Lear Redux (review)

 

Spoilers ahoy! 

Years ago, I saw a production called Tempest Redux at this very theatre, from the same company and with several of the same cast members.  "Awesome" frankly remains the word by which I most recall that show.

So imagine my excitement at the thought of Lear Redux!  The thing I perhaps most expected, paradoxically, was to be surprised.  Boy was I ever startled, shocked, moved, and yes very definitely surprised on every level!  In the most powerful, moving way!

A few seconds after walking into the theatre, the set told me much.  A very large, comfortable bedroom, with lot of medicines and even an IV set up next to double bed.  Above a fireplace (!) was a full color portrait/poster with one word:  HAMLET.  So I knew this was the bedroom of an elderly Shakespearean actor, and I guessed he was suffering from some kind of dream and/or dementia, blending his memories and perceptions with (arguably) Shakespeare's greatest tragedy.

While I was mostly right, the rabbit hole writer director John Farmanesh-Bocca composed with this amazing cast went far deeper, far more transcendent than anything I suspected going in.  Yes, King Lear.  But also, yes also The Singing Detective, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and a solid sprinkling of the Bagadvagita.  At times it almost felt as if my brain exploded by the end of those ninety five minutes in front of that stage!

Jack Stehlin plays the elderly Actor as well as Lear.  To put it mildly there are parallels between the former and latter, not least having  three daughters with the same names--Goneril (Jade Sealey), Regan (Eve Danzeisen), and the late Cordelia (Emily Yetter).  That he now has a dog named Cordelia, played in puppet from by the same actor, hints at some of the drama yet to come.  The actor's ever loyal, enabling brother (Dennis Gersten) ends up doubling for Kent from the play, while his two nurses (Ahkei Togun, Andres Valez) do time as Edgar and Edmund respectively--although I'd argue the former also is The Fool. 

Now, to be sure this is not really Shakespeare's play.  Yet it comes close to being the best version of King Lear I've ever seen (a brutally difficult script to perform) anyway!  The re-imagining of it all through the guilt and hallucinations of this deteriorating great actor strikes a chord of increasingly profound insight, which is increasingly also distorted!  Eventually, amid the storm, things take a wild Left Turn, exploring the inner dreamscape of the Actor, but also beyond.  In an echo of Gloucester's blinding, a new blind character emerges speaking of what quantum physics can teach us about Time and about ourselves.  Here is a prophet of sorts, a guide into the mystical underpinnings of what we see as reality, as the world, as all things that are and yet are not.  My favorite line in the play emerges from this, as Lear says with growing astonishment "...I am the storm...I am my daughters..." which of course is true on several levels.

I was reminded a bit of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, who proclaimed "Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks."  Yet whereas Ahab feels rage at this, longing to strike back at whatever lies beyond, the Actor wearing the identity of Lear steps through it.  He sees, he understands, he weeps and laughs, he grows a hard-won wisdom bitter and sweet beyond human words.  He does not want to go back, and who can blame him?  

Yet the play ends with more than tragedy.  Horrible things happen.  Pain and loss and terror in full measure.  Beyond, however, beyond "this mortal coil" lies more of what the Actor glimpsed on his Shakespearean dream quest.  

The conclusion of the play, enacted by such a very fine ensemble portraying such multi-layered groups of characters, lifted us all outside ourselves for a few moments.  I felt the ground shift underneath my heart.  And when I looked again at the poster, reading the description of "A Quantum Fantasia" I totally got it.

Lear Redux plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm (with Wednesday night shows including post show discussions at 8pm on June 11 and 25) until July 13, 2025 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 Sepulveda Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90025.

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 Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon (review)

 Spoilers ahoy! 

For those who don't know, i.e. most folks who aren't actively involved in live theatre, a "two hander" is a play with only two characters.  

The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon is such a play, which handles the issues of building an entire full length work consisting almost entirely of conversations between two people with impressive skill.   

Rebecca Aleman (there is an accent on the last vowel but I don't know how to make that) is both the playwright and lead--a woman journalist named Paulina in a Latin American country not at all welcoming of either.  I don't know if her name comes from the character in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, but...maybe.  We meet Paulina as Rodrigo (Eric K. Roberts), a younger Anglo-seeming man, brings her into a bedroom via wheelchair.  He smoothly and expertly helps her into bed, goes through exercises to help her remember how to read and speak.  She can barely use one hand.  The all but silent first five minutes of the play sets the atmosphere and rhythms with which we will spend the next ninety.  Every gesture, word, glance, almost every breath seems to convey meaning as we try and figure out the story here.

That story is heart-wrenching.

Seamlessly the play jumps over time--well, not so much jumps as almost seamlessly glides.  Paulina gets better, amid dreams and fragments of memory we hear but do not see--with Laura Crotte, Sofia Ybarra, and Miguel Nunez providing voices of these shreds of history bubbling up to the surface.

All the while the back walls of the set project simple but beautiful images which offer hints--as well as text!  Every line in Spanish appears as an English subtitle (or maybe uptitle) above the action, while every line in English appears in Spanish!  Honestly, I loved that, on so many levels, and not just for allowing me to precisely understand every line (honestly, I've attending bilingual shows before now--and it is startling how understandable things became).  Paulina is a writer, first and foremost.  Seeing the play not only spoken but written proved a startling as well as moving event, one which still makes me shiver.

Ultimately, this play chronicles not just a seriously wounded woman clawing back to her own memories, her own self (on so many levels) but re-discovering and even re-defining her relationship with Rodrigo--including why she is here, in a private home, rather than a professional health facility.

Hint--for her own safety.

All that she discovers we anticipate, but never completely.  Surprises abound, some touching, others horror-soaked, others complex, and some breath-taking.  It amounts to a profound tour-de-force of storytelling, a concentration that seems totally theatrical as opposed to cinematic in any way.  Its topicality adds to the power of this production, a tall order since half the time I was holding my breath and feeling genuine terror about what the truth of this story would prove to be.  

The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 4 p.m. until May 25, 20.25 at The Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles CA 90013.  It is a joint production by the Latino Theatre Company here is Los Angeles and the Water People Theater in Chicago.

Beatnik Girl (review)

 

Spoilers ahoy!

I am genuinely sorry it took me so long to see this play at Theatre40 in Beverly Hills. Beatnik Girl by my friend Leda Siskind has closed, but I hope this was only the first of many productions.

This show, directed by Ann Hearn Tobolowsky, centers around a character named Edie Gordon (Rebecca Del Santo) an aspiring poet and writer in 1950s New York, the era of the beatniks.  Here was the nascent beginning of what eventually became the wave of change and reform which led to the Sixties, the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, and the ongoing struggles against modern misogyny, anti-semitism, and a suffocating sense of conformity.  Edie faces pretty much all of the above, enduring some harrowing relationships and events before emerging as a confident voice of the era.

What I most want to impress upon everyone was how this production ultimately sucked me into the era.  In fact, as the show ended and the top notch cast took their bows, I did not applaud.  Rather I snapped my fingers, in tune with that period, not because of any attempt to compliment, but because it felt so very natural to do so.  

No small feat!

The entire cast contributed to this effect, but apart from Del Santo I especially want to call attention to Andrea Goones who played four very different characters with great skill, but mostly the really meaty part of Nadie, Edie's neighbor and best friend.  Her trajectory formed a lot of the spine of what was happening, not least for her charming but frustrating innocence, with a support system too small as well as not nearly skilled enough for what she was going through.  Edie, despite  her highs and lows, remained forever a portrait of someone gathering strength.  Nadine needed more help.  Sadly, she simply did not get it, and in the end she haunted me the most.

Steven Dawn Hart played three roles, and while his parts were smaller he infused each one with a sense of full humanity (even the total *ssw*p* jerk). 

Rounding off the cast were Bradley James Holzer and Alex Seycurka playing some important supporting roles, both achieving a realism I increasingly accepted on a visceral level (hence the above "snapping").

Plus, this play solves a wonderful technical problem about any play that focuses so much one one character--Edie--that we need to change the sets and costumes over and over again.  The danger is always of losing momentum as the action seems to stop.  This show's solution (built into the script) is to have a sax player on stage, offering live music to transition not only between scenes but between our present and the year 1957.   In this production the performer serving such a vital function was Adam Zilberman.

I felt absolutely transported into another time, another place, surrounded by characters whose complexity felt almost disturbingly real.  My deep hope is many another production will follow.

Theatre Forty is at 241 S. Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills CA 90212 (and has plenty of parking).