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.