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20th Century Torments in Our Class, Parade, Joe Turner’s, Royale

by Don Shirley | May 13, 2013

Can the stage produce anything about the anti-Semitism that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust that we haven’t already seen? Well, I’ve seen a lot of plays related to the Holocaust, but I have never seen a play structured like Our Class, currently being produced by Son of Semele in the southern space of Atwater Village Theatre.

Although the production had been scheduled to close yesterday, five additional performances have now been scheduled after a brief break. That extension is a welcome mitzvah.

The extension of Our Class also happens to coincide with a mighty revival of the musical Parade, which tells the story of what was probably America’s worst outbreak of the same fever that later would slaughter so many Jews in Europe.

Gary Patent (front), Alexander Wells, Dan Via and Sarah Rosenberg in “Our Class.” Photo by Kim Chueh.

But first, Our Class. Playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek set most of it in a small town in Poland, his homeland. It’s a part of the world that was assaulted by a whipsaw in the prelude to World War II — conquered first by the Soviet Union and then by the Nazis, before returning to East Bloc communism after the war.

Our Class is fictional, but it’s based on the killings of most of the Jews who lived in the small town of Jedwabne, northeast of Warsaw, in 1941. This incident took place after the Nazis seized control of the town, and for years the Nazis got most of the blame for it. But in the last 15 years, historians have concluded that in fact the Nazis primarily provided cover for the dastardly deeds committed by the ostensibly Christian villagers against their Jewish neighbors.

Slobodzianek wrote about a group of 10 classmates — half of them from Catholic families, the other half from Jewish families. The saga begins in the late ‘20s, when the children play together amicably enough. But during the ‘30s, the poison from what we assume is happening in the adult society around the children gradually filters into their lives, culminating in the horrors of 1941. And that’s just the end of the first act.

After intermission, the play follows the survivors of the war all the way into the 21^st century, while those who have died watch silently, mostly from the sidelines. By the end, it becomes clear that the savagery of 1941 has virtually ruined the survivors — including the remaining perps — to such an extent that they occasionally envy those who died.

Our Class is an intimate epic — reducing the scope of a world war down to these 10 people from this one town, but at the same time extending its examination of these 10 for more than 80 years.

For Son of Semele’s West Coast premiere, director Matthew McCray realized that the group’s own 36-seat space on Beverly Boulevard was simply too tiny for a play of this size, but he has retained the intimacy in Atwater by limiting seating to 50, who sit in a single row around the entire square stage.

In an email, he explained his decision to produce in the round at Atwater Village:

Gavin Peretti, Kiff Scholl, Melina Bielefelt, Sharyn Gabriel, Gary Patent, Sarah Rosenberg, Michael Nehring and Alexander Wells in Our Class. Photo by Kim Chueh.

Gavin Peretti, Kiff Scholl, Melina Bielefelt, Sharyn Gabriel, Gary Patent, Sarah Rosenberg, Michael Nehring and Alexander Wells. Photo by Kim Chueh.

“This play, which sometimes has five or six different narratives happening at the same time, needed more space for the audience to be able to track who was doing what. And I also felt that the extra space would be helpful for the audience on a comfort level as well, because the play is so intense emotionally.”

Obviously, a play that covers so many decades has to reject realism. Much of the story is narrated in story theater style. The same actors play their roles from childhood into old age (at least for those who survive the longest), so suspension of disbelief about age-matching between actors and roles is sometimes necessary.

The awful violence isn’t steeped in stage blood or actual flames. Many of the victims were burned or smothered to death inside a barn, and pieces of classroom furniture are used to suggest this. In a theater, this imagery is probably more effective than more ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to suggest the violence with greater verisimilitude.

The audience should be prepared for a mental workout — not only in imagining the ultimately unimaginable but also in keeping track of the many characters and their fates. Still, if you arrive at the theater reasonably well-rested, you should have no problem being caught up in this sweeping, novelistic saga.

Despite the many decades covered here, the characters are not cardboard victims and villains. The Jewish characters are hardly saintly martyrs, and two of the Polish characters are seen helping Jews escape, in different ways. Even the most publicly unrepentant killers (who are also rapists) have moments of self-doubt during the play’s three hours.

The experience is dotted with musical interludes and accompaniments, usually with the actors playing instruments they retrieve from boxes along the sidelines. While the music by Sage Lewis and McCray is suitably atmospheric, some of the lyrics are difficult to understand.

The lyrics and the spoken lines are drawn from the English version by Ryan Craig, which was the text used in the play’s premiere at the British National Theatre, prior to the Polish premiere. But McCray has also drawn from a more Americanized text used at the US premiere at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater.

Kiff Scholl and Sharyn Gabriel. Photo by Mainak Dhar.

The actors become an impressively cohesive ensemble. I don’t relish singling any of them out, but I can’t help but heap honors on Michael Nehring, as the one Jew who escapes to America before the war. He recites two long lists of names in the play. In the first, he recalls his family members who stayed and died. Later he enumerates his younger family members who survive in America. The length of the latter list becomes a rare moment of affectionate humor near the end of the play, while the former is delivered with Lear-like power.

Our Class is closed next weekend in order to integrate an understudy into the ensemble for a few shows, although the original actor is expected to return later. Five more performances are now scheduled, from May 24 through June 2. That’s not enough. This Class should stay in session for months or even years — and perhaps eventually move into a space that could accommodate at least a few more than 50 spectators.

Our Class, Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Avenue, Atwater. Fri May 24 and 31, 8 pm. Sat May 25, 8 pm. Sun May 26 and June 2, 3 pm. www.sonofsemele.org.

I wonder if the fictional Abram, the one Jew who escapes to America in Our Class, might have ever heard the story of Leo Frank, the Jewish pencil manufacturer who was charged with murdering an employee at his Atlanta factory in 1913 — almost exactly a century ago from now.

Frank was lynched by an anti-Semitic mob in 1915, shortly after his death sentence had been reduced to life imprisonment.

His story was told in the Broadway musical Parade, which has had two professional productions in Los Angeles County – most famously the Mark Taper Forum’s in 2009.

Now it’s being re-visited by 3-D Theatricals in Orange County, at Fullerton’s Plummer Auditorium, and it packs a tremendous punch.

Perhaps, as with many complex musicals, seeing Parade more than once allows us to better appreciate it on different levels. I don’t recall having such an intense emotional response to Leo Frank’s fate in those two previous LA productions as I did in Fullerton last weekend — could it be, at least in part, because I had just seen Our Class as well?

Jeff Skowron in “Parade.” Photo by Isaac James Creative.

In Parade, note how a somewhat sentimental song sung by the mother of the murder victim Mary Phagan suddenly, in the last line, turns venomously anti-Semitic — a pattern that also occurs at a moment near the beginning of Our Class, after the classmates honor a deceased Polish leader with a song.

At any rate, T. J. Dawson’s staging of Parade overcomes the boxy and insufficiently raked aspects of the Plummer to reach deeply inside the audience’s heart, with a cast led by a picture-perfect Jeff Skowron as Leo and a remarkably precocious Caitlin Humphreys as Lucille Frank. Her program bio reveals that she is on the verge of getting her BFA from Cal State Fullerton, with a photo that makes her look as young as she apparently is — but from the evidence on the stage and in her voice, one would assume she is at least 15 years older.

It’s a big production — 36 actors on stage, 14 of whom have Equity asterisks by their names (not including Humphreys, but that shouldn’t last long), and an orchestra that sounds big. The designers include such respected names as Tom Buderwitz and Shon Le Blanc. Yes, 3-D is approaching the big leagues.

Jason Robert Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book are in excellent hands, and so is the audience. Don’t forget to examine the blow-ups in the lobby of some of the original newspaper articles about the Frank case.

Parade, Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Also Sat matinee on May 25, 2 pm. Closes May 26. www.3DTshows.com. 714-589-2770 ext 1.

In one of those articles in the lobby at Parade, the second references to the two original suspects in the murder of Mary Phagan are “Frank” and “the negro” (his name was actually Newt Lee).

Raynor Scheine, Lillias White and Glynn Turman in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Photo by Craig Schwartz.

And in one of the songs in Parade, the black characters get to reflect on the irony that the Frank case is attracting so much attention from the Yankees, as opposed to the scant notice taken of many cases in which black defendants were railroaded and/or lynched.

In short, perhaps the most seriously threatened people during that period of American history were the African Americans who had been freed from the shackles of slavery 50 years earlier but who had yet to escape the many tribulations of Jim Crow — or, you might say, the influence of Joe Turner (aka Joe Turney), a white man who was able to impress young black men in Tennessee into peonage during the 1890s, long after slavery had supposedly ended.

Center Theatre Group is devoting two of its stages right now to African American characters of that era. Phylicia Rashad’s revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is at the Mark Taper Forum, while the premiere of Marco Ramirez’s The Royale is at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

Lynell George writes about the common themes of the two productions in an illuminating essay that is posted here and is also printed in the two programs.

Neither of the CTG plays depicts the perils of being part of the “other” group as directly and as graphically as Our Class or Parade. The CTG plays are more about the psychological journeys of the characters as they struggle to transcend the heritage of slavery.

Stylistically, however, Joe Turner’s and The Royale are almost 180 degrees apart from each other. As with many of Wilson’s plays, Joe Turner’s is largely realistic, even when the material includes references to spiritual or other not-so-realistic phenomena. The climaxes of each act are beautifully executed in Rashad’s version, but I grew impatient with some of the play’s less vital moments in a way I don’t remember from the last Joe Turner’s I saw — the Fountain Theatre production in 2006.

The Royale is almost a piece of performance art as much as a play. In depicting a fictional version of the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson (here named Jay Jackson), Ramirez and director Daniel Aukin have the actors functioning as percussionists (without any actual drums) as well as actors.

David St. Louis, Desean Terry and Robert Gossett in “The Royale.” Photo by Craig Schwartz.

The performances are compelling, but the play feels slender. Jay Jackson is seen confronting his anxieties about the racial repercussions of his successes — which he seems to fear more than defeat — but we don’t learn all that much about what actually happened to him in the wake of his victories. Perhaps Ramirez didn’t want to tread where Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope had already gone, but can anyone remember the last time The Great White Hope was professionally staged in LA? I don’t.

I would have appreciated a few more trims in Joe Turner’s and a few more turns in the tale of The Royale. But I’m staying tuned for another CTG dramatization of early 20^th century black history in The Scottsboro Boys, coming soon to the Ahmanson.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., LA. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2:30 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. No public performances May 21-24. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

The Royale, Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. No public performances this Tuesday or Wednesday. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

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A Two-Laramie Marathon and a Same-Sex Subject Sampler

by Don Shirley | May 6, 2013

Hmm, this sounded interesting — The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later at Chance Theater. Surely the sequel to a production as momentous as The Laramie Project should be seen, but as far as I know, the only professional reading of this particular sequel in Greater LA was at a one-night benefit at Broad Stage in 2009.

Yet as I considered making the trip to the far eastern reaches of Anaheim, I realized that I didn’t actually remember the details of The Laramie Project itself well enough to see the sequel without refreshing my memory about the original.

David McCormick and James McHale in “The Laramie Project.”

Normally, in a situation like this, I might try to read or at least sample the script of the original or watch the HBO movie, or — if I don’t have the time for those — at least find and read an online synopsis. But Chance made my choices easier — and its own task twice as challenging.

Chance is producing the original along with the sequel in repertory. Fortunately for Los Angelenos who might not want to face weekday traffic to Anaheim, the company scheduled performances of the original on Saturday afternoons and performances of the sequel on Saturday evenings.

So I devoted about 10 hours on Saturday to Chance’s Laramie productions (including travel time and the break between shows). I don’t regret a single minute of it.

First, at the matinee, I was astonished by the continuing power of the original Laramie Project. When I first saw it in 2002 at the Colony Theatre, I was moved, but I certainly didn’t expect that I would be even more moved by it 11 years later.

As you probably know, The Laramie Project is an example of documentary theater — it is drawn from the research Tectonic Theater Project did in Laramie, Wyoming in the aftermath of the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. Like other forms of journalism, you might assume that examples of documentary theater would, in time, feel like “yesterday’s news”. But that hasn’t happened yet with The Laramie Project.

The most obvious reason for this is that the struggle for gay rights in the United States is still very much with us. We might even be on the verge of its biggest breakthrough moment, depending on what the Supreme Court decides soon in two different cases.

But a less obvious reason is that a revival of documentary theater, unlike a reading of an old magazine or newspaper article, is being actively re-created, not simply reproduced, in front of our eyes at each new performance — and in this case, by a company of actors who had no role in the show’s original creation.

The eight actors on the Chance stage bring remarkable attention and conviction to their dozens of roles, guided by director Oanh Nguyen. Not for a moment does this production have a been-there-done-that feeling.

At the end of the nearly-three-hour original (including two intermissions), I was burning with curiosity about what happened next to the people whose real words I had just heard. I often feel this way after encounters with fictional characters, but seldom do I have the opportunity to slake my curiosity two hours later by watching the same actors perform many of the same roles in the sequel.

Karen Webster, David McCormick, Robert Foran, Erika C. Miller and Jocelyn A. Brown in “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.”

It’s possible to see the two parts in reverse order — the sequel on Friday night, the original on Saturday afternoon, for example. Unless you’re already very familiar with the original, I would discourage this reverse sequence because of the factor I just mentioned — most of us want to find out happened later after we find out what happened earlier. Also, the sequel is shorter by about 45 minutes, which you might appreciate at the end of your experience more that you would halfway through it.

At the same time, it’s undeniable that the original contains the climax of the saga, in terms of emotional impact. If you want to save your tears for the last part of your overall experience, you’re likelier to shed them in the original than you are in the sequel, and therefore the reverse schedule might have some appeal to a few veterans of seeing (or being in) previous Laramie productions.

But no one should interpret that last comment to mean that the sequel is dry or uninvolving. When the Tectonic interviewers/actors returned to Laramie in 2008, they found indications that the passage of time had begun to chip away at the conclusion — based on the statements by the killers — that homophobia was the most significant motivation for the crime against Matthew Shepard. People who had come of age in recent years had only hazy notions of what had happened, and a much disputed 2004 episode of 20/20 had reinforced the interpretation that the crime was more about a robbery and drugs than about bigotry against homosexuals.

20/20 had conducted jailhouse interviews of the killers to buttress its report. So the Tectonics arranged their own jailhouse interviews of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, and excerpts from these interviews — although they weren’t conducted in Laramie — make up the climax of the sequel.

These interviews return the focus to the killers’ homophobia, but they also serve to amplify the differences between the two men to an extent that was felt only in a limited way in the original Laramie Project. The Tectonics and their leader Moisés Kaufman deserve credit for striving to illuminate the killers and their motivations, along with Henderson’s grandmother and a priest who had remained a spiritual advisor to McKinney. These explorations solidly remove Laramie Project from suspicions of being a simplistic piece of agitprop.

Karen Webster, Brandon Sean Pearson and Karen O’Hanlon in “The Laramie Project.”

In Chance’s production, Brandon Sean Pearson as McKinney and James McHale as Henderson (and also as McKinney’s interrogator Greg Pierotti) provide persuasive, fascinating glimpses of the killers and their contrasting personalities and feelings of remorse (Henderson has a lot of it, McKinney not so much).

The sequel also illustrates at least one surprisingly encouraging piece of post-Matthew Shepard news from Wyoming, in the form of an unexpected vote in the state legislature in neighboring Cheyenne.

Those who haven’t seen either Laramie Project should understand that although it might be known in shorthand as “the Matthew Shepard play,” it really isn’t about Matthew Shepard. He isn’t one of the many characters who’s directly depicted in it.

Instead, the project is a depiction of communities — primarily the community of Laramie but secondarily the community of the Tectonic actors themselves — and how they deal with the crisis of Shepard’s murder. This mission requires a lot more complexity than a play about Shepard himself, and a lot more time. This wide-angle viewpoint, which is beautifully enhanced by Joe Holbrook’s video, Fred Kinney’s set and KC Wilkerson’s lights, is well worth spending most of a day in Anaheim Hills.

**All The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later photos by Casey Long.

The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, Chance Theater, 5552 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim. The Laramie Project: Thu 8 pm, Sat 3 pm, Sun 2 pm. The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later: Fri 8 pm, Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. Through May 19. www.chancetheater.com. 714-777-3033.

The night before I saw the two Laramies, I caught one of the final performances of Rattlestick Theatre’s production of Slipping, by Daniel Talbott, at the Lillian Theatre in Hollywood. It’s another play that examines a young gay man’s experience in mid-America – but in this case, it’s Iowa, not Wyoming, and the character is a recent arrival there, in the wake of a move prompted by his father’s death in San Francisco and his mother’s decision to take a teaching job in Iowa.

Unexpectedly, Talbott makes the young man’s experience in Iowa look more sustainable than his experience in the Bay Area, where some of the scenes are set in this chronologically fractured play. The contrast is most apparent in the difference between this high school’s student’s sexual partners.

MacLeod Andrews in “Slipping.” Photo by Graham John Bell.

In California, he’s involved in a depressing affair with a big and potentially violent kid who’s deeply ashamed of his homosexual feelings, while in Iowa, he attracts the attention of a previously straight but curious, open-minded and non-threatening classmate. This difference is refreshingly unpredictable but also occasionally implausible.

But then this character’s problems go far beyond the temperaments of the guys he beds. They also extend to his resentment of the unseen guys his mother is now bedding, as well as his generally unresolved grief over his father’s death. The play sometimes feels like a psychological case study told in an unnecessarily confusing style. But the ending isn’t as grim as you might expect and almost serves as an illustration of the “it gets better” slogan — or, at least, “it might get better.”

By the way, after much attention to the casting of the recent Broadway sensation Seth Numrich in the central role, he ended up leaving the cast after only a week in order to take a job in London. It certainly looks as if he and the producers must have known about this in advance. Numrich’s exit was announced only four days after the play opened on April 13 and his replacement Wyatt Fenner took over the role on April 21.

Fenner certainly appeared to be well-versed in the role by the time I saw him last Friday. On one level I’m glad I saw Fenner, who ended up performing the role more times than Numrich had, but in another sense I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows over what looked like an example of bait and switch.

Don’t let my discussion of The Laramie Project and Slipping give the impression that theater these days invariably tends to depict gay characters as victims of violence and abuse.

Michael Yavnieli and Jeff LeBeau in “Years to the Day.” Photo by Ed Krieger.

In Beau Willimon’s just-closed The Parisian Woman at South Coast Repertory, knowledge of a same-sex affair is used as a weapon in the brass-knuckled politics of contemporary Washington. But the people (who would possibly be called bisexual, as opposed to gay) who are involved in this affair do not appear to suffer much from its use as a tactic. In fact, one of them in this case is the one who wields the weapon and therefore gains a desired result.

In Allen Barton’s Years to the Day, at Beverly Hills Playhouse, one of two men who meet for coffee comes out as gay to his longtime straight friend. But there is no competition here as to which character comes off as more neurotically tied up in knots — it’s the straight guy.

The play also includes cryptic references to a third friend, but the script leaves hanging questions of what happened to him and what caused it. It sounded as to me as if Barton plans on writing a sequel. Years to the Day is no Laramie Project, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a sequel to it, too. It wouldn’t take nearly as much time for me to drive to Beverly Hills as it would for me to drive to Anaheim Hills.

Years to the Day, Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Ave., Beverly Hills. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. Through June 2. www.skylighttheatrecompany.com. 702-582-8587.

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The Tribulations of Lorenz Hart, Romania and Rodney King

by Don Shirley | April 29, 2013

Some potential theatergoers might be misled into thinking that Falling For Make Believe is just another musical revue. The title sounds glossy, with a slight danger of veering into gassy. The fact that the show’s score (including the title phrase itself) is taken from the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songbook might re-inforce this mistaken impression that it’s simply a tour through their greatest hits.

Think again. Falling for Make Believe rejects “falling for” the usual “make believe” that has permeated such previous dramatizations of the life of lyricist Hart as the 1948 Hollywood movie Words and Music. Mark Saltzman’s new musical at the Colony is much more than a revue, masterfully capturing not only the wit and melancholy of Hart’s lyrics but also the angst of his closeted, alcoholic adult years.

Brett Ryback, Rebecca Ann Johnson and Ben D. Goldberg.

The production arrives in LA in the wake of End of the Rainbow, which depicted Judy Garland’s final months in similarly unblinking terms (she, too was somewhat inaccurately depicted in Words and Music). But there are some major differences between the two — Falling in Love With Make Believe covers a much longer period of time, from 1927 to 1943, in even less stage time than is allotted for End of the Rainbow, and of course the focus of our attention is on a lyricist, not a performer.

As someone who frequently feels that biographical shows collapse too much real time into not enough stage time, I was a little leery when I heard that Saltzman’s show is a 95-minute no-intermission wonder that also spends some of its time introducing us to its fictional narrator, Fletcher Mecklin.

Fletcher is depicted as a struggling actor who auditioned for Rodgers and Hart, got jobs in their touring companies before the Depression, but then had to rely on selling sheet music at Gimbel’s after the crash. Later, in Hart’s declining years, Saltzman throws Fletcher into the same holding cell as Hart, after a police roundup of gay men in bars. And finally Fletcher and Hart have at least a one-night fling, followed by Hart sending Fletcher a cigarette case as a token of what appears to be real affection.

In a program note, Saltzman points out that “the particulars of most love affairs of gay celebrities in the pre-Stonewall era were scrupulously eradicated from the record, often by families who literally burned love letters and journals.” So the lack of such records, in a sense, has liberated Saltzman to imagine what a surreptitious fling with Hart might have been like, and he succeeds in making the fictional Hart-Mecklin relationship plausible, even convincing.

True, Saltzman’s indulging in a variety of “make believe” himself, but it’s the kind of “make believe” that is created in the service of a fuller truth, in contrast to the total erasure of Hart’s homosexuality in Words and Music.

Ben D. Goldberg and Rebecca Ann Johnson in “Falling for Make Believe.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

Fletcher is also a good choice as narrator, as someone who wasn’t in the thick of the story but certainly is interested in what was going on, due to his own experiences with the same closet that obscured our view of Hart. His thoughts are structured within the framework of his attendance at Hart’s memorial service, in 1943.

But the show isn’t entirely about Fletcher and Hart and their mutual closet. It’s also a portrait of the often strained relationship between the younger, heterosexual, sober Rodgers and the older, shorter, often inebriated Hart. We get glimpses of how they must have worked together, as well as how they sometimes failed to work together because of Hart’s alcoholic ways.

Whatever the stresses in the partnership, the two men produced a stream of songs that seems indestructible. Perhaps realizing this, Saltzman hasn’t been afraid to bend some of the songs into unexpected or shorter versions for his own dramatic purposes. He lets “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” appear at several key moments of the narrative — the title is a fairly apt indication of Hart’s feelings throughout much of the play. “My Funny Valentine” is sung by two characters who are fond of Hart in very different ways.

As mentioned above, this is a play about a lyricist and secondarily, his composing partner — it’s not about a performer. I don’t know how frequently Hart and Rodgers performed their own songs or how they sounded, but the actors who play these roles in Jim Fall’s staging (musical direction by Keith Harrison) sing well enough to suggest that Rodgers and Hart might have confidently performed in public — without ever entertaining the notion that they might have been the stars of their own shows.

Each of these actors also brings something to his part that draws him closer to the character. Ben D. Goldberg isn’t as short as Hart apparently was, but he’s short, and he bears a passing resemblance to his character. Brett Ryback, as Rodgers, has the advantage of being able to play the piano in certain scenes, and the fact that he has composed his own musicals surely hasn’t hurt his ability to glimpse into the soul of the great composer.he’s portraying. More important, Goldberg and Ryback inhabit their characters’ opposite temperaments with absolute precision.

Fittingly, the actors playing the fictional performers are allowed to showcase their voices to a greater extent. As Fletcher, Tyler Milliron has a substantial tenor (he was recently heard singing opera in International City Theatre’s Master Class), but he knows how to sing a show tune as well as an aria, and as an actor, he’s a congenial audience guide. Rebecca Ann Johnson plays Vivian Ross, who apparently is meant to suggest Vivienne Segal, the female lead in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey. Here Johnson’s Vivian serves as Hart’s devoted gal pal as well as a singer with sizzling stage presence.

Brett Ryback and Ben D. Goldberg.

Jeffrey Landman plays Hart’s somewhat slimy agent and enabler, while Megan Moran plays a variety of disparate women’s roles.

I wish Saltzman might have found a few moments to observe the Rodgers and Hart years in Hollywood and, according to what I’ve read, the fact that Hart maintained his primary home in New York with his mother until 1938. Nevertheless, I understand that it’s tempting to keep adding more and more to a biographical drama until it becomes bloated. Frequently the excess gets cleared away in subsequent productions, after the premiere, but the premiere at the Colony already appears streamlined enough to consider expansions to more and bigger theaters — perhaps even a few in LA.

Falling For Make Believe is at least on the level of Louie & Keely, which later expanded from its Sacred Fools origins to the Geffen, winning multiple awards along the way. Saltzman’s musical deserves second and third and tenth productions.

**All Falling for Make Believe production photos by Michael Lamont. For an interview with Saltzman and Ryback, go here.

Falling For Make Believe, Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank. Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm, through May 19. www.colonytheatre.org. 818-558-7000.

Turmoil in the streets! No, not now, but slightly more than 20 years ago.

Two productions that close next Saturday depict different arenas for this turmoil in diametrically opposite ways. Both are worthwhile.

At Open Fist Theatre, Caryl Churchill’s elaborate Mad Forest analyzes the effect of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, in which the Communist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu was not only overthrown but executed. It’s a panoramic production, with 20 actors playing 36 roles (not including Ceausescu).

Alec Cygano, Jessica Noboa and Ryan Mulkay. Photo by Ehrin Marlow.

The focus of parts one and three is on two families of different economic classes. The wealthier parents are somewhat caught up, on a low level, in the calcified establishment, but their lower-class counterparts are in more desperate straits. In both families, the grown or nearly-grown children are itching for various forms of rebellion. The two families’ stories are united by a proposed marriage.

Meanwhile, the society around them is crumbling, as witnessed by a parade of comments in part two, based on interviews that Churchill and company conducted in Romania the year after the revolution. This is the least effective part of the play.

As with most revolutions, the aftermath of the Romanian upheaval, as depicted by Churchill, is littered with disillusionment and disappointment (see my recent comments on how this theme is Americanized and addressed in American Misfit at the Boston Court).

Marya Mazor’s staging and Richard Hoover’s set design bring admirable clarity and passion to a somewhat cluttered but fascinating play. The text is so sprawling that if you have any interest in the subject at all, you should take immediate advantage of Open Fist’s version while it’s still up, because the play is too ambitious for most 99-seat companies — and it would be too expensive for most larger companies.

The last LA production of Mad Forest I recall was at the Matrix Theatre, directed by Stephanie Shroyer in 1996. It divided the audience into facing halves and then surrounded us with the action in every corner of the room, which, as I recall, was somewhat more involving than the current prosecenium-configured production but also somewhat more confusing.

A few years after Romania erupted, so did LA, in the literally riotous reaction to the initial verdicts in the trials of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Last year, King himself died.

Stellar solo artist Roger Guenveur Smith has come forward with his Rodney King, at the Bootleg Theater. It’s a miniature, far from the scope of Mad Forest — one actor on stage, spending most of his time as either King (or is he an artist commenting on King?), primarily through spoken word and movement and sound, with a running time of less than an hour.. But it isn’t so solipsistic or truncated that it ignores some of the other victims of racial strife during that era. It samples the stories of Reginald Denny and Latasha Harlins, among others.

Roger Guenveur Smith's "Rodney King." Photo by Patti McGuire.

Roger Guenveur Smith in “Rodney King.” Photo by Patti McGuire.

As in Mad Forest, I left the theater with a somber sense of the pesky inability of people to “get along,” to quote King, and of his own inner demons that tormented him until the day he drowned (apparently accidentally, but after drinking). The script apparently changes somewhat from one performance to another, so it’s probably best not to cite many specific details, but Smith has a captivating stage presence that makes any of his performances worth checking out.

Mad Forest, Open Fist Theatre, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Fri-Sat 8 pm. Closes Sat. www.openfist.org.

Rodney King, Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., LA. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 3 pm. Closes Sun. www.bootlegtheater.org.

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All-American Metaphors in Misfit and Buffalo

by Don Shirley | April 15, 2013

When the first word in a play title is “American,” it usually means that the writer is working on a larger metaphorical scale than we might assume from a first glance.

This weekend I saw the new American Misfit at Boston Court and a revival of American Buffalo at the Geffen. One of the actors in American Misfit, Larry Cedar, was also the only actor in the extremely different American Fiesta last fall at the Colony. And of course American Idiot arrived earlier last year, much to the regret of many of us.

Eden Riegel and Daniel MK Cohen in “American Misfit.” Photo by Ed Krieger.

In American Misfit, playwright Dan Dietz examines a chapter from the aftermath of the American Revolution. His chief subject is the Harpe brothers. These two men, from a Tory family, went wild on the Tennessee frontier in the 1790s, to the extent that they have sometimes been labeled as America’s first serial killers.

Metaphorically, however, the play becomes a wider examination of American revolutions in general, with brief glances at several other outbreaks of revolutionary spirit throughout American history.

Foremost among these is the revolution that shook up popular music in the 1950s. The play is presented within the scenic framework of a rockabilly dance hall, probably in the 1950s, as rock n’ roll tore apart the more genteel melodies that had dominated the charts. The leader of the band at the back of the stage, Rockabilly Boy (Banks Boutté) is the narrator of the story about the Harpe brothers.

But the actors who embody the Harpe brothers’ story are usually dressed in 1790s costumes, not the 1950s outfits worn by the band. So the concept of revolutions in different eras ricochets across the stage and across the play, which also finds time to include brief remarks from several figures who were engaged in other revolutions in other eras — George Washington himself, Robert E. Lee, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ronald Reagan. The segues between eras are usually accompanied by the sound of a turntable arm being yanked off a record or by rumbling sounds and shaking motions, as if an earthquake were happening.

In the primary narrative, that of the Harpe brothers, the slightly older and considerably larger Big (A J Meijer) provides the brawn, while the slightly younger and considerably smaller Little (Daniel MK Cohen) provides the brains. Little has worked out an elaborate rationale for the mayhem perpetrated by him and his brother. In the absence of the previous monarchy, which he professes to prefer to democracy, he figures that survival more or less comes down to every man for himself. He rejects the moderate attempts to form a new representative democracy by Washington and his cohorts.

He doesn’t attempt to organize a counter-revolutionary army, however. The Harpes and two young women acolytes (Karen Jean Olds and Maya Erskine), who are somewhat reminiscent of Charles Manson’s women although not quite as earnest in their devotion, simply go about killing anyone who might get in their way.

Maya Erskine, Karen Jean Olds, Daniel MK Cohen, Larry Cedar, AJ Meijer and Eden Riegel with Banks Boutte.

Not surprisingly, this tactic isn’t just unconscionably wrong but it’s also ineffective as a revolutionary tool. When Little finally meets Sally (Eden Riegel), who’s at least his intellectual equal, he begins to re-consider what he’s doing — much to the dismay of Big and the two other women. The arrival of Sally is presaged in a stunning dream sequence that provides the first act finale.

If all this sounds somewhat abstruse or confusing, the rockabilly score by Dietz and Phillip Owen, with musical direction and arrangements by Omar Brancato, keeps everyone wide awake and eager to figure it all out. Boutté is an alarmingly seductive fulcrum of the production, playing a role that’s not too far, dramatically if not musically speaking, from the role of the emcee in Cabaret.

Much like The Government Inspector at the Boston Court last year (in a co-production with Furious Theatre), American Misfit doesn’t fit easily into the categories of “musical” or “non-musical.” Most of the actors other than Boutté don’t have to sing all that much, but the younger ones do have to dance — Nick Santiago’s set, after all, is a dance hall. And choreographer Lee Martino makes sure that all the actors who belong to the Harpe gang look as if they were born to boogie. In fact, dance is a central component of the final scene.

The older actors who play the cameos, Cedar and P.J. Ochlan, don’t have as much dancing to do, but they have to keep switching faces, costumes, personas and eras every few minutes. Most of these moments work well, but I had a little difficulty fitting the Oppenheimer monologue into the rest of the play — the atomic bomb seems to be a step beyond mere “revolution,” and the framing of Oppenheimer’s thoughts as a dream involving an unseen Marilyn Monroe further muddies the metaphorical waters.

A couple of shows come to mind as precedents for American Misfit. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, in its 2008 premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, also deals with a character from east Tennessee when it was still a frontier and also injects relatively modern music into an era nearly 200 years ago, but its particular musical genre — emo — isn’t as natural a match as rockabilly is with the same turf.

AJ Meijer, Daniel MK Cohen, Eden Rieger, Karen Jean Olds and Maya Ereskine with Banks Boutte.

AJ Meijer, Daniel MK Cohen, Eden Rieger, Karen Jean Olds and Maya Erskine with Banks Boutte.

Of course, the grand champion of musicals that sweep through American history while making larger points about dangerous elements within the national culture is Assassins, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman creation. American Misfit isn’t in that league.

The Harpes’ monarchist loyalties prevent us from making a direct connection from them to the McVeigh-style radicals who populate the right-wing fringe of our politics. Perhaps a more apt comparison might be made between the Harpes and the psychologically disturbed serial killers of today.

Still, no matter which brand of modern misfits the Harpes most resemble, their story is a compelling one, as told by Dietz, Owen, director Michael Michetti and his entire cast. The violence, by the way, is made less excruciating by the use of Heather Ho’s puppet dummies. This is the most audience-friendly (at least for adults) Boston Court production since, yes, The Government Inspector.

American Misfit, Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm, Wednesday May 8 8 pm. Closes May 12. www.bostoncourt.org. 626-683-6883.

**All American Misfit production photos by Ed Krieger.

After years of bad plays by David Mamet, Geffen Playhouse is finally treating LA to a revival of one of Mamet’s best, American Buffalo. In this “American” play, the metaphor is, of course, “business.” Mamet’s inept low-life thieves keep repeating the importance of following correct “business” procedures almost as if they were working on their MBAs. I wonder if the contemporary Mamet, with his right-wing viewpoints, would place the same emphasis on “business” if he were writing the play today. Maybe he might write about some inept low-level government bureaucrats instead.

Ron Eldard, Freddy Rodriguez and Bill Smitrovich in “American Buffalo.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

Anyhow, the play is still a captivating comedy and occasionally touches the heart in a place beyond laughter. Randall Arney expertly directs a terrific trio of actors — Ron Eldard as the hothead who thinks that someone who tells him to “help yourself” to the leftover toast on a breakfast plate has just committed a heinous insult that’s worthy of death, Bill Smitrovich as the dim-bulb owner of a Chicago junk shop, and Freddy Rodriguez as the even dimmer junkie whose self-protective lie is a nearly fatal mistake.

American Buffalo, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 and 7 pm. Closes May 12. www.geffenplayhouse.com. 310-208-5454.

Those who are hankerin’ for a show about frontier America that doesn’t involve serial killing might want to check out La Mirada’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. After searching my memory, I’m pretty sure I had never actually seen a stage production of this Johnny Mercer/Gene De Paul/Al Kasha Joel Hirschhorn/Lawrence Kasha/David Landay musical, and I didn’t want to miss Kevin Earley’s return to LA musical theater, especially when matched with Beth Malone.

Eric Stretch and Brian Steven Shaw in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." Photos by Michael Lamont.

Eric Stretch and Brian Steven Shaw in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

For those who were as uninitiated as I was, let me advise you that while there is no serial killing here, Seven Brides does depict a serial kidnapping of young women by young men. These women unanimously decide — after a few months — that they not only like their kidnappers but want to marry them. It’s set in the 1850s, before anyone had identified the Stockholm syndrome. Even the women’s previous boyfriends join in the rapturous celebration of the marriages of the kidnappers and their victims.

All right, let’s not ask any further questions about the story. If you want to hear Earley and Malone sing and watch them fight and then reconcile, as I did, or if you just want to see some some roof-raising dancing from the company under the choreographic guidance of Patti Colombo and direction of Glenn Casale, this is your show.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. Wed-Thu 7:30 pm, Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes May 5. www.lamiradatheatre.com. 562-944-9801. 714-994-6310.

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Going Down to the Red Line and Up to Roof Piece

by Don Shirley | April 8, 2013

I see so many plays that I seldom have the opportunity to see much dance (except in musicals). And I very seldom get to see the sort of large-scale site-specific dance that erupted over large parts of LA this past weekend. This time, however, the prospect of all that spectacle won me over. I attended three free public events in CAP UCLA’s Trisha Brown retrospective and also Stephan Koplowitz’s Red Line Time, which was produced by Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.

TBDC guest dancer and UCLA MFA student Laurel Tentindo performing in Trisha Brown’s "Roof Piece" at the Getty Center.

Tara Lorenzen performing in Trisha Brown’s “Roof Piece” at the Getty Center.

In at least one important aspect, large-scale site-specific dance is easier to pull off than large-scale site-specific theater in which actors have to speak or sing. It’s difficult to control the comprehensibility of spoken or sung language in large, outdoor sites, where acoustics are iffy and ambient noises compete for attention.

Many of the most successful site-specific spoken-word plays reduce the playing space to small, carefully controlled real-life interiors rather than expanding it to big public exteriors. In these tiny environments, most of us don’t have much trouble understanding the words. This year, Chalk Rep’s premiere of Dorothy Fortenberry’s Mommune was set inside a real children’s play center. Last year, a production of Stephen Belber’s Tape took place in a real motel room. Productions of Moving Arts’ Car Plays are always set in real cars. Of course, a downside to these miniature spaces is that the audience numbers are also severely restricted.

Dance, on the other hand, is usually performed with few words or none (except, of course, in musicals). Choreographers who don’t rely on music — and neither Brown nor Koplowitz did in this weekend’s productions — don’t have to worry much about sound quality. In fact, unexpected sounds that intrude from the real-life landscape can enhance the theatricality of their site-specific events.

Certainly one of the most memorable moments of Red Line Time on Saturday occurred when a large security guard at the courtyard outside the Wilshire/Western Red Line station strode purposefully to a spot within a foot or two of the dancers-in-motion and demanded to know, in a commanding voice, “Who’s running this thing?” (Koplowitz immediately materialized from the sidelines with the proper permits in hand, and the dancers didn’t miss a step).

Ensemble of "Red Line Time." Photo by Scott Groller.

Ensemble of “Red Line Time” at Vermont/Santa Moinica station. Photo by Scott Groller.

For Red Line Time, dancers and audience assembled at 4 pm at the east entrance to the Union Station Metro station. Everyone carried a Metro TAP card with a day pass ($5 for unlimited access), which would enable us to breeze through the turnstiles at the 14 Red Line stations we were about to visit. In the entrance area at Union Station, the dancers introduced us to the steps that would serve as the framework for all the project’s subsequent performances, and then we all descended into the subway.

On our way to North Hollywood, at the other end of the line, we disembarked at seven stations, including NoHo itself. At each station we ascended at least to the entrance area above the tracks (obviously, performing alongside the tracks themselves would have been dangerous), and the dancers performed variations on the basic piece, designed to take advantage of each new space. At two of the stations we left Metro altogether, and the dancers performed just outside the Metro entrances — including the courtyard at the Wilshire/Western stop mentioned above.

After the NoHo performance, we turned around and began the journey back to downtown, stopping at all the stations we had previously skipped. The event ended after we emerged from the subway at Grand Park — the last stop before Union Station. The dancers did one last performance in the park. By now, the sun had set, and the dancers took their final bows with the illuminated City Hall in the background.

Red Line Time was a performance with 13 intermissions — as we traveled from one station to another — but no opportunity to use a restroom. No public restrooms exist in the Metro system.

The experience lasted nearly four hours — almost double the time that had been predicted. I didn’t do any exact head counts, but I’d estimate that at least two-thirds of the initial audience members dropped out before it ended, especially during the North Hollywood pivot. With all the step-climbing and negotiation of the space inside crowded subway cars, it required a degree of stamina and flexibility on the part of the audience members — although not nearly as much as it required from the dancers themselves.

Ensemble of “Red Line Time” outside 7th Street station.

Even one of the two men in the eight-dancer troupe dropped out midway through the first half. Koplowitz told me that dancer Nick Duran had injured himself before the performance began and had initially tried to keep performing but then changed his mind. After one dance was done with only seven performers instead of eight, understudy Jacob Campbell took Duran’s place.

Koplowitz’s dance was essentially a theme and variations. The theme was an abstract progression of shifting geometric lines and patterns. But it also provided room for small explosions of individual efforts apart from the group’s, for occasional concentrations of two or four dancers and, of course, for variations depending on the design of the floors, walls, steps, railings and even the ceilings of the different performance spaces.

As long as they didn’t get in the way of the dancers, the audience members could choose where to observe each performance, and not necessarily from one stationary spot. At one stop, we were encouraged to ride up and then down especially long escalators as we watched, which gave us changing perspectives similar to those of a camera angle as you zoom in or out on the subject.

By the normal standards of theatergoing, the entire event was too long and somewhat repetitive. However, in its site-specific context, the frequent interludes when we rode the train and our own activity in moving from place to place certainly kept everyone awake, and they inspired a sense of communal adventure in the big city unlike the more sedentary communal experiences inside conventional theaters.

From my theater critic’s perspective, half of the event’s theatricality came from watching the interactions of the general public with the dancers. Most of these interactions weren’t as assertive as the aforementioned security guard’s, but there were a few moments when passers-by walked in between dancers, without pausing on their way to the train, as if they were oblivious to the event (fortunately, no collisions resulted). Far more often, passers-by stopped to watch, usually respectfully, although one stop generated what sounded like catcalls from a group of young men.

Ensemble of “Red Line Time.”

If I had been a passer-by without any previous awareness of the event, I would have been delighted by this momentary respite from the hustle-bustle of the Metro routines — although if I had been straining to catch the next train, I might have had more mixed feelings.

For those of us who volunteered to take the trip, it gave us glimpses not only of how dance can create aesthetic pleasure within unusual circumstances and settings but also glimpses of urban LA that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise seen or noticed. These moments varied over a wide range. During one of the rides in a crowded car, a loud fellow rider — self-proclaimed to be 80 years old — commanded the attention of everyone within 10 feet. Among his other comments, he suggested to my wife that I might want to challenge him in a push-up contest on the floor of the subway car ““ fortunately, at that moment, the door opened and we disembarked without incident.

But other moments offered much quieter revelations. In the NoHo station, the dancers draped themselves along the lines of a mural commemorating Amelia Earhart — a mural that I had never especially noticed during the many times I’ve walked right by it.

Red Line Time was an exploration of the nuances of public spaces that are mostly underground, and its dancers really moved within the limited dimensions of each temporary “stage”, usually mingling in close proximity to each other, but wearing starkly different colors that made individuals easier to recognize.

BY CONTRAST, the revival of Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece explored the upward and outward vistas of Getty Center, an institution that exists on a plane that’s literally above above most of LA. The dancers, all wearing virtually identical bright red outfits, remained rooted in very specific positions. They never connected with each other except by sight over relatively long distances.

Here’s how Roof Piece worked. Individual dancers were stationed at 10 vantage points throughout the vast Getty campus. Most of these positions, but not all of them, were higher than even the normal pedestrian plane of the Getty. The southernmost dancer — in the cactus garden terrace overlooking West LA — began a series of reportedly improvised movements that were somewhat reminiscent of t’ai chi. Several hundred feet (my guess) away, the second dancer in line watched the first and began doing the same movements a brief moment later. The third dancer could see only the second dancer but replicated the movements and passed them on to the fourth dancer. The chain continued until they were performed by the tenth dancer, at the northern end of the campus. Behind and far below her, the 405 freeway headed northward across the Santa Monica Mountains.

Samuel Wentz performing in “Roof Piece.”

Halfway through the 40-minute performance, the dancers turned around to face the other direction. The northernmost dancer became the originator of the movements. At one moment as I watched her, she appeared to imitate a hawk that was soaring at her eye level, far in the distance. The next closest dancer began passing her movements southward down the line — until they reached the southernmost dancer who had started the performance. He now presumably ended it.

Spectators could see no more than three dancers at any one time from any one vantage point, so it was difficult to monitor exactly how precisely the movements were maintained as they proceeded down the line. Part of me wondered if this might be a non-verbal version of the old group game in which one individual whispers something to a second person, who passes it on through however many people are participating, and then everyone gets to be surprised by how much the details have changed by the time the words reach the last player.

The accuracy of the transmission of the dancers’ movement hinged on keeping the sight lines clear between each pair of dancers, sometimes across impressive distances. But the dancers stood out in their bright red costumes against the whitish tones of the Getty architecture. Between dancers 9 and 10, security guards kept asking spectators to keep the long, narrow sight lines clear of obstructions.

While the positions of the dancers remained unchanged, the positions of the spectators — at least those of us who wanted to see as much of the performance as possible — kept changing. I started at the south end and ended at the north end, following a Getty staffer, but anyone who wanted to participate could use hand-held maps to see where each of the 10 positions were. I later saw a photo of a group of spectators who began imitating the moves themselves while standing on the plaza, but I can’t say I personally witnessed this; I must have been elsewhere on the campus when it happened.

Tamara Riewe in “Roof Piece.”

So was this just a high-end party game? Hardly. Set against the spectacular backdrops of the city and the mountains and the Getty itself, the transmission of movement at the Getty was suggestive of the transmission of culture across much greater geographical distances or even across historical eras.

Although Brown first developed the piece for presentation on the rooftops of New York’s SoHo (and it was performed again in 2011 on New York’s relatively new High Line park), the Getty — with its emphasis on different eras and different traditions of visual art — was an ideal location for expanding the meaning of Roof Piece. It became a symbol for how human beings learn from each other and thereby create invisible bridges of communication. And by changing the direction of the transmissions halfway through the piece, it demonstrated how original impulses can move in any direction across the cultural spectrum.

I saw a couple of other Trisha Brown pieces over the weekend, at UCLA and the Hammer Museum, but neither of them matched the eloquence and grandeur of Roof Piece.

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The Problems With Cornerstone and David Mamet

by Don Shirley | April 1, 2013

Cornerstone Theater Company often guides me into corners of the city that I otherwise wouldn’t see. On Saturday it brought me to the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools campus, home of Los Angeles High School of the Arts (LAHSA), to see Cornerstone’s latest, Lunch Lady Courage.

From afar, I had read about the controversy over the demolition of the Ambassador Hotel, which formerly occupied this site between Wilshire Boulevard and 8^th Street. But seeing the shiny new campus, along with a few remnants of the Ambassador, somewhat mollifies my preservationist impulses in favor of current and future concerns and needs.

Bahni Turpin and Rachael Portillo in “Lunch Lady Courage.” Photo by Kevin Michael Campbell.

I do have a few future concerns about Cornerstone itself, however, that weren’t mollified by Lunch Lady Courage.

For those who aren’t familiar with Cornerstone, its signature productions are done in collaboration with community partners. Members of the selected community — amateur actors or even non-actors — usually have roles alongside at least a handful of members of Cornerstone’s professional ensemble.

Occasionally, Cornerstone has also produced additional shows using only its professional members. But those all-pro productions, which are structurally no different from hundreds of other professional plays seen each year in LA, surely wouldn’t attract nearly as many grants on their own, without the benefit of Cornerstone’s core mission — its community shows.

Recently, however, the number of professionals in Cornerstone’s community shows seems to be diminishing. Last November, Seed had only three cast members with asterisks denoting Actors’ Equity membership, and Lunch Lady Courage also has only three.

Cornerstone shows have usually been better than good-hearted community-theater productions in part because of the professional talent that has worked alongside the community participants. Not surprisingly, the fewer the number of pros, the greater the chance that the production will look less professional.

In part, Lunch Lady Courage may look that way because it begins in a high school courtyard and then moves literally into a high school auditorium — a place that many of us associate with amateur theatrics. It’s a fancier high school auditorium than most — it was designed to suggest the embellishments of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub that preceded it on this spot. But when most of the cast consists of high school students — talented but not especially polished — the production edges toward feeling like an adventurous high school play.

Cornerstone veteran Peter Howard loosely based his script on Brecht’s Mother Courage. Yes — Mother Courage, the epic antiwar play, written on the verge of World War II but set during the Thirty Years’ War three centuries earlier. Lunch Lady Courage is set in the present day at an LA high school, but, as in Brecht’s play, its central characters are a woman, her two sons and her mute daughter.

Page Leong

In Brecht’s play, this familial quartet wheels a cart through the war zones, selling provisions for the troops on both sides. But the ultimate cost of Mother Courage’s career choice is the loss of her three children. She’s caught up in the irony of providing for her children in an atmosphere that threatens their lives. She’s a strong woman, but hardly a heroine for the ages.

Lunch Lady Courage, as you might expect for a high school-related production, isn’t nearly as grim. The title character (Page Leong) wheels a cart through the school campus, righteously selling and promoting healthful breakfasts and lunches, in addition to working in the school cafeteria. She isn’t a grasping entrepreneur; she’s a unionized employee of the public schools system, and any flaws she has certainly aren’t potentially fatal.

Her “war” doesn’t involve actual weapons and killing. In keeping with the fact that she’s in the third play in Cornerstone’s Hunger Cycle, Lunch Lady Courage (the character) does battle with the culture that fills American youth with junk food and that threatens their long-germ health.

Her children are enrolled in the same school where she works, so she can keep a close eye on what they’re doing, and naturally they rebel in ways similar to the ways that Mother Courage’s children rebel — but the immediate consequences are relatively benign. In fact, while there are a few indirect allusions to drugs and gangs at this high school, we don’t see any of it. The harshest violence here results in a mere scrape. A very minor character had a baby too soon, but any resulting problems she has are minimized. Some of the kids’ families are said to be poor, but no one appears to be despairing or bitter or even grouchy.

Lunch Lady’s younger son Queso (as in Brecht’s Swiss Cheese; Lunch Lady Courage explains that his father was a daily purveyor for the school cafeterias) is a lousy student. But during the course of the school year covered by the script, he reads Brecht’s original play in order to get additional credit for a book report on it. Implausibly enough, one of his fellow students — who is later expelled over an unspecified infraction — is already expressing his admiration for Brecht before Swiss Cheese even starts reading the play.

Bahni Turpin and Clara Choi.

Another student, in a casual conversation, points out how the “fiscal priorities” of California are skewed in favor of prisons over schools and rattles off statistics to prove it. Yet another student is a passionate expert on urban gardening, while two others are capable of substituting for an absent teacher in a culinary arts class. Such students seem so precocious that they contradict any notion that the school is floundering

Of course Brecht wanted us to learn something from his plays, not caring if his policy points violated the sense of surface realism of his plays. But he was also careful not to let his policy points be directly contradicted by efforts to make his characters look less desperate and despairing.

Brecht also inserted musical interludes into his plays — another break with surface realism. So does Howard in Lunch Lady Courage. But these musical numbers aren’t very well done. Most of the musical numbers are performed by large groups, and many of the individual lyrics (by composer and musical director Gabe Lopez) were difficult to decipher on Saturday. A few solos sounded so artificially amplified that they made me wonder, momentarily, if they were pre-recorded.

Chris Anthony, associate artistic director of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, directed Lunch Lady Courage. She is not a member of the Cornerstone ensemble. Leong as Lunch Lady Courage, Bahni Turpin as the play’s only teacher, and Joel Jimenez as one of the other cafeteria workers and chorus members, are the three Equity actors. They provide welcome bursts of professionalism.

But the problems here can’t be completely attributed to the Equity/amateur differences or any budgetary problems that might be preventing Cornerstone from hiring more pros.

Last May, Café Vida, the first play in Cornerstone’s Hunger Cycle, had only four Equity cast members, but it seemingly erased the boundaries between them and the amateur actors who were in many of its leading roles. Café Vida was directed by Cornerstone’s artistic director Michael John Garcés, and somehow he was able to coax some terrific, fully convincing performances out of the untested actors who came from Homeboy Industries — which was the community that play examined — even though they were not much older than the high school students in Lunch Lady Courage.

Frank Boeheim

Of course it helped that Lisa Loomer wrote much more compelling and convincing personal crises into Café Vida than Howard wrote into Lunch Lady Courage. Perhaps Loomer was able to do so in part because she wasn’t working at a high school. At LAHSA, Cornerstone probably felt obligated to keep the atmosphere relatively light and cheery. Also, Loomer didn’t base her play on any existing source material — especially one, such as Brecht’s play, that led to some shaky juxtapositions with the contemporary material.

Cornerstone is one of the cornerstones of LA theater. I’m not about to stop attending its productions. But after Seed and Lunch Lady Courage, Cornerstone needs to make sure that it can continue attracting enough support from general audiences, as well as from the affected communities. Please don’t let it devolve into a feel-good, do-good theater company that lacks the abilities — or perhaps the resources — to put on a great show.

Lunch Lady Courage, Cocoanut Grove Theatre at Los Angeles High School of the Arts, 701 S. Catalina St. (three blocks west of Vermont), LA. Thu-Sat 7:30 pm. Closes April 13. Tickets are pay-what-you-can. www.CornerstoneTheater.org.

Two cheers for Charles McNulty’s analysis in the LA Times of “The Problem With David Mamet.” But I would have given three cheers if McNulty had gone on to examine the problem with Center Theatre Group’s and Geffen Playhouse’s extreme bias in favor of Mamet in the past decade or so. His recent plays invariably seem to get productions in LA’s toniest theaters, even though it has been nearly 20 years since he wrote a play that McNulty (or I or most critics or the masses) liked. Even The Cryptogram, the 1994 play praised by McNulty, seemed awfully slight when the Geffen produced it in 1999.

David Mamet

Will Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie, who has called Mamet his favorite playwright, be able to resist the most recent Mamet efforts — “the red herring-crammed Race and the quarter-baked The Anarchist,” to quote McNulty’s descriptions of them, as he plans his next seasons at the Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre? There’s little evidence of it from his previous record.

But CTG is riding a wave right now from such exciting new plays as Tribes and The Nether (and End of the Rainbow, for that matter) by little-known writers. Let’s hope that something on that level prevents Ritchie from indulging in his usual soft spot for Mamet as he makes his plans for the next seasons.

Meanwhile, in case anyone is worried about whether Mamet might be poverty-stricken if LA’s major theaters stop producing his new plays, rest assured that the Geffen is about to revive one of his early plays that nearly everyone likes, American Buffalo.

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Spring, Melancholia, Nether and Four Diva Shows

by Don Shirley | March 25, 2013

Two of LA County’s most prominent theatrical venues are being temporarily shape-shifted.

For Spring Awakening, the current production at La Mirada Theatre, the audience of up to 199 sits on the stage instead of in the 1,251 seats in the main auditorium. And at Los Angeles Theatre Center, a revival of Melancholia has moved from its most recent home in the 99-seat Theatre 4 to an even smaller-capacity venue in what used to be the Latino Museum gallery, across the downstairs lobby from Theatre 3.

Nick Adorno and Christopher Higgins in “Spring Awakening.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

In both productions, the increased intimacy pays off. And coincidentally, both productions focus, at least in part, on the extreme pressures that drive a young man to suicide.

Stage depictions of this subject — more than most subjects I can think of — are likely to be enhanced by extreme intimacy. By reducing the dimensions of the worlds inhabited by these young men, the directors have encouraged their audiences to step into these suicidal characters’ pressure cookers.

The musical Spring Awakening, of course, is about much more than just the sad plight of Moritz (Coby Getzug), the young man who is driven to take his own life by the colossal sense of failure he feels after failing to pass with his class. It’s also about his free-thinking classmate Melchior, their sheltered friend Wendla (Micaela Martinez), a handful of other classmates and the adults they encounter in a provincial German town in the 1890s.

The setting comes from the original play by Frank Wedekind, but of course the reason why Spring Awakening has become a 21^st-century phenomenon is because of the 21^st-century music by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater. It’s one of those scores that rewards me with new insights every time I hear it.

Of course some of those insights, this time around, might be attributable to the close-up clarity of the lyrics that we hear in the new 199-seat thrust stage that has been built within the larger La Mirada stage. Or at least that’s how it sounded from where I was sitting on the west side of the action (the north and south sides of the stage also contain banks of seats). Josh Bessom designed the sound and John Glaudini is the musical director of the offstage band.

Micaela Martinez, Austin MacPhee and Coby Getzug in “Spring Awakening.” Photo by Michael Lamont.

In most of the big-theater productions of the show that I’ve seen, seats were set aside for a few audience members on the stage itself. In those productions, actors occasionally sat and performed in those areas, too, side by side with audience members.

Most of the spectators in those big theaters don’t feel intimately connected to the action because of distances, but at least they can see that a lucky few audience members are in the thick of it. In retrospect, I guess that device was an attempt to provide the same effect that occurs more or less naturally in the smaller La Mirada staging by Brian Kite. Here, however, with everyone much closer to the thick of it, Kite saw no need to follow the custom of bringing a few audience members even closer.

Another big-theater Spring Awakening custom he has jettisoned is the use of hand-held mics, which were there primarily for visual effect in some of the more vigorously rhythmic numbers. Perhaps the original show’s creators thought this would help the score’s contemporary quality register more strongly, but Kite here proves that these mics aren’t necessary. In fact, in such close quarters they might even be distracting.

(Over the Moon Productions presented LA’s first intimate staging of Spring Awakening a year ago in a 99-seat theater in Hollywood; here is what I wrote about it. It followed the traditions of hand-held mics and a few audience members on the stage. But the configuration there wasn’t nearly as sharp a thrust as it is in La Mirada. Being aware of the audience on at least three sides of the action can be as much a contributor to the intimacy level as the actual number of seats.)

The La Mirada production is loaded with talent and takes full advantage of the excitement of the stage configuration. Austin MacPhee (a sophomore at UCLA!) has a more Teutonic look that any other Melchior I’ve seen, but his blond and juvenile looks make the dark and resolute tones of his voice all the more surprising. Martinez and Getzug brought me to the brink of tears in their portraits of Wendla and Moritz. All the adults are in the hands of two LA theater favorites — Linda Kerns and Michael Rothhaar, who work wonders with their ever-changing assignments. FYI for those who care, Kite told me the production is using Actors’ Equity’s HAT (Hollywood Area Theater) contract.

The cast of “Spring Awakening.”

In his remarks before the show started, Kite remarked that La Mirada has managed to build a new second stage while spending nothing on a capital campaign. Of course it’s a second stage that precludes the simultaneous use of the first stage, but it does offer a different kind of a theatrical experience to La Mirada’s audiences. If this pilot production becomes a series with fare similar to Spring Awakening, it might actually succeed in lowering the average age of La Mirada audiences by a few months, if not a few years.

Meanwhile, in downtown LA, LATC artistic director Jose Luis Valenzuela is reviving Melancholia, the Latino Theater Lab’s surreal portrait of a PTSD-afflicted soldier’s return to East LA from the war in Iraq. It was last seen in 2007 in Theatre 4, just off the main LATC lobby, but now it’s in the former gallery space downstairs. The square space has a mere two rows of seats on three out of the four sides, with “backstage” areas in the corners and the playing area in the center of the room.

That room has a very low ceiling, by the standards of all the other theaters within the LATC building, which would be an obstacle for some shows. But here, the low ceiling and the generally murky lighting level contribute to the feeling of being inside this poor guy’s troubled brain.

Melancholia is an impressive piece of ensemble stagecraft, and it opened just in time for the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the American invasion of Iraq.

Three actors (Sam Golzari, Xavi Moreno, Ramiro Segovia) take turns playing the leading role, further suggesting the fractured quality of young Mario’s psyche. The narrative is equally fractured, moving both backwards and forwards in time, but Fidel Gomez and Alexis de la Rocha play the otherworldly agents who more or less stage manage the proceedings and become our guides. Most of the other actors play several roles each. This is ensemble-“devised” theater of the sort that RADAR L.A. favors, and I began to wonder if its current production is a prelude to an appearance in the return of RADAR L.A. next fall — some of which will occur at LATC.

Fidel Gomez and Ramiro Segovia in “Melancholia.”

There was one unexpected kink in the Sunday matinee. In the home stretch of the production, just as Mario was about to re-live the combat scene that sent him reeling, flashing lights and a recorded announcement alerted everyone to an “emergency” that required us all to leave the premises by using the nearest stairwell. When it became clear that it wasn’t “part of the play,” the action stopped and everyone started to file out, only to be told within two or three minutes that it was all a mistake — a malfunction of the building’s alarm system, and we could return to our seats. The performance continued, but of course its momentum had been interrupted. The flashing lights were still flashing even as we finally left the building after the performance. Presumably, a lesson was learned.

Spring Awakening, La Mirada Theatre, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada. Tues-Thu 7:30 pm, Fri 8 pm, Sat 7 pm and 10:30 pm. Closes Saturday. 562-944-9801. www.lamiradatheatre.com.

Melancholia, Los Angeles Theatre Center, LATC Gallery (downstairs), 514 S. Spring St., LA. Thu-Sat 8 pm, sun 3 pm. Dark on Easter, March 31. Closes April 7. www.thelatc.org. 866-811-4111.

Last week, I wrote about two productions about men whose jobs require them to work all day at their computers — a situation that I had never thought was particularly dramatic. But it proved to be more exciting than expected in Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale at South Coast Repertory and Doris Baizley’s Sexsting at the Skylight.

Only later, after I had posted last week’s column, did it occur to me that another play was about to open that also covers the online world — but in a much more far-reaching and futuristic way than the plays I wrote about last week.

In Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, we are introduced to a virtual world that serves as a playground where people can violate the normal rules that exist in the non-virtual world, without fear of any consequences. Of course people can do that now, killing other “people” in online games. But The Nether is set far enough into the future that the online world can convey a much greater verisimilitude than exists in today’s gaming.

Adam Haas Hunter and Brighid Fleming in “The Nether.”

And the favored activity in The Hideaway — the faux-Victorian online world created by Sims (is this character’s name a nod to SimCity?) — is having sex with virtual “children.”

A lot of theatergoers are likely to turn elsewhere upon hearing that. But they should know that we don’t see any graphic representations of this behavior on stage. We are asked to consider the notion that a virtual outlet for these kinds of proclivities might actually prevent those so inclined from acting out this behavior in real life. But because the dramatic situation is about a detective’s dogged pursuit of Sims, the other side of the argument is given just about equal weight.

In this play, we are far enough into the future that the prospect exists of some people crossing over into the online world on a full-time basis (also, we learn that most of the trees have disappeared from the world, and that the “internet” is the old name for what is now “the nether”.).

Neel Keller directs an expert ensemble. There are some surprises that I don’t want to spoil by describing the characters and performances with too much detail, but here’s one that is irrelevant to anyone’s enjoyment of the play but which I couldn’t help noticing — Robert Joy, who’s very good as Sims, looks a little like Michael Ritchie, Center Theatre Group’s artistic director.

The design of the Hideaway (set by Adrian Jones, lighting by Christopher Kuhl, costumes by Alex Jaeger) produces something that looks as if it might be at home in a Disney theme park. This makes one of Sims’ angrier remarks somewhat ironic — he accuses the detective of trying to obtain his code and sell it to Disney.

This is a probing, mind-bending play to an extent that is rare among the predictable scripts that prevail on too many of our stages. Kudos to Center Theatre Group for producing the premiere of The Nether, especially as it’s by a writer, Haley, who is based in LA.

The Nether, Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd. Culver City. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 pm and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Closes April 14. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

Speaking of predictable scripts, let’s look briefly at the burst of productions about famous women singers.

My favorite is End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s look at the final descent of Judy Garland, at the Ahmanson. It’s a real play, which seeks to do more than simply dote on a celebrity. Yet neither does its grim side leave us wondering what all the fuss was about surrounding Garland. Tracie Bennett’s performance is star quality personified, flaws and all.

At Pasadena Playhouse, Randy Johnson’s One Night With Janis Joplin is not a play. It’s a concert by, well, impersonators. They’re very skilled impersonators — not just of Joplin, but also of her black mentors — and the music is quite powerful at times. But seriously, a theatrical presentation about Joplin that doesn’t acknowledge that she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27? Really? Drama is about the bad as well as the good.

By the way, I hear that glow sticks were passed out to audience members at the opening of the Joplin show, but at the next performance the only thing offered to us as we entered was ear plugs. It was a nice gesture, but compared to the likes of such aural misadventures as American Idiot and Backbeat at the Ahmanson, the ear plugs really weren’t necessary.

Gigi Bermingham, James Lent and Jennifer Shelton in “Master Class.” Photo by Suzanne Mapes.

Like the Joplin show, Nuttin’ But Hutton dotes. This one, at NoHo Arts Center, dotes on Betty Hutton. But Diane Vincent doesn’t pretend she’s Hutton. Instead she plays a contemporary fan of Hutton’s who’s trying to mount this very production. Vincent’s husband Sam Kriger is the musical director; together they co-created it. At least it acknowledges that the “˜40s/’early “˜50s movie star had a few problems, unlike the Joplin show in Pasadena. It’s fun, but I doubt that it’s fun enough to convince those with no prior knowledge of Hutton that they should immediately rush out and see her films.

Finally, a revival of Terrence McNally’s Master Class just opened at International City Theatre in Long Beach. Gigi Bermingham is wonderful as Maria Callas, and the students at her “master class” are skillfully portrayed (for those who haven’t seen it, this Callas is past her singing days and barely sings a note, but her students are warblers, if not the actors that she wants them to become).

Still, whenever I see Master Class, I start to zone out when Callas starts doing monologues about her past. They lack the intensity of her exchanges with the students. That’s what happens here, in Todd Nielsen’s staging.

End of the Rainbow, Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N.Grand Ave., LA. Tues-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Thursday matinees, April 4 and 18 2 pm. No Sunday evening performances on April 7 and 21. Closes April 21. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-972-4400.

One Night With Janis Joplin, Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 4 and 8 pm, Sun 2 and 7 pm. Closes April 21. www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org. 626-356-7529.

Nuttin’ But Hutton, NoHo Arts Center, 11136 Magnola Blvd., North Hollywood. Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 3 pm. Closes April 28. www.tix.com. 800-595-4849.

Master Class, International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes April 14. www.InternationalCityTheatre.org. 562-436-4610.

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Sitting With The Whale and Sexsting. Bob Verini Sings.

by Don Shirley | March 19, 2013

I spend too much time sitting at my computer, as I write this column and also edit other people’s writing for LA STAGE Times. Lately, as the media picks up on the ominous catchphrase “sitting is the new smoking,” I’ve also become more aware that I spend hours sitting in theaters and driving to theaters while sitting.

It’s an occupational hazard for someone who writes about theater. But although I write about drama, I’ve never thought of my routines as being dramatic — especially all that time I sit alone at my computer.

Last Saturday, however, I saw two staged dramas in a row about men who sit at their computers as part of their work. In the afternoon, I saw Samuel D. Hunter’s poignant The Whale at South Coast Repertory, and in the evening I saw Doris Baizley’s provocative Sexsting at the Skylight Theatre.

The two online wage slaves in these plays have very different occupations.

Jennifer Christopher and Matthew Arkin in South Coast Repertory’s “The Whale.” Photo by Scott Brinegar.

Charlie (Matthew Arkin) in The Whale teaches an online writing course from his home. Most of the drama in his case arises not from his work but from the fact that he weighs 600 pounds and is apparently on death’s door as a result of his girth.

In Sexsting, FBI Agent Richard Roe is creating his own drama at the computer by posing as a 14-year-old girl in cyber-conversations with a geographically distant man who has been hanging out in unsavory chart rooms. Richard is trying to preemptively catch a sexual predator.

Fortunately, my online occupation is much more like Charlie’s in The Whale than it’s like Richard’s in Sexsting.

Let’s look at The Whale. Parts of this play will remind many dedicated LA theatergoers of the same playwright’s A Bright New Boise, which was produced at Rogue Machine last year. Both plays feature men in early middle age who are trying to re-connect with a difficult teenaged child, after years of separation. Both plays are set in Idaho (The Whale in a small town, as opposed to Boise). Both plays have characters who wrestle with spiritual issues and others who are turned off by anything remotely religious (but while the religion in Boise is primarily Rapture-believing fundamentalism, in The Whale it’s Mormonism). Although the main character in Boise works in a hobby supply store, in his off-hours he also sits alone at his computer, writing — in his case, a novel.

Still, The Whale and Boise are sufficiently different from each other that fans of Boise should immediately make plans to see The Whale. Both plays are so involving that it’s safe to say that Hunter’s work should be seen as widely as possible.

Matthew Arkin

In an interview in the program, Hunter says his original inspiration for The Whale “didn’t start with the obesity” of the central character. It stemmed from an expository writing course Hunter taught to apathetic students at Rutgers in 2009. “And the obesity came in because I felt like I was at such a distance from these kids — it was like I had three heads — and I wanted to create that distance not only between Charlie and the other characters on stage but between Charlie and the audience so that we had to break some of those barriers and come to accept him despite his appearance.”

The play begins with a scene in which Charlie is reading from a dreadfully inadequate non-analysis of The Great Gatsby from one of his students. Judging from some of his students’ online comments that Charlie reads, it’s clear that they feel as distant from him as he does from them. He is careful to use only a microphone, not a camera, when he interacts with them, so as not to appall them by his looks and build an even higher barrier.

Still, the students are not simply Charlie’s or Hunter’s punching bags. One of them, years ago, became his gay lover, we learn as the play continues. In the present day, his hitherto estranged daughter Ellie (Helen Sadler) also becomes a student, in her own recalcitrant way. He hasn’t given up on believing that his students have something interesting to say, even if they don’t know how to express it.

As for himself, however, he more or less gave up long ago — after his lover died. His lover’s sister (Blake Lindsley), a nurse, is his only friend, and her attempts to provide care for him are mixed with her habits of smoking in his apartment and providing him with junk food. He’s interested in a Mormon missionary (Wyatt Fenner) who knocks on his door primarily because he hopes the young man might be able to find out why Charlie’s lover became virtually suicidal after he briefly returned to the Mormon Church in which he had been raised.

Matthew Arkin and Helen Sadler.

Charlie mixes guilt over leaving his daughter and his wife (Jennifer Christopher) in the lurch with a beguiling optimism that at least his teaching efforts might make a difference in someone’s life, perhaps even his daughter’s, before he dies.

Martin Benson stages the play’s West Coast premiere without one false note. Kevin Haney’s prosthetics and Angela Balogh Calin’s costumes create a shocking apparition of extreme obesity. Yet as Charlie, Arkin makes us notice every little glance and wince despite the layers of fat that encircle him.

Occasionally the character of Ellie seems a little over the top. The references to literary whales verge on becoming distractions, and the final moment of the play feels a bit abrupt — it’s not as polished as the final moment of A Bright New Boise. These are minor quibbles I have with the script, not the production.

But they don’t diminish the importance of seeing this play from this strong new voice. And this production — on the heels of SCR’s The Motherfucker With the Hat and Chinglish – also underlines the importance of having South Coast in our neighborhood. OK, it’s on the outskirts for most Angelenos, and my drive on Saturday — haunted by guilt over all that sitting and three separate traffic jams — was one of the most difficult drives to Costa Mesa I’ve experienced. But it’s worth the effort when the results are as moving as what I experienced at The Whale.

The Whale, South Coast Repertory Argyros Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tues-Sun 7:45 pm, Sat-Sun 2 pm. Closes March 31. www.scr.org. 714-708-5555.

Sexsting isn’t as moving as The Whale. But it is a sad and ironic — even occasionally funny — glimpse into two men who have more in common than they might realize, despite their adversarial relationship.

Wolfie Trausch and JD Cullum.

One of them, Richard Roe (normally Gregory Itzin, understudy Carl Weintraub at the performance I saw) is a San Diego-based FBI agent who’s under pressure from his younger superior to rope in more potential sex abusers more rapidly. His online target, Johnny D (JD Cullum) is a frustrated husband and father in Illinois, with an uninspiring job, who walks on the wild side by entering online chat rooms, where he might meet underage females — or male FBI agents his own age.

Johnny would probably prefer just to flirt. When Richard (aka Sandybythesea) becomes more aggressive, Johnny tends to back off. But eventually he’s roped in to faking a “business trip” that takes him to San Diego, with a box of condoms in his luggage.

The potential stasis of watching two men pretend to type at their desks while speaking the words they’re typing is varied with a background trio of other, usually silhouetted chat room participants of different ages and genders. Two of these actors also double as Johnny’s teenage children.

Baizley’s meditation on moral ambiguity, as directed by Jim Holmes, is a small but memorable reminder of potential explosives hiding behind the wall of cyber intimacy. It’s set in an era a half-dozen years ago when Facebook had yet to rule the world; now, even if the medium has changed somewhat, the potential force of those explosions is even greater.

Sexsting, Katselas Theatre Company at Skylight Theatre, 1816½ N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. Closes March 31. www.katselastheatre.com. 702-582-8587.

VERINI’S STILL HERE: I’ve seen a lot of Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle ceremonies, and I’m still here (although I’ve missed some of the more recent ones). At this year’s, yesterday evening at LATC, I was especially impressed by two performances of award presenters who are members of the LADCC.

Bob Verini

First, a nod to Sharon Perlmutter’s signing (as well of speaking) of her remarks about the Deaf West/Fountain co-production of Cyrano. I can’t read ASL, so I can’t vouch for how well she did, but I salute the attempt.

I feel no such uncertainty about how well the event’s producer Bob Verini performed his own rendition of “I’m Still Here” — with re-written critic-specific lyrics. To quote an old Variety phrase (he writes for Variety), it was boffo.

He has given me permission to re-produce the lyrics here, to be sung to the Stephen Sondheim melody from Follies:

Good shows and bum shows,

We’ve seen ‘em all, and my dear,

We’re still here.

Improv and dumb shows,

39 stabs at King Lear,

And we’re here.

We’ve gone to Shakespeare staged in tents,

Cross-dressing Fiddlers, high school Rents.

Memorized Same Time, Next Year, and we’re here.

(“George, it’s Doris, happy anniversary, darling”)

We’ve been to Annies where even Sandy was bad,

And we’re here.

Seen naked fannies people would pay to keep clad,

And we’re here.

We’ve stood outdoors with all of you,

While the director fixed the loo.

Then someone scores an acting coup, and we cheer.

You make our cares disappear, so we’re here.

We’ve suffered through eight hundred twelve Hello Dollys,

They stopped amusing at two.

When people don’t get what you loved about Follies,

What is a critic to do?

(And then all the one-person shows, oy)

Grim monodramas,

Kids hooked on smack, crack and beer,

And we’re here.

Child-beating mamas,

Straight guys suspecting they’re queer,

And we’re here.

Our jobs are hanging on the ropes,

While all the bloggers call us dopes.

We should’ve stuck to reviewing soaps for a career.

But we all love the-ay-ter, so we’re here.

We’ve made it through “hey, you’re that guy in the paper–

You called my daughter’s play junk.”

Or better yet, “I read your piece in the paper””

I gotta tell you it stunk.”

Good shows and great shows,

We’ve seen ‘em all and my dear,

We’re still here.

Like, love or hate shows,

All give us something to cheer.

So we’re here.

We have a need for all of you,

But let’s concede you need us too.

You’re craving feedback that’s smart, fair and clear.

Even should print disappear,

We’d be here!

Look who’s here!

We’re still here!

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From Tribes to Our Town

by Don Shirley | March 11, 2013

Director David Cromer, who shed new light on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town last year at Broad Stage, has returned to the LA area with the opening of Nina Raine’s Tribes, at the Taper.

It happens to coincide with the opening of another fascinating rendition of Our Town, staged by Jenny Sullivan, at the Rubicon. More on that later, but first let’s look at Tribes.

I was glad to see Gordon Davidson in the audience on opening night at the Taper. In 1979, he directed Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God there. It was the first play that introduced many of us to deaf characters and issues of the deaf world. Its effect was magnified by productions on Broadway, in London and later on film. As a producer, Davidson also brought Deaf West Theatre’s landmark production of Big River from its tiny NoHo space to the Taper — and it too went on to Broadway and points beyond.

Tribes deals with some of the same issues, but it’s sufficiently different from the Taper’s previous productions involving deaf talent that Taper veterans won’t have a been-there-done-that feeling.

Nina Raine

Playwright Raine is British. Her play is set primarily in the London home of a family with only one deaf member, the youngest son Billy (Russell Harvard), who has just returned home from college. His two older siblings are still hanging around the house. Daniel (Will Brill) is working on an academic thesis, although whether he’s working toward an actual university degree is left hazy. Ruth (Gayle Rankin) has just begun what she hopes will be a career in opera, although whether she has any formal training in singing opera remains, yes, hazy. In short, they are smart but unemployed and perhaps unemployable.

Their father Christopher (Jeff Still) is an ex-professor who enjoys dwelling on the fact of his two older children’s lack of employment, but then he also enjoys criticizing just about anyone over just about anything. He now writes books that are described by Daniel as “argumentative.” He doesn’t spare his wife and the children’s mother Beth (Lee Roy Rogers), who has just started writing her own detective novel.

Except for Billy, the members of this family engage in acrimonious discussions whenever they get together, yet the family doesn’t appear to be on the verge of disintegration. Using words to make points — and score points — is a way of life with these people. It’s a tribal custom, to use the analogy of Raine’s title. But Billy can’t keep up with the others. He reads lips and occasionally speaks clearly enough, if the batteries are working on his hearing aids. But he usually remains silent.

Then Billy meets Sylvia (Susan Pourfar), a hearing child of deaf parents. She works for a deaf charity and signs beautifully — which is increasingly useful, because as she comes of age, she is gradually losing her own hearing. She’s impressed with Billy’s lip-reading, showing him how he might be able to get a job with it. At the same time, she teaches him how to sign.

Susan Pourfar and Will Brill in “Tribes.” Photo by Craig Schwartz.

Sylvia is the most intriguing character in the play. In transit from hearing society into the deaf world, she is at the point where she feels somewhat alienated from both groups.

Even as she introduces Billy to signing and to deaf culture — a “tribe” in which he can learn to be as fluent as his parents and siblings are at home — she is regretting her own loss of hearing. She is the character without a tribe.

Raine has no deafness in her family, but she did study signing. And she is intent on creating a play in which both the advantages and the disadvantages of relying only on speaking and lip-reading — or relying only on signing — are keenly felt.

Cromer’s staging attempts to let the audience experience, however briefly, the incomprehension sometimes experienced by all the characters in the play. If you have your hearing but you have trouble grasping everything that’s said as the family flings words around the living room, it’s probably the result of an effort to bring the hearing audience a little closer to the experience of Billy within this family. For example, eventually I understood that Christopher is studying Chinese, even though he has avoided learning how to sign, but I missed the first two references to his Chinese studies while I was watching the play, catching up with them only when I read the script following the performance.

American audiences might even be a little more at sea during those family exchanges than the audiences were in Raine’s native England, because occasionally Americans might find themselves puzzling over the meaning of references to such British phenomena as Gateshead, the Arsenal, and Runcorn. In this play, the more you find yourself puzzled over exactly what was said, the closer you come to Billy’s own experiences.

Russell Harvard (front) and Will Brill.

Daniel Kluger’s sound design also includes more obvious moments in which Billy’s lack of hearing is re-created. But we’re not left completely reliant on our own ears. Most of the signed snippets of conversation are translated in creatively placed titles for of us who can’t read signing. And CTG will offer ASL translations of four performances (as well as one audio-described performance for the blind and three performances with “open captioning”, which adds more titles than usual).

Tribes has an imperfect second act. A subplot about Billy’s problems on his new job raises issues that are troubling enough that the way in which that subplot then gets short shrift — with no real resolution — is also somewhat troubling. Still, it’s rare that a new play opens so many vantage points on previously seldom-explored experiences. If Raine bites off slightly more than she can chew within one play, it’s nonetheless a very filling and often tasty theatrical repast.

Tribes, Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., LA. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2:30 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. No public performances (only student matinees) March 19-22. Closes at the matinee on April 14. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

Cromer’s staging of Our Town last year at Broad Stage was indeed illuminating; here is what I wrote after seeing it. But Jenny Sullivan’s version at the Rubicon is equally outstanding in its own way.

Ventura is hardly a small town in New Hampshire, but Ventura’s Our Town comes closer to the feeling of being in that kind of environment that the Broad version did. The Rubicon is literally located on a Main Street — and a rather sleepy stretch of Main Street at that. When the Stage Manager (James O’Neil) points at landmarks beyond the theater walls at the beginning of the play, he’s supposedly pointing to real Ventura counterparts of the landmarks mentioned in the text. I don’t know Ventura well enough to vouch for their total accuracy, but when he mentioned the high school, he was indeed pointing in the direction of the real Ventura High School that I pass whenever I drive to the Rubicon.

James Lashly, Joseph Fuqua and Tom Astor in “Our Town.” Photo by Jeanne Tanner.

More important, the Rubicon is a much more intimate environment than Broad Stage, seating only 170 for this production. Everyone is closer to everything that’s happening in the play. At the Broad, chances are that you were seated close to a scene or two but not to the entire play.

Even so, Sullivan at the Rubicon expands the play into the audience — and the audience into the play — as much as Cromer did at the Broad, with 33 audience seats on the stage itself and with many scenes taking place at least partially on a ramp leading through the audience or around the perimeter of the hall. This kind of environmental staging is a great way to emphasize the “our” in the title Our Town.

The production also takes advantage of the fact that the Rubicon building is a former church. The balcony serves as a choir loft, and original stained-glass windows are revealed before the wedding scene takes place.

Beyond all of that, the performances are crisp yet nuanced. Small moments register. It’s a perfect style for the New Hampshire understatement that Wilder wanted.

As I wrote last year, I have a long personal history with Our Town. But this production had a very personal meaning for me that most haven’t had, because of its timing. Last Thursday Willy Switkes, a friend and uncle-by-marriage, died at the age of 83, on the other side of the country. I mourned on this side of the country, far from the short graveside service, but seeing an excellent Our Town on this side of the country was probably the next best way for me to mark the occasion.

Dillon Francis, Stephanie McNamara, Remi Sandri and Tom Mueller.

It isn’t just the fact that Our Town deals with death relatively unblinkingly, for a play that was a commercial hit in the 1930s. It’s that the play specifically talks about how the dead are gradually “weaned away” from the living. In the last two months before he died, Willy seemed to be going through that process before his actual death. After a diagnosis four years ago, he had lived longer than expected, and while he appreciated the extra time, he was also ready to go. At a certain point, he wanted it to happen sooner rather than later, and that’s exactly what happened. He passed in peace.

I don’t think I ever appreciated that aspect of Our Town as much as I did in this Our Town. While I give Willy most of the credit for this, certainly the Rubicon knew how to handle this aspect of the play as well as the rest of it. Many of the actors had just gone through their own grieving for a former Rubicon colleague, Bonnie Franklin, who died — much more prematurely than Willy died — the week before the production opened.

I thank the Rubicon and Wilder and Our Town — and Uncle Willy — for being there in my time of need.

Our Town, Rubicon Theatre, 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. Wed 2 and 7 pm, Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes March 31. www.rubicontheatre.org. 805-667-2900.

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It’s Raining Women on San Fernando Valley Stages

by Don Shirley | March 4, 2013

The southeast San Fernando Valley women’s theater festival is booming. You haven’t heard of this festival?

Neither had I, until I realized that last week I was seeing five shows in the southeast Valley with casts that totaled 20 women and only one man.

OK, I made up the “festival” part. These plays that focus mostly on women, in a fairly circumscribed geographical area, might have been an actual festival only if someone had noticed their concurrence early enough to connect the dots and raise the money for a few festival trappings.

Still, that doesn’t prevent anyone from creating a personal festival, as I did, from these productions.

Kasi Jones, Ann Hu, Lani Shipman, Jillian Easton and Susan Boyd Joyce in “The Baby Project.” Photo by Deverill Weekes.

At the top of your list should be two original creations about modern motherhood. The Baby Project is the story of an unorthodox route to maternity, told in a musical format. And Mommune takes us to a slightly altered reality in order to examine the pressures that imperfect mothers now face.

Both of these are notable for their venues as well as for the actual productions. Mommune takes place in a real children’s play center, befitting the site-specificity embraced by Chalk Repertory Theatre, which is producing it. The Baby Project is Road Theatre’s first production in its new theater at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony on Magnolia Boulevard.

Certainly the most original play among these five is Dorothy Fortenberry’s Mommune. Set in “the soon future,” according to the script, it takes us to a society in which prospective parents are required to take pre-parenthood classes. Judging from this example, many of these classes are taught in former children’s play centers.

The instructors, at least in this case, are moms who made mistakes as parents. They were sentenced to these “mommunes,” while their children were sent to “kiddunes.” The moms are separated from their children until they learn the basics of parenting well enough to be able to teach these basics to others.

As the audience enters the “mommune” at Pint Size Kids, on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, we’re directed to little chairs or to benches in the facility’s central area. But as the play begins, we’re ushered into a separate classroom for a session in a “Babies 101″ class taught by one of the errant moms, Lynne (Amy Ellenberger). In this initial scene and in another scene near the end, we serve as the prospective parents. We’re handed dolls for demonstration purposes in that first scene.

Then, as the students are told to begin watching a video, we resume our regular roles as fly-on-the-wall audience members, and we’re allowed back into the main room, where most of the action takes place. We begin to learn what’s going on behind the mommune’s cheerful façade.

Cate Scott Campbell, Amy Ellenberger and Ursaline Bryant in “Mommune.” Photo by Dave Brewer.

Mrs. Jensen (Ursaline Bryant) runs this mommune, but she’s not the final arbiter of who stays there for how long. Today is the day when Mrs. Jensen’s unseen supervisor will decide which of two veterans within the program is ready to graduate and resume her role as a regular mom in the outside world. As they approach their final interviews, the contenders – Lynne and her bitchier rival Trista (Cate Scott Campbell) — are hopeful.

We also meet two other residents of the mommune. Bree (Sofie Calderon) is not deaf but communicates only in her own form of sign language, for reasons that we learn later. And in the first sentence she speaks, a brand-new inmate — the rebellious Charlotte (Hilary Ward) — uses a word that you don’t expect to hear in a place called Pint Size Kids.

Fortenberry’s play is an intricate layering act. While many of the mommune’s parenting principles sound reasonable enough, the orthodoxy with which they’re enforced as dogma is unsettling and sometimes wickedly funny. The mommies in this program behaved in ways that most people would consider somewhat neglectful or worse, but at the same time the hypocrisy and overkill in parental disapproval of other parents is roasted over a satirical flame.

The question arises over why only moms, not dads, are sent to these places. Is it because moms are always considered the parents in charge? The play doesn’t directly answer that question, but I wondered if abusive or neglectful dads are simply sent to regular prison in “the soon future”.

Mommune probes into a number of sensitive questions about parents and children in today’s world. These are familiar subjects in the popular media, but Fortenberry explores them with rare creativity and flair. And Larissa Kokernot’s staging is a model of site-specific intimacy — the best example of it from the Chalk Rep team since its reprise of Family Planning in 2009.

Susan Boyd Joyce, Jillian Easton, Ann Hu and Lani Shipman in “The Baby Project.” Photo by Deverill Weekes.

The Baby Project, at the Road’s new space, examines some of these same subjects — but from the perspective of single, fortysomething Dana (Lani Shipman), who is not a mother but wants to be one. The musical’s book, by Lori Jaroslow, starts in New York, where actress Dana is fresh off a relationship with a woman. She’s now more interested in becoming a mother than she is in finding another lover of whatever gender.

Hearing that the best sperm banks are in LA, she moves to North Hollywood and almost immediately finds a new love, a job as an LAUSD substitute in South Central, an HMO that she’s able to join thanks to string-pulling by her new lover’s past as a former employee of the HMO, and yes ““ the renowned sperm bank.

Almost every turn of events mentioned in the previous sentence has a degree of implausibility, but then this is a musical, in which people start singing to express themselves, so some suspension of disbelief is par for the course. And, of course, none of these opportunities pan out in ways that Dana would have imagined, although eventually she achieves motherhood in an altogether different way. I won’t give it away here, but you’ll see it coming down the narrative long before Dana does.

All right, the plot isn’t airtight, and it’s slightly longer than necessary, but Jaroslow’s script and Fonda Feingold’s and Noriko Olling’s music and lyrics offer some good laughs and a tear or two along the way. A few of the references are very NoHo-specific, including a couple of wisecracks about the locally notorious intersection of Lankershim, Vineland and Camarillo. The score is an ear-friendly blend of jazz and pop and Sondheim-inspired introspection, with a couple of hard-to-forget highlights (“My Little Inkling” is perhaps the most memorable).

Shipman has the pipes and the edginess that keep us caring about Dana. And the other women on stage (Jillian Easton, Ann Hu, Kasi Jones and Susan Boyd Joyce) all play many roles, of both genders, with impressive versatility.

The exterior of Road Theatre’s new space at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony.

The new Road theater is somewhat larger than the Road’s longtime Lankershim home (which is currently occupied by Albie Selznick’s Smoke and Mirrors magic show). The Magnolia space is also one of the most sharply raked 99-seat facilities in LA, which seems a bit incongruous with its location in a senior residence. But there are plenty of supports to grab if you begin to slip and fall — not that I saw anyone in the average-aged audience beginning to slip and fall. I sat in two different seats and found that I could hear and see better from the rear than I could from the front.

Mommune, Pint Size Kids, 13323 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Sat-Sun 8 pm, through April 7. www.ChalkRep.com.

The Baby Project, NoHo Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm, through March 17. www.RoadTheatre.org. 866-506-1248.

Here are brief reports on the other women-oriented three productions I saw in the southeast Valley over the past few days.

Divorce Party the Musical is producer Mark Schwartz’s sequel to Menopause the Musical. Remember Menopause the Musical? I probably remember it better than most men, as I wrote about seeing it as one of three men in an audience that also included more than 200 women. But if you missed that production a decade ago, you had another opportunity when another version came to El Portal less than two months ago.

Well, now Divorce Party is at El Portal, borrowing the Menopause (and, for that matter, Troubie) device of using familiar melodies with new lyrics that can legally pass as “parody.” In this case, a woman in the throes of a divorce is visited by her sister, a cousin, and another friend; they attempt to lift her spirits with, yes, a divorce party. The creators are two men — Schwartz and lyricist/director Jay Falzone — plus Amy Botwinick, a chiropractor who has written self-help books about divorce.

Janna Cardia and Scott Ahearn in “Divorce Party the Musical.” Photo by Jason Gillman.

It’s a combination of rather crude and unimaginative comedy shtick and the generally belted songs. One man plays the role of The Boy Toy, which means he plays a variety of male roles. The generally light-hearted tone gives way near the end to a few moments of dialogue aptly identified as being from the Dr. Phil school of thought, but it doesn’t stay serious for too long. No, we have to leave time for the Boy Toy’s Chippendales-style strip and a glossy “sequel” scene in which it’s reported that the women have solved their problems. Strangely enough, on opening night, the number of men at this clear-cut “girls’ night out” seemed almost equal to the number of women, but it’s hard to believe it will stay that way for long.

You couldn’t find a women-oriented play more different from Divorce Party than Ladyhouse Blues, Andak’s revival of a Kevin O’Morrison play from the mid-’70s. It features a household of women — a mother and four adult or almost-adult daughters — in St. Louis in the sultry summer of 1919, before the single mother’s one son returns from World War I.

The play is old-fashioned Chekhov-influenced realism, but it has moments of lyrical delicacy, and it serves as a look back at currents in American life that can still be detected today — the rise of women in the workplace, the persistence of rural roots in urban settings, xenophobia, the impact of technology. It also serves as a showcase for five women in rather meaty roles, and it’s lovingly revived by director Anne McNaughton and her cast of five.

Finally, closing over last weekend was the Falcon’s revival of Shirley Valentine, Willy Russell’s solo show about a bored British empty-nester who runs off with a friend to Greece. I’ve always felt this script would be better if it weren’t a solo show, but DeeDee Rescher brought it back to life quite winningly, under Andrew Barnicle’s direction.

Divorce Party the Musical, El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm., through April 14. www.elportaltheatre.com. 866-811-4111.

Ladyhouse Blues, NewPlace Studio, 10950 Peach Grove St., North Hollywood. Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm., through March 24. www.Andak.org. 866-811-4111.

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The Oklahoman and the Chicano Should Be Friends

by Don Shirley | February 25, 2013

One particular detail in a program note caught my eye last Saturday, at the opening of A Noise Within’s revival of John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath, as dramatized in 1988 by Frank Galati.

In 1937, two years before the novel The Grapes of Wrath finally emerged in 1939, Steinbeck abandoned his first attempt at writing a novel drawn from the same material — the Dust Bowl migration of Oklahomans to California. That earlier attempt was titled The Oklahomans.

This factoid jumped out of the program on Saturday because a few hours earlier I had been watching Musical Theatre West’s production of Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach. It’s billed as the show’s 70^th anniversary production — the original Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in March 1943, a mere four years after The Grapes of Wrath immortalized the wandering “Okies” in fiction.

Lindsey Ginter, Nicholas Neve, Deborah Strang, Ranya Jaber, Lili Fuller and Andrew Hellenthal in "The Grapes of Wrath" at A Noise Within. Photo by Craig Schwartz.

I wonder…if Steinbeck had kept his original title The Oklahomans and it had made as big a splash as The Grapes of Wrath made in 1939, wouldn’t it have been unlikely that the ground-breaking Rodgers and Hammerstein musical would have been called Oklahoma!? There would have been too much potential for confusion.

Would Oklahoma! instead have kept the title of the 1931 play it was based on — Green Grow the Lilacs, by Lynn Riggs? Not likely — the newer musical’s title was already the livelier Away We Go! when its first tryout took place in New Haven. It was then reportedly changed to Oklahoma! because Away We Go! wasn’t specific enough — it sounded like too many other lighter, now-forgotten musicals.

If the use of the Oklahoma! title had been eliminated because of possible confusion with a Steinbeck best-selling novel called The Oklahomans, perhaps the musical’s creators would have appropriated one of the other song titles from the show as the title of the show. “Poor Jud is Daid”, anyone?Â “Lonely Room”? Nah — they wouldn’t have wanted a title that could have created a “lonely room” inside the theater. But perhaps “Many a New Day” might have been able to transcend its specific situation in the score well enough to double as the name of the show itself.

While Oklahoma! and The Grapes of Wrath are both about Oklahomans and appeared within four years of each other, most casual consumers of 20^th-century culture wouldn’t necessarily think of the two in the same breath. The general reputation of the novel is that it’s dark and pessimistic, and the reputation of the musical is that it’s bright and optimistic.

Of course those common perceptions are determined in large part by the two different eras in which the stories are set. The musical takes place in 1907, with Oklahoma on the cusp of statehood, while Steinbeck’s novel occurs in the “˜30s, as the scourges of the Depression and the Dust Bowl uprooted 15% of Oklahoma’s population, sending many of them to California.

Still, the challenge for a memorable revival of The Grapes of Wrath is to shine a little light on its warmer, more human moments — while not betraying the play’s essential bleakness. And the challenge for a memorable revival of Oklahoma! is to highlight its darker tones — without completely draining its Away We Go!-style energy and romance.

Madison Claire Parks and Christopher Newell in "Oklahoma!" at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center. Photo by A.J. Hernandez.

Finding the heartbreak and the humanity within The Grapes of Wrath certainly appears to have been on the mind of Michael Michetti, who directed it for A Noise Within. In an LA STAGE Times interview, he spoke of how he personally was moved to tears by several moments in the play that depict characters who have virtually nothing, offering some of what little they have to others who are even more desperate.

This sensibility culminates, along with the play itself, in a scene that wasn’t included in the movie version because of Hollywood’s prissier standards in 1940. In it, we see the Joad daughter Rose, abandoned by her husband and having just experienced a delivery of a stillborn child, offering her breast milk to a stranger who is starving.

I can’t say that this scene moved me to tears on Saturday. But it did achieve its requisite gravitas. Actually, if the tearjerking had seemed obvious here — for example, if Rose herself (Lili Fuller) had been audibly sobbing during this scene — the moment would have come off as synthetically sentimental. The relative silence of that last scene, swathed in fading light designed by Elizabeth Harper, is far more effective.

Fortunately, most of the production is hardly stone-cold quiet, which would have made it somewhat somnolent. It’s stocked with appropriate musical interludes and accompaniments by a live band that travels around the theatrical space (the band includes sound designer Robert Oriol). Some of the band members take on small roles in the spotlight of the Joad saga, but at other times the sounds of the band emerge from the darkness behind the audience. It serves the twin purposes of enveloping the audience in a somewhat environmental staging and also of preventing the pace from devolving into a slow crawl.

In fact, the production clocks in at slightly less than three hours — shorter than the length as reported in accounts of the initial productions of Galati’s script in 1988 and 1989.

Any condensed version of an epic novel runs the risk that the characters are boiled down to a few superficial strokes, and Galati’s script doesn’t entirely escape this quality. However, the actors fill in some of the details wordlessly. Behold the lived-in look of Deborah Strang’s Ma Joad, as she effortlessly radiates common sense and compassion. Steve Coombs’ Tom Joad still looks young enough to make credible his sense of fiery idealism — a quality he picks up from the ex-preacher Jim Casy (Matt Gottlieb). As the oldest Joads, Gary Ballard and Jill Hill pull off the production’s few moments of comparative levity — before both of them drop dead, that is.

Melissa Ficociello’s scenic design follows the pattern of the original production — lots of movement of flexible pieces, but she also applies this practice to the construction of the Joad jalopy, which looks truly overburdened as it wanders westward.

Saundra McClain and Stephen Grant Reynolds in "Oklahoma!" at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center. Photo by A.J. Hernandez.

Meanwhile, in Long Beach, Davis Gaines’ staging of Oklahoma! for Musical Theatre West allows the troubles of Oklahoma life to be sensed as well as the frontier’s cocky can-do quality. Of course much of this is written into the script.

The character of the farmhand Jud Fry is very dark, of course. He’s somewhat reminiscent of the loners who, nowadays, shoot up schools and movie theaters. But Rodgers and Hammerstein allowed him a chance to speak his innermost mind in the song “Lonely Room”, and while it doesn’t excuse his behavior, it briefly allows him a modicum of the audience’s pity. This particular Jud (Christopher Newell) isn’t a bad-looking guy, compared to some of the Juds I’ve seen, and this makes his ability to get an initial yes from Laurey, when she agrees to go to the box social with him, a little more credible than usual. Of course he also turns her “Out of My Dreams” song into something that could aptly be titled “Out of My Nightmares.”

The next big song in the show, “The Farmer and the Cowman (Should be Friends),” emphasizes that these two groups are closer to being natural enemies than friends. In the box social that follows, it’s made clear than a man’s gun is just about the last thing he owns that he might willingly give up.

A lot of theatergoers remember the title song more than anything else in the show. It’s about as optimistic as any title song ever — “Oklahoma, OK,” and all that. But perhaps they forget that its two appearances in the show are separated by a scene in which everything is decidedly not OK. A man is killed in a fight, and while his killer has a good self-defense argument, he’s allowed to make that argument in a way that short-circuits the wheels of justice in a manner more fitting to the lawless West than it is to the state that Oklahoma is about to become.

So Gaines didn’t have to do anything particularly extraordinary to emphasize the show’s darker moments, other than making sure they register in a theater as big as the Carpenter Center. He also had to make sure that the voices are as strong as his own, and while that might be difficult for most theatrical singers, his young principals — Madison Claire Parks as Laurey, Bryant Martin as Curly, Newell’s Jud, Teya Patt as Ado Annie and Luke Hawkins as Will Parker — are as accomplished in that regard as the veteran Saundra McClain as Aunt Eller and Stephen Reynolds as Andrew Carnes. Amin El Gamal as Ali Hakim, in conjunction with Patt and Hawkins, also make the show’s comic exchanges unexpectedly fresh.

The experience of watching these two American classics back to back made me wonder if Laurey and Curly turned into Ma and Pa Joad three decades later. Just think about that occasionally while you’re watching them, and both productions will acquire an extra layer of poignancy.

The Grapes of Wrath, A Noise Within 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. In repertory with two other productions. This Saturday 2 and 8 pm, this Sunday 2 pm. Also March 24 2 and 7 pm, April 11-12 8 pm, April 20 8 pm, April 21 2 pm, May 3 8 pm, May 11 2 pm and 8 pm. www.ANoiseWithin.org. 626-356-3100.

Oklahoma!, Carpenter Center, Cal State Long Beach, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 2 and 7 pm. Closes March 3. www.musical.org. 562-856-1999 x 4.

I was surprised to hear a reference to The Grapes of Wrath in another show I saw last weekend — Casa 0101’s revival of Luis Valdez’s I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges.

Two married Mexican American LA actors, Connie and Buddy, return to their suburban home after auditioning for roles as a maid and a gardener, respectively. They’re dressed in the shabby outfits that they wore to look the part.Â Unexpectedly, they discover that their precocious teenage offspring Sonny has shown up at the house while they were gone.Â They had thought he was in school at Harvard. Looking at their outfits, Sonny remarks, “What’s this? The Grapes of Wrath — in Spanish?”

Carmelita Maldonado, Alex Valdivia, Elizabeth Pan and Daniel E. Mora in Casa 0101 Theater’s production of "I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges"

Of course, for decades now, Americans’ image of migrant farm workers has consisted primarily of Mexican Americans, not Anglos like the white Joads of Oklahoma. Sonny may not have been thinking about that when he made his remark; he seems to be more interested in taking digs at his parents’ careers playing stereotypes. But it’s typical of Valdez’s fascinating 1986 play that casual comments might explode in ways that weren’t necessarily intended.

In other words, this is a much more surprising play than you might think when you first start watching what appear to be its sitcom-like contours. You shouldn’t know these surprises in advance, but there are quite a few of them in the increasingly meta-theatrical second act.

Whatever you think of these surprises, Valdez and director Hector Rodriguez’s staging paint some vivid portraits of Chicano actors (Carmelita Maldonado, Daniel F. Mora) — who pose as poor in order to win respectable middle-class wages and amenities — and their brilliant son (Alex Valdivia), who seems determined to throw his parents’ middle-class “badges” back in their faces. Providing extra complications is Sonny’s new, older girlfriend (Elizabeth Pan), a Japanese American dancer.

I especially enjoyed seeing this play at a late matinee on Sunday that conflicted with most of the Oscars show. It’s always fun to see a play on Oscar night, not only because the theaters usually have ample room but also because attending them during the big ceremony at the Dolby makes a statement on behalf of LA theater, as opposed to Hollywood glitz. But this play was especially appropriate as a counterpoint to the Oscars, in that it demonstrates one of Hollywood’s perpetual problems — the limited range of roles available to Latino actors.

By the way, in her program note, Casa 0101 artistic director Josefina LÃ³pez points out that not enough has changed since the play opened in 1986 at LATC — “Ben Affleck thinks it’s okay to play a Latino in Argo! When do we get to play the leads in film?!”

Of course, the Oscar show is so long that I could see Stinking Badges at 5 pm and still get home in time to catch the last half-hour of the Oscar ceremony — when most of the highest-profile awards were handed out, including the best picture trophy to, yes, Affleck and the other producers of Argo.

I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, Casa 0101, 2102 E. First St., Boyle Heights. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 5 pm. Closes March 10. www.Casa0101.org. 323-263-7684.

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Von Bach and Absolutely Filthy — Parodies That Pop

by Don Shirley | February 19, 2013

One of the reasons satirists sometimes make sure their efforts are described as “parodies” is because the First Amendment allows parodies to proceed without requiring the satirists to obtain rights to the source material that’s being parodied. Yet just to be safe, the makers of parodies sometimes take extra precautions.

And so, at Sacred Fools Theater, as the absolutely fascinating Absolutely Filthy takes characters clearly based on the Peanuts gang into adulthood, the names in the program disguise those origins. Still, the characters themselves call each other with their Peanuts names. There’ll be more on Absolutely Filthy later in the column.

Meanwhile, the musical Triassic Parq is a take-off on the movie Jurassic Park — from the dinosaurs’ points of view. And then there’s Von Bach, at Fremont Centre Theatre.

JR Reed and Maia Peters in "Von Bach" at Fremont Centre Theatre. Photo by Scott Rognlien.

Instead of parodying any particular story, Von Bach playwright Owen Hammer has created an original character who’s reminiscent of the central figures in the Frankenstein/ Dracula/Re-Animator tradition. He has probably eliminated any danger of being sued. But Hammer doesn’t leave it at that.

Von Bach ingeniously and hilariously parodies not only the man-becoming-monster storytelling tradition but also the arena in which people sue each other over the rights to tell stories.Â At times the action in Von Bach flashes back to the title character’s experiments in the 19^th century, but the main frame of the play is actually set in our own era, and in our own city.

A screenwriter (Maia Peters), who’s besotted with the original Von Bach novel, is hired to write the latest film version of the Von Bach legend. But first the production is sued by the grandson (David Wilcox) of the most famous actor ever to play the role and then by Von Bach (JR Reed) himself, the re-animated version of the original, miraculously transported into 21^st-century LA.

Whose life is it, anyway?

The Next Arena’s production of Von Bach is enhanced by a series of original film clips and trailers that are supposedly from at least a half-dozen previous screen versions of the story, plus fabricated footage of a TMZ-style celebrity news show and commercials for a drug that Von Bach begins hawking (after all, he has to make a living, especially if he doesn’t control the rights to his own story).

If this sounds complicated, the plot becomes even more tangled as the show goes on, but director Scott Rognlien of the Next Arena keeps everything remarkably coherent, and the jokes hit most of their intended targets.

Von Bach has been in the works for quite a while, with an earlier production in 2010 at Artworks Theatre in Hollywood that didn’t get much attention (I don’t remember hearing anything about it back then), although it received an encouraging review in the LA Weekly. However, the current production has been developed even farther, including a series of posters from the various Von Bach films mounted in the Fremont lobby.

Although the clips on the screen at the back of the stage add to the panache of the production, the live performances are hardly neglected, with tart and well-timed contributions not only from the principals mentioned above but also from Summer Herrick Stevens as the flip movie producer, Matt Taylor as the antic director, Jonathan Howard as the cgi performer and as a judge, and Lori Ann Edwards as in a variety of women’s roles.

I don’t consider myself a devotee of the man-into-monster genre, but my brain buzzed with delight as I left Von Bach.

Also this weekend, I finally saw another production that treats the subject of re-animation — How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. It’s Patrick Bristow’s Americanized version of a British script written and created by Ben Muir, Jess Napthine, David Ash, Lee Cooper and After Dark Entertainment. That long list of creators is a clue to the improvisational nature of the production.

The audience has purportedly assembled for a seminar on the subject in the title. It’s led by Bristow with Jayne Entwistle, Mario Vernazza and Chris Sheets playing his assistants, who often lead the proceedings into unexpected detours.

Former Groundling Bristow is a master at the sort of audience interaction that keeps the show lightly humming for about 75 minutes, but it’s a mere shadow of the many layers on view in Von Bach.

At one moment in Von Bach, we see not only snippets from the film adaptations of the tale but also a brief glimpse of a stage musical treatment of the Von Bach story, which looks suspiciously like Phantom of the Opera. This reminded me of the latest incarnation of a similar tale, Jekyll & Hyde, which is now at the Pantages.

Like most critics, I’m not a fan of the Frank Wildnorn/Leslie Bricusse score, but Jeff Calhoun’s staging — which originated at La Mirada Theatre last year — is a big improvement over the previous versions I’ve seen. Â Calhoun and his team have tried to trim fat from the score and have come up with some relatively clever designs.

The climactic scene in which Jekyll and Hyde (the characters) more or less sing a psychological duel always struck me as fairly ridiculous when it involved only one actor switching back and forth between his two personalities, but in this version the actor (Constantine Maroulis) is allowed to stay in character as Jekyll while projections and other effects impersonate Hyde in that scene. It’s still kitsch, but not on the level that I remember from previous productions,

Von Bach, Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. Sat 8 pm, Sun 3 pm, Closes March 10.Â www.FremontCentreTheatre.com. 866-811-4111.

How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse, Theater Asylum, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 3 pm. Closes Feb 24. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/288789. Â 800-838-3006.

Jekyll & Hyde, Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Tue-Fri 8 pm, SatÂ 2 pm and 8 pm, Sun 1 pm and 6:30 pm. Closes March 3. www.BroadwayLA.org. 800-982-2787.

Meanwhile, in Absolutely Filthy at Sacred Fools, most of the adult Peanuts characters re-unite for the funeral of Charlie Brown. But one of them is conspicuously left out, at least at first — Pigpen, the character who was always surrounded by a cloud of dust. He’s the central character in Absolutely Filthy — hence the title — and playwright Brendan Hunt plays him in a performance that is probably unlike any you’ve ever seen.

Robbie Winston, Anna Douglas, Shannon Nelson, Jaime Andrews and Curt Bonnem in "Absolutely Filthy" at Sacred Fools. Photo by Shaela Cook.

Unless, that is, you’ve seen an actor hula-hooping his way through nearly an entire play, sometimes while naked.

Yes, Hunt depicts Pigpen’s cloud of dust by constantly spinning a grungy-looking hula hoop around his waist. And he keeps it spinning even during the part of the play when he takes off all his clothes. That disrobing is inspired by his feeling that if his childhood friends don’t want to be seen with him because he isn’t dressed appropriately for a funeral, why not take off his clothes?

Pigpen, you see, has never overcome his childhood stigma and is now homeless and dirtier than ever. His lot in life has been in stark contrast to those of most of his friends. Lucy (Anna Douglas), the girl who always pulled the football away from Charlie Brown (Scott Golden, in flashbacks) when he was trying to kick it, is a cutthroat TV sports interviewer. Her brother Linus (Robbie Winston) failed to complete a tour of duty in Iraq and remains a sensitive soul in the shadow of his sister.

Charlie’s sister Sally (Shannon Nelson) was the one true love of Pigpen’s life — they hooked up while in college, but he ruined that relationship with a casual fling with Patty, who’s now a fashion designer in France. Patty’s former friend Marcie (Jaime Andrews) is a glasses-free ocular surgeon after a traumatic incident. “The black guy” Franklin (KJ Middlebrooks) is a judge and a recovering alcoholic who gives Pigpen a hand. Schroeder (Curt Bonnem) transformed from a Beethoven devotee into a shallow pop star.

Snoopy (Jessica Sherman) died long ago, but he returns as a German-speaking female dog in a hallucination inside Pigpen’s head. Another hallucination, befitting the theological inquiries of Peanuts, brings a somewhat irreverent Jesus Christ (Amir Levi) into Pigpen’s brain. Several adult versions of characters from other comic strips make brief appearances.

Of course if you didn’t grow up reading Peanuts or the other comics of that era, most of this might sound meaningless. As a Peanuts fan since childhood, I was caught up in all of it from beginning to end.

At one point in the play, a few of the characters refer to their younger selves as cartoons, as parodies, but Peanuts — although measured out in its little daily doses — was always deeper than mere parody. The children in the comic strip were already more sophisticated than most actual children — little adults. By dreaming up the later lives of these characters, Hunt honors that level of depth. At the same time, by making Pigpen his central character and embodying him so creatively and convincingly, Hunt challenges us to go beyond the point of view that Charles Schulz created in the original comic strip and consider a wider range of possibilities.

This is one of the best Sacred Fools shows ever — and a play that truly seems appropriate for a company called Sacred Fools. Jeremy Aldridge, the director, also staged the production that until now has been the company’s biggest success — Louie and Keely Live at the Sahara. Absolutely Filthy, although very different, achieves the same level of unexpected epiphanies.

Absolutely Filthy, Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Dr., LA. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Thur Mar 7 8 pm, Sun Mar 3 and 10, 7 pm. Closes Mar 10. Â www.sacredfools.org. 310-281-8337.

With such enterprising and entertaining full-length productions in the parody genre as Von Bach, Absolutely Filthy and the musical Triassic Parq (closing next Sunday at the Chance Theater in Anaheim), Sketches From the National Lampoon at the Hayworth Theatre looks, by comparison, somewhat old-fashioned and pallid. In fact, most of the short sketches are from the National Lampoon archives, albeit freshened a bit with a few updated references.

The cast is sharp enough, including veterans from Sacred Fools and the Troubies. But I didn’t laugh as much at the National Lampoon show as I have, for example, at most of the Friday/Saturday night Groundlings shows I’ve seen. Not that I’ve experienced a Groundlings show recently, but I’ve seen them many times over the years, and they have always struck me as a consistent purveyor of high-quality live sketch comedy. National Lampoon’s show wasn’t even as funny as last week’s Saturday Night Live.

Sketches From the National Lampoon, Hayworth Theatre, 2511 Wilshire Blvd., LA. Thu-Sat 8 pm, Sun 3 and 7 pm. Closes March 17. www.nationallampoon.com. 323-337-1546.

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