Percussive is the best word for The Brothers Size. Before the one-act play by Tarell Alvin McCraney even begins, you are immersed in the feverish drumming of onstage musician Jonathan Melville Pratt, who, accompanied by louder, recorded beats, fills the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre with the singular rhythm of the South. Once the story of two brothers in the Louisiana bayou country kicks in, the vibrations emanate from three young actors in top form: Joshua Elijah Reese and Okieriete Onaodowan as siblings Ogun and Oshoosi Size, respectively, and Antwayn Hopper as the mysterious Elegba, They appear, reappear and square off two at a time inside a circle of white chalk. Oshoosi, just out of prison, wants to forget his past and change his course while in the grip of dangerous impulse and the influence of Elegba. Ogun, who fixes cars, wants to fix his brother but has no idea how.
The Brothers Size, directed by Tea Alagic, is ultimately about love, but it’s difficult to make an emotional connection with Ogun and Oshoosi. Possibly the parameters– actors announce their arrivals and departures, and they improvise (though inventively) on a stage without props – remind us that, as in a Brechtian world – we are watching a play and as such not completely given over to these characters.
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It’s not enough to be good at your craft. You have to be good at your relationship, too. That’s more than photojournalist Sarah can handle in Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still. But who can blame her? Her face and body are collaterally damaged on assignment overseas, and when her journalist boyfriend James brings her home, walking cane, bandages and all, he’s hovering lover her like one of those choppers back in the war zone.
But is Sarah too obsessed with her work for a meaningful relationship (or marriage, which James decides he wants)? Or is James, who’s replaced his own emotional scars from covering the world’s ugliness with cooking and watching old movies on Netflix, unreasonably trying to change Sarah? These are the uneasy and paramount questions of Marguiles’ 2009 play, which is getting a snappy and intelligently realized production at the North Coast Rep under the direction of David Ellenstein. The cast of four is led by New Yorker Mhari Sandoval as Sarah, a role played on Broadway by Laura Linney. Sandoval projects all the grit and passion of a hardened photojournalist, one for whom time stands still, as the title goes, when her critical image is in focus. As James, Francis Gercke exudes the appropriate concern and exasperation, though the character itself seems no match for Sarah in intensity. John Nutten and Stacey Hardke lighten the domestic drama (when not comically heightening it) as editor Richard and events planner/eventual supermom Mandy, whose May-December romance is as dewy-eyed as Sarah and James’ is desperate. The foibles of love and commitment aside, Time Stands Still stands tallest when its inhabitants compel us to confront the questions of a journalist’s role (whether to document the dark world or to try to change it) and whether it is better to accept grim reality and brood about it or to take Mandy’s attitude that lemonade can be made out of lemons. My words, not hers, but you get the idea. Margulies’ smart script proffers no pat answers. Nor does the North Coast Rep staging force any upon us. You can easily foresee the play’s resolution, but getting to it is a thought-provoking exercise. Playwright David Wiener’s Extraordinary Chambers may not be altogether extraordinary (it’s the least bit overwrought in places), but it is a tense, contemplative work comprised of moments that chill you to the marrow. Like when the bespectacled Cambodian guide Sopoan (Albert Park) recounts hiding his glasses from the Khmer Rouge, to whom reading was a crime worthy of execution. Or when the naïve American businessman Carter Dean (Manny Fernandes) first confronts the horrifying truth about his host in Phnom Penh, Dr. Heng (Greg Watanabe). The impact of these revelations linger.
In Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company’s production of Extraordinary Chambers at the 10th Avenue Theatre downtown, you become immersed in Wiener’s narrative – a story of restless strangers in a strange land – only to learn just as Carter and his wife do that the victims and survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime are omnipresent, in flesh or in spirit. Though an estimated 1.7 million (the number is probably much higher) died in the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields in the ‘70s, this incredibly grim chapter in human history remains obscure to many people. Extraordinary Chambers (the title refers to a tribunal empowered to bring culpable Khmer Rouge members to justice) is a potent reminder. Mo’olelo’s Seema Sueko directs a committed cast highlighted by Watanabe, who in a previous Geffen Playhouse production of Extraordinary Chambers portrayed Sopoan and here tackles Dr. Heng, and Esther K. Chae, an enigmatic and secretive presence as Heng’s wife, Rom Chang. Fernandes and Erika Beth Phillips as Carter’s wife, Mara, are less engrossing figures, but how they grapple with the story’s questions of loss, longing, moral conscience and guilt is central to understanding why what happened in Cambodia is not just a tragedy for the Cambodians. Albert Park’s Sopoan speaks for the haunted and tortured for whom the killing fields will never be as fleeting as a nightmare. His well-timed monologues and his second-act interrogation speak to the desperation and devastation that the Khmer Rouge left in its wake. His is also this production’s most understated and ultimately resonant performance. There’s more than one penguin encounter in town. Diversionary Theatre in University Heights is staging the West Coast premiere of Marc Acito’s one-act play Birds of a Feather, the story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who are given an egg to hatch, and subsequently a chick to raise. It’s based on a true story and on the 2005 children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, that popularized the same-gender penguin parenting and incited many a moralizing conservative. Steve Gunderson and Mike Sears, each a gifted comedic actor strong on physicality, hilariously inhabit the penguin roles without seeming silly. They do double duty as a hetero (the implication is that male parents Roy and Silo are gay) hawk couple, Pale Male and Lola. Gunderson and Sears both indulge a moment as Roy and Silo’s grown chick as well.
Where Birds of a Feather strays is when the focus turns to its four human characters, all played by Rachael VanWormer and Kevin Koppman-Gue. These include network newscaster Paula Zahn, her husband, a zookeeper and a birdwatcher. The charm, wit and innate drama of Acito’s play (he also wrote the book for last year’s potent Allegiance at the Old Globe) resides in those two penguin characters more than in the tribulations (however true) and retrospections of mere humans. Perhaps it’s because weddings are so grounded in decorum that playwrights and screenwriters and dinner-theater producers are compelled to hurl them into chaos. They take a day in which it’s critical that everything goes right and wring laughter from it by having everything go wrong. What a scream!
So we have British actor/playwright Robin Hawdon’s Perfect Wedding, on stage at the North Coast Rep. Matthew Wiener, who directed an uproarious Lend Me A Tenor at the Solana Beach theater two years ago, is at the helm again. But this full-volume farce is nowhere near as appealing. Perfect Wedding has the same scrambling about the stage from room to room, mistaken identities and frozen double takes as Tenor, and the pace is just as appropriately frantic, so why does it all become so exhausting? The serpentine story line for a start. Groom-to-be Bill (Christopher M. Williams, Max in that 2011 Lend Me A Tenor) wakes up on the morning of his wedding day in bed with Judy (Brenda Dodge), whom he doesn’t remember falling into the sack with the night before. Best man Tom (Jason Maddy) arrives and is wheedled by a hyperventilating Bill into pretending, for the sake of about-to-arrive bride-to-be Rachel (Amanda Schaar), that the strange girl belongs to him. Only Tom mistakes the chambermaid (Kerry McCue) for the strange girl, not knowing that the real strange girl is his actual date for the wedding. In spite of all these hapless complications, it basically turns out to be a bug-eyed game of hide and seek: Hide the bad girl from the good girl. Or is it the good girl from the bad girl? Oh, to hell with it. Kudos to the cast for its nonstop energy throughout. McCue, as the maid drawn into the mess armed only with a toilet brush, is the clear audience favorite, though her eye-rolling is overworked (but less so than Linda Van Zandt’s fingernails-on-chalkboard “Here Comes the Bride” refrain --one time would have been enough from the mom-of-the-bride character). Perfect Wedding rises above its imperfections based on its sweetness and cuteness, and even with a rumpled bridal-suite bed on stage the whole time, the tale is never very risqué. It beats going to a real wedding, unless of course it’s your own. The term “dramedy,” signifying a mingling of drama and comedy, had yet to be coined back when Shakespeare was being so prolific. Had it been, some critic in the Bard’s day might have dubbed The Merchant of Venice a dramedy. While the play possesses the familiar devices of Shakespearean comedies – quarreling lovers, cross-dressing, cutting quips – it traffics deeply in themes of prejudice, persecution, revenge and retribution. In the Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival production, Miles Anderson delivers a soaring performance as Shylock, the Jewish money lender. The full breadth of that performance largely overshadows everything else in this staging (directed by Adrian Noble), lush though it may be.
Death on a broad scale is examined at ion theatre, which is staging Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-nominated Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. Set in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, Joseph’s volatile drama traffics in guilt and ghosts. The central figure and truth-seeker is a tiger (Ron Choularton) wearing not stripes but rags. He prowls the stage, challenging God to explain or justify the way things are, violent and inexplicable as they seem to be. His rants are funnier and somehow more incisive coming from a “tiger,” though they feel at times stagy. Brian Abraham’s Arab gardener, Musa, is the play’s most sympathetic character: He’s a topiary artist, a reluctant go-between in the real and afterlife mayhem in Baghdad, and the purveyor of playwright Joseph’s weightiest words.
Claudio Raygoza, who also appears as Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, directs a charged cast that includes Jake Rosko and Evan Kendig as American soldiers who succumb to the lure of Saddam’s ill-gotten gold and to self-destruction. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is thick with symbolism, but it’s also a story of man and beast, and how it’s hard to tell the two apart. What happened after Hedda Gabler shot herself in the head? The answer, according to playwright Jeff Whitty (Avenue Q), is The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler. The 2006 play, which premiered at the South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, unfolds at Diversionary Theatre like a literary-minded sketch show, with Hedda-in-the-hereafter (Jacque Wilke) meeting other notables victimized by the whims of their authors, including Margaret Mitchell’s Mammy (Yolanda Franklin) and Euripedes’ Medea (Shana Wride). Can Hedda break free of Ibsen? Can Mammy trade her apron for a mini-dress? Can you have too many Jesuses on one stage at the same time? The insights and humor feel rather labored, and you don’t care too much how any of these questions is answered.
Venus in Fur isn’t nearly as kinky as it pretends to be. But it is pretty damned funny. Credit playwright David Ives, who skewers literary pedants and gender dynamics in a single deft stroke, and who created the memorable Vanda Jordan – actress, dominatrix, goddess. In the San Diego Repertory’s current production of Venus in Fur, Caroline Kinsolving is an hysterical force of nature as leather-clad, dog collar-wearing Vanda, who’s more than a match for uptight, pretentious playwright Thomas Novachek (Jeffrey Meek). As Vanda, who is auditioning for the lead role in Novachek’s play that he swears is NOT about S&M, Kinsoving ping-pongs from earthy wisecracker to 19th-century m’lady and still finds time to swing from a pole like a pro. The latter earned her a burst of applause on opening night from the Rep audience, demonstrating better critical reception than Elizabeth Berkley got in “Showgirls.”
Kinsolving and Meek thrust and parry for an hour and a half on stage in the Rep’s compact, barely furnished Lyceum Space, play-acting and changing costumes (though Kinsolving is mostly in fetish-wear) and even swapping genders near the end. The closest they ever come to the aforementioned kinky is Meek’s zipping up a writhing Kinsolving’s thigh-high boots while she writhes on a fainting couch. (That’s the extent of any comparison between this play and Kinky Boots.) There are narrative suggestions throughout that Vanda Jordan may not be whom she first appears to be, and the otherworldly finale implies the downright mythological. Take these clues for what they are. Co-directors Kim Rubinstein and the Rep’s Sam Woodhouse keep Venus in Fur from careening off track, though in Kinsolving and Meek they have a pair of actors who clearly have a feel for Ives’ play. Woodhouse told the opening night audience before curtain that Venus in Fur is the most produced play in America this year, and that’s not a big surprise. From the theaters’ standpoint it must be relatively inexpensive to produce, and for audiences it’s 90-something minutes of laughs naughty enough to inspire après-show romancing – or fantasizing as the case may be. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the only one to have a gun pointed at him in a theater. Should you find yourself in the audience at Cygnet Theatre’s Assassins, you will have six or seven guns pointed at you, only nobody pulls the trigger. The disconcertion is only one byproduct of this moderately subversive musical by Stephen Sondheim (with a book by John Weidman) that tells the tales of America’s most notorious slayers and would-be slayers of chief executives, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. Cygnet’s Sean Murray directs a vigorous staging that intermittently shocks, amuses and explicates. That it never finds a consistent tone is not so much the shortcoming of this production as it is Sondheim and Weidman’s original work, first produced 23 years ago. A few sequences impress and disturb on a profound level (Hinckley’s twisted ode to Jodie Foster and “Squeaky” Fromme’s even more twisted ode to Charlie Manson, “Unworthy of Your Love” or the other assassins’ enticement of Lee Oswald to join their ranks). But Assassins careens from carnival shooting gallery to, in the case of McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz (Jason Maddy), haunted gunman of dark conviction, to broad comic pratfalls (Melissa Fernandes as Fromme and Melinda Gilb as fellow Gerald Ford stalker Sara Jane Moore).
It’s not until the last half-hour, when the sights are set on Oswald (Jacob Caltrider) and that November day in Dallas that Assassins crystallizes. The post-assassination “Something Just Broke” brings heartache to what had been a more calculated narrative, an intent to remind us that behind every assassin’s malevolence is a troubled or misguided human being, that as the show’s principal tune decrees “Everybody’s Got the Right” (to be happy). Assassins’ deft cast also includes Braxton Molinaro as the stentorian Booth and Kurt Norby, eerily moving as Hinckley. The invaluable Sandy Campbell is here, too, though other than a brief turn as immigrant anarchist Emma Goldman, she doesn’t get enough to do. Be prepared: Assassins is a lengthy-one-act musical. The hanging of Garfield killer Charles Guiteau (Carr) would have made a dramatic halfway pause, but the show goes on. No rest for the armed and deadly. |
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
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