Marti Gobel in "we are continuous."                                                                  Photo by Talon Reed Cooper

            Time-wise, “we are continuous” is ambiguously set in “Now and Here” according to the program distributed at performances at Diversionary Theatre, which is staging Harrison David Rivers’ one-act play. While the script feels very much out of the late 1980s, there’s a timelessness about this taut family drama that examines acceptance (and lack thereof), the resiliency of hope, and the love between partners and between a mother and son.
            That’s a lot of ground to tread in only 80 minutes. But about one-third into the story, when all to that point has seemed happy-happy-joy-joy between a mother (Marti Gobel), her son (Elliot Sagay) and the son’s husband (Eli Wood), the crises and the conflicts of “we are continuous” come to the fore. While the mother, Ora, is day by day coming to terms with her beloved son Simon’s sexuality, her unseen husband is having none of it and has gone so drastic as to search for evidence that Simon’s choices are the result of some prior sexual abuse or impropriety.
            This intolerance and denial leaves Ora and Simon struggling on their own terms to maintain what has been a lifelong loving relationship, and Simon and husband Abe feeling like shunned outsiders.
            When an even more dramatic crisis arrives, the stakes of this play are heightened threefold, as is the threat to the already fragile connection between mother and son.
            Rivers has crafted “we are continuous” as an amalgam of in-the-moment scenes and recurring monologues delivered by Ora, Simon and Abe. Some are expository, designed to move the story along from each character’s individual perspective. Others – and those that are most effective – are reflective and soul-baring. It’s a theatrical strategy that I found a little bumpy. I was far more invested in “we are continuous” when the characters are interacting in whatever combination than was I in monologues that can come off as stagey.
            Regardless of the play’s structure, Diversionary’s production is enhanced by the fierce and sympathetic presence of Gobel as Ora and, complementing her, Sagay as Simon. The “we” in “we are continuous” has to be mother and son, who no matter what will share a devotion that rises above.
            Meanwhile with nuance and sincerity, Wood enables the Abe character to become more than an understanding lover-turned-husband.
            Director Kian Kline-Chilton, in making his Diversionary debut, has been in conversation with playwright Rivers and as such demonstrates his comprehension of the arc of “we are continuous” and its emotional flash points, which though we may suspect are coming nonetheless arrive with suddenness and impact.
            It was Rivers, a friend and collaborator of Diversionary Artistic Director Sherri Eden Barber, who first recommended that position to her after the departure of Matt Morrow from the helm of the University Heights company. So it makes sense that Rivers’ “we are continuous,” which premiered in 2022 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, would be among the first productions of Barber’s stewardship. Even with the uneasy melding of monologue and action its presence at Diversionary is auspicious and its love story an important and perceptive one.
            “We are continuous” runs through March 9 at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights.

            It’s been said that in Ishinomaki, a Japanese town ravaged by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and its resulting aftershocks and tsunamis, that drivers of taxis encountered ghost passengers in the back seats of their cabs. This is the point of exploration of Keiko Green’s world premiere “Empty Ride.”
            The one-act play at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre is the product of a Globe commission and appears a year after it was workshopped at its annual Powers New Voices Festival. Green’s “ghost story” as she has called it is a thoughtful and mostly understated reflection on what’s left behind after death, and on that thin line existing between this world and the next.
            For a ghost story it’s not especially scary, nor does it bid to be. “Empty Ride” has its sudden, startling shocks, most of them invisibles facilitated by Avi Amon’s sound design, Mextly Couzin’s lighting and an anxiety that accompanies driving a taxi at night through unfamiliar streets, or simply being in the dark. That anxiety is heightened by the deliberate pacing forged by director Sivan Battat.
            As with any effective storytelling apt to chill the spine, “Empty Ride” relies upon what we don’t see rather than what we do.
            That these disturbances come in a theater-in-the-round  with ostensibly nowhere to hide is part of the ingenuity of this staging.
            The taxi driver in “Empty Ride” is young Kisa (Michele Selene Ang), an artist from Paris, who has returned to her hometown of Ishinomaki five years after a tsunami all but leveled it and in the process swept away her mother. Her father (Jojo Gonzalez) is weak and very ill and still consumed by grief. Kisa dons a cab-driving uniform and takes over his one-man business – after having been instructed to transport fares only in the daylight hours.
            The fiercely independent Kisa departs from this advice soon, and it’s by night that she hears if not sees things she cannot explain, things that rattle her to the core.
            A figure, if not a ghost, from her past enters the picture when in picking up a fare, Kisa rediscovers Toru (Major Curda), a young man with whom she may or may not have been romantically involved. There is room for doubt. Beside Toru and completely in charge of him -- and seemingly everything around her -- is his sister Sachiko (Jully Lee), a real estate pro who seeks to revitalize the devastated town, and to make lots of money while she’s at it. Part of doing so will directly impact Kisa and her father, adding another layer of conflict to what might or might not develop between Kisa and the eager, likable Toru.
            Playwright Green’s other character is an American, Alex (David Rosenberg), who lives next door to Kisa’s father and has been looking after him – nowhere near to her satisfaction. Alex has been given a monologue articulating what he swears was being haunted by the unseen in Ishinomaki.
            To recount how this all plays out would be to spoil “Empty Ride’s” denouement, one not entirely unexpected but nevertheless lovely and contemplative.
            Of note is how the illusion of a taxi in motion is accomplished in this show; it’s as if somehow in this confined space we’re in the back seat of Kisa’s cab ourselves.
            Ang’s genuinely human performance is equaled by Gonzalez’s, though he has far less stage time. Curda’s Toru tamps down the cockiness at just the right junctures. Lee’s character is the broadest, though this establishes an important contrast between brother and sister, and, in their own confrontation, between Kisa and Sachiko.
            In spite of his harrowing ghost story, the Alex character feels the least essential – that’s no slighting of Rosenberg’s portrayal.   
            A story at first simple but quickly vast and searching, “Empty Ride” is further demonstration of the prodigious Green’s imagination and perceptiveness. It’s also quite a ride.
            “Empty Ride” runs through March 2 on the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Stage in Balboa Park.

PHOTO OF MICHELE SELENE ANG BY RICH SOUBLET II

Alan Rust and Rosina Reynolds in "Other Desert Cities."                                       Karli Cadel Photography

            Having now seen Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” twice – 12 years ago at the Old Globe and just Saturday night at Cygnet Theatre – I’m convinced that this is a tense drama that succeeds more because of its actors than its script.
            In Baitz’s 2011 play, daughter Brooke Wyeth’s yuletide visit to her parents’ home in Palm Springs in order to get their approval for her soon-to-be-published, damning family memoir is muddled, motivationally speaking. She’s a grown woman, albeit with a troubled past. So why does she really care about their approval? Her relationship with them, owing to political and more serious familial issues, has been long difficult; and does she show up with this red-hot memoir, one painting her parents as “monsters,” as strident mother Polly Wyeth refers to it, actually believing they won’t freak?
            More lacking in the narrative is the reason why Brooke was driven to substance abuse and to the brink of suicide, and is still obsessed on a daily basis she says, with the brother she lost. A brother who went down those roads himself, was complicit in a deadly act of political statement-making, and did commit suicide? She spends much of Act One aching out loud about how she and Henry were soulmates, emotionally inseparable. But it isn’t until the very end of “Other Desert Cities,” in a postscript scene, that we’re told how the two siblings were so very close.
            “Other Desert Cities” is also overstuffed with the presence of Brooke’s other brother, Trip, a “lowly” television producer who is annoying in the first act before playing a more relevant role in Act Two. (This despite or because of, depending on how you look at it, the old dependable pot-smoking scene.) The same could be said for the character of Polly’s sister Silda, lately of rehab, broke and living with Polly and her husband Lyman. Her role in the drama, which doesn’t feel very essential at the start, also becomes more key to the story later on.
            All this said, as with the Globe production of “Other Desert Cities” a dozen years ago that was elevated by the performances of Kandis Chappell as Polly and Robert Foxworth as Lyman, Cygnet’s has Rosina Reynolds and Alan Rust playing the Wyeths. For me, the reaction of the parents in Baitz’s play is even more important than that of the Brooke character, portrayed at Cygnet with an edgy resolve by Melanie Lora. The scenes without them have nowhere near the reverberations generated by those that do.
            Neither Trip (Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger) nor Silda (Debra Wanger) is really that complicated, try as Baitz may have done to make them so. Everyone else in this Christmas-time confrontation-fest – for that’s what it is – is on the surface strong yet beneath that fraught with doubts and hurts from long past. Brooke’s memoir, “Love and Mercy,” seems guaranteed to bubble everything to and over the surface.
            Much is made of the political difference between the Ronny and Nancy-loving parents’ and everyone else, but these references smack of contrivance. The interpersonal crises of “Other Desert Cities” are far deeper.
            As always, Reynolds commands the stage like few actors in town. She could speak the phone book (if we still had phone books) with eloquence and clarity, but more than that she never fails to create a character, and Polly Wyeth is the fulcrum of “Other Desert Cities.” Strong support from Rust adds to the perception and the understanding that Brooke’s parents may have been intoxicated by the early-2000s glamour and selfishness of the GOP upper crust but they still love their “lib” daughter, even as they battle with her like only family members can.
            The Brooke and Polly characters as written often speak in oratory in “Other Desert Cities.” Lyman and Trip and Silda less so. There are times when these people don’t sound real. Yet we do give a damn about what happens in this Palm Springs living room, a marvel of mid-century modern décor designed by Andrew Hull, complete with panoramic picture-window view of the San Jacintos.
             The Wyeths, mired in profound, roiling differences and complications that will only worsen as “Other Desert Cities” proceeds, will be forced to learn on all sides. Embraces are few. Mostly their salvos come from neutral corners of that cozy living room.
            Cygnet’s Sean Murray directs with the actor’s instinct with which he consistently directs. Voluble as it can be, “Other Desert Cities” maintains its momentum toward a surprising ending. Lora’s tortured but principled Brooke may not be a very sympathetic character for most of the going, but when her world gets rocked … well, find out for yourself.
            Then drive out to Palm Springs, where the San Jacintos and a more serene atmosphere await.
            “Other Desert Cities” runs through March 2 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.

Leigh Scarritt (left) and Rachael VanWormer in "The Half-Life of Marie Curie."     Photo by Daren Scott

            Lauren Gunderson knows how to write about women and she knows how to write about science. That’s a simple – OK, overly simple – takeaway from her one-act “The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” currently onstage at New Village Arts Theatre.
            The story of an exceptional friendship between the Polish-born woman who discovered radium and polonium and British electrical engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton is an engrossing one, particularly as both women (especially Curie) are portrayed by Gunderson as real people with real flaws and not as super-scientists or super-women.
            At NVA, Kym Pappas directs Rachael VanWormer (as Curie) and Leigh Scarritt (as Ayrton) in a  90-minute two-hander that focuses on three years in the pioneering women’s lives. (It does go beyond that, all the way through each’s passing.)
          These are larger-than-life performances. VanWormer wrings every possible deeply embedded pang out of Curie’s torment over having become a target of public derision (and rejection by her own scientific community) because of (horrors!) an affair with a married Frenchman. As her confidante and crony who entices Curie to England for refuge, Scarritt is worldly wise and cheerfully indomitable.
            That these are portrayals likely more flamboyant than were the actual historical figures themselves – though who knows? It’s not like we have YouTube video of either woman as reference – gives dramatic and occasional comic life to “Half-Life” and, as Gunderson always does so deftly, demonstrates that science is a practice and a discipline of human beings and not merely Nature’s inexplicable wonderwork.
            Much of the first half of the play finds Ayrton tirelessly attempting to bolster and cheer up a joyless, agonizing Curie (with VanWormer appropriately dressed in black), pointing out in the process, rightfully so, that the treatment she’s getting from both the scientific intelligentsia and the hoi polloi would never be given to men.
            Ayrton’s frustration could become ours, as the Curie character comes off as resigned to victimhood. But just as Gunderson’s play finds its footing as it goes along, so does Ayrton’s unfailing resolve and good humor win Curie over, and the tone of “Half-Life” changes for the better, for characters and audience alike. The scene where the two get giddy on whiskey is a relief and a laugh.
            As VanWormer remarked to me in an interview I did with her for the San Diego Union-Tribune, these two women’s relationship was more than just that of BFFs. They had their differences and their set-to’s. This production’s major conflagration comes when Ayrton confronts Curie over the vial of radium she carries around with her like a beloved rosary. Harsh words are exchanged in the way that close friends never mean to exchange but inevitably do at some point in a complex and longtime relationship.
            Playing the far lighter of the two characters allows Scarritt to dominate many of the scenes in “Half-Life.” The fun she’s having comes close to wink-wink at times, but who can fault an actor for enjoying a role like this? The friend almost anyone, female or male, would love to have.
            VanWormer’s role demands much physicality – and more than a little coughing. But as she’s shown over the years in a variety of productions, she knows how to play figures from another time in history and give them resonance.
            Oh, yes. Speaking of resonance. A congratulatory bow to sound designer Harper Justus at NVA. Every tiny but significant effect, from radium transforming itself to the off-stage piano playing of Curie’s 7-year-old daughter, contributes to the production’s emotional atmosphere.
            Marie Curie, as the play tells us, died at 66 having lived a too-short life nevertheless marked by history-changing achievement. It was not lived, also as the play shows us, without pain but, happily, also not without a soulmate friend.
            “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” runs through Feb. 23 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.