Susan Clausen stars in "Donna Orbits the Moon."                                                      Photo by Ken Jacques

            It’s clear very early on in “Donna Orbits the Moon” that its protagonist, a gooseberry-blondie-baking suburban housewife who sounds like Marge Gunderson from “Fargo,” is not herself. She slaps a fellow shopper at the supermarket. She chases a motorist who cut her off until she runs out of gas. She tries to assault a woman at church with a Bible.
            But what seems at first like major anger management issues turns out to be far more complicated in Scripps Ranch Theatre’s production of Ian August’s 2011 one-person play. When Donna (Susan Clausen) begins hearing the disembodied voice of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin telling her that she “must go up before you can land,” she’s crossed over into, as Rod Serling famously narrated, “the Twilight Zone.”
            The 90-minute-long “Donna Orbits the Moon,” however, is not science fiction or supernatural drama. The truths of Donna’s life and the explanation for her outbursts and mental torment become more and more tangible – and understandable -- as the story unfolds.
            Scripps Ranch Theatre first presented “Donna Orbits the Moon” during the pandemic shutdown of local theaters, with Clausen starring and Kandace Crystal directing in a streaming production. This onstage reiteration also directed by Crystal allows them to enhance the storytelling with sound design and projections (by Ted Leib) in the small theater on the Alliant University campus and to present a more fluid space for the actor to move – a must for a one-person show reliant upon that one-on-one between performer and audience.
            For at least the first half of “Donna Orbits the Moon” Donna’s misbehavior can be interpreted as ornery eccentricity and her delusions fanciful. Even though it isn’t long before her unseen husband Gil begins urging her to “go to the hospital.” (Also unseen are the couple’s grown children Terry and Charley.)
            A seemingly benign trip to the library in search of books on astronaut Aldrin, who was the second man to walk on the moon in 1969, is a pivot point. One children’s book on Aldrin in particular will lead the growingly desperate Donna to the light.
            Though August wrote the play years ago, its lunar shadings are quite relevant, with NASA’s Artemis program planning a mission to orbit the moon sometime this year and the first manned landing since 1972 eyed for next year or in 2028.  Still, the moon and space devices of the script feel somewhat strained to me, and I admittedly puzzled on them until that aforementioned visit to the library Donna makes.
            That aside, this production is a grand achievement for Clausen, whose unflagging energy, knack for comedy and ultimate baring of soul make Donna a fully realized person whose personal trauma is shared by all too many people. To say more would be to undermine the stages of Donna’s journey for audiences at SRT.
            Seeing “Donna Orbit the Moon” reminded me of something Aldrin once said about whether he took for granted his magnificent lunar adventure: “Just imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing the moon and thinking: I have been there.”
            “Donna Orbits the Moon” runs through Feb. 15 at Scripps Ranch Theatre.

Wendy Hovland portrays a health teacher presiding over an important class in "Everything You Need To Know About Abortion In One Hour Or Less."                                        Photo courtesy of TuYo Theatre

            Woe to reside in Oklahoma. Among the 50 states, it’s eighth-lowest in median household income. Its schools are required in social science classes to teach that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. With very, very few exceptions, abortion is banned.
            It’s not alone when it comes to the latter. Currently, Oklahoma is one of 12 U.S. states that enforces strict bans on abortion.
            “Everything You Need To Know About Abortion In One Hour Or Less” is set in an Oklahoma high school. The socially conscious play written by five American playwrights (Justice Hehir, Dena Igusti, Phanesia Pharel, Nia Akilah Robinson and Julia Specht) calling themselves the Wish Collective is being presented in nine locations throughout the county by TuYo Theatre.
            The title’s off just a tad: The production, set on a high school campus in a locked classroom, runs five minutes longer than an hour, and maybe it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about abortion, but it must come close. Every moment is maximized, as in the play a dauntless health science teacher (Wendy Hovland) and an equally committed athletics coach (Matthew Martinez Hannon) enlighten a group of teen students about women’s productive rights, resources, realities vs. fears and propaganda, and about how to provide presence and emotional support for those having an abortion.
            There’s even a lesson delivered with the help of an overhead projector (remember those?) that demonstrates to the students how deeply into human history abortion has existed and takes them up to where we are today in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. That same overhead projector is utilized to teach the teens about medical resources and referrals. On the interpersonal side, students are enlisted to role-play, to learn how to care for each other in abortion scenarios.
            The content is open and frank. The human drama in the play beneath all the teaching and myth-busting emerges in the back stories of the coach and of one of the young students. A little more would add some needed theatricality to the play, though admittedly in an hour there isn’t a lot of time for character expansion.
            The young actors are quite believable. They could be high school teens anywhere in America, not just in Oklahoma. If there’s anything at all that strains credibility it’s that not one cell phone, in any of their hands, is ever seen. But then maybe these fictional kids were asked to stow them before class. The listening was and is too important.
            On the evening I attended a performance, at Bayfront Charter High School in Chula Vista, I was the only male in the audience. It got me to thinking, as I departed afterward in the drizzling rain, that what “Everything You Need To Know About Abortion In One Hour Or Less” has to say isn’t just for females. We all need education and insight, and reminders to care without judgment.
            “Everything You Need To Know About Abortion In One Hour Or Less” will be presented through Jan. 28 at various locations. Go to the TuYo Theatre website for days, sites and times: tuyotheatre.org.

:Lauren King Thompson (left) and Deborah Gilmour Smyth in "The Trip to Bountiful." Photo by JT McMillan

            These days kindness is in very short supply.
            But it’s there in Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” which Lamb’s Players Theatre is staging for the first time in more than 30 years. The fearless and determined journey that the elderly Carrie Watts makes from the unhappy Houston home she lives in with her devoted son and self-absorbed daughter-in-law from to her roots in fictional Bountiful, Texas, is made easier – and more tender for her, and for the audience – by the assistance of a fellow passenger on the bus and by a small-town sheriff.
            Carrie is a woman really without guile, and though she resides in an idealized past of cotton fields and chirping birds and big, blue skies there’s no blaming her for that – the present, in the company of a domineering daughter-in-law and a kind but spineless son, is without comfort.
            Lamb’s Associate Artistic Director Deborah Gilmour Smyth portrayed that unsympathetic daughter in law, Jessie Mae, when the company produced “The Trip to Bountiful” for the first time in 1991 in Lamb’s’ pre-Coronado days. Then, as now, Foote’s 1953 classic enjoyed the subtle direction of Robert Smyth, Lamb’s’ artistic director.
            Gilmour Smyth continues to prove one of the San Diego theater community’s most affecting, intuitive and tireless actors. Just a few months after delivering such a performance as a woman descending into dementia in Backyard Renaissance’s “The Waverly Gallery” she brings to the Lamb’s stage a Carrie Watts such as Foote must have intended, a woman of grit and spirit aching for inner peace and for home. 
            The trick to producing “The Trip to Bountiful” as I see it is to avoid sentimentality. The combination of Gilmour Smyth’s nuanced performance and a decidedly more minimalist staging allows the quiet moments of the play (and there are many of them, mostly between Carrie and her son, beautifully played by Andrew Oswald, and between her and fellow bus passenger Thelma, a very good Lauren King Thompson) to sink in.
            The noise is generated, as written, by the domineering Jessie Mae Watts. Kelsey Venter generates plenty of that, but also the kind of nervous laughter that comes with encountering a character so wholly without understanding for spouse, or certainly for mother-in-law. Jessie Mae treats Carrie like a child whom she can bully.
            Lance Arthur Smith’s turn as a sheriff with a heart is brief but memorable, while Spencer Gerber makes the most out of an obliging ticket agent.
            The integrity of Foote’s play, so fully realized at Lamb’s, is its power to make us “see” Bountiful in all its faded beauty and desiccated dreams. When Gilmour Smyth’s Carrie looks to the rafters at the sound of her beloved birds we can believe they are treetops hovering over a town-gone-by in the Texas nowhere.
            “The Trip to Bountiful” runs through March 1 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.

Faline England and James Sutorius in "Louisa Gillis."                                               Photo by Aaron Rumley

            Louisa Gillis is dead, by her own design, in Joanna McClelland Glass’ new play by the same name. But the enigmatic Louisa resides in every character onstage in this world premiere at North Coast Repertory Theatre.
            Celia (Faline England), her surviving daughter, is an alcoholic wounded deep inside by the neglect of Louisa, who pawned her off on a sister and who banished Celia’s father whom Louisa deemed guilty of “moral turpitude.”
            Celia’s own daughter Lucy (Caroline Renee) may be once removed from the darkness of Louisa, but she is now the child of a drunk, and there’s enough evidence psychological and societal to know what a curse that can be.
            Louisa’s banished spouse Steven (James Sutorius) moved on long before granddaughter Lucy was born, and though he’s enjoyed a 40-year second marriage to a woman of heart and substance (Denise Young, as Helga), his bitterness and bile about Wife No. 1 infuses much of his attitude as he nears the end of his life – and it is in no small part the cause of a nasty, broken relationship with Celia.
            This is melodrama. This is family dysfunction. This is, as director David Ellenstein described it in an interview I did with him for The San Diego Union-Tribune, “familial morass.”
            “Louisa Gillis” is North Coast Rep’s second go-round with a play by Glass, whose “Trying” was produced for streaming during the pandemic-necessitated shutdown of live theater. The playwright has worked closely with Ellenstein and his company in bringing this new work to the stage. Like so many world premieres it could use some paring here and there, and the absence of an intermission (not sure why) makes “Louisa Gillis” feel long when it really isn’t.
            As with North Coast Rep’s streaming version of “Trying,” Sutorius is at the forefront (though England gets the last bow after the play ends). His performance as an elderly man losing a grip is more reminiscent, however, of his outstanding turn in Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” which Ellenstein directed in its West Coast premiere in Solana Beach in 2018. That also marked Sutorius’ first performance at NC Rep.
            He creates an even richer character in “Louisa Gillis.” Steven may be tired and bitter and more and more betrayed by his declining physicality, but the longtime college professor and student of mankind retains the words of Shakespeare as if they were etched on his soul, enough humor to cut through the ever-tightening tensions of his old age, and undying affection for faithful Helga.
            Cranky as he is, Steven’s the kind of man of letters and musing that this college professor would like to have had as a grandpa. Sutorius brought that home to me.
            Structurally, “Louisa Gillis” is divided into scenes of confrontation: the whole family at the outset, then variously and not necessarily in this order Steven and Helga, Celia and Lucy, Lucy and Helga, Steven and Celia, etc. There’s rancor in most, tenderness in few.
            Once the fractured relationships have been established, the principal conflict of the play  is revealed: A letter written by Louisa and entrusted to her attorneys decrees that upon Steven’s death he is to be buried beside her and her family, Helga’s wishes be damned.
            It’s a stipulation that appalls everyone except Celia: She’s so ridden with guilt and resentment (and so “in love” with “Johnny,” her regular bottle of Johnny Walker) that she’s torn between being true to her mother’s request in spite of the pain that was caused to her, and being contrarian, especially when her insulting father is involved.
            I have a little trouble with the crux of the conflict: If Louisa charged Steven with moral turpitude and cast him away, why would a judge or jury in a theoretical “custody fight” over Steven’s ashes award them to the woman who scorned him when the other side was someone who had loved him and been his companion for four decades?
            Maybe I missed something.
            “Louisa Gillis” is set in a Connecticut haven for elders, which Steven hotly resents. He’s clinging to the New York City apartment where he and Helga shared their independence and their happier years. Making it worse is that because Celia inherited all the money left by her mother, she’s pulling the purse strings and it’s she who is responsible for her father (and Helga, whom she despises) living in a place where an unseen beefy doorman makes sure that Steven doesn’t wander off, or flee.
            If the script could use some massaging, the performances are solid. Sutorius rules every scene he’s in. England is tasked with being a slaphappy drunk more than a despairing, broke-down one, and her moments with her “Johnny” sometimes can feel a bit caricatured. There are quite a few laughs in “Louisa Gillis,” grim as its circumstances might be, but I’ve never found alcoholism humor very funny.
            Renee’s Lucy is the grown-up in the room much of the time – certainly so when it’s just she and her reeling mother. She’s got a nice stage presence.
            At first, Young has little to do as Helga tries to keep Steven from losing it with Celia, but as the story goes on she brings the manner of warmth and understanding and grit that Glass certainly intended for the character. She fittingly ends up being the conscience of the play.
            The literary quality of the script in part is what Ellenstein has said attracted him to “Louisa Gillis,” and it is indeed a story often told in the rich voice of someone who knows the words of Shakespeare and other great scribes.
            One suggestion for revision: Steven tells Helga, as he knows his death is coming, that he’d like to have a phone conversation with God. He even says he’d be doing it “on Monday.” We never hear the conversation.
            It’s one I’d like to hear, even if it was one-sided.
            “Louisa Gillis” runs through Feb. 8 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

Jamaelya Hines and Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger in "Red Light Winter."  Bernadette Johnson / Narrative Photography

            OnWord Theatre’s season-opening production of Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter” is courageously performed and uncompromisingly directed.
            If only it were a better play.
            I pay no attention to who or what won or was nominated for Pulitzer Prizes, so I’ll put aside the fact that Rapp’s autobiographically inspired piece was a finalist in 2006. (No award for drama was ultimately given that year.) Taken purely on its own narrative integrity, “Red Light Winter” is provocative in the rawest sense (that’s fine) and dialogue rich (the same), but it’s also misogynistic, muddled and rife with incongruities.
            Rapp himself has called the play based on his own experience – and a friend’s – in Amsterdam in which they enlisted one of that city’s notorious window prostitutes in what turns out to be a game of sex-for-hire and one-upmanship. In the play’s second act, which takes place a year later in New York, the doings are darker, stranger and more brutal.
            The players are two versions of the Rapp of 20 years ago himself – Matt, an awkward, perpetual-graduate-student sort who lives in an internal eddy of swirling self-consciousness, a struggling playwright who regards Henry Miller with awe and his own sexuality with dread; and Davis, a totally unharried, passive-aggressive hedonist who seemingly knows no moral bounds. That these two were ever buddies at Ivy League Brown (for where else would literary types matriculate?) and roommates abroad is just one stretch of belief in “Red Light Winter.”
            Christina, the prostitute who Davis brings “home” to the long-celibate Matt (a lark, a ruse, or a compensation for having married the woman who’d broken up with his pal three years before?), is initially a type and a trope. Eventually she is revealed as a more layered and human character, and honestly the only sympathetic one in the play.
            Director Marti Gobel, a co-founder of the fledgling OnWord Theatre (with Danielle Bunch and Jamaelya Hines, who is touching and restrained playing Christina here), has championed “Red Light Winter” for its audacity and shock value. There is some nudity and simulated sex, which if not staged in the little Light Box Theater in Liberty Station with the audience quite close would not be all that audacious and shocking. Rather, it’s the undercurrent of despair, delusion and cruelty (the latter from the Davis character) that is most unsettling about this play. Sex is demystified and degraded, friendship polluted. No conscience, unselfishness or better angels here.
            The whys nag. Why, really, is Matt “attempting” to hang himself at the start of the tale? Why did Christina really turn to prostitution in Amsterdam’s Red Light District? Why did a 15-second snippet of sex with her transform Matt into a scary obsessive? Why is Davis so g-damned bad?
            Why don’t any of these three recognize each other upon meeting again in Act 2? It’d only been a year. I’ll take a stab at Rapp’s thinking here – their interactions in Amsterdam were so empty and, at least in Davis’ and Christina’s cases, piled upon so many other empty interactions that no face or memory could stand out.
            But with all this left to one’s speculation and confusion, how is it possible to give a damn about Matt or Christina? We’ll leave Davis out.
            The hooker who is more than meets the eye is a tired dramatic chestnut, and Rapp doesn’t do anything especially intrepid with it here. Matt’s a mess, let’s tell it like it is. Davis is one of many Davises in the world of the supremely self-involved, self-indulgent.
            Here’s the strength of OnWord’s production of a play that to me is so problematic: we can’t look away.
            Gobel’s direction allows events, such as they are, to play out at a slow boil. There’s no race to climaxes, of any kind, and she and her actors know how to utilize and effect silences amid all of Rapp’s dervish of words.
            As Matt, Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger mines the sweetness in a character that is ever on the verge of being swallowed up by panicky self-doubt and practically hallucination. Further, his verbal dexterity with Rapp’s dialogue – and monologue – demonstrate an understanding of Matt that I wish I had.
            Ibraheem Farmer is a newcomer to San Diego stages but has worked with Gobel before in the Midwest. He’s all over the Davis character -- brash and cocky and manipulative as written – and by far the most animated figure onstage. Matt can seem numb, Christina frozen. But Davis? Always in motion, wheels ever turning, the malice lurking.
            Understandably, Hines, like the character she’s playing, is the most vulnerable on the stage. She is poised, and she is somehow credible in a narrative that is not.
            There was an improv class going on down the hall from the Light Box Theater the night I attended. It was ringing with laughter and ebullience. I only heard it during intermission, but it was the sound of another world.
            “Red Light Winter” runs through Jan. 24 at the Light Box Theater in Liberty Station, Point Loma.