Adam & Evie (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

In our age, the great myth of our daily lives has become one of vast longing.  We judge ourselves based on this.  To be honest, it can bring enormous pain, deep humiliation, frustration and feelings of failure for years on end.  Sounds horrific.  Yet the promise and (not coincidentally) truth remains it holds promise of joy, companionship, a thousand thousand  pleasures great and small, as well as a surcease from loneliness. 

The love story. More even than a yen to believe in God, our desire for Love permeates this society.  Such proves the focus of Charles L. Mee’s Adam & Evie, whose world premiere runs at the City Garage.

Credit:  Paul Rubenstein

More or less at this point in many reviews—certainly in a lot of mine—comes a description of the plot.  Given the style of this work, however, that is problematical.  How not?  The play doesn’t really have a single plot, but dozens. No overall story save the idea of one, the love story.  As a piece of theatre it much more resembles Bach rearranging endless variations on a theme rather than any kind of an overriding arc. Boy meets girl.  Woman meets man.  Woman meets woman.  Man meets man.  Couples meet and connect.  Sometimes fall apart.  Other times they look back upon the details of their lives together.  Individuals yearn for what they once had, believe they could have had, maybe regret what they did.  Which doesn’t really give a real taste of the show, so let me try again.

Love at first sight, or something similar.  A young Adam (Landon Beatty) and Evie (Lindsay Plake) experience this under the fond gaze of an Older Adam (Tom Laskey) and Older Evie (Sandy Mansson).  Same people?  Maybe.  Seems possible, or perhaps just a kind of cosmic coincidence.  That the older couple rise from their table to sing and do a tap dance gives but one of many clues we aren’t quite in the world we know.

Credit:  Paul Rubenstein

Or not the world we know when awake.  I call performances like this “Theatre of Dreams” simply because that is how it feels.  Rather than complain about the lack of linear logic, seems best (certainly more enjoyable) to accept the play as following dream logic.

So someone comes on with the head of a chicken (Bo Roberts).  Or a ballet dancer (Megan Kim) enters to dance counterpoint to a scene.

Fine.  Go with it.  As we would with a dream.  And understanding, if it comes, will follow the same as with a dream—not least simply via the experience.

Director Frederique Michel seems skilled with such material.  Quite apart from previous shows she’s directed, this one gels in that odd way that even extremely divergent material can when everyone shows themselves on the same page with approximately the same skill level. So members of an ersatz chorus periodically gather on either side of the stage to sing tunes, most quite recognizable if altered. Again, fine.  It fits.  It feels right, whole even.  Like a couple when it all clicks.  Clowns (Kat Johnston, Trace Taylor, Jeffrey Garner) seem right at home with the Mad Opera Singer (Yukiko Hadena) as well as Romeo (David E. Frank) and Juliet.  Yes, almost everyone plays multiple roles—just as nearly everyone sooner or later ends up paired however briefly with nearly the entire other member of cast.

Credit:  Paul Rubenstein

The Adams and Evies remain steady, though. Pretty much.  To be honest the entire ensemble gathers to quickly, very humorously re-tell the tale of the Greek Tantalus—a sprawling story of deep tragedy treated (briefly) as something of a farce.

Seems appropriate.

But here’s the truth.  The most powerful moment in the whole work for me (it is ninety minutes sans any intermission) came fairly early.  Young Adam and Evie pick up these two wooden noise makers, the kind you strum one part against another. The “noise” sounds very much like the distant croak of a frog. Or maybe that was because the noise makers looked like frogs.  But we seemed outdoors.  Another couple were having a scene downstage while young Adam and Evie simple wandered a bit, making noise at one another. I cannot even say they were flirting. Felt more like the savoring of each others’ company, in simple unadorned happiness.

Which seems the best of love, really.  But your mileage may vary.  Hope so.

Adam & Evie plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm (pay-what-you-can at the door) until April 30, 2017 at the City Garage, building T1, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica CA 90404.

Rules of Seconds (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

LATC downtown pretty much guarantees a good show, or so it seems to me.  When they eventually fail to deliver such no doubt I'll be shocked.  Rules of Seconds however does not shock--not in that way.  It does, however, surprise over and over again.  It also entertains.

At least on the surface, the story (and title) derive from the practice and regulations of dueling in 1855 Boston.  Such was of course illegal by this time.  Very much illegal.  But the popularity of finding excuses for people to feel insulted and demand blood in recompense remained and remains.  In fact, this play seems to me the first play this year (that I've seen anyway) addressing the issues of last November's election.

Credit: Grettel Cortes Photography

The plot focuses on a woman (Amy Brenneman) and her two sons, one fragile and clearly suffering from what we could call OCD (Matthew Elkins), the other far stronger as well as more clever (Josh Helman).  Wandering--or stealthily entering--their lives is a businessman (Jamie Harris) with a gift of the gab.  He also quite likes dueling.  Regards it as the epitome of honor, proof he is a gentleman.  In fact he simply likes killing people.  He likes it a lot.

Naturally, it is the weaker of the two sons he targets.  From that moment on, a spiral of secrets revealed, difficult choices made, cruelties practiced and hopes sometimes nurtured, sometimes stomped underfoot proceed.  It makes for what might have been quite a nice melodrama back in the day.  Perhaps with a neat message at the end, about the evils of the codo duello.

Credit: Grettel Cortes Photography

But instead, we get a pretty explicit exploration of what our age would call "toxic masculinity."  Expectation breeds acceptance of the worst, most infantile and destructive of traits.  Acceptance becomes reverence.  Reverence becomes a cycle of revenge and blood and death.  Yet to be fair, it isn't as if masculinity is the horror's only source.  Women too--as this play reveals--have the same impulses, sometimes as dark as can be and for as human reasons as men.

Not pretty.  But true.  Fortunately thoroughly laced with excitement and humor.

Overall an excellent example of a very dark comedy, both very dark and very funny.  Very disturbing too, the more one thinks on it.  The moment an almost childlike, lovely man feels a surge of desire to kill is one of many that simply emerge naturally, and haunted me.  Likewise the stories of seeming minor characters played winningly by actors such as Joshua Bitton, Feodor Chin, Leandro Cano, Ron Bottitta, Damu Malik and Jennifer Pollono turn out worthy of laughter as well as tears.  Both.  And all.

Credit: Grettel Cortes Photography

Not a great play, to be honest.  The rhythms of changing moods prove very tricky, and at least one character (and rather unusually, pretty much the ONLY one) remains a cypher rather than a person.  Honestly, the ending does prove a tiny bit too pat, although quite fun. But good, because it remains a genuine blend of the best elements in theatre, not a great blend but a good hearty one with lots to recommend it!

Rules of Seconds plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm until April 13, 2017 at the Tom Bradley Theatre, part of the Los Angeles Theatre Center 514 South Spring Street, Los Angeles CA 90013.

Martha (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

I make a point of not reading the program of shows before a performance.  This is a philosophical choice, because of a desire to have a play or performance stand on its own.  After all, if audiences need to do homework to "get" a performance, how good can such be in the end?

For Martha, the one woman show about Martha Graham, I went one step further. For better and for worse, I did no research about the iconic dancer/choreographer.  True, her name remains famous. Her life in the most vague and general terms remained known to me.  But more, I wanted to see what this play would reveal.

And yeah, sometimes I'm just a little bit lazy.

So how did it turn out?

Very well indeed.  Playwright Ellen Melaver and director Steward J. Zully ended up giving actress Christina Carlisi a wonderful opportunity to simply explore this great artist's character and life, without going overboard on explanations of the many, many contexts of Martha Graham's life.  Not a blow by blow of her days, as if someone wanted to turn her wikipedia page into a theatrical performance.  Instead the whole thing came across as a slice of life, a few moments when Graham looked back in the wake of a disaster--reliving moments, remembering people, commenting on those around her in one way or another.  The disaster she eventually even relives--and by that time we understand enough to know how much it made her soul bleed.

Not linear.  Not organized.  Not straightforward or full of justifications.  And never, ever, not once boring.  Rather we feel as if a fascinating woman walked into our lives and shared some searingly honest moments and memories.

Which seems, after all, the point.

Martha plays Sundays at 7pm through April 16, 2017 at the Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks CA 91423.

Malicious Bunny (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Matthew A. Sprosty’s world premiere of Malicious Bunny contains an amazing scene. Near the end of Act One, blue collar worker Jonathan (Markus Taylor) visits the very swank, expensive apartment of his wife Angela’s (Heidi-Marie Ferren) parents.  Mr. and Mrs. Parsby (Larry Gilman and Jennifer Edwards) pretty clearly despise their son-in-law.  They certainly have no desire to look at him, much less talk with him.  Reasons why—apart from the snobbery of money—emerge as Jonathan, whose visit clearly surprises them, insists on staying.  What the parents don’t realize is that Angela is with them as well.  She listens to it all via her husband’s Bluetooth, and she remains in constant communication with him.

Honestly, doesn’t that description whet your dramatic appetite, at least a bit?  Because honestly, this wonderful scene eclipses everything else in the play. It plays out with tension and mystery, character and tensions emerging one after another, while the cast does a genuinely splendid job.

It also leads up to murder.

Here lies the problem.  Not that we already know such is the reason for the visit (although from a technical point of view that does weaken the scene) but because the rest of the play never reaches this level.  Understand—elements turn out quite interesting, even engaging, but overall the script remains uneven.  Billed a dark comedy, honestly I hardly ever laughed or even grinned. Part of that must lie with the slow way scenes shifted (this remains a complaint of mine with many productions—no one wants to watch furniture being moved) but also frankly the lack of insight we receive about most of the characters.  The only one who consistently seems very much alive and himself is Greg (Andrew McIntyre) whose relationship with best friend Jonathan remains the biggest unexplored mystery of the play.

Clearly, the playwright has some real talent.  Ditto the cast.  Director Bryan Fox shows some skill and cleverness, albeit amid some problems, but truthfully the production does not gel into a coherent experience.  Given its avowed nature as a comedy, this comes down more than anything to rhythm.  One can indeed shift tone and genre successfully and to great effect.  But the skill to do so only shows in small flashes.  Meanwhile three extremely minor characters—the Pit Boss (Nicholas Maes), Detective Grilling (Tess Kartel) and Detective Ispy (James Vallejo)—seem wasted.  Honestly I could not figure a single reason for the first of the three to even be in the script!  The other two come across as just weird, but purposelessly so.  I like weird.  But weird needs to fit.  Just as a deliberately jarring note in a piece of music has to be the right jarring note and placed in just the right moment.

Malicious Bunny plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 7pm until April 9, 2017 at the Actor Company’s Let Live Theater, 916 North Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles CA