If I Needed Someone (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

For those of you who don't know, a "two hander" in theatre parlance is a play with only two characters who pretty much share the stage for the entire performance.  If this sounds hard, it is.  Very hard.  Especially in a full ninety-minute play.  Even more when the play is one long scene.

If I Needed Someone by Neil LaBute is just such a play--demanding an enormous concentration without letup for almost two hours.  

Jules (Devin Davis-Lorton) is an animator who's invited Jim (Adam Langsam) back to her apartment during a part.  She is quite drunk and with this setup one might expect a work of horror a la Ira Levin.  Instead, we are witness to a wildly awkward dance between two people trying to connect--all the while each creates an obstacle course of their personal issues.  Which can be funny!  And sometimes, is!  More, it can be heart-breaking.  Again, it sometimes is.  Just as it is sometimes simply educative, sometimes touching, sometimes deeply uncomfortable (for so very many reasons) and sometimes very hope-ful.

These actors accomplish a Olympic level effort, not only in terms of bringing truth to their every word (no small feat) but in listening to each other (sometimes), allowing themselves to change (eventually).  In the process we learn to know them, learn a lot of their individual hopes and pains.  More, we even reach that special point when sooner or later we say quietly to ourselves "that is me."

Because the two person cast--while proving themselves capable of this acting marathon--have a very good script with which to breathe life into a fictional tale on stage.  It feels remarkable complete in its portrait of these two people, living as we do, in a time of change and not really sure precisely how to navigate their own time.  Again, like us.  Each ultimately wants very much to reach out, and each ultimately navigates those obstacle courses mentioned earlier.  From a slightly slow start, the script gives us a powerful series of moments and revelations between people who want to connect, want to understand each other, want someone to not give up (while of course not being a predator, a liar, a psycho or creep of some kind).  The conclusion, simple in some ways while intensely complex in others,  reminds us we can indeed connect.  Loneliness is not incurable.  We may be doomed to die, but we are not doomed to live totally alone.

Or we don't have to be.

Kudos to everyone involved, including of course director Frederique Michel! 

If I Needed Someone plays  Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays 4pm until Sunday, September 22, 2024 at the City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica, CA 90404  

The Bald Soprano (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

I told some folks the title of the play I was going to see--The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco.  Most had not heard of it and seemed baffled by the image.

One friend, though, perked up and asked with an incredulous grin "CityGarage is doing that?"

Which actually says rather a lot, right there.  My own reaction echoes theirs pretty perfectly.

Charles Duncombe, manager of CityGarage in Santa Monica welcomed the audience on opening night, describing the play as like Monty Python.  I would have added "but French."  Which could serve as a review, almost.

Ionesco himself called this an "anti-play" in that it has no story, even though it almost succeeds in pretending it does, deliberately.  In fact it makes for a hilarious and savage comment on pettiness and how much of our lives, our expectations, our assumptions don't really make a lot of sense.  Reacting as it was to the theatre scene of a specific time and place, does that make it dated?  Yes.  And yet also makes it timeless.  Because life--that is to say, we mere mortals--remain absurd.

Now, to continue with a simile, Monty Python as a genre (ditto Theatre of the Absurd) has some tricky if subtle demands.  This production, with a bevy of CityGarage regulars, threads most of the needles and as a result gets a lot of laughs.  As well it should!  Nothing makes very much sense, of course.  That is the point! 

In fact describing anything like a "plot" seems almost meaningless!  Rather the performances themselves simply exist amid a weird melee of musings, assertions, questions, revelations, confessions, arguments, accusations, and ramblings--which somehow feel familiar.  Which is also the point!

Insomuch as there is a point.

Standouts in the cast almost entirely focus on the female characters.  Make of that what you will.  Angela Byer and Bo Roberts play a married couple (or are they?) visiting some friends while suffering from a strong bout of amnesia.  The couple they are visiting (or just maybe really are) consist of Andy Kallok and David E. Frank, the latter playing the wife (again, the female characters stand out--or are they female--I'm not sure), while Courtney Brechemin portrays the Maid who tells us all sorts of wonderful weird things.  A fire chief played by Clifford Irvine rounds up the cast--he visits looking for fires, which is his job after all.  That bit almost makes sense. Almost.

That "almost" is one reason the whole thing is so funny.  It makes for a deliciously weird joke, with extra layers of "WTF?" and "Waitaminute" and "Whhhhaaaat?" on top.  

Imagine the story-telling equivalent of Merry-Go-Round after taking a tiny hit of acid, in France and that suggests a little bit of zany humor direct Frederique Michel achieves with this cast.  Imagine if you will Monty Python and the Holy Grail crossovered with a 1950s sitcom of your choice, minus children.  Then stir in very acid humor about the bourgeoisie.  That sounds like a mere formula, doesn't it?  And yet the only "formula" here is silliness, the arch type of silliness of which we all may well be guilty.

Oh, who am I kidding?  We ARE guilty of such.  Sooner or later.  

So come and have a laugh.

The Bald Soprano plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm until June 2, 2024 at City Garage, Bergamot Station, T1 Space, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404.