Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities.  Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year.  Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.

Ashley Walden is an Ovation Fellow from the California Institute of the Arts.

I loved Tree! This is by far the best play I have seen this fall. Not once did I look at the light grid. It made you almost want to cry but once you were at that moment it made you laugh.

In the world premiere of Julie Hebert’s Tree we find African American chef Leo Price (Chuma Gault) living in Chicago caring for his aging mother with dementia, Jessalyn Price (Sloan Robinson), and his college-age daughter, J.J. (Tessa Thompson), when white Gender Studies professor Didi Marcantel (Jacqueline Wright) barges into his life with a provocative cache of old love letters she has discovered written by his mother to her recently deceased father. From the addled memories of Jessalyn come contradictory stories of her dangerous interracial romance with Didi’s father.

At the end of the piece, I found myself thinking about the flow of the play and could not determine whether many of its great moments were due to the writing, directing or acting. The play ran approximately 90 minutes with no intermission and the audience members were there for each and every second. I would attribute the audience’s level of engagement to the quality of the text and the unity of each theatrical element of the production.

The scenic and lighting design by Brian Sidney Bembridge worked for me and again I found myself not knowing if it worked because it was the perfect Chicago home or because it meshed so seamlessly with the other elements. Each of the characters was dressed in a way that did not hint of costuming but they were innately dressed in the type of outfit each would have worn.

At the center of this production was the ensemble, comprised of four actors, primarily in two-actor scenes. Although the cast was small, the stage never seemed empty; on the contrary, it was always full of energy, life and curiosity for the next moment.

Through the story-telling, I was engaged with each character and felt there were moments in the play where I could see each one’s true feelings in the situation. The moments when the characters were isolated on stage were my favorite. The play was constructed so Jessalyn’s monologues were given while she was alone. The stories hinted to the letters in the play and showed her in more youthful days. Those solitary moments on stage illuminated the younger, vivacious woman buried deep inside of the confused woman the other characters had come to know.

The lone moments when Didi was above the stage in the boat stayed with me because they revealed her at her most vulnerable. Leo’s solitary moments were magical. Despite the fact many of those moments were forced because of scene transitions, they really helped reveal Leo and the struggle happening inside of him while being bombarded with family history he would rather forget. Under the direction of Jessica Kubzansky, the cast executed the play so that the smallest on stage moments were events.

Tree, presented by Ensemble Studio Theater Los Angeles, runs until Dec. 13. For more information, visit http://lastagealliance.com/lastagetixcalendar.asp?ShowList=4181