Inside The Mind of Me (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Watching this work, I had very mixed reactions. Honestly the more I thought about it the more mixed they remained. If anything the sensation grew.

Inside The Mind of Me frankly is the kind of work I often really enjoy--a dive into a human mind, where the boundaries of reality and dream, memory and fantasy, hope and despair blur into each other. Playwright Wade Wilson has definitely got talent! But honestly, I don't think the play works.

The essential set-up involves a character named Me (Michael Marcel), in a coma and visited by two friends--Chris (Eric Anthony) and Jessica (Brooke Maroon). Here is my first real problem with the play. Neither Chris nor Jessica ever seemed real to me. Their stories as we went along came across as the kind we should have found compelling. Yet neither one ever became more than a cardboard cutout--not the actors' faults because they seemed talented. Nor, let me emphasize, is this a thread throughout the play. On the contrary, there are a good fistful of vivid, interesting characters including Me's Grandfather Stan ( Marty Hrejsa) and his wretched train-wreck of a father Curtin (Christopher Durbin).

For example, much is made of the fact that Jessica--the most popular girl in school--fell in love during high school with Me, who was shy and considered a sissy, because he wrote a love poem to her. Never once did I understand that. Because she never ever becomes more than a cypher, almost a collection of perfectly logical plot points rather than a human being.


But within the mind of Me we meet a dreamscape a la Wonderland by way of a kind of acid trip, peopled with interesting characters and rather puzzling (in a good way!) characters wondering around. Beyond doubt the best of these were Angel (Kire Horton) a kind of bewinged hippy chick, and Circus (Graydon Schlicter) a demonic clown. Here we get one of paradoxes that I enjoyed most--are Angel and Circus part of Me's mind or do they exist outside of him? I don't know. The evidence could go either way.

Interesting, but less compelling are Death (Erin Braswell) and Loveless (Hollie Sokol) who seems to be an embodiment of primal desires--lust as opposed to love, pleasure before wisdom, the here and now rather than patience. But again, neither one quite became real to me.

But that might be the staging, at least in part. I found the design and setup generally confusing rather than paradoxical. Given the subject matter is so non-realistic, frankly there's less room for any mis-notes however slight. For example, when difference between the physical and (for lack of a better word) dream world wasn't clear enough to make any breaking of that barrier mean much. The play as it went on seemed more and more about the relationship between Me and Death--but the latter simply didn't have enough to do.

Likewise it frankly felt odd to see this tall, muscular, very handsome young man play Me, who is supposed to have been a 'loser' or nerd.  Not the actor's fault! He did well! But there's simply a limit to how many times you can hit a wrong note before the production becomes permanently muddled.

On the other hand, the audience responded very positively indeed! While I found myself seriously annoyed by the on-the-nose dialogue (I saw what the last lines were going to be a mile away and mentally screamed "SHOW DON'T TELL!") people around me almost gave the show a standing ovation! But I do wonder how much of that is due to the inherent charm and charisma of the cast. That was considerable (and a very clever, even needful decision by the director).

Still, in the end I really loved what I thought this play was trying to be. The whole thing bubbled with promise and talent, but in the end for me personally it didn't quite work.

The Inside Edge of the World (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Here is the official blurb for The Inside Edge of the World (Or Where Have All the Good Serial Killers Gone?):

A lonely criminal forensics enthusiast stumbles across a serial killer in his own neighborhood. With the help of his dog, they set out to study the man, but get a little too close. It’s kind of a cross between Rear Window and The Dog Whisperer.

This doesn't really convey the rather wonderful  one person show enacted by Michael Evans Lopez.I myself have a taste for the odd and beautiful, the lonely outsider who tries to do good. Which makes me very nearly the target audience for this show!

Lopez begins in a way that gives a pretty clear "taste" of what is to come. A conversation in the dark I first took as between brothers, one of them much younger. Then, as the lights arose and I saw only one figure curled up as if in bed, my mind went to the idea of multiple personalities. As the conversation proved quite human, if eccentric, and ultimately rather touching this gave promise of something special.

When I eventually learned one member of the conservation was the central character's dog--I smiled.

As it happened, quite a few smiles crossed my face as the story went on. Different kinds of smiles, to be sure. The smile that goes with hearing something so bizarre it has to be funny, a smile at the friendship between man and dog, a smile in strange harmony with sad weirdo awash with a poignant madness. And while the script did much, the bulk of the effort in generating those smiles lay with Mr. Lopez. In particular the open ended moment of revelation making up the play's climax only worked because the fifty minutes of performance that preceded. Without our understanding of the central character, it would have fallen flat.

But we did understand. And as a result another smile, as well as maybe a tear, arose.

(Quick note: I do think the title of the play is a bit dull. I had trouble remembering it. The secondary title has a lot more zing, at least to me.)

R&J (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Last year I reviewed the Mine is Yours theater's gender-swapped production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I had a mixed reaction to it. Now they've re-imagined that production for the 2015 Hollywood Fringe with a somewhat different cast and noticeably different staging and approach.

The new R&J, about the star crossed lovers Romea (Mary Ellen Schneider) and Julian (Dane Oliver), is much improved! In fact, the chemistry between these two actors is one of the major highlights of the production--that and the often-startling ways their love is portrayed. I don't want to spoil anything (despite the above disclaimer) but the moment wherein they meet is fairly electric--and tellingly, from that moment on the hitherto rather callow Romea begins to act in a more adult manner. She starts to show promise of what a very fine young woman this teenager might grow to be, if only.

If only. Two little words that might as well be engraved on one of the two theatrical masks. We've all seen this particular Shakespeare play many times, but kudos to the cast and director Abby Craden for making us feel that tragedy in the gut. In fact, that seems to be the reason for the gender switch. It makes us see the work anew. When Julian is treated as a sex object, we aren't used to thinking of that in relation to a teenage boy. When Romea stabs Tybalt to death, the rage involved feels different when fueled by feminine energy.

This means that (for the most part) anything about the matriarchal nature of this world simply never ends up explored. Which is too bad.

But on the other hand the world of this play does exist, does feel consistent (using Julian as a maypole in a party--and his reaction--was a nice and disturbing touch), especially in the interplay of characters. The gangs of restless young women such as Tybalt (Cj Merriman), Mercutia (Taylor Jackson Ross in one of the plum roles of this play) and Benvolia (Hannah Pell) to whom Romea belongs were much better realized than the same in most other productions I've seen--which involved young men of course.

Alan Blumenfeld as the Nurse and Katherine James as Sister Laurence also stood out, lending a gravitas to older individuals who understood yet remained in some sense baffled by the leads.

I genuinely would say this is my favorite live production of Romeo and Juliet. Perfect? No. But it works, it holds my attention and twists my heart.

R&J has one more performance, Saturday, June 27th at 3pm at The Actors Company in The Other Space,
916A N Formosa Ave. West Hollywood, CA 90046.

Unemployed Finally... (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Heather R. Dowling's Unemployed Finally... got me thinking about one-person shows. Because it is one. Which you've probably figured out already. The subject matter is admirably captured in the title and poster as well as the promotion:

The story of a woman who tried on 30 jobs, in 30 years before finally doing what everyone said she couldn’t. Heather Dowling is an actress and writer who has impersonated someone who wanted a “real job” since she was 14. She has surrendered to her passion for writing and performing. But now she has dirt to dish about the odd-jobs and odd-balls she’s encountered along the way. Come see her now. Unemployed. Finally.

So how is it? Fun! Let me be more precise. One person shows pretty much need a few  specifics to work. First is an interesting subject matter, or at least an entertaining one. Dowling's story of (essentially) how she ended up making this one person show proves exactly that. It all comes down to the perennial conflict between what we want versus stark reality. Classic, really. The same as many a more famous piece of theater from Hamlet to The Fantastiks. But that proves no guarantee! More importantly, how does Dowling pull off the actual performance?

Happily she not only has genuine stage presence (an ineffable something every smart director loves to see) but a fine sense of timing as well as physical clarity. Both vital when you're the only one on stage. Literally every eye remains fixed on one person, who needs must remain focused and clear. Many will say this comes out most in terms of playing different characters. Well, yes and no. She does accomplish exactly that, with style even and enough vivid detail they all come off as individuals. As a nice touch (that frankly some actors should learn from her) lies in the fact that each character has a different attitude and a different physicality. They look at things with different eyes, sit in chairs with different bodies, listen even with different faces. Yeah, they are all Heather R. Dowling's but she makes them different. And in that lies precisely why we end up caring, why we smile when she (as she clearly does here on stage before us) achieves her dream of theater. Makes for a charming and engaging hour of theater, one that also strikes a chord in those (like myself) who in some way or other share her dream.

Unemployed Finally... plays at Theatre Asylum’s Elephant Studio, 1078 Lillian Way, Los Angeles, CA 90038 on Thursday June 25 at 8:30pm and Saturday June 27 at 1pm.

F*ck You Jason (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Euripides was the third great tragedian in an ancient Greece, during what has sometimes been called the first Golden Age of western theater. He proved himself over and over again the equivalent of a wild-eyed hippie. Arguably his most famous work, Medea (sadly most of his plays are lost) really challenged the status quo. For the first time (as far as we know) someone wrote the story from Medea's point of view. In Euripides' play, she is not an evil she-witch, but a wronged woman driven to the brink of madness and beyond.

Despite its incredible contributions to what we today call Western Civilization--including democracy, trial by jury, naturalistic art, etc.--Athens was also profoundly misogynistic. Women not only lacked the vote, they were barely regarded as human. Passion between a man and a woman often was thought of as a kind of inevitable madness, necessary for life but full of potential trouble. Euripides was not alone in criticizing this, far from it! But portraying Medea as a love story gone horribly wrong instead of a cautionary horror tale about foreign women was daring for its time.

Writer/director Benny Lee Harris Lumpkins Jr. thought this play topical today. Myself I would agree with him so much as to say anyone who disagrees is one of the reasons it in fact remains so. His blending of different translations with additional lines (including the words "Fuck you Jason!" as a refrain) make his viewpoint quite clear. The way Medea's pain and even humanity consistently earn dismissal from the two male characters no doubt strike a chord.

The final production, however, doesn't really work. This comes down to three reasons:

1. Mise-en-scene. I have zero notion where and when this story is taking place. The whole production offers no clue whatsoever. It doesn't even take place "nowhere" or "limbo." I have no sense of place or context. Maybe the movement piece with which the show began was supposed to establish that? If such was the intent it failed. Maybe I should have polled members of the audience for their view but that prologue-esque part of the play gave me nothing. Nor did the rest of the play. I never felt there was a specific place on stage.
2. Dialogue. I am severely prejudiced against "on the nose" lines and dialogue. Not saying it cannot work, but has to be earned. In particular we need to know these characters well enough to accept this is their natural mode of communication. Frankly, this entire play seems edited with the Idea totally eclipsing the Humanity of the characters. The result comes across as preaching to the choir with very little attempt made to keep anyone's interest. Nuance of character, for example, seemed nowhere in the script. The two male roles in particular seemed like stereotypes rather than people.

I should mention some exceptions to this. The most obvious being the Chorus (Lori Mulligan, Valeria Rifici and Stepy Kamei). When they popped their heads onstage to repeat the refrain, or entered with stylized movements speaking in erie (but clear--kudos for that!) unison, or when a lament for how women are treated by men became a discussion of mutual love between two of the women--THERE we see the potential the writer/director as well as this idea has! Loved those moments!

3. The Cast. I've only ever seen one member of this cast in anything before--a member of the chorus. I also want to offer some real praise for Lesli Harad in the lead role of Medea. She fell into almost every single trap actors find in playing stylized verse plays--but she remained at least a recognizable human being throughout. Those actors portraying Jason, the Nurse and Creon however left a terrible impression. Acting is not emoting. Nor is it screaming. Perhaps this was a performance where they were for some reason seriously "off." I don't know. The script certainly did not help them, with orations instead of speech. Yeah, this kind of stylized play is difficult to pull off, simply because it is so atypical from what our training and exposure tends to be. I'm sure Ancient Greek audiences and performers would find our modern realistic styles just as baffling. But half the cast of this show never made that stylization work. As a result, they never seemed to be people--just mouthpieces for the playwright.

Plenty of talent on that stage, maybe more than I noticed. But this production lacked enough focus and nuance to really make the ideas breathe, sing or live.

Fuck You Jason, or Medea plays at the Elephant Space at 6322 Santa Monica Blvd. LA, CA 90038 on Friday June 19 at 7pm, Sunday June 21 at 7pm, Thursday June 25 at 11:55pm and Sunday June 28 at 2:30pm.

My Sister (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

My Sister by Janet Schlapkohl marks my first review of the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Honestly, it sets the bar pretty damn high.


"A story of twin sisters fighting to live their dreams as the world attempts to tear them apart." reads the tagline, and that certainly proves accurate. If insufficient. We're a little too used to that verb--tear apart--to feel its full power. Imagine your hand torn apart, until flesh and bone ripped asunder. Or your tongue pulled out of your skull. Nothing that bloody happens on stage. Emotionally, however, that is precisely what happens to these two souls.

Photo cred. JD Mendenhall

Emily and Elizabeth Hinkler (real life twin sisters) comprise the entire cast--at least the ones we see. From the moment the play begins, others hover around the tiny one room flat they share in 1930s Berlin. Magda is a Cabaret performer at night, a cleaning woman in a public hospital during the day. Matilde, who has cerebral palsy (so I was told later--I wasn't qualified to say what she had but felt utterly certain she knew), writes her sister's material and by listening to her radio has managed to perceive very much what is going on in the outside world. Adolf Hitler is now Chancellor. National Socialists are cracking down on outsiders, censoring art and humor and songs. Magda just wants to survive, to get along. Matilde, she sees with increasing terror what it means that the government is now taking away the "incurables" for "special treatment" from the hospital where her sister works.

Photo cred. JD Mendenhall

Something like this could end up so maudlin and sentimental. Likewise it could show nothing but darkness ascendent. That is focuses instead on the truth of the moment, of two sisters seeing the world in different ways despite very nearly sharing the same heart. 

The Third Reich and the Holocaust seem like such gigantic tragedies, in no small part because they are! Yet for that reason maybe we lose focus. We have a hard time wrapping our skulls around what it meant as civil liberties were taken away one by one, what it must have felt like as anyone different tried to seem 'normal' out of slowly suffocating terror, to see the consequences of words airily repeated put into practice. My Sister doesn't deal with the war, or why people enjoyed listening to Hitler speak, or debate over treaties. It shows LIFE, in two gallant but flawed souls simply trying not to drown in a deluge. It shows foolishness and wisdom, joy and recklessness, wit and lots of different nuances in courage. I felt humbled and my heart took a blow that needed about seventy five minutes to land--leaving me floored.

Recommended. Very much.

My Sister plays June 4, 5, 12, 13, & 20 at 6pm, June 21 at 3pm and June 27 at 8pm at the Underground Uptown Theatre, 1312 N. Wilton Place, Los Angeles, CA 90028 (http://hff15.org/2195)

Nightmaricomio (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

A play director I know was at the opening night of Nightmaricomio with me. Afterwards, she sighed and said "Everything I do is so ordinary." The reply that came from my mouth seemed especially appropriate in understanding this, ZJU's first entry into Hollywood's Fringe Festival. "Wouldn't it be a shame if all plays were Dionysian," I said, "or all plays were Apollonian? It would be like having only one gender!"

Maybe that is the key to understanding this show. Friedrich Nietzsche drew a distinction between two types of art. Dionysian is wild, primal, often rude, difficult to understand intellectually, surprising, with a logic (if you can call it that) more akin to dreams than the waking world. Apollonian art has structure, makes sense, is frankly more accessible to most because it is clearer, tells a story, has recognizable figures of one kind or other.

Nightmaricomio turns out very Dionysian indeed, possibly the most such I've ever seen from ZJU. For one thing it is a dance, pretty much never-ending from the moment the door opens to when the last audience member leaves. Not a particularly choreographed dance, but extremely organic and with the cast interacting virtually every moment. Does what follows have a "story"? Well, yes. And no. It has stories, that flow one into the other, which each player donning many roles. Three times individual cast members break out into soliloquies (one from Shakespeare) with the rest of the cast behaving/enacting/reacting to them. Likewise the players become animals, become trees or forces of nature. More than once they drop out of character, becoming actors in a play, this play. But even that isn't quite true. Because they aren't themselves but versions of themselves, enacting a play within the play that seems "naturalistic" by comparison but is just as unreal--not least in the amount of violence it contains. Unreal violence. Yet telling.

Tis a bit hard to single out people within such an ensemble that functions mostly as a gestalt. Yet one of the aspects of the Dionysian to tossing away differences, blending polarities. Everyone simultaneously becomes individual as well as collective. Sebastian Munoz struggling free from a monstrous crowd, and magically rescuing/empowering Redetha Deason from it. Hannah Kaplan just stepping out from the weirdness and dreams to tell a quick, funny, tragic little moment from life. Corey Zicari turning into a goofy little fun bird (I think) who proves only too vulnerable. Roger Weiss suddenly giving a speech about individuality from a famous play, in verse no less, for a moment becoming the STAR of the show, everyone else mere props giving shape to HIS words. Erin Treanor, Leif LaDuke, Vivi Thai as well all do what this kind of off-kilter semi-performance art show, seamlessly going from individual to cell, human to animal to spirit to shape to actor, and in this show always dancer.

One cast member is not a dancer, though. Kevin Van Cott is a musician. He is on stage literally more than any other member of the ensemble, and arguably his skills as a drummer will win your applause. But in my opinion he also stole the show, by breaking out of his role more than once, and sometimes in subtle little ways demonstrating a lot of personal power.

If I try and describe much further the content of this show, failure will be the result. Fundamentally it needs experiencing rather than explaining. Should you be in the mood for an experience as opposed to a straightforward story, or feel the attraction of having your brain pulled a little outside its usual box, then here is a show I recommend, highly. But, in the words of a friend, it is also "weird." Me, I like weird.

Nightmaricomio plays Thursdays, June 12 at 7pm, June 19 at 9pm and June 26 at 8:30pm, at the Theatre Asylum Lab at 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., LA CA 90038. Reservations can be made at 818.202.4120 or at zombiejoes.tix.com

Disclaimer: Zombie Joe, the director and producer, is a friend of mine and he asked me to design the postcard for this show which I did based on his description. I did it, without having seen the performance.