ZJU's Othello (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Of all Shakespeare's major plays, Othello is my  probably my least favorite. Yet Josh T. Ryan remains a director I always enjoy, so when he told me that was his next play, I got excited.

He dropped a few other hints since. One, "Godzilla rises," makes perfect sense but I'm not going to explain. Don't want to spoil it. The other was when he told me with a glint in both eyes, "This is gonna be so gay!"

Well, yeah. It is. Gloriously, even hilariously so! In effect he decided to set the entire story amidst the fashion industry and models of the 1980s. Don't bother trying to figure out how. Just go with it. The result blends Shakespeare with Velvet Goldmine liberally sprinkled with Rocky Horror and even Phantom of the Paradise. The wild hair, the even wilder clothes, the patterned makeup, amazing shoes, even a red carpet which was very nearly the only set. Plus a half-mad photographer (Sebastian Munoz) who took pictures like a kind of punctuation to scenes and moments.

Photo Credit: Josh T. Ryan

It worked! In the process the whole ensemble took on re-imagined roles with the kind of gusto this sort of thing really needs to have work. Iago (Vincent Cusimano) steals it--he usually does. Honestly the whole work really seems more about him as the West's first real Antihero than about the title character. In this case he, like most of the characters, is a model (and given the opportunity a diva of the first order) and quite flaming. So much so when he even sarcastically assures the audience he does indeed have a wife. Her name's Amelia (Anna Gion) and she radiates stage presence. The entire cast does. None quite so much as Othello (Vanessa Cate) however, who comes across as the Alpha of the Pack, the one person who maintains interest with barely doing anything. She even makes her final song in a strangely beautiful surreal anthem for her crime.

Oh, did I mention this one is a little bit of  musical? Yeah, it is.

Photo Credit: Josh T. Ryan

Yeah, and a white girl is playing Othello (she did the murder scene the best I've ever seen it--the power, the lashing out at a whim, the love that survived even her Desdemona's (Kirsten Benjamin) demise. Other standouts include Hannah Mosqueda as Roderigo, Quinn Knox as Cassio, Tyler Koster as Montano and Hedy Beinert as Bianca.

Let us not forget also the live music from Kevin Van Cott, the costumes (dubbed "Othello" haute couture in the program) by Jeri Batzdorff and in this case the sound/lights operator who is a character in this production, suitably named Fineas and performed by R. Benjamin Warren. Fabulous makeup design by Natalie Hyde.

It might not be your cup of tea. Or glass of champagne. But it remained a startling nugget of joy and wonder in this writer's memory.

Othello plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30pm, until June 27, 2015 at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre at 4850 Lankershim Blvd (just south of the NoHo sign) North Hollywood CA 91601.  Tickets are $15 and reservations can be made at (818) 202-4120 or by going to zombiejoes.tix.com

Kamikaze (review)

Spoilers ahoy!.... kinda/sorta

Full disclosure. Kamikaze is a one woman show performed by Vanessa Cate and directed by Zombie Joe. I know both these folks and consider them friends. More, I've enjoyed every single thing either one of them has done. Genuinely. One reason for this remains the fact I got to know their work first, then the people. But I'm not uncritical of either one.

Zombie actually called me "ruthless" once. I think he meant it as a compliment.

But to the show!

Kamikaze makes an excellent example of Performance Art--a tricky form because it nearly always comes from a highly intuitive place. Elements juxtapose in a way that make little or no literal sense but somehow "fit." Dance, mime and words blend, along with singing or interactive activities with the audience. Absolute reality and precision go hand-in-hand with the bizarre, the deliberately vague, the nonsensical. Frankly, most attempts at it crash and burn. It takes an unusual focus coupled with particularly strong performance skills to pull off.

This one does indeed work. I went in with as few expectations as I could manage. Still, the show did surprise, startle, fascinate. Almost immediately, as the lights rose, the one thing very few performers or performances offer at the very start appeared.

Photo Credit: Zombie Joe's Underground

Stillness. Following by slow, precise movement. Frankly, this shouldn't have worked. But it did. One reason remains the intimacy of the space (Zombie Joe's is not a large venue). More importantly, Vanessa Cate remains an actress of great stage presence. A difficult thing to define, that, but almost impossible to miss when revealed. When darkness fell once more, we in the audience heard singing, in this case the so-called "Ophelia Song" by William Shakespeare (Cate had several roles in ZJU's wonderful Hamlet last year, but not interestingly Ophelia). The lights rose, and we all laughed. We were watching Cate simply...shop. Something about the smile, the way she picked up items and put them in the imaginary basket, moved around the store... To be sure, a fine example of mime, but one cannot quite put your finger on what it might actually mean.

And that is kinda the point. Language is wonderful. I myself love words and the potential they offer, the insights and messages to which they give shape. But part of this show revels in the subtleties of experience for which we have no words. Language not with sound or symbol, but experience.

The same applies to when the lights shifted and we got a genuinely hilarious bit of Cate simply driving. Why was it so funny? And why did it seem something else was going on? Likewise, how come these odd images and movements connect in the way they feel as if they do? Ditto the next segment that intercut three wildly different scenarios (the program listed this part as "So Fine"/Fish/Hell and that actually does make plenty of sense as far as titles go).

When performance art works, it often feels as if one has just visited another person's dream. And such was precisely my reaction to this one woman

Photo Credit: Zombie Joe's Underground

show. The skits and pieces that make it up rattle around my heart still. Like a therapist, my inclination is to interpret the dream. So I look at a major clue, the title of the show. The program helps, as it gives a definition:

ka-mi-ka-ze (noun) 1. Japanese "divine wind" (from the legendary name of a typhoon that in 1281 saved Japan by destroying the Mongol navy): kami divine + kaze wind 2. A Japanese pilot trained in World War II to make a suicidal crash attack, especially upon a ship. 3. Slang - An extremely reckless person who seems to court death.

Of course, Vanessa Cate, as a veteran of Urban Death at ZJU, could mean far more than the death of the body. Interestingly, she also made a point of saying in the program how the Kamikaze was viewed as a legendary salvation.

What I got out of this work was the odyssey of a woman's soul, from trying to understand the world, to enjoying/experiencing what it has to offer, to feeling the pleasures and tortures of life, then coming to some very personal answers. We see her delve into madness, into nightmare, clearly finding great pleasure in things (an actress I know in the audience opening night had a very pleasing surprise at one point) but also emerging from trauma.

One of the most clear-cut, most "linear" parts of the piece was simply titled Tracy.  This one frankly comes across as a mini-play in and of itself, an

Photo Credit: Zombie Joe's Underground

autobiographical account of a friendship. Cate, wearing a floral dress and matching glasses (!) stood prim and enthusiastic, telling of her friend Tracy. How they were girls together. How they grew apart, without our narrator seemingly noticing--a bad sign. At first the story is funny, very much so. Yet Cate's character, like nearly all founts of real comedy, is tragic. Here there's something marvelously subtle I feel the need to praise. This monologue is not written in great prose. It doesn't create fantastic word pictures nor do the words invoke the essence of what's happening with the precision of a haiku. Because that would not be this character's vocabulary. Rather, Cate's performance does all that. Standing almost perfectly still, with almost the same expression throughout, her voice bled this character's soul all over the stage. First a drop or two, then a trickle, then a vein opened up. A tour-de-force and that one section alone would be worth the price of admission!

But that did not complete the night's journey. No, Cate went on with several more pieces, including her poem "I Am Raw" and a monologue lifted from a decades-old movie, equal parts cheesy, awesome, beautiful (in no small part because Cate herself is), insightful and just a bit disturbing. A nice comment on art, that, and to be expected really from the author of Fragments of Oscar Wilde. Art, even pop art, lives because it says something true. Don't such things provide individual building blocks of our psyches, our souls? Sharing them, sometimes, takes courage. This segment does take that, on several levels. But by then we rather expect it.

And when it ends with martial arts, that seems very right as well.

Kamikaze plays at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30pm from Sept. 20 to October 5, 2013. You can find the venue at 4850 Lankershim Blvd. (across from KFC) North Hollywood 91601. You can make reservations by calling (818) 202-4120

Fragments of Oscar Wilde

Spoilers Ahoy!

This week marks something of a marathon--four plays to review within five days. Not that I complain! But it ends up putting me in a contemplative, some might say pretentiously pedantic mood.

So be it!

Fragments of Oscar Wilde comes across as a very personal and rather experimental idea by writer/director Vanessa Cate. Something about Oscar Wilde does seem to stir something like that from authors. Years ago I saw a play about his life, in which his imprisonment for sodomy was intercut with scenes from both The Importance of Being Earnest (with the warden as Lady Bracknell) and the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Patience (which made fun of him), other prisoners doing the chorus. Twas fun!

Photo: Vanessa Cate

In this case, Ms. Cate combined scenes from several Wilde works to create a theatrical montage of scenes along a theme--the relationship between love and art and life. She took several opening scenes from the novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray, a bit of La Sainte Courtisane, another bit from Salome, The Nightingale and the Rose, and the uncompleted play A Florentine Tragedy.

Honestly the flow between the different sections of the piece sometimes seem a little ragged, but the writing itself unites the different elements. Just to keep us on our toes, she also finds ways to surprise us. The very first scene shows La Courtisane (Anastasia Charalambous) reading about a character from Portrait, Lord Henry--who instead of a jaded older gentleman (I've seen John Guilgud and Colin Firth play him) turns out to be an attractive young woman! More, one who looks rather like a cherub or maybe Nancy Drew--if either one had somehow acquired an extremely jaded palate towards life (Taylor Solomon).

Photo: Vanessa Cate

Likewise the speech of Salome towards the dead John the Baptist's mouth ends up delivered by three women towards the audience, dancing together and sharing a long red cape (Natalie Hyde, Stephanie Giles, Rebecca Watson). About two years ago I reviewed a production of this specific play and it frankly was better done in this instance.

Now I'm going to get pretentious and pedantic. You have been warned!

The whole show has a few problems--the single biggest one is the lack of vocal training by the cast. Honestly, this remains a pervasive complaint I have with nearly all theatre I go and see. But it really stands out when the language doesn't even pretend at any naturalism. Wilde's speech is and remains arch, witty and sophisticated. We Americans rarely learn how to do that. In this show the quality of vocal performance varies quite a bit. A few actors fall into the trap of (evidently) thinking speed and volume equals passion. No. Worse, a couple have trouble with parts of speech (rule of thumb--anyone who places the stress on pronouns over and over and over again has not mastered the art of speaking). A few show weak consonants, which is actually very easy to overcome by practice. Really--do some tongue twisters a few times a day for three weeks and the results will astonish!

Photo: Vanessa Cate

But these problems--which remain very common--get some nice compensation in the actual production. For one thing, the leads do quite well. Secondly, Zombie Joe's is a "black box" theatre so we can easily hear actors. As the great director Peter Brooks once noted, the quieter a character speaks the easier it is for them to find the emotional truth.

Also the director did something very clever in casting. The cast as a whole all demonstrated genuine stage presence. Each took command of the stage simply by entering, standing, walking or exiting. No small feat. All in some really fundamental way radiated their character, even looking at things and listening in ways their characters would. Again--NO SMALL THING.

Finally the movements conveyed a great deal. I happen to know that a few members of the cast (I've seen them in other things) are dancers or at least studied dance. So too the Director, and the various movements throughout conveyed a great deal. No fidgeting, no remaining rigidly still, no uncontrolled awkward business. Bravo! For example, an actress at the very beginning has a lovely piece of material wrapped around her. While exiting, she simply lets it drop, revealing a brief flash of nudity. Very simple and elegant. Likewise a sword fight almost looked real (they had foils and moved as if they were sabres--but how many folks would ever know that?) and certainly looked NOT AT ALL AWKWARD. Most sword fights on stage look wrong, Very wrong. One at San Francisco's ACT was actually embarrassing!

Photo: Vanessa Cate

So in the end I find myself very glad to have attended, genuinely moved by what I saw, and left pondering the dramatic sonnet Ms. Cate created for us. Wilde was never an author to tell you what to think--one reason Victorian society (and our own) found him so daunting. He drew connections, showed consequences, did not stint on the details the story naturally presented. Fragments of Oscar Wilde and the cast that present it do a find job of capturing all that bittersweet irony, the melancholy beauties, the musings by an artist upon art (and not necessarily to be taken entirely seriously).

Fragments of Oscar Wilde plays Saturday Nights at 8:30 March 23 thru May 18 (no show April 6) at Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre Group 4850 Lankershim Blvd. North Hollywood, CA Call 818-202-4120 for reservations.