The Homecoming (review)

 

Spoilers ahoy!

Tiny confession.  Although having heard of it for years, up until now I had neither read nor seen The Homecoming by the late, great Harold Pinter.  Hence this was an intense treat, to see a play of this caliber for the first time, done by a theatre company on this level...I feel buzzed in the aftermath.

In many ways, the premise (in terms of plot or situation, anyway) is simple, in terms of the play's period, the 1960s, almost cliche.  Teddy (Taylor Lee Marr), a philosophy professor in some American university, returns home to his North London working class home after six years.  This home consists of nothing but four men--Max (Troy Dunn) a cantankerous retired butcher now walking with a cane, his other two sons Lenny (Adam Langsam) who gives off a strange air--one that we eventually realize is "Pimp"--and Joey (Carey Cannata), the youngest in so many ways with hopes of becoming a boxer, and finally Sam (David E. Frank) Max's younger brother who works as a chauffeur.  Teddy arrives without warning in the middle of the night, bringing with him a wife, Ruth (Angela Beyer), about whom no one is his family has any clue at all.

She seems to be the first woman in this house, since the death of Jessie, Max's wife and the boys' mother.  

A lot of things become instantly obvious.  First, this house simmers with tension, unresolved and possibly unresolvable.  Every word it seems is a weapon, or a shield.  Secrets are everywhere, their presence increasingly loud, their specific nature remaining elusive.  

Second, what is true of one home seems utterly true (albeit in a totally different flavor) of the "home" which is Teddy and Ruth's marriage.  We sense instantly here is something afoot, which grows more obvious by the breath.  For several moments in the play I wondered if Ruth had been hired to pretend to be Teddy's wife.  While I dismissed that idea pretty quickly, by now the idea seems more likely--on Ruth was in effect "hired" when she and Teddy did get married six years ago.  Here is not a happy marriage.

Whose homecoming is this?  Teddy's obviously.  But we learn Ruth used to live near here, so might it not be hers as well?  The men of this house begin becoming more obviously themselves, a cascade effect from the introduction of Ruth.  So, one could say they are also coming home, home to themselves.  Little truths spill out.  How Lenny hates being called Leonard, evidently because his mother called him that.  Hints of abuse by Max are sprinkled throughout.  People keep talking about an old friend of Max, and Sam ends up spewing a BIG secret about him.  Joey almost turns infantile by the end.  

Throughout, words rarely reveal anything.  They hint, and tease, deceive and accuse, but hardly anything of import is ever stated clearly.  Everything, every sentence and phrase and word, is an act of combat, or a negotiation.  Life as warfare.  Or, as high stakes poker.  

And this cast, under the direction of Frederique Michel, makes every glance or smile or silence work exactly the same way.  The experience proves eerie, fascinating, a little bit disgusting, often quite funny, and it crawls under one's skin.  I should mention I know about half the cast reasonably well, yet looking at them on stage during this performance I did not see the men and woman I know.  I saw Ruth and Max, Sam and Lenny, Joey and Teddy.

Bravo.

The Homecoming plays Fridays and Saturdays 8:00pm, Sundays at 4:00pm through June 15, 2025 at City Garage, Bergamot Station, T1 Space, 2525 Michigan Ave Santa Monica, CA 90404

The Bald Soprano (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

I told some folks the title of the play I was going to see--The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco.  Most had not heard of it and seemed baffled by the image.

One friend, though, perked up and asked with an incredulous grin "CityGarage is doing that?"

Which actually says rather a lot, right there.  My own reaction echoes theirs pretty perfectly.

Charles Duncombe, manager of CityGarage in Santa Monica welcomed the audience on opening night, describing the play as like Monty Python.  I would have added "but French."  Which could serve as a review, almost.

Ionesco himself called this an "anti-play" in that it has no story, even though it almost succeeds in pretending it does, deliberately.  In fact it makes for a hilarious and savage comment on pettiness and how much of our lives, our expectations, our assumptions don't really make a lot of sense.  Reacting as it was to the theatre scene of a specific time and place, does that make it dated?  Yes.  And yet also makes it timeless.  Because life--that is to say, we mere mortals--remain absurd.

Now, to continue with a simile, Monty Python as a genre (ditto Theatre of the Absurd) has some tricky if subtle demands.  This production, with a bevy of CityGarage regulars, threads most of the needles and as a result gets a lot of laughs.  As well it should!  Nothing makes very much sense, of course.  That is the point! 

In fact describing anything like a "plot" seems almost meaningless!  Rather the performances themselves simply exist amid a weird melee of musings, assertions, questions, revelations, confessions, arguments, accusations, and ramblings--which somehow feel familiar.  Which is also the point!

Insomuch as there is a point.

Standouts in the cast almost entirely focus on the female characters.  Make of that what you will.  Angela Byer and Bo Roberts play a married couple (or are they?) visiting some friends while suffering from a strong bout of amnesia.  The couple they are visiting (or just maybe really are) consist of Andy Kallok and David E. Frank, the latter playing the wife (again, the female characters stand out--or are they female--I'm not sure), while Courtney Brechemin portrays the Maid who tells us all sorts of wonderful weird things.  A fire chief played by Clifford Irvine rounds up the cast--he visits looking for fires, which is his job after all.  That bit almost makes sense. Almost.

That "almost" is one reason the whole thing is so funny.  It makes for a deliciously weird joke, with extra layers of "WTF?" and "Waitaminute" and "Whhhhaaaat?" on top.  

Imagine the story-telling equivalent of Merry-Go-Round after taking a tiny hit of acid, in France and that suggests a little bit of zany humor direct Frederique Michel achieves with this cast.  Imagine if you will Monty Python and the Holy Grail crossovered with a 1950s sitcom of your choice, minus children.  Then stir in very acid humor about the bourgeoisie.  That sounds like a mere formula, doesn't it?  And yet the only "formula" here is silliness, the arch type of silliness of which we all may well be guilty.

Oh, who am I kidding?  We ARE guilty of such.  Sooner or later.  

So come and have a laugh.

The Bald Soprano plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm until June 2, 2024 at City Garage, Bergamot Station, T1 Space, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404.

Betrayal (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize in literature, which is way impressive.  As a writer he managed to write silences into his plays which were filled with meaning, and forced actors to plumb the text for meanings by having them say the same lines several times.  It makes for quite a challenge--one met magnificently by the latest production of Betrayal by Santa Monica's CityGarage.

Frankly, been looking forward to this ever since they announced it on the schedule and even more when I read the cast.

Essentially, the play tells the story of an affair.  Emma (Angela Beyer) is married to book publisher Robert (David E. Frank) but had/has had a long term affair with his best friend Jerry (Troy Dunn).  If this sounds a little too straightforward, even mundane for Pinter, never you worry.  What follows is a sometimes scorching, sometimes hilarious, always intriguing exploration of human relations.  Aiding in all this is how the scenes generally (but not quite always) proceed in reverse chronological order, namely starting with a meeting years after the affair has ended and ending with the scene in which that new relationship was truly born.  Helping all this is a a character known simply as the Waiter (Gifford Irving) who wanders around the scenes in which his character does not appear simply to tell the audience when what follows happens.

This last is a tiny addition from director Frederique Michel.  Personally, even though I understood the chronology (did the role of Waiter at my University), this helped me keep track.

But what really grabs our attention and hearts are the performances.  Again, Pinter masterfully forces actors to examine what the words coming out of their mouths really mean.  In the hands of these actors, the results often astound.  The meaning of the word "squash" for example changes dramatically as events proceed.  All too often current styles of acting consist of treating lines casually--which in theatre at least nearly always turns out to be a dreadful error.  In Betrayal every word matters, and given its author so too nearly every single silence, i.e. the words not said.  Maybe never even considered for speaking.  

One result of this is a constant state of surprise.  Predicting what is about to happen simply doesn't work.  Oh, we know some of the results already.  The play began at the ending after all!  But the play isn't about the plot, but about the human relationships--the thousand thousand tiny moments, the words said or stammered or whispered or spat.  Every question asked, and answered (or not) assumes enormous weight--the weight of lives and hopes and disappointments.  Even the tiny, meaningless lies.  Or the tiny, seemingly meaningless details.  Whose kitchen was it when Jerry did that thing?  Where did Robert go in Venice, and how?  When did Emma tell her husband that secret?  

Trivial and momentous at the same time and for the same reason.

Betrayal plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 4pm until March 17, 2024 at Bergamot T1 Space, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404.

Insulted, Belarus (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Until I saw this play, I don't think the name Lukashenko had ever registered with me.  He is a dictator in the land-locked country of Belarus, near Romania.  Playwright Andrei Kureichik was smuggled out of that country after the dictator cracked down on the country and all dissent in a big, big way.  Weirdly (in light of what has been going on in the USA), he held a sham election and this time people tried to call him out on that.  His reaction was brutal violence.

Insulted, Belarus (translated by John Freedman) tells the tale, Reader's Theatre style, of that election and its horrific aftermath.  But more than that, it portrayed the hopes of those who thought maybe this time they could topple a dictator by the rules he said he was going to obey (but never, ever had).  This was the real thing, played with chilling, shallow malice (Randall Wulff).  A optimist election witness (Devin Davis-Lorton), a candidate (Angela Beyer) seeking to unseat the dictator, a hooligan/protestor (Anthony M. Sannazzaro), they all wanted to change things.  Just as a storm-trooper (Andrew Loviska), and a school principal (Juliet Morrison) want things to stay the same, and don't care who gets hurt, maimed, violated, or even killed.  Not at first.

Add to the mix the dictator's youngest son (Courtney Brechemin) exactly as shallow and selfish as his father, but with the excuse of childhood.  A kind of weird mirror/echo to the dictator.

Powerful stuff.  And topical.  Performed by one of the best theatre companies in the Los Angeles area.  More, this play works in stirring up emotions.  The performances are all good.  As expected with this company!

It is also less good that what I've come to expect.  Nowhere near bad, or even average.  In fact it remains a very worthwhile piece of theatre!  But...less excellent than expected.  And I think the reason lies in the whole Readers' Theatre format, which forces pretty much the entire cast to directly interact with the audience for most of the performance.  This is hard.  Honestly, the audience can almost never give anything to the actors in this situation.  It is as if the cast are stuck doing ninety minutes of very intense monologues.  It is very hard  And lacking the dynamic energy that an entire cast usually feeds to one another--and which I've seen nearly all this cast participate with/create in the past--well, it suffers.  Some.  Not a lot.  Barely enough to mention.  Just enough to mention, in fact.

The play is still powerful.  Still dramatic.  Still intense and worth the price of a ticket, not least for us to think about nations who are not in the forefront of the news reports right now, but still suffer.  

I am not "damning with faint praise" but rather "praising with faint damnation."  Saying "not quite as good as City Garage usually fares" is a little like saying "not the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan."  Because it remains an impactful work of living art, opening one's eyes and heart to the unknown, yet somehow recognizable as absolutely true.  The characters and their fates (for so many of them are acted upon most of all) haunted me long after I left the theatre.  Honestly, given the track record of this theatre company, had my soul not been so haunted I would be shocked.

Insulted, Belarus plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm until December 17, 2023 at the City Garage, Bergamot T1 Space, 2525 Michigan Ave Santa Monica, CA 90404.

Endgame (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

City Garage re-emerges from Covid 19 with Endgame by the late, great (and controversial) Samuel Beckett.  Many agree this play, a weird exploration of the moments and process of ending, perhaps exceeds his more famous Waiting for Godot in power and poignancy.  Certainly it remains an easy play to misunderstand.

Regular readers might experience a bit of deja vu, but methinks it crucial the note this show--as is the case with most of City Garage's productions, is not intended as a story.  To be sure it has a story, or if you prefer a plot.  Its real nature emerges once an audience member understands what they are seeing and hearing is more or less a dream.  A dream given form.  A dream acting out with all the beautiful, terrifying, hilarious "logic" of an actual dream.  Do not look for a linear tale here, but an experience.  I call this the Theatre of Dreams.

Within that context, we are in world winding down to its end.  Four survivors hold on for a little while, much reduced from what they once were, within nothing to do but focus on trivia--trivial desires, trivial attempts at pleasure, trivial cruelties, even trivial enlightenments.  All four characters know they are circling the drain.  This is the end.  And knowing that, they play games.

Hence the title.  Clov (Troy Dunn) pretty much is the only active one in the bunch, obeying the orders of the feeble, blind Hamm (Bo Roberts) who sits in the middle of a room surrounded by nothing, demanding answers to questions he asked minutes before, insisting Clov look out the window and describe what he sees, or push his chair around the room as a meagre substitute for travel.  Off to the side are two large garbage cans, where live--or at least dwell--Hamm's parents, Nell (Martha Duncan) and Nagg (Andy Kollack).  If this all sounds bizarre, then you've latched onto a basic truth about the show!

Events such as they are do take place, however.  Struggles even, especially between Clov and Hamm.  One longs to leave but fears to.  The other longs for everything to simply end, yet desperately tries to fill his time, trying to impose meaning upon things that mean...well, nothing.  Or, everything, since there is nothing else.  

What results from all this, especially under the direction of Frederique Michel, ends up startlingly compelling as well as rather surprisingly funny.  Dark humor, yes, but then is not humor one of the best vaccines we have against despair?  Michel's direction coupled with this cast and the quiet, profound design (costumes by Josephine Poinot, set and lights by Charles Duncombe) pulls us into this metaphorical world, and in the end we recognize it--not because we've survived any kind of genuine apocalypse, but rather we've all gone through a thousand tiny ones.  The death of childhood.  An ending of love.  One chapter in life starts, only after the previous one dies.  Friendships fade away.  Places change and cease to be what once they were.  So do we.  From such microscopic and inevitable catastrophes we find a reason to laugh when an overworked servant keeps forgetting a ladder when he goes to use it.

In this play, that happens.  A lot.  And it remains funny.

Endgame plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm until April 10, 2022, at City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave, Building T1, Santa Monica CA 90404 (right across the street from the 26th Street/Bergamont Station train station).

Covid safety protocols will be observed.  Proof of vaccination required.  Masks must be worn inside the theatre.