Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

While I've been here and there this month, fellow OWA correspondent Richard Valitutto has been busy celebrating the 100th anniversary year of August Strindberg's death in Orange County and filed this report.

After a successful New York run in January earlier this year, Robert Cucuzza’s off-kilter adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie returned to the West Coast for a third brief appearance this past weekend as part of the South Coast Repertory’s studio series. In L.A., Cattywampus was previously presented at Son of Semele Theater in August 2011 and again at REDCAT’s NOW Festival in September 2011. I saw it this Friday, opening night at SCR.

Though it would seem safe to assume that writer/director Cucuzza is laying low while his show is presented for a fourth time, this would be a mistake. Cucuzza has been fiercely involved with the continued development of the work with small rewrites and edits, not least of which being the renaming of Jean’s counterpart, the car-detailer, from Donnie to Jodie (an adjustment whose parallelism, if only for alliterative purposes, pleases me more). This in addition to the fact that the SCR Studio performances featured fresh, new actors playing both Jodie (Jacob Loeb) and Julie (Lola Kelly), though still just as well-directed and acted as their predecessors. Loeb brought to the role a fantastic kineticism, matched well by Kelly’s execution of neo-Julie’s profoundly weird sexuo-deferential entanglements. Jenny Greer once again convincingly played the true down-n-out yinzer Chrissie. Combined with the subtle and polished bluegrass lounge-rock continuous underscore – performed with joyful ease by composers Juli Crockett (guitar) and Michael Feldman (electric organ) – and the keen, economical design elements, the show’s energy was palpably crackling: pratfalls, F-bombs, Pittsburghese, and all.

Cucuzza’s tragicomedy still remains true to a lot of what is already written about its previous runs. Like Strindberg’s 1888 tragedy, this version is lean, antipodal, provocative, and weird. Cleverly adapting the work to present-day Pittsburgh pauperdom, Cucuzza is a master of parallelism. Calling it an adaptation is actually slightly inaccurate, as the rewrite follows Strindberg’s plot details and dialogue so closely it feels more like a very thorough translation done by an academic Myron Cope. This “mirror effect” sometimes lends itself to hilarious conflagrations, such as when Jodie reveals his 10-year plan which will ultimately lead him to the same object of 19th-century Jean’s desire: Roumania. But it also has more abstractly poetic parallels as well: Julie’s caged finch is now a Phoenix-emblazoned kite. One element from Strindberg’s play which was curiously absent (though not conspicuously so) was the fascinating explanation of Julie’s family troubles stemming from her mother’s failed attempt to challenge gender norms, the continued repercussions of which are evident in her and her father’s behaviors.

The one thing that does not readily correlate is the element of class-struggle in a naturalist’s deterministic society. It is a bit hard to accept that Julie and Jodie are as socially and morally conflicted as Julie and Jean. But as one translator of Strindberg’s play Edwin Björkman explains in his preface, the title “Miss” in “Miss Julie” really is just that (originally the Swedish fröken, like the German Fräulein), despite her being the daughter of a count. She is no royalty, just a fatefully positioned person of privilege. If anything, the transferral to American life may be most successful in that where Strindberg’s characters display seditious undercurrents influenced by and contributing to changing socio-economic conditions in the Swedish post-monarchy, Cucuzza’s characters are borderline sociopaths symptomatic of a failed cultural and economic system. In short, Cucuzza’s show is just that much crazier. The emotional extremes of the show were not necessarily virtuosically executed, but they communicated the spirit of passion and confusion which I’m sure Strindberg would have enjoyed. And as all good translators and interpreters know, the spirit of the word, not the word itself, is everything.

Labels: Richard Valitutto, South Coast Rep

August Wilson’s play Jitney, which opened recently in a very fine revival at Orange County’s South Coast Repertory, is an odd man out in many ways. One of the first plays written by Wilson, Jitney was reworked and then reworked again for premieres in both 1996 and 2000 following a production in its original version in 1982. It’s one of the 10 plays that make up Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” which examine the African American experience throughout the 20th century decade by decade, nearly all of which are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Jitney, an episodic story of the men who work in an unlicensed taxi business, or jitney during the early 1970s, is set in that same neighborhood, although it predates the idea of the cycle itself. Later after the successes of Wilson's Fences and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the scope of the overall project came into focus and the connections between the plays began to take shape. But Jitney stands alone. While there is still the sweep of socioeconomic, historical and cultural issues that fill the plot, the play's structure is looser and less focused. The magical realism that repeatedly comes up in the later plays has yet to surface with Jitney feeling a bit more like Arthur Miller than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Powerful emotional scenes tend to run on, uncertain of exactly where to stop and a crush of subplots sometimes leave the greater arc of the show wanting.

And yet the play is unmistakably Wilson’s with its ambition and its real-life integration of multiple conflicting cultural contexts. The South Coast Repertory and director Ron OJ Parson have concocted such a loving, detailed version of the play in this revival that the show succeeds despite the source material's limitations. There's beautiful language here and powerful emotion that shines through within the lives of these men. The ostensible central figure is Becker, the owner of the jitney business, played by the always excellent Charlie Robinson. Robinson has given masterful performances in many of Wilson's plays in the area theaters including superb turns as Troy in Fences at both SCR and The Odyssey Theater in recent seasons. Becker's son Booster, a convincing Montae Russell, is just out of prison for a murder charge, and all the drivers are already aware that the pending reunion is not going to go well. Those drivers have a variety of their own issues. Youngblood, played by the very watchable Larry Bates, is an eager young man with dreams and plans to achieve them that his common sense can't always quite cover. Many of the others have a variety of issues that promise to threaten not only their own functioning but the operation of the business, including the alcoholic Fielding, an eloquent David McKnight, and an armed busybody and shop gossip Turnbo, played by Ellis E. Williams in another superb addition to the cast. Sometimes the set and surroundings for these characters looks a bit too polished and tidy to feel completely real, but the ensemble manages to transcend any off message visual cues with performances that feel lived-in and emotionally authentic. Parson and SCR have produced a vision of Jitney that far from standing apart from Wilson's history plays, feels fully integrated. History and the world seem to flow from these crises and conflicts for a wonderful evening overall. Jitney continues through June 10 in Costa Mesa, and with the holidy weekend, you've got plenty of chances to see it.

Labels: South Coast Rep

Thanks to Ben Vanaman for the following report on two recent theater offerings from Orange County

Each Spring, Orange County’s Tony Award-winning South Coast Repertory theater company hosts the Pacific Playwrights Festival, a three-day event where new plays receive staged readings. Among the notable plays that have been launched at the festival are Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel, Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole just to name a few recent examples. In addition, SCR simultaneously mounts full productions of plays that have previously appeared at the festival. This year, there are two, both world premieres: Steven Drukman’s The Prince of Atlantis which concludes its run Sunday on the Segerstrom Stage, and the musical Cloudlands from dramatist Octavio Solis and composer Adam Gwon on the smaller Julianne Argyros Stage which continues through May 6th.

The Prince of Atlantis is set in the Boston suburb of Nonantum, whose denizens spout colloquialisms specific to their neighborhood, an arcane language mixing Italian, English, Romany, and street slang from the 1930s and 1940s. “Divia mush,” for instance, translates to “crazy guy,” and this play is full of crazy men, like Joey Colletti (John Kapelos), a wealthy fish merchant who’s serving a nine-month sentence for selling tainted fish, which has resulted in casualty. Adding to his woes: a son named Miles (a sympathetic Brett Ryback) who wants to meet him for the first time. Joey asks seemingly unstable brother Kevin (Matthew Arkin, in the production’s strongest turn) to run interference, leading to unanticipated complications and poignant payoffs.

The plot’s primary focus is the awkward meeting of Kevin and Miles, an intellectual who owns a small publishing imprint and is appalled by the décor of Joey’s estate, where Kevin is staying while awaiting his brother’s release. The Neptune-themed kitsch prompts Miles to quote from Oscar Wilde: “either the wallpaper goes, or I go.” But of course Miles is compelled to stay, as this is a tale of the central role that family plays in the formation of identity. It may not hurt that Miles is intrigued when Kevin announces that he’s been reading Hamlet, a play about sons and fathers and pretend fathers, deliberation versus action, the essential if elusive self. As yet incapable of making critical decisions about his own heart, Miles seeks guidance and approbation from floundering Kevin while flirting with Joey’s streetwise girlfriend Connie (a delightful Nike Doukas), and the startling results are equal parts pleasure and pathos.

The other former Playwrights Festival offering currently getting the full treatment, Cloudlands, is far more problematic. It's also the one that lingers, though not necessarily for the right reasons. You don’t want to discuss the meaning of this musical after exiting the theater as much as you may seek to exorcise the spirit of it. You don’t care to dissect its ideas as much as you would like to talk about the mission of the American musical theater itself. You might well ask: “has it come to this?”

Cloudlands leads to a shocking climax and a disturbing resolution that are equally anticipated by the time they arrive. However, this makes recapping the synopsis an exercise in judgment. I will say this much: the story takes place in present-day San Francisco for no particular reason; it is about a not quite next to normal bourgeois American family at a moment of impending crisis; it identifies ethnic conflict and then arguably reduces this conflict to caricature; its theme of how the past is inextricably bound to the present mirrors the action next door on the Segerstrom Stage while making one yearn for the company of Drukman’s more relatable characters; and its tragic outcome feels less earned than rigged. Teenage heroine Monica shoulders the burden of her family’s dark legacy while keeping her head metaphorically in the clouds, and she sometimes feels more like a representation of the ethereally troubled teen than flesh and blood. Yet, one commends the young actress portraying Monica –Addi McDaniel- for making her reasonably sympathetic.

There was a time when you went to a musical to have a good time; to be lifted up. That time may be over. Where musicals (and comedy, for that matter) were once at least in part about resilience –when life throws you a curve, you sing and dance, spin patter- today’s musicals seem increasingly to be about knocking over taboos, the downward spiral, characters sprinting toward self-annihilation. And, still, the tunes are pretty, in Cloudlands creating a tonal disconnection with the overheated action that I think accounted for some of the tittering at the end of the show. Overall, I found Adam Gwon’s score to be melodious but lacking distinction, a series of pop anthems and ballads sounding more or less the same: melancholy suffused with longing. This music enters the brain, lodges there briefly, and then dies a quick death. Pop ballad scores; jukebox musicals: more than anything, I think the American musical theater needs a new musical language and Cloudlands, while struggling to find it, hasn't quite arrived there yet.

Labels: South Coast Rep

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

Monette Magrath as Henrietta Leavitt in Silent Sky Photo: Henry DiRocco/SCR 2011

Astronomical research, at first glance, may not seem like the richest wellspring for theatrical ventures. But somewhat surprisingly, Lauren Gunderson is proving just such an assumption wrong with the world premiere of a new play at South Coast Repertory this month called Silent Sky. Actually, Gunderson has written a number of plays about science-related topics, and Silent Sky joins their ranks, though it is also about the pull of family commitments. In particular, the story focuses on one of the great unsung heroes of late 19th-century astronomy, Henrietta Leavitt. Leavitt, working for next to nothing in the Harvard College Observatory of the late 19th century discovered a groundbreaking property of stars that paved the way for her successors including Edwin Hubble to better determine the distances between stars and the vastness of the universe overall. Leavitt's story is a compelling one considering the lack of opportunity for women to excel in and receive credit for work in the scientific fields of her time, and Gunderson seizes the opportunity to flesh out Leavitt's achievements and the personal characteristics that contributed to her perseverance.

In fact, the work-life and scientific advancement scenes in the play are some of the strongest in Silent Sky. Gunderson is especially adept at translating technically sophisticated, if historical, material into something watchable. Monette Magrath, the actress who plays Leavitt, gives a credible and very watchable performance. Her interactions with professional colleagues like Annie Cannon, played by Colette Kilroy, and Williamina Fleming, played by Amelia White provide much of the driving force behind the often intellectual action in the show. I also rather liked the attractive if simple staging which incorporated a video projection of stars on a stage largely uncluttered except for the suggestion of arcs and spheres. If there is a downfall in Silent Sky it's the relatively clunky family, romantic, and personal background foisted upon Leavitt's story. Relatively little is known about Leavitt's personal life, and Gunderson has fleshed out some details with rather predictable storylines. There is a sister, Margaret, played by Erin Cottrell who is initially hurt by Henrietta's desire to leave home to do scientific work. The health and welfare of her family frequently draws Henrietta away from her work as well as a burgeoning love affair with Peter Shaw, played by Nick Toren. Gunderson does not overplay this imagined frustrated romance, but it can feel a bit cliché and certainly forced as if the arc of the scientific discovery plot isn't compelling enough on its own.

But regardless of the relative success or failure of Silent Sky, the play represents one of the most important and exciting things about South Coast Repertory, the organization's commitment to new American plays. Gunderson's play is an SCR commission and part of the 14th year of the company's Pacific Playwrights Festival. Again SCR has made room for two fully staged productions of new plays and several readings of works in development. The festivals reading will start on April 29 and the second fully staged production this year, Itamar Moses' Completeness, will start previews on April 17. The festival is one of Southern California's theater gems and it’s great for audiences to be exposed to so much new work on a regular basis.

Labels: South Coast Rep

Richard Doyle and James Lancaster Photo by Henry DiRocco/SCR.

It is a particularly good time for Irish playwrights. And by that I mean that some of the most consistently interesting and groundbreaking plays continue to come out of Ireland in the last two decades often from the pens of the triumvirate of Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh. And while Walsh has always been a particular favorite of mine for his brand of edgy surrealism, McPherson’s stage world is hard to resist with its sentimental brand of beautiful storytelling and the supernatural. One of his first big successes in the U.S. as a playwright, The Weir, has returned to Southern California at South Coast Repertory in an admirable and very enjoyable production. The play is a ghost story set in a bar in contemporary Ireland. A group of four local men and a woman who has recently moved to their town meet one evening and, with enough alcohol, soon become involved in telling different ghost stories. These stories become progressively more personal and intense as the night wears on. And while the play is not meant to be horrifying, McPherson is drawing a connection between what's scary in the supernatural world and the real life fears and traumas most people know all too well. I don't want to say too much more about what happens in The Weir since the beauty of the story is mostly in the telling of it.

McPherson's plays can be delicate things. They rely heavily on actors being storytellers in the most traditional sense, holding an audience rapt with the sound of their voice and the mastery with which they color and shape a series of events. There is little other action, and McPherson's plots often unfold within the context of the stories the characters tell to one another on stage. The Weir is no exception. In fact the play presages much of the material in McPherson's best known later plays, Shining City and The Seafarer. South Coast Repertory has brought together a cast that manages to get the primary tasks of the evening right. I was most impressed by Richard Doyle who plays Jack, the senior member of the group, and James Lancaster as Finbar, the local boy whose done well in real estate and now brings a client, a young woman not his wife, to meet some of the local townspeople. The cast is rounded out by the very capable Kirsten Potter, Daniel Reichert, and Tony Ward. Accents for the most part are quite stable across the board although some of the cast struggled a bit more with projecting to the back of the house than others. I also found some of the dialog and activity that link the stories in The Weir clumsy and uncertain under the direction of Warner Shook. But in a play whose heart and soul pours out of inebriated monologues, this is a relatively minor issue. The Weir is another largely successful offering from South Coast Repertory and is a great chance to expose yourself to one of the great living Irish playwrights of our time.

Labels: South Coast Rep

l-r: Linda Gehringer, Brian Kerwin, Marin Hinkle, Lily Holleman and Arye Gross Photo: Henry DiRocco 2011

Orange County’s South Coast Repertory is no stranger to new works or the latest and greatest of recent plays that have started life elsewhere. So it is no surprise that the company and artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson moved to bring a work from arguably the hottest young playwright of the moment, Annie Baker, to Southern California. Her comedy, Circle Mirror Transformation, opened there over the weekend with an excellent, seasoned cast, and I’m happy to say that Baker’s work lives up to all of the hype that precedes her. Not only does it have one of the best play titles in years, it is an inventive, smart comedy that sets a fairly high standard for anything else you might see on a local stage this year.

The set up is simple. Four students and a teacher meet at a local community center in small town Vermont for a series of amateur acting classes. All of the play’s action takes place in the rehearsal room during class times and nearly all of that occurs in the context of the acting exercises or games the teacher, Marty, leads her students through. (It’s one of these exercises the play takes its name from.) While this may sound like a rehash of Christopher Guests’ Waiting for Guffman, it couldn’t be further away from it. This is not a series of gags about small town life and characters bumping up against dreams of the theater. Instead the plays incredible economical dialog unravels a story about the experiences the characters have with one another both inside and outside of class. There are stretches of pregnant silence throughout and many of the laughs stem more from what isn’t spoken than what is. Baker never wastes time explaining the exercises letting them speak for themselves in her short, clipped scenes expertly directed by Sam Gold who has been closely involved with the success of Baker’s plays in New York.

The cast, all veterans of many local stages, is superb. Linda Gehringer plays Marty, the group's leader who is coping with the strains of her marriage to James, played by Brian Kerwin, who has been obligated to participate in the six week class. Meanwhile recently divorced Schultz, embodied here by a surprisingly hawt and butch Arye Gross, is beginning to fall for New York escapee and former actress Theresa, played by Marin Hinkle. The group is rounded out by the adolescent Lauren, winningly embodied by Lily Holleman whose go at teen angst never overwhelms the show and is spot on throughout. These are all great performances that mine the actors’ physical range in a script of relatively few words and the subtext of what the characters’ actually do say when they speak. There is a heart in Circle Mirror Transformation as well besides the laughs. Skeletons come clambering out of everyone’s closet as these characters learn to stretch their acting muscles and Baker expertly communicates this information to the audience in a manner that is both economical and smart. So if you want to see the next big thing, that can actually deliver on its promises, head down to Orange County where Circle Mirror Transformation continues at South Coast Repertory until Jan 30.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, South Coast Rep

The cast of Putting It Together
Photo: South Coast Rep 2009

Is Sondheim like sex and chocolate? I would argue it is. At least to the extent that like the others, it meets the old qualification that even when Sondheim's bad, it’s still Sondheim. Which was my thought after seeing the South Coast Repertory revival of Putting It Together this past weekend. Not that the production is bad. It’s actually quite serviceable. It’s just that it isn’t great and it left me thinking – well, it is Sondheim still, isn’t it? Putting It Together is essentially a revue. It incorporates songs from several other works and arranges them in such a way as to imply a story line for a group of five performers. The action takes place over the course of a dinner party in the upscale condominium of a New York couple. There’s not a lot of plot to it and most of the action focuses on the relationship stress faced by an older couple and the potential romantic interminglings of their younger male and female guests.

However, the show is really about the songs, and there are many great ones here. Several of them are delivered with a fair amount of insight and emotion. I was particularly taken with “Sorry/Grateful” from Company performed here by Harry Groener. In fact, Groener had his hands in many of the best numbers including “Old Friends”, “Country House”, and “Pretty Women.” The other cast members struggled to live up to his standard vocally and acting wise, though no one was cringe inducing. Matt McGrath who was excellent here in Los Angeles a few year’s back in Robert Wilson’s The Black Rider returns as a far more human and urbane young man. He's witty, but burdened with what appears to be a high school prom outfit complete with shiny vest and tie which does him no favors. Dan Callaway was rather All-American if a bit pitchy at times. The two women in the cast, Mary Gordon Murray and Niki Scalera were plagued by rather poorly tailored and garish costumes. In fact the whole staging seemed like a bit of a period piece with the midtown condominium dining room ensconced specifically in the early-to-mid 1980s.

Or at least it seems like the Orange County idea of a New York penthouse. In any event, even when the quasi-story begins to unravel as it stretches for some way to logically include "Gun Song" from Assassins, it's always possible to enjoy these theatrical songs for what they are. If you're not familiar with the music, I'd highly recommend you go despite some of the clumsiness.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, South Coast Rep

from l-r: Matthew Arkin, Jenny O'Hara, Marin Hinkle, Arye Gross
Photo: South Coast Repertory 2009

Playwright Richard Greenberg’s long relationship with South Coast Repertory theater in Orange County continues to bear fruit with yet another world premiere there this month entitled Our Mother’s Brief Affair. It’s in line with much of his recent work, lightly tweaking the liberal middle class for its apparent hypocrisy by thrusting his characters in a situation that pushes the very buttons they are quick to point out in others. In this sense, Affair is perhaps most kindred to 2002’s A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, but this time the issue isn’t race as much as it is loyalty to one’s moral convictions.

It’s a sparse 90-minute, 4 character affair where two fraternal twins, brother and sister, cope and complain about new revelations from their now elderly mother about a 10-week romantic affair she had in her fifties while still married to their father. The characters deliver most of the dialogue as expositions, though funny expositions, aimed directly at the audience with brief asides to one another to actually flesh out the scenes they are describing. Greenberg is no stranger to this tactic, though he seems more enamored with it than ever here giving Affair a rather didactic flair. There’s more than a little sentiment as well, but things can get long winded. In perhaps the riskiest gambit, though, the whole plot revolves around a bit of detail from American history I won’t reveal here. Let it be said, however, that it’s obscure enough that the characters spend a good 10 minutes during a break in the “action” to acknowledge and fully explain all the history around the not-actually-dramatic twist. It doesn’t exactly work. I mean, it’s understandable in its explanation; it’s just a little far to reach in such a slim wisp of a theater piece.

The set consists only of a concrete enclosed New York park that the characters inhabit moving from bench to bench to represent scene changes. The acting is quite good. Arye Gross and Marin Hinkle play the twins to Jenny O’Hara’s mother and all of them are utterly convincing with the neurotic bits they’re given. It’s a psychological play, but not deeply so and none of them get too carried away when they don’t need to be. It’s very pleasant and warmhearted. And while it’s not likely to change anyone’s life, Our Mother’s Brief Affair might get somebody to stop and think—even if only for a very short while. It continues on stage in Costa Mesa through May 3.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, South Coast Rep

Kasey Mahaffy, Rob Nagle, Louis Lotorto in Taking Steps
Photo : Henry DiRocco/SCR 2008

It always seems to me that the Southern California theater picks-up in the summer. Maybe it just seems that way to me since there is less competition from music events for space in my mind during this time, but it is ever thus. As if on cue, there are two really strong offerings right now I’d like to draw attention to. Nothing says summer like an Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and South Coast Repertory , like many other local companies in the past, is happy to oblige. Taking Steps, directed here by Art Manke, receives an attentive and generous staging from the Orange County company. Steps dates from the the late 70s and like Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves, it is also preoccupied with spacial games – here all three floors of a decaying Victorian mansion occupy the same stage simultaneously. Characters cross each other obliviously and engage in other sight-gags like jogging around a pole at times to represent a spiral staircase. Manke has decided to aggressively exploit the late 1970s setting complete with disco music at the intermission, which works well, if for no other reason in that it helps make sense of rather the out-of-date sexual mores and social cues that populate the plot. Rob Nagle, Kasey Mahaffy, Bill Brochtrup, Kirsten Potter, Louis Lotorto, and Emily Eiden make up a fine cast that handles the physical elements of the production with ease making everyone seem gangley and clumsy in a substantially physical production. Accents are sable and unforced throughout which is an achievement in my book - if you are going to do them, get them right, which they do. While the whole thing could have been a notch or two more maniacal, it’s well worth seeing and a fun afternoon.

Of course, if you like your comedy with a bit more serious bent, there is a quite good play receiving its West Coast Premiere now at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena. Jason Grote’s 1001 is perhaps the most ambitious play to appear here in greater L.A. since Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson in its sheer scope, brazenness, broad agenda and purpose. A densely plotted tale of lovers telling stories and the way telling stories shapes our sense of self melds elements from 1001 Nights with a modern twist on the Scheherazade legend in a work that contains everything from a Middle Eastern parody of Vertigo to Osama bin Laden dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Add to this cameos from Jorge Luis Borges, Gustav Flaubert, and the voice of Alan Dershowitz and you may begin to get an idea of just how much is going on here. The intersecting and frequently self-referential storylines rise and disappear in a non-linear sequence in a work that is simultaneously thoughtful and laugh-out-loud funny. It may be a little broad at times and sometimes is too smart for its own good, but it’s gutsy and never treats the audience like idiots. There are many really excellent performances here including Monka Jolly’s Scheherazade and a very nice turn from Jason Chanos who was covering the lead role of Alan on Thursday. These are two faces I would love to see more of on stages around town. Of course, credit is due to the very capable hands of director Michael Michetti who continues to be behind the best work in town over and over again. 1001 runs through June 9 and is definitely worth a trip to Pasadena.

Labels: LA Theater Reviews, South Coast Rep