Warsaw (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

Warsaw by Paul Webb just premiered in Long Beach, a very humane drama entwining love, grief, guilt, forgiveness, and genuine fear.  I have very mixed feelings about it--but anything I might say may come across as nit-picking.  Maybe it is.

The play centers around a Doctor (Anna Van Valin) and a Priest (Bruce Nozick) who talk while one of the former's patients is being slowly awakened from a medically induced coma following a horrible car accident.  Said patient, Krystina (Suzanne Ford) left a powerful impression on both these folks, not least because the Doctor right now is going through a horrific breakup with David (Eric Scoufaras), which involved the death of her brother.  She blames herself and David for her brother's death.  Meanwhile as Krystyna starts to emerge from her coma, she has dreams in which she is in therapy discussing her marriage, her politics, her background in general. 

Plenty of surprises proceed to pop up.  For example, both the brother's death and the accident which crushed so much of Krystyna's body were directly caused by nothing less than 9/11!  We begin to realize before long this is 2001, in the wake of the attack.  More, though, all this begins also to entwine with the Warsaw Uprising in 1944!  Hence the title!  Meanwhile we meet and get to know the very nice young man (Spencer Del Carmen) who was driving the truck in Krystyna's accident.  

But the heart of this story is a series of coincidences (or destiny) bringing the past and (more or less) present together.  Let me be very clear--that was cool.  As an inspiration, as a story, as an idea this makes for juicy stuff, the stuff of sometimes great theatre.

Would it were indeed great.

Not that is is by any stretch of the imagination bad.  Not at all!  But the complexity of the setting and background do get in the way--more, I would argue some elements of the play don't quite work.  Some of this script frankly requires threading rather a lot of needles to create the impact I think the writer strives for.  I don't believe all those needled ended up threaded, and my suspicion remains the play did not need all those needles.  One was a trap the play contains and which the production fell into--namely, sentiment versus honesty.  Two love stories run in a weird tandem throughout.  Me, I love weird, and thought the parallel stories should have worked.  In my view, neither quite landed.  A lot of those stories for example were explained rather than seen--although the production tried to show what they could.

Again, you may call this nitpicking.  Again, I want to emphasize this is neither a bad play nor a bad production.  Yet again, what I'm writing about are a cluster of nuances which makes this play not achieve a bullseye.  

More, your mileage may vary.  The love story are clearly meant to offer hope and insight--which they can do.  The interplay of the Holocaust with the attack on the World Trade Center intrigues and provokes thought.  Not one actor gives a bad performance, and we end up liking these characters.

I just feel the script needed some major polishing.  

Warsaw plays Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays @ 7:30 p.m. & Sundays @ 2 p.m until May 17, 2026 at the International City Theatre, Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center’s Beverly O’Neill Theater, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach, CA 90802

Masala Dabba (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

 Here's a fun fact.  Trying to guess the meaning of this play's title, Masala Dabba, I was guessing it referred to an Indian recipe of some kind which becomes the focus of some inter-generational tension, probably played out in and around and about a restaurant.

I was almost totally wrong.

The title is much better than that, referring instead to a traditional Indian spice box. So rather than refer to a specific food, it calls back to the ingredients which make up those dishes you yourself choose to make or consume.

A far better metaphor.  Wendy Graf's play does indeed focus on a family--Nishi Byrd (Ansuya Nathan), her husband Charlie (Timylle Adams), their daughter Tina (Jon Joseph Gentry), and Nishi's mother Aditi Dashi (Nandina Minocha) who has come all the way from a small village in India to visit her daughter's family for the very first time in Berkeley.  You can probably guess already some secret strain vibrates between Nishi and Aditi.  It doesn't help when the latter makes some comments which could easily come across--and are interpreted as--racist about her African American son-in-law.

One might expect such a set-up to flow in a certain direction, a plot outline governing the shape and tenor of each scene.  I want to emphasize this play breaks those rules, a fact I found very refreshing.  The ebb and flow remains mostly subtle, albeit unmistakable.  Each scene ends on what clearly is supposed to feel like a tender cliffhanger, a hint of secrets to learn, pains to be understood.  And they are that.

Here comes my only real complaint.  The production falls into a series of traps, which altogether do not (I want to make that very clear--do NOT) unravel what the writer and actors are doing.  But there are hiccups.  Many scenes are quite brief, and between them are (rather short) set shifts that distracted.  The set included an elaborate window piece in the back, which gave a sense of what this home felt like but did nothing else.  More, since the stage had this glorious cyclorama directly behind the set, I longed for the colors there to change in reference to what was happening on stage.  Better yet--projections onto that surface (if that is feasible which I don't know).  

This is a fairly subtle complaint.  Yet the impact, while subtle, was felt and gave me some trouble entering into the tale.

Fortunately, I liked the characters and found the hints of mystery compelling, with a slow series of revelations which tugged at my heart.  Central to all this is Tina meeting her grandmother for the very first time, who finds startling bliss in getting to know her grandchild.  Tina, eager to learn about her mother's heritage, discovers something new and exciting, and the thrill of that feels very real, very moving.  Just as the resentments between mother and daughter never feel formulaic, but indeed very logical.  This play does not relate the coming of a storm, but a shifting of a tide.  And there is much beauty in that.  Beauty and sadness.  Anger and forgiveness.  Confession and, yes, cooking.

Central is the Masala Dabba brought from India which ends up an important talking point, not least because the stories associated with each spice.  Very intimate, very thought- and emotion-provoking.  

Masala Dabba plays Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 2pm until September 14, 2025 at the International City Theatre, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach, CA 90802.