Perceptions of beauty and brutal realities collide in The Bluest Eye, a co-production between Moxie Theatre and Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company adapted by Lydia Diamond from Toni Morrison’s debut novel. In the careful hands of director Delicia Turner Sonnenberg (Moxie’s artistic director) and with the sensitivity of a fine cast, The Bluest Eye is the first wholly memorable production of the 2013 local theater season.
The year that passes (Ohio, 1940s) in the life of young African American girl Pecola Breedlove (Cashae Monya, at once childlike and haunted beyond her years) is a harrowing one with all too few answers to her heart-rending questions of self and her hunger to be loved and accepted. Her mother (Melissa Coleman-Reed) has been beaten into near-submission by poverty, racism and domestic abuse, and Pecola’s father, Cholly (Warner Miller), commits the unspeakable at her expense. While 11-year-old Pecola finds friendship and welcome hours of playfulness in the company of a temporary foster family – Marshel Adams and especially Lorene Chesley are first-rate as sisters Frieda and Claudia – she can not escape the ugliness of racism, and worse. She asks the wish-granting charlatan Soaphead Church (Abner Genece) for the blue eyes that will make her beautiful and perhaps free. The price of her wish is inestimable. The lyricism of Morrison’s 1970 novel is ever-present in this thoughtful adaptation, commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and first produced in 2005. The Moxie-Mo’olelo collaboration succeeds not only on the strength of the ensemble and Turner Sonnenberg’s direction, but in its attention to little details that illuminate and trouble the heart as they should, like the Dick and Jane book Pecola clings to, a child’s fantasy of the perfect family life, and the blue-eyed blonde white baby doll that Frieda mothers and Claudia wants to destroy. In addition, the play’s two most horrifying scenes – both involving Cholly – are managed with laudable restraint, sacrificing none of their shock or significance. The Bluest Eye suggests that Moxie and Mo’olelo’s first joint production should be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
0 Comments
By 2013 standards, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific would seem a quaint reminder of bygone Broadway’s grandeur. Its gangly seabees drool over dames. Its female characters, except for the audacious Bloody Mary, live for love. Its little slice of World War II is bathed in the island aroma of Bali Ha’i. So why is it so hard to resist this old warhorse? Simple: the songs. You can have Nellie Forbush’s silly “A Cockeyed Optimist” and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man,” but South Pacific’s rousing numbers for its gang of seabees, “There is Nothin’ Like A Dame” and “Bloody Mary,” are good-natured fun. “Some Enchanted Evening” may be a show-tune cliché, but it still oozes amour, and the wistful ballad “This Nearly Was Mine” can moisten the eyes of the most stubborn stoic. Of course in the case of the latter two, you need a worthy Emile DeBeque. You need an operatic baritone who brings lung power and tender passion to the role of South Pacific’s love-bewitched French plantation owner.
The Welk Theatre’s got such an Emile DeBeque in Randall Dodge, a veteran of the Escondido company’s The Fantasticks and The Pirates of Penzance. Worthy of a backing orchestra larger than the Welk production can accommodate (its ensemble numbers four – keyboards, percussion, violin and reeds), Dodge makes the Welk’s South Pacific pure romantic escapism. Vocal performances by Hannah M. James as Nellie, the Navy nurse from Little Rock who loves DeBeque, and Benjamin Lopez, as the smitten (by island girl Liat) Marine Lt. Cable, are stellar as well, and Brenda Oen is a boisterous Bloody Mary. In spite of its leisurely pace, South Pacific’s parallel love stories unfold without allowing for development of any particular chemistry between the couples (Nellie and DeBeque, and Cable and Liat), Today, as in 1949 when the show debuted on Broadway, we are asked to accept love at first sight, across a crowded room, as “Some Enchanted Evening” suggests, or on an enchanted island as regards Liat and the lieutenant. We do because it’s Rodgers & Hammerstein. To quibble would be the act of a 2013 cynic. It’s too early in the new year for that. Let Bali Ha’i and those in its spell have their illusions. Gardens of grey may seem like a misnomer, but how apt it was for a dark and unsettling chapter in American high society history.
A mansion located in affluent East Hampton, N.Y., Grey Gardens in its grand heyday was the home of the Bouvier Beales, the elder Edith (“Big Edie”) and her daughter, “Little Edie.” Also frequent familiars in this domicile of wealth and privilege were Little Edie’s young cousins, Jacqueline and Lee. We would know them later as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Lee Radziwill. The fractious relationship between Edith and Little Edie, one poisoned by jealousy and resentment and twisted rivalry, eventually turned the seemingly idyllic household upside down and submerged it into the mire until all that was left were two reclusive, lonely women sharing a roof in utter squalor. A 1975 documentary by the Maysles brothers about the two women became a 2006 musical written by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, with a book by Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife). It’s a strangely inscrutable exercise in musical theater with auto-wreck undertones: You know the fate of these two women is painful to watch, yet you can’t look away. Ion Theatre’s new production of Grey Gardens, directed by Kim Strassburger, is that kind of arresting. Besides a gifted cast fronted by Linda Libby (playing mother in Act 1 and daughter in Act 2) and Annie Hinton (as Big Edie in the second act), Grey Gardens enjoys a score that is both amusing in a black-humor way (“The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” “Jerry Likes My Corn”) and heart-breaking (“The Girl Who Has Everything,” Will You” and “Another Winter in a Summer Town”). Its peripheral characters, too, make the most of every moment on ion’s black box stage, from Ruff Yeager as the booze-swilling, piano-playing George Gould Strong to Charles Evans, whose slacker-boy Jerry is a highlight of Act 2. The trappings and doings at the mansion ooze opulence and preciousness in Act 1, in spite of the limitations of the tiny stage, before turning to something out of a pathetic reality show about the fallen rich in Act 2. An unlikely story for a musical, you’re thinking? Not here, where the denouement is as harrowing as a tragic opera. When Paul Robeson declared that “The artist must take sides,” he was referring to, in his own words, the “fight for freedom or slavery.” The activist film and stage actor was also talking about the fight for dignity, respect and the common wants to which so many oppressed people are denied. This truth is dramatized in The Tallest Tree in the Forest, a world-premiere play with music by Daniel Beaty that’s a co-production of La Jolla Playhouse and Kansas City Repertory Theatre. As much a two-act history lesson as a portrait of Robeson, Tallest Tree crosses oceans as well as racial divides on its journey into the courageous if conflicted soul of a man who should never be forgotten. Though the lyrically troubling “Ol’ Man River” (from Showboat) is the song for which African-American Robeson will always be remembered, it’s important to be reminded, as we are by The Tallest Tree in the Forest, that Robeson’s booming voice relentlessly cried out for civil rights at the risk of his own life.
Beaty wrote and stars in this one-man-show, directed by Moises Kaufman. But this is no static, extended monologue – Beaty portrays multiple characters, including Robeson’s wife, “Essie,” President Harry Truman and the voice of sensationalizing newspaper scribes and a paranoid J. Edgar Hoover. Beaty is at his best when immersed wholly in Robeson, a man of fire and passion. The quick-change, back-and-forth dialogue he does with Essie and the showdown with Truman are less effective. A three-person band supports Beaty’s able rendering of 14 tunes that personify not only Robeson’s fight for justice but the tenor of the times in the America in which Robeson lived. The latter is also explicitly depicted in John Narun’s projection design, a highlight of the production. If even one person sees The Tallest Tree in the Forest then goes home, sits down and reads up on Paul Robeson, Beaty’s play will have served well the legacy of a man who enlightened as well as entertained, who stood up to bullies and bigots and who should receive more credit than he gets for rattling America’s collective conscience and effecting change. With all the critical drooling over the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock, it’s nice to know that the master of suspense can still be played for laughs. Mel Brooks left no sight gag unturned in spoofing Hitchcock’s films in his 1977 romp “High Anxiety.” Neither does Patrick Barlow in his stage adaptation of Sir Alfred’s 1935 spy flick “The 39 Steps.” Four years after being produced at La Jolla Playhouse, The 39 Steps is back, this time at Lamb’s Players Theatre under the direction of Deborah Gilmour Smyth. If you haven’t seen the play before, know that any resemblance in tone to the played-straight 1935 movie is strictly accidental. The 39 Steps is a quick-change send-up played by a cast of only four that’s reliant upon unrestrained physical comedy, unashamedly obvious allusions (visual, verbal and musical) to other Hitchcock films and a vaudevillian devil-may-care.
It’s not the start-to-finish howl it aspires to be. Like the “Airplane” or “Naked Gun” films, The 39 Steps throws so much at you there are bound to be hits and misses. The man-on-the-run espionage story, meanwhile, never stands a chance against the antics of the inexhaustible ensemble. David S. Humphrey is an elastic-limbed Richard Hannay, the wrongly accused hero, while Kelsey Venter tackles three roles, including the blonde Pamela who helps Richard clear his name. But three parts seems like child’s play compared to the load Robert Smyth (Lamb’s artistic director) and Jesse Abeel carry. Between the two of them they portray policemen, innkeepers, innkeepers’ wives, foreign spies -- even, in Abeel’s case, the moss, peat and shrubs of a Scottish bog. Smyth’s and Abeel’s lightning-fast change of costumes and characters are more fun than the Hitchcock bits, which are easy snippets of parody. Humphrey and Venter’s finest moment arrives in Act 2, when they are handcuffed together. They pull off awkward twists, turns and grimaces that would make Lucy and Desi, who had at this shtick on TV eons ago, proud. Truly impressive is how Lamb’s stages a man-on-the-run story with nothing more than props and body language. But after managing Around the World in 80 Days, as the theater did last year, the British Isles must have felt like a breather. Picture a human being completely devoid of skin -- a walking, breathing mass of viscera and bone, something like those anatomical figures you see in science textbooks or on the otherwise sterile walls of doctors’ offices. Skinless’ haunted heroine, Zinnia Wells, writes about these frightening creatures in her novel-in-progress – and she sees them, as alive as the moonless night, in the forest beyond her dysfunctional home.
This is half the premise of Johnna Adams’ new play, Skinless, now on stage at Moxie Theatre under the direction of Delicia Turner Sonnenberg. The other, dialectical half is a philosophical contretemps between Emmi, a graduate student in women’s studies, and dissertation director Sylvia Diaz. At stake is the definition, and to their way of thinking, the future of feminism. The connective thread is Emmi’s fascination with the late, under-regarded writer Zinnia, around whose life she pines to do her academic research. No dice, says Sylvia, dismissing Zinnia Wells as a forgettable crafter of horror whose immortalizing in a university library would do nothing to further the feminist fight. Playwright Adams is an intelligent, prodigious wordsmith, and it’s that talent that compensates for the deficiency in theatricality in Skinless, which finds Zinnia (an otherworldly Jo Anne Glover) reading aloud from her book much of the time. In addition, the office showdowns between Emmi (Anna Rebek) and Sylvia (Rhona Gold) are longer on polemics than on drama, but the questions they raise – about women, about power, about identity – are worthy ones. The set is literally divided in two: the bookish university office of the present on the left, the front porch of the house of Zinnia, her sisters and her unseen bedridden mother on the right. Lurking in the darkness of the siblings’ collective imagination are the skinless people. There is no definitive answer as to who they are. One possibility, we learn with the revealing of a horrific family secret, is a shocking one. Skinless should rely more on, if not shock value, than on atmosphere and timely silences, each in their way more eloquent than the pages of a novel or the platitudes of academia. Whether Henrik Ibsen intended A Doll’s House to be a proto-feminist work remains a topic for literary debate. But there’s no question that the tense and revelatory story is ultimately one of Nora Helmer’s self-awakening. Her discoveries, and the bold break she makes with her previous acquiescence, won’t stir an audience the way they did more than 130 years ago. But theater-goers can still be engrossed in Nora’s overdue metamorphosis. At the Old Globe, Kirsten Brandt directs a cogent production faithful to Ibsen’s sociopolitical commentary and at the same time indulgent of the play’s rich characters. Credit, too, Anne-Charlotte Hanes Harvey, with whom Brandt created this adaptation for the Sheryl and Harvey White stage. In their hands, A Doll’s House is far from a period piece.
As Nora, Gretchen Hall is prepossessing and very much in the buoyancy of a woman who, at the outset, believes that life is as good as it can get. She’s also agile and athletic when called for, and it’s mesmerizing to watch her Nora journey from near-flightiness to desperation to fierce resolve. Hall’s real-life husband, Fred Arsenault, makes Torvald Helmer proud and, in the end, clueless, without being an outright antagonist (though it’s hard to feel any sympathy for Torvald, who reaps what he sows). Richard Baird, a familiar presence on the San Diego theater scene, also avoids mere villainy as Krogstad, the discarded employee at Torvald’s bank who had loaned Nora money and is subsequently blackmailing her in an effort to regain his post. Admiring of both Torvald (his best friend) and Nora (whom he has admired deeply, from afar) is the dying Dr. Rank, vividly portrayed here by Jack Koenig, as both hapless and touching. The gentle sound of breaking waves, intermittent in this production, heightens the atmosphere of wintertime in Norway and is also a reminder of the constancy of life. The world goes on even as those briefly inhabiting it lust, deceive and connive. In tossing aside her flirtations and abandoning her submission to a man who does not know how to love her, Nora realizes her better self. This Globe staging, ruminative and then finally emphatic, makes Nora’s realization ours as well. The drag-fest that is She-Rantulas From Outer Space in 3D is so over the top it might as well be in outer space. But the wild-eyed screams, broad sight gags and what-the-hell plot aren’t much different than what you may remember from those belovedly bad sci-fi flicks from the ‘50s – you know, like The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman or It! The Terror From Beyond Space. Ruff Yeager and Phil Johnson co-wrote She-Rantulas, with Yeager directing at Diversionary Theatre and Johnson, in ‘50s flip hairdo, starring as beleaguered housewife Betty. Melinda Gilb, Andy Collins and Fred Harlow contribute dual or, in Gilb’s case, multiple roles, and Diversionary regular Tony Houck is achingly funny as Suzie, Betty’s daughter-slash-the She-Rantula. The alien antics are loud and go on a bit longer than need be in this one-act show, but wasn’t that true with those ‘50s sci-fi pictures we now so romanticize? Besides, you couldn’t get a 50-foot woman inside a theater.
The Amish Project is a tour de force for Iliana Carter, who plays multiple roles in Jessica Dickey’s one-woman play at Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company’s 10th Avenue Theatre. Clad in traditional Amish woman’s dress, apron and bonnet, Carter re-enacts the tragedy (and aftermath) of a 2006 shooting at a Pennsylvania schoolhouse that left five girls dead. With props as sparse as a schoolhouse blackboard and a hunk of chalk, Carter assumes practically from moment to moment the personas of the innocent schoolchildren, the gunman (who took his own life in the spree), the killer’s tormented widow and others in the village of Nickel Mines.
The constant shift in character is a testament to Carter’s commitment and versatility, though the impact of some of the portrayals is sacrificed in the process: the breakdown of the widow, for one. That pain says so much about the other victims of massacres like this one – the guilt-ridden survivors – and you want to absorb it and let it get inside you, over time. By play’s end, all of the Nickel Mines men, women and children may be a troubled jumble in your mind. Yet even if they are, you won’t forget them, and that’s what matters most. Its silly title belies what a cracking good play Bekah Brunstetter’s Be A Good Little Widow really is. Its commentaries on love, marriage, death and grieving are potent but not ponderous, and a talented four-person cast on the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White stage generates laughter, surprise and just the right number of lump-in-your-throat moments. Primary among them is the good little widow herself, Zoe Winters, whose Melody is fun to watch even when she’s suffering. (She loses her young husband, Craig, in a plane crash.) Not only is Winters gifted at the art of physical comedy, but her wide-eyed double takes are ideally suited to the play’s shifting light and darkness. As the lost Craig’s tightly controlled mother, Hope, Christine Estabrook is free-spirited Melody’s polar opposite, yet both are torn apart and need each other more than either would admit. The one-act evolution of their relationship in the midst of mourning is what makes Be A Good Little Widow so damned good.
|
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
April 2024
Categories |
David Coddon |
|