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).