Exit The King (review)

sPoiLErS AhoY!

I like to praise Los Angeles live theatre as being huge, diverse, brave, and very high quality.

My opinion holds in part because last week I saw the premiere of Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco at A Noise Within.  Not only is this an excellent production of a difficult play, it is the second such I've seen in this city in the last decade!  Both also took startlingly different/wonderful directions as well!

This version, done with kind of spectacular sets, lights, costume design this company's budget can afford, has at its heart a very talented and focused cast.  Such a combination manages to hit an startling number of targets available in this play.  For example, it remains genuinely funny, amid a lot of slapstick and silliness.  

King Bérenger the First (Henri Lubatti) is the title character, monarch of a land in a massive, in fact impossible state of decline.  The borders have shrunk, the water stopped being drinkable, the citizenry are few, far between, and all feeble-minded.  Not only that, the sun burns less bright and sounds grow less loud!  

Young Queen Marie (Erika Soto) refuses to believe one word of this.  She insists the kingdom and king himself remain a vital as ever, even as the latter can barely stand without help.  His Majesty agrees with her, even as Queen Marguerite (Joy DeMichelle) and the Doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) insist on the truth.  The King is dying.  In fact, he has maybe ninety minutes left.  Give or take.  Until the curtain, anyway.  Against the backdrop of all this, Juliette the maid/cook/scullery/seamstress et al (KT Vogt) and the Guard (Lynn Robert Berg) try to make sense of this all.  Juliette's life is horrible, tough, full of back-breaking labor and no joy.  The Guard recalls the glories--and yes, the atrocities--of the King's fantastical, horrible, and frankly unbelievable past (including his invention of the airplane).  Mostly, though, the King struggles with increasing desperation and decreasing ability to understand his inevitable End.

Now, this is widely regarded as an example of the theatre of the absurd.  Yet we feel for the characters.  Recognize their own pain, their sometimes courage, as well as periodic terror and/or heroic efforts to hold back the night.

Is this what is absurd?  Yes.  So too every word spoken by each character, half of which make no sense, most of the others consist of brave or foolish (sometimes both) efforts to face DEATH.  Because words remain imperfect tools at their very best, at their most moving, most beautiful.  What about the ones who accept this looming doom?  Are they absurd?  Of course!  Just as the King himself, as he sinks into darkness against his will, struggling with shrinking awareness and power to somehow do what we all think we would do--refuse to give up, to surrender, to rage against the dying of the light.  He too is absurd.

For that matter, isn't it absurd we watch and hear all this, feeling for people who do not exist, could not exist, and who in the end do not really die?  Not yet, anyway.

Not the mention the cast, the playwright, the director (Michael Michetti) and all the wonderful artists who fashioned this performance...!

Absurd how all this pretending about nothing real, somehow also reminds us both of the absurdity of it all--and also makes us feel exactly what these fake people would feel if only they existed.

Just as if we existed.

Exit The King has performances Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7: 30 p.m. as well as  Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. until May 31, 2026 at A Noise Within, 3352 E Foothill Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91107.

Warsaw (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

Warsaw by Paul Webb just premiered in Long Beach, a very humane drama entwining love, grief, guilt, forgiveness, and genuine fear.  I have very mixed feelings about it--but anything I might say may come across as nit-picking.  Maybe it is.

The play centers around a Doctor (Anna Van Valin) and a Priest (Bruce Nozick) who talk while one of the former's patients is being slowly awakened from a medically induced coma following a horrible car accident.  Said patient, Krystina (Suzanne Ford) left a powerful impression on both these folks, not least because the Doctor right now is going through a horrific breakup with David (Eric Scoufaras), which involved the death of her brother.  She blames herself and David for her brother's death.  Meanwhile as Krystyna starts to emerge from her coma, she has dreams in which she is in therapy discussing her marriage, her politics, her background in general. 

Plenty of surprises proceed to pop up.  For example, both the brother's death and the accident which crushed so much of Krystyna's body were directly caused by nothing less than 9/11!  We begin to realize before long this is 2001, in the wake of the attack.  More, though, all this begins also to entwine with the Warsaw Uprising in 1944!  Hence the title!  Meanwhile we meet and get to know the very nice young man (Spencer Del Carmen) who was driving the truck in Krystyna's accident.  

But the heart of this story is a series of coincidences (or destiny) bringing the past and (more or less) present together.  Let me be very clear--that was cool.  As an inspiration, as a story, as an idea this makes for juicy stuff, the stuff of sometimes great theatre.

Would it were indeed great.

Not that is is by any stretch of the imagination bad.  Not at all!  But the complexity of the setting and background do get in the way--more, I would argue some elements of the play don't quite work.  Some of this script frankly requires threading rather a lot of needles to create the impact I think the writer strives for.  I don't believe all those needled ended up threaded, and my suspicion remains the play did not need all those needles.  One was a trap the play contains and which the production fell into--namely, sentiment versus honesty.  Two love stories run in a weird tandem throughout.  Me, I love weird, and thought the parallel stories should have worked.  In my view, neither quite landed.  A lot of those stories for example were explained rather than seen--although the production tried to show what they could.

Again, you may call this nitpicking.  Again, I want to emphasize this is neither a bad play nor a bad production.  Yet again, what I'm writing about are a cluster of nuances which makes this play not achieve a bullseye.  

More, your mileage may vary.  The love story are clearly meant to offer hope and insight--which they can do.  The interplay of the Holocaust with the attack on the World Trade Center intrigues and provokes thought.  Not one actor gives a bad performance, and we end up liking these characters.

I just feel the script needed some major polishing.  

Warsaw plays Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays @ 7:30 p.m. & Sundays @ 2 p.m until May 17, 2026 at the International City Theatre, Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center’s Beverly O’Neill Theater, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach, CA 90802

Blue Kiss (review)

 Spoilers ahoy! 

I am running behind on my reviews for a variety of reasons (including an eye infection) and I want to apologize to the Ruskin Group for this failure.

Blue Kiss by Stephen Fife is not a play with which I was familiar.  So I sought to learn as little as possible going 'in' because I prefer zero expectations of any kind.  Went in a little nervous because 2026 has so far been an amazing year with every single production so far turning out somewhere between "very good" to "excellent in every way."  The pattern had to break sooner or later, right?

This show did not disappoint.  Was not the exception.  Continued the pattern.

Blue Kiss (the title refers to a nickname for someone--which spoils absolutely nothing) is a "two hander," which means it consists of an entire cast of exactly two actors--in this case  Susan Carolina Rodriguez and Todd Casey Morris.  Did not recognize either of their names (no surprise in a city this size) but am mightily impressed by their performances.  A "two hander" puts the overwhelming weight of a play onto two artists, and neither one gets any real moment to relax.  Nobody leaves stage for more than one minute or so, and given this remains life not filmed no camera ever pans way or cuts to the other character.  Both are in the room with us, practically every single moment.  The challenge--which these two meet with grace and power--is to remain absolutely in the present, in the moment for every single second.

The entire play takes place in an apartment wherein Todd's character gets ready to start tutoring Susan's on her upcoming SAT essays.  Clearly there's a lot of tension from the moment the lights rise as the tutor engages in a somewhat fraught conversation the phone.  Nothing overt, just a hint of pressure, patience, judgment, and a whole brew of very natural dynamics between individuals.  We get a sense of someone complex, with many a hidden issue.  When the student arrives, we instantly get more tension as these two very, very different people try to engage with each other from an obvious range of different patterns, values, habits, and (more subtly) pains.

By now of course I figured out what many of the audience no doubt had already--these two have some as-yet-unrevealed connection waiting to pretty much explode.

Director Mike Reilly deserves a lot of credit for keeping this show on course.  The explosion happens, not in a single atomic blast but more like a few firecrackers, then a grenade or two, ending up with an intense series of artillery barrages!  Kudos to the writer for creating such an intricate emotional mine field here, including the fact both these people react to the world in wildly varying ways.  Both are full of wounds, full of scars.  Some still open and bleeding, or ready to open again.  Neither has anywhere near the right answers, although both believe they do.  But their complexity, brought to life by these two performers, makes every shock both startling yet feel absolutely inevitable.

And I felt for them both.  So much.  Both are right, both are wrong.  And after getting to know them as well as I did, my reaction was (among other things) to forgive.  Not in some generic sentiment, but reacting to what I now know--which, incidentally, includes hardly a single point of similarity between their issues and soul-scars and my own.  It did not matter.

Hopefully, I've conveyed a little of how powerfully the script, direction, and performances moved me.

Blue Kiss plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm until May 17, 2026 at the Ruskin Group Theatre 2800 Airport Ave. Santa Monica, CA 90405.

Peace Be Onto You (review)

 Spoilers ahoy!

I love classical theatre, and by great good fortune have been seeing one excellent performance of same after another this year.  So a modern play by a writer (Eric Eberwein) with whom I remain unfamiliar led to some worry.   One's luck has to end sometime right?

Maybe, but not this time!

Peace Be With You, a full length drama from Force of Nature Productions follows four characters, each flawed, none evil, not one with most much less all of any answers at all.  Very human, the lot.  

Lee (Benjamin Wheeler) is this adopted kid with issues.  His relationship with a stressed adoptive mom Jody (Lara Fisher) remains strained for all sorts of reasons, some of which seem her fault to some degree--but also his rejection by other foster families until early teens left their mark.  She made mistakes but loves him, not wisely perhaps but sincerely.  He feels that, for both good and ill but more importantly feels lost, deeply in need of some anchor, some goal, some escape from a life that feels like a prison.  

Personally, I can relate.  Tell the truth, can't you?  If not now, at some point in your life?

Courtney (Melissa Murra), Leo's best friend ex, also loves him.  As a friend.  As an ally--they are both adopted but with different histories--and as just someone who treasures him.  She and Jody react rather badly when Leo decides to join the Marines.  

At this point the US Military is engaged...somewhere.  We don't know precisely where, so it could be today or a few years ago, or maybe a few years hence.  It hardly matters.

Then there is Patrick (Mitch Hall), a older man and Marine who has started a relationship with Lee, and did indeed suggest the young man sign up.  He saw in Leo someone in need of structure and achievement, an identity outside his own history, and believed service might work.

It did not.  The facts of combat proved traumatic to say the least.  Even the necessary process of military training ended up doing a lot more harm than good, in Lee's case.  He emerged ultimately isolated from others, paranoid with a visceral belief that everyone at all times are surrounded by armed enemies.  Not a rational, conscious idea, but a sense deep in his bones that is the case.  

Not healthy.  Not feasible.  But who could have predicted this?  One thing I carried away from this show was the mystery which human beings are to one another.  We are not predictable.  This came through so clearly in the production, especially in terms of the performances by all four fine actors in cast, as well as direction by Jahel Corban Caldera.  One character has a line which haunts me still.  "We all loved him.  It was not enough."  A thousand lifetimes worth of tragedy in those few words.  They shook me.  

And so I emerged a somewhat different person from that theatre than the one who entered.  Just as Lee was changed by boot camp.  And every one else in the story emerged as a result of events.  Life.  Concentrated.  Released.  Tasted in the air and the blood by the audience experiencing this play.

Peace Be With You plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm through April 25, 2026 at Sawyer's Playhouse, 11031 Camarillo Street, North Hollywood