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 

Othello Reading - UnSexMeHere Players

 Spoilers ahoy!

Kinda weird to put this here, 'cause the play is well over four centuries old at this point, but 'tis part of the brand.

UnSex Me Here Players is a new company here in Los Angeles, founded by my dear friend Emily Asher Kellis.  Explicitly devoted to "... providing opportunities to women, trans and non binary actors in Los Angeles" this company already did a reading of Hamlet last year and has plans for a reading of Macbeth ere long.  

How very topical, you might be thinking at this point.  Exactly.

Their Othello played at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, with an exclusively female, trans, and non-binary cast of actors.  Interestingly (to me anyway) the director was was Anne Noble, who recently portrayed a brilliant lead in Richard III for A Noise Within.  The cast overall was very fine indeed, which says a lot since honestly of all Shakespeare's major plays this one is my least favorite at all.  Indeed, until moving to this city I never saw a single production which held my attention.  Since moving here I've seen three, or should I write four?  This was not a full production, but it came pretty close.  Mostly, because methinks this play in particular needs a much stronger focus on character and atmosphere rather than plot (Shakespeare's plots are pretty much always secondary).

In no particular order, I want to offer some serious praise for the cast in general as well as specifics:

Starting with Kaite Brandt at Desdemona, who together with Judy Louise Johnson as the title character created a couple and a marriage in which I believed, not only its honest sincerity but the horrible flaws which turned into a total tragedy.  This play displays an extremely unsentimental view of marriage, not cynical but per se but with a profound recognition how much luck you need to be creat happiness.  Luck or certain kinds of support.

Liza De Weerd Seneca as Iago and Emily Asher Kellis as Emilia likewise show another married couple, one equally as doomed and at least for somewhat the same reasons--these people do not see each other with nearly enough perception.  Neither do they seem nearly as self aware as needed.  The former also switches back and forth between the most total pure sociopathy then full of seemingly genuine cheerful company and/or fierce loyalty with chilling effect.

Kat Johnston as Rodrigo makes a very funny foil to Iago, this pathetic schmuck who practically has VICTIM scrawled across their forehead.  Heart-breaking and hilarious at the same time.

Julia Manis led me to care, for the very first time, about Cassio, secondary target of Iago's plotting (tellingly, Iago clearly doesn't even consider Desdemona as anything other than a prop).  Cassio usually seems bland and shallow, but Manis made even his drunkenness, his weakness, his frankly icky relationship with Bianca feel like a combination which makes for a real human being rather than a walking, dialogue-spouting plot device.

Likewise Bethany Koulias as Bianca took a tiny role and grabbed center stage with every entrance, without once failing to serve this specific story, nor once seeming anything other than totally human.

Kudos as well as Shannon Lee Clair, Jane Macfie and Kitty Swink in their much smaller roles, each unique and remarkably genuine.

I urge folks go the https://www.unsexmehereplayers.com website and subscribe to learn what this new company has coming up.  

Death of a Salesman (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

As it happens, this year has been one full of excellent productions of classics. Latest is Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, by A Noise Within.  My own theory, for whatever it might be worth, focuses on the times in which we are living.  Art comments, questions, examines LIFE.  When we do the same we find art speaks more to us, so we pay more attention. 

Especially the classics, and most especially the ones who address issues of our own times.

Arthur Miller's most famous play is slightly autobiographical (a lot of them are), but what really makes it resonate remains the fact it feels autobiographical for someone we know.  To some extent, also, for ourselves.  

Willy Loman (Geoff Elliott) walks on stage looking exhausted beyond words.  Not just physically, but down into the soul.  His wife Linda (Deborah Strang) does her best to listen, to comfort, to basically help as much as she can.  Along the way we soon learn this couple's two sons are staying with them for a bit.  Happy (Ian Littleworth) is the son who has his own apartment but decided to visit for a day or so.  Biff (David Kepner), the older son and clearly the favorite, arrived from Texas after years of farming, wandering, trying to find...something.  

Clearly, this family has problems.  Problems with a capital P that rhymes with C that stands for Capitalism.  Willy in particular loses himself in memories, focusing on past and present hopes, ideas, fears and frustrations, his prejudices and strange blind spots.  Almost immediately we get a sense of him as a man lost, a man who increasingly seems never ever to have found himself, never learned the things he desperately believes he needed.  Now in his sixties, tired and confused, his career as a salesman dwindling by any metric, the man visibly is coming apart at the seams--not least his demands from others while proving himself all but incapable of listening to others.

That we don't hate this man is one of Miller's major achievements.  Instead, we ache for him.

As well we should.  Willy Loman is us, after all.  Trapped in a world he did not choose, bereft of good options (at least any he can perceive and/or accept), without the personal resources to be more than desperate.  Far too close for all our lives for comfort--and hence fascinating in way like a slow motion train wreck.  Except we weep instead of gawk.

Miller wanted a play without scene breaks, and the action of the play--including memories and dreams--pretty much flow without interruption, at least in the first act.  The scale feels intimate and somehow vastly deep.  Unlike in classical tragedy, Willy did not make anyone personal mistake--his errors, while real, seem all very understandable,  entirely human.  Devastating, though.  Because for all his preening about his friends and how esteemed he says he is, all the support others offer remains meager.  Not individually, but cumulatively.  He walks a lonely road, even when holding a wife in his arms, gazing at sons he adores who likewise adore him.  Because they aren't enough.  Life is bigger than any one family, no matter how close--even were they flawless and these folks show off just how human every single one of them are.

We watch a play which poses several questions, which sooner or later mostly do get answers.  Exactly why is Willy in this situation?  How did Biff's life fall apart so totally, and what did Willy have to do with that?  Is there a way out for Willy, for Biff, for Happ or for Linda?  Out of a stifling, shallow present of short-term hopes and concerns which threaten to overwhelm?  

Director Julia Rodriquez-Elliott gives us an astounding theatrical experience, not least because with Scenic Designer Frederica Nascimento the "look" and "feel" of this production comes across as slightly less naturalistic, leaning more towards the dreamlike or mythic.  Frankly, I will always applaud this, not least because it leans into live theatre's strengths rather than attempting to copy film or television.  Likewise I want to herald the uniformly fine cast, including Kasey Mahaffy, Cassandra Marie Murphy, Bert Emmett, David Nevell, Michael Uribes, Jacob Cherry, Dominique Razon, and Rachel K. Han.  From literally the very first moment when the play begins until the very final moment, I felt totally sucked in, soul and mind.

Death of a Salesman plays Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays @ 7:30 p.m., Saturdays & Sundays @ 2 p.m. until April 29, 2026 (no matiness on March 28) at A Noise Within,  3352 E Foothill Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91107 (Free parking available directly behind the theater at the Sierra Madre Villa Metro parking structure, 149 N. Halstead St.