version of the cutting edge international theater festival, Under the Radar. Center Theater Group’s contribution to the festival was a short run of The Method Gun by Krik Lynn that was off-beat, funny and surprisingly beautiful in the most unexpected ways. So it was good thinking to bring the troupe back again this fall with a new musical, I’ve Never Been so Happy with book and lyrics from Lynn in collaboration with composer Peter Stopschinski. The work premiered last April in Austin and the show opened Saturday in its West Coast premiere. Even walking into the Douglas reassured one that the night would be something unexpected and exciting. The entire lobby of the Kirk Douglas Theater had been redecorated with Western kitsch from hay on the floor to saloon doors around the concession stand. Audience members are shuttled into a makeshift dressing room and costumed in 10-gallon hats, bonnets and any variety of vests and Western wear.

All this activity made for one amped up pre-show, and, entering the theater, the audience is greeted with a massive multi-level barn floor stage complete with a small pit for four strings, guitar player and keyboards as the cast mills about in a warm up for the promised hootenanny. So what could go wrong? Well even in Texas, it appears the play’s the thing. I’ve Never Been so Happy is reliant on a rather flimsy premise about the host of a family-oriented Country and Western television (or radio?) variety program, which stars his daughter Annabellee, who is eager to get out from under her father’s very overprotective wing. He wants her married before she can leave home and she agrees to let him pick the groom in an effort to make this happen and for her to inherit all of his land in a King Lear sort of twist. The groom-to-be, as it turns out, will be Jeremy, an 18 year-old just evicted from his mother’s wymyn’s commune in the surrounding area due to his gender and age. That mother, Julie, believes tying her son to the last mountain lion in Texas is the way to go to achieve this. As with The Method Gun there are numerous quirky touches here including Lynn’s fondness for anthropomorphism. The mountain lion as well as twin pet dachshunds Siegfried and Siegmunda are all voiced by human actors and have substantial singing parts with their owners. None of this works as well as the roaming unexplained tiger in The Method Gun but the intent is the same.

Of course, a sophisticated or profound scenario is not necessary for a comedy, but I’ve Never Been so Happy squanders golden material at every turn like a 12:45 AM SNL skit. Nothing much is ever made of the fact that part of the show is set in a family TV show or that the wymyn’s commune coexists in the same sphere as it. Instead the focus stays on the dogs and the mostly-imaginary love story. All of this might not be such of an issue, of course, if the music could save the day but it rarely does. The closing number, “I’ve Never Been so Happy” and Annabellee’s big Act I number “Everything’s Tied” are the only two that work. Stranger yet, very little of the music references Country and Western musical traditions, instead going for a less-involved Stephen Schwartz feel. At other times the musical choices are puzzling. Both acts start with down tempo duets which douses the audience with cold water from the minute the curtain goes up. The musical production values are off as well with strained and off pitch vocalism from many in the cast. There are exceptions. I was taken with E. Jason Liebrecht's Jeremy and Cami Alys's stage time as Julie. I longed for the sharp word play and irreverence of The Method Gun in Never Been’s lyrics, but until the very finale they were elusive.

There is something to all this I think. I imagine that the show could be construed as a commentary on the Western or perhaps even Texan character. The kitsch of the pre-show provides further commentary on the intimate and conflicting strains that make up the people of the West and the mountain lion serves as a metaphor for the Western spirit that is easily lost in the conflict of ideals that populates so much of today’s world. But this too seemed to slip through the fingers too easily in I’ve Never Been so Happy. CTG has a record of turning out some remarkable hits from the Douglas space and the ghost of Bloody, Bloody, Andrew Jackson fills the theater with this kind of material. But I’ve Never Been so Happy is a long way from that success, I’d wager, even if the promised self-love of the title is the first step in getting others to love you as well. The show runs through October 23 at the Kirk Douglas Theater.

Labels: Kirk Douglas Theater, LA Theater Reviews

When I was a child, I used to love watching the Carol Burnett Show on CBS. However, one thing I never understood was why the recurring skits where Carol played the chronically unhappy Eunice constantly at war with her mother and various family members were so popular. I never found the endless arguments and shouting funny, but obviously others did. And to this day I find that corner of the humor world difficult to relate to. Thus I went into the world premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s latest play Poor Behavior now on stage at the Mark Taper Forum with some trepidation. The title alone suggests the kind of thing that happens when people stop being polite and start getting…well, you know. And when the play opens in the middle of an all out verbal brawl between Ian, played by Reg Rogers, and his friend’s wife Ella, played by Johanna Day, I was wondering what I was in for. But to my surprise, Poor Behavior actually turned out to be a clever, well-written and surprisingly provocative adult play.

Certainly the word is the thing in Rebeck’s world, and her two couples unleash barrages of sharply witty dialog at one another. Ian is married to the somewhat mentally unstable Maureen, here a hysterical Sharon Lawrence. The two have come to the country home of Ella and her husband Peter, a likable Christopher Evan Welch, for the weekend, and soon Ian and Ella are in a row over morality and religion that seems to irritate their spouses with its palpable sexual energy. There are some misconstrued gestures and sidelong glances that soon drive Maureen to suspect Ian has cheated on her with Ella. Slowly all four of the characters are drawn into the speculative affair which Ian refuses to deny in a way that forces Ella closer to him. Rogers and Day are superb in generating tension between the two characters amidst some eloquent verbal bantering that pressures the audience to keep up with them. Rebeck masterfully keeps the story aloft with a series of unfolding complications that manage to avoid becoming just another thriller or succumbing to some easy, pat position on the moral issues in the work. That isn’t to say that she avoids painting herself into a bit of a corer in the end of the show. But I don’t want to spoil the fun. There is an honesty to Poor Behavior as well that is both charming and thoughtful. And in a play that is always in the midst of another argument, that is a good thing. The show runs downtown through October 16.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, Mark Taper Forum

The SITI Company cast of The Trojan Women (After Euripides)

For a few brief moments in September each year the Getty Villa in Malibu comes to life with live theater. Due to the the wonts of the inhabitants of the tony surrounding neighborhood, these adaptations of classical dramas, performed in the amphitheater, are fleeting as if they were only on loan to the Getty, not unlike contested antiquities that were once the museum's but now come and go to their countries of origin. The Getty's productions involve a variety of visiting artists and this year they welcomed Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki's SITI Company and a new adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women. Actually to get technical about it, the SITI adaptation is entitled The Trojan Women (After Euripides) in what the program notes indicate is a gesture to recognize that the company has done some significant excavation on the play in order to recognize the many historical overtones audiences may see in the work thousands of years later on.

The nature and extent of these revisions, however, conducted under the guidance of director Bogart and playwright Jocelyn Clarke, may not be quite as radical as the above statement might suggest. Characters have been deleted and others added. A newly written Odysseus appears at the end to interact with Hecuba, and Athena is nowhere to be found in the introduction. The women's chorus is replaced by a male eunuch priest character and there is greater emphasis on the idea of the Greeks committing a cultural genocide in the conclusion of this lengthy war. The costumes are classically inspired but contemporary with Helen dripping in jewels and the men all in business suits. And yet, the language and minimal sets outside the surroundings of the Getty Villa gives the play a distinctly unadorned feel. The changes are incorporated so well that there is little sense that this adaptation has strayed far from what audiences might be otherwise familiar with.

Even with significant changes, the story remains largely uneventful. Four Trojan royal women - Hecuba, Kassandra, Andromache, and Helen (who is not really a Trojan at all) lament the loss of their city and people and await being taken to their new separate fates in distant Greek lands. Not unlike a Wagner act, the action mostly occurs before and after the 100 minutes depicted in the play so much of the drama is in the storytelling. Despite this I was riveted throughout, even without lush Romantic German music. The performances were gut-wrenching. Akiko Aizawa's Kassandra was mad and perfectly tragic while Makela Spielman highlights Andromache's pain and nobility. But the actor at the center of the proceedings is Ellen Lauren as Hecuba. Lauren rages with white-hot anger and heartbreak but manages to keep things from boiling over into parody. The male characters are more ancillary here, but J. Ed Araiza makes it clear that Menelaus will buckle under his reunited wife's seduction. Brent Werzner's Poseidon haunts the stage for nearly the whole show following his opening monologue in his identification with his beloved lost Trojans.

The influence of Asian theater traditions is evident in Bogart's calm, meditative movements that seem restrained even in moments of great activity. Actors are specifically posed in ways that look self-conscious to contemporary audiences. But this is a perfect setting for such tactics, heightening the cultural distinctions of the Trojans from the Greeks and giving everything a more majestic feel. Of course, if you don't already have tickets for the show before it closes at the end of September, you are probably out of luck in that, as usual, they are long gone by now. But the SITI group has managed to add another satisfying reputable production to the Getty's theatrical track record to date.

Labels: Getty Villa, 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