Sleeping Around (review)

Spoilers Ahoy!

The idea of Sleeping Around is pretty simple. It is an offering by Theatre Unleashed to this year's Hollywood Fringe Festival. In essence we start with a couple Donnie and Angela (Jim Martyka and Sammi Lappin) who are using each other for a sexual fantasy. What gives a hint something special awaits is what their fantasies turn out to be. Nun and choirboy? Hooker and john? Father and daughter? No--a happy marriage, with two people glad to see each other at the end of the day's work. Happy to see one another. Eager to find comfort and company by giving and receiving joy.

Okay wow. A scenario I expected to be gloriously tacky proved moving, and I instantly liked these people.

Then in scene two, we see Donnie again--this time with his wife Elizabeth (Courtney Bell), who adores him. And whom he adores. So why was he cheating on her? And why is she urging him to do it? These two very nearly broke my heart as the answers emerged.

Elizabeth then meets and sleeps with Ryan (Lee Pollero), who then sleeps with Sophie (Brandy June), who goes to "confess" her infidelity to an uncaring Elliott (Eric Cire) and so on. La Ronde for the 21st century in effect. We get to meet more characters--Sam (Gregory Crafts), Colleen (Jenn Scuderi Crafts), Chris (Jase  Lindgren). A tapestry of humanity, all of them realized with with and humor and most of all with honesty. I'm very pleased with everyone, although I do believe Martyka and Lappin and Bell gave the best performances--a remark meant to convey very high praise indeed.

For the Fringe, Sleeping Around has two more performances at  Theatre Asylum - 6320 Santa Monica Blvd. LA. CA. 90038, Sunday June 21 at 5:30pm and Thursday June 25 at 8:30pm.

The Blacks: A Clown Show (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show emerged onto the stage the same year I was born. For a time it was the longest-running non-musical on Broadway. As it begins, one might wonder why? After all, it seems a very odd thing indeed. At first. Very much like a stage performance one might come across in a dream. Therein lies a great deal of its power.

Because trying to "figure it out" soon becomes a lost cause. Who are these people? A troupe of black actors who seem to simultaneously reject and exult in the way white culture has sought to define them. They pander to the four officials who make up their onstage audience, while subtly mocking and threatening them. In fact the players themselves seem to be trying to work out their own feelings, their hopes in the face of a situation doing its best to turn them into just...things.

Tiny revelations build on tiny revelations, made vivid by the skill of the entire cast in terms of not only their individual scenes and vignettes but how they listen. They listen fascinated, enraged, puzzled, suspicious, hopeful and calculating. Violence seems in the air, not least as they describe and then re-enact the murder of a young white woman by a black man. They lack a white woman of course so one of their company undergoes a ritual to enter that "other world' for the play.

Meanwhile, the royals come across as buffoons a la characters in Alice in Wonderland, but more dangerous. Yet increasingly impotent. They come to see the power they once wielded with such arrogant abandon  evaporating in their grasp. As with their victims, despair descends. But without the rage which now seems to slowly drown them.

I cannot tell you ultimately the plot of The Orig-O-naL Theater Company's premiere production. Or, maybe I could, but that seems trivial. Rather I find myself wanting to savor the experience, to allow its seeds to grow within me, and acknowledge what the cast has wrought in my own soul. Because in the end this performance did what theater at its highest achieves--the story it depicted became not a story, but a life, and that life seemed my own.