Wearhorse (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Wearhorse (or Wear Horse) is based on the kind of real life event that nearly always makes people go WTF????? About someone who posted pics online of them posing inside a gutted horse carcass.

Now, while a bit squeamish, I'm not adverse to a play that makes me look away now and then. Discomfort can easily be part of fascination, even entertainment and certainly enlightenment. Parts of this play actually made me squirm in discomfort, bordering on nausea. Not a lot, but bits.

Do I get something in return for this? Well, yes. But...

First let me address the script by John Hendel. Kudos for taking on such a startling, even provocative subject to explore. Ultimately it isn't clear he has much to actually say about the events. Not sure he or the play need that. If this is simply a snapshot of three people so in search of an identity they go over the edge, well and good. No complaints there! I want to also praise the way the characters demonstrate they are aware this is a play, that they are in front of an audience! This was arguably my favorite aspect of the show! But I do wonder what happened to it? Why did it simply stop? More, I thought introducing this aspect didn't quite work. Not sure why.

More problematical was addressing the audience directly in monologues. Not that this is a bad thing, something to be avoided. But experience tells me this tends to be a trap for actors. So much training of actors in our times is aimed at either physicality and/or naturalism that a monologue to the audience without a justifying context tends to become almost default akin to the intro of a song in a musical! It shouldn't be so. But that is the nature of theatre today, at least way more often than not.

Reginald (Brendan A. Bradley), the first actor to speak, begins directly to the audience. What is the context? The script as produced doesn't really give a clue. Is he telling a psychiatrist what happened? Are the audience his surrogate imaginary friends? I'm not advocating any of these solutions, but noting the actor didn't have an answer.

Along those lines, a plastic gun in his hand doesn't help. I get that maybe it is supposed to justify the unreality of events, but the fact I had to think of that afterwards shows in the moment it did not work. Here we get into the responsibility of director Ruth Du in her theatrical directing debut. She seems to have approached this whole work intelligently and very shrewdly cast interesting, appealing actors as these weird, frankly twisted human beings--people so distorted that the posing inside a dead horse ends up being the tip of a not-mentally-healthy iceberg. Anything to trick...er,  help the mundanes into sympathy. Bradley certainly shows more than appeal, but a willingness to be vulnerable.

Caroline Bloom plays Erica, Reginald's partner in extreme art. If anything she has even more charm that Bradley! Rounding out the cast is Angela Leib as Patty, Erica's totally deranged (I'd go so far as to say paranoid schizophrenic) Mom. She gave the best performance of the three, having ended up deepest inside her character.

But... (there that word is again)

This kind of story requires a real diving inside and a diving deep to really get at the meat of these characters and what they are all about. Everyone needed to enact metaphorically the central act of the play--scooping out the viscera then taking its place inside. Which is what I did not see. Now, this is hard, especially given the amount of rehearsal shows for the Fringe Festival tend to get. When the director isn't used to live theatre and the actors are not part of an ensemble which has built up a level of real trust, even harder. So it isn't as if it is at all fair to complain that this production didn't meet its ambitions. The fact remains I walked away thinking about the play but not moved. I found it interesting, not compelling. Never once did I enter into these bizarre characters' lives, see things from their view. So my experience ended up the bare minimum one could expect from a talented director and cast with a play that incidentally felt too short for the subject.

W.E.A.R.H.O.R.S.E. plays Friday June 13 at 8:30pm, Saturday June 21 at 5:30pm, Monday June 23 at 7pm and Friday June 27 at 10pm at the Theatre Asylum, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90038. Tickets are a mere $12 (less than a movie).

Nightmaricomio (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

A play director I know was at the opening night of Nightmaricomio with me. Afterwards, she sighed and said "Everything I do is so ordinary." The reply that came from my mouth seemed especially appropriate in understanding this, ZJU's first entry into Hollywood's Fringe Festival. "Wouldn't it be a shame if all plays were Dionysian," I said, "or all plays were Apollonian? It would be like having only one gender!"

Maybe that is the key to understanding this show. Friedrich Nietzsche drew a distinction between two types of art. Dionysian is wild, primal, often rude, difficult to understand intellectually, surprising, with a logic (if you can call it that) more akin to dreams than the waking world. Apollonian art has structure, makes sense, is frankly more accessible to most because it is clearer, tells a story, has recognizable figures of one kind or other.

Nightmaricomio turns out very Dionysian indeed, possibly the most such I've ever seen from ZJU. For one thing it is a dance, pretty much never-ending from the moment the door opens to when the last audience member leaves. Not a particularly choreographed dance, but extremely organic and with the cast interacting virtually every moment. Does what follows have a "story"? Well, yes. And no. It has stories, that flow one into the other, which each player donning many roles. Three times individual cast members break out into soliloquies (one from Shakespeare) with the rest of the cast behaving/enacting/reacting to them. Likewise the players become animals, become trees or forces of nature. More than once they drop out of character, becoming actors in a play, this play. But even that isn't quite true. Because they aren't themselves but versions of themselves, enacting a play within the play that seems "naturalistic" by comparison but is just as unreal--not least in the amount of violence it contains. Unreal violence. Yet telling.

Tis a bit hard to single out people within such an ensemble that functions mostly as a gestalt. Yet one of the aspects of the Dionysian to tossing away differences, blending polarities. Everyone simultaneously becomes individual as well as collective. Sebastian Munoz struggling free from a monstrous crowd, and magically rescuing/empowering Redetha Deason from it. Hannah Kaplan just stepping out from the weirdness and dreams to tell a quick, funny, tragic little moment from life. Corey Zicari turning into a goofy little fun bird (I think) who proves only too vulnerable. Roger Weiss suddenly giving a speech about individuality from a famous play, in verse no less, for a moment becoming the STAR of the show, everyone else mere props giving shape to HIS words. Erin Treanor, Leif LaDuke, Vivi Thai as well all do what this kind of off-kilter semi-performance art show, seamlessly going from individual to cell, human to animal to spirit to shape to actor, and in this show always dancer.

One cast member is not a dancer, though. Kevin Van Cott is a musician. He is on stage literally more than any other member of the ensemble, and arguably his skills as a drummer will win your applause. But in my opinion he also stole the show, by breaking out of his role more than once, and sometimes in subtle little ways demonstrating a lot of personal power.

If I try and describe much further the content of this show, failure will be the result. Fundamentally it needs experiencing rather than explaining. Should you be in the mood for an experience as opposed to a straightforward story, or feel the attraction of having your brain pulled a little outside its usual box, then here is a show I recommend, highly. But, in the words of a friend, it is also "weird." Me, I like weird.

Nightmaricomio plays Thursdays, June 12 at 7pm, June 19 at 9pm and June 26 at 8:30pm, at the Theatre Asylum Lab at 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., LA CA 90038. Reservations can be made at 818.202.4120 or at zombiejoes.tix.com

Disclaimer: Zombie Joe, the director and producer, is a friend of mine and he asked me to design the postcard for this show which I did based on his description. I did it, without having seen the performance.

Other Desert Cities (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

I'm going to pontificate a bit with this review, out of a desire to be fair. Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz and its production at the International City Theatre in Long Beach deserves a nuanced explanation of my reaction to it.

A few words of explanation. The idea of the "well made play" really dates back to the 1940s and 50s, akin in many ways to that of the "three act structure" of screenplays heralded by Syd Field. It has much to recommend it when  handled properly, but does tend to end up with a bit too much formula, a little too much playing it safe. Other Desert Cities has nearly all the benefits but several of the possible drawbacks of the "well made play." Everything is foreshadowed, sometimes with great subtlety. No character is anything like a "walk on." It builds to a logical climax, in terms of a long-held family secret finally being revealed to a younger generation. No immediately easy answers. Everyone has a valid point of view explored in the play. No one functions as voice of the playwright, offering The Answer to questions asked. All well and good. Puts it well above many a work I've seen.

What is less good--on the nose dialogue. Part of the tension between the characters is supposed to be politics, liberal young versus conservative old, against the backdrop of 2004 and the Iraqi War. Yet instead of specific ideas, or human reaction between people who disagree fiercely yet remain permanently entwined, we get cliches. Formulaic talking points. Along with this goes name-dropping, used frankly as a short cut. For example, near the end of the play Polly Wyeth (Suzanne Ford) tries to explain herself by explaining why she has reacted to a tragedy the way she has, and gives credit to "Nancy" who has been a "mentor" to her. Such a name-dropping was distracting, like the constant mention of specific politicians or movie stars. In fact much of the play neatly avoided the real meat of the whole drama, in favor of little lectures that all often came across as preaching. The ultimate proof of this is a flaw in the whole structure--namely the climax of the whole play belonged at the end of Act One.

When The Secret comes out, the fallout from that took up a few minutes at most. It should have taken much much more. Rather than portray the actual consequences of this revelation--keeping a secret which emotionally maimed someone, nearly leading them to self-destruction--we got the daughter Brooke (Ann Noble) throwing the pages of her book and crying. No. Forgiveness for something like that should never, ever be so very cheap. The speechifying and avoidance of this story's bloody, weeping heart seriously weaken a play that for the most part shows fine ambition and some genuine skill at dialogue as well as world creation.

But no play is perfect. Actors and directors for many many decades have had to overcome problems with scripts. Yes, even Shakespeare (one reason why Richard III to give a notorious example needs serious editing). And let us give credit to the cast for presence, for emotional truth, for approaching their roles with skill. Regarding this I have to single out Blake Anthony Edwards as Trip Wyeth, the youngest member of the family while arguably the most mature. He had in many ways the plum role, because he's the character with no political axe to grind. So all his dialogue and motivations remained personal.

Yet at the same time I must fault the cast for often not diving into these characters as deeply as the drama of their situation seems to demand. Given how universal this showed up in the production, the responsibility seems to me must lie with director caryn desai. I kept seeing surface emotions, surface actions, not the raw pain and hopes and mixed feelings to make me care very much about what was happening. I felt interested. I didn't dislike the characters. But frankly, I think the story pretty much begged for us to end up hating each one of them sooner or later--and maybe loving each a little bit throughout. To achieve that, though, they'd need to bleed a lot more of their souls onto the stage. Not that anyone couldn't act! Far from it! Nicholas Horman as patriarch Lyman Wyeth and Eileeen T'Kaye as his sister-in-law (and family black sheep) both bring presence and focus to their roles--no small thing, either one--and it says much that I believed in them, every single one of them.

But--I didn't care that much. Sooner or later I cared for a few moments here and there. Not throughout.

The story essentially deals with Brooke coming home to her parents' home for the first time in six years. She's in the midst of a divorce, following a near-nervous breakdown in which she suffered an extreme episode of depression. (If this marriage was intended as a red herring about the real story, it didn't work as one.) When she was sick, her family had rallied to her side. Now she's written a new book. She's afraid how they will react to it, because the one subject never mentioned is her elder brother Henry--Brooke's best friend who committed suicide when she was a teenager. That loss left a wound in her soul, and now her book is about that loss. This book threatens to tear the house of Wyeth apart, from her relentlessly supportive but remote father to her constantly pushing mother.

Most would probably agree this sounds like the stuff of a good play. Nor can I honestly call the production a bad one. What I can say is that both script and production have not dug in to find the essence of the drama, cut open the body of these characters' lives to crack open the bone and reveal the marrow within. Playwright, director and actors have done workmanlike jobs, using above average skills and genuine talent, yet in the end they all played it safe. And the best theatre, the most fantastic and insightful theatre, is always dangerous.

Other Desert Cities runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., June 6 through June 29.  International City Theatre is located in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center at 300 E. Ocean Blvd. in Long Beach, CA 90802. For reservations and information, call the ICT Box Office at 562-436-4610 or www.InternationalCityTheatre.org.

Sonata for Rimbaud (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Courtesy of Zombie Joe's Underground

What is poetry? Or maybe the better question--what is a poem? Quite possibly the greatest compliment I can offer Sonata for Rimbaud, a one man show written and performed by Abbott Alexander is that thinking about this show, I found myself asking those kinds of questions.

For example, wikipedia has this definition: "Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language  to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning."

Looking at that I have little choice but to go with my initial thought, that Sonata for Rimbaud is in fact a poem--save that it uses movement as well, at times quite stylized, enough to maybe have it qualify as dance.

Guess that makes it theatre!

A powerful piece of theatre, to be sure. I myself was not familiar with the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, as per the title. Alexander's piece of theatre inspired me to look further. Please view that also as a compliment, a very positive judgment of both piece and performance. He seems like a brilliant but lost soul. An innocent Lucifer, if you will, never having been in (or found) God's presence and lacking any power of an angel save that of words woven into art.

Courtesy of Zombie Joe's Underground

The temptation of a reviewer at this point becomes to describe the action, give some indication of the "plot." And that is what I'm going to do, but not in a way you might expect. Our narrator/lead--who is he supposed to be? I don't know, and pretty soon even asking the question seemed beside the point. He was a man, a human, grappling with things I have known and finding in Rimbaud something of a kindred spirit. Just as I found in him the very same. By implication, I feel for Rimbaud.

He shows himself a man frustrated with mundane little problems, wavering between glorious arrogance and wise shame. A lonely man. A man who wants to rebel, wants to fit in, wants to excel and sometimes has, sometimes does, but doesn't feel it. Not really.

He seems familiar. At times very familiar.

Perhaps for that very reason I couldn't take my eyes away, and the technical part of me, the part that looks back and analyzes, wants to offer some praise  here. The best actors can convey enormous dignity--and humiliate themselves totally, fearlessly. Such was what I saw in Mr. Alexander's performance. Likewise I cannot tell you how impressed I was with the simple fact he said every word. Many won't even understand what that means! But many actors mouth words, say the sound of words, pretend to talk by pretending to say words--at least now and then. Not in this performance. He said every word, instead of making the sounds of the word.

I hope many more people manage to go see this show at Zombie Joe's. I hope they end up as fascinated and moved as myself, or even more. My greatest hope is that they'll have the same double experience, of seeing first this performance and then looking up the life of Arthur Rimbaud--then each time saying the identical words I did somewhere in my mind:

Hello. You are me.

Sonata for Rimbaud runs on Friday Evenings @ 8:30pm for (3) more Performances (Thru JUNE 20), at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre Group, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601.  Tickets Only $15. Reservation Hotline: 818-202-4120.  Websites: ZombieJoes.com For Advance Tickets: ZombieJoes.Tix.com.