A Seder meal with an imposter guest proves awkward and hilarious in "Beau Jest." Photo by Aaron Rumley

            With a lot of cutting and no genuine loss of substance, James Sherman’s romantic comedy “Beau Jest” could be condensed into one of those 15-minute vignettes they broadcast on “Love American Style.”
            Call it “Love Jewish-American Style.”
          Instead this longtime staple of both professional and community theater runs a couple of hours long, North Coast Rep’s current production included. “Beau Jest” is pure fluffy fun and so without sexual suggestion or innuendo that it could be rated G. Even more than one of those old “Love American Style” episodes could have been rated G.
            I’ve seen “Beau Jest” a couple of times now, and finally I’ve learned a lesson that maybe even playwright Sherman didn’t intend, that everyone needs a shrink in the family. Because it’s therapist Joel Goldman (a superb Josh Cahn at North Coast) who finally tells beleaguered sister Sarah (Katrina Michaels) what she needs to do: TELL THE TRUTH! He also tells her something that anyone who blames his, her or their parents for whatever is wrong with their lives must do: GET OVER IT!
            But brother Joel, who is not painted as a very sympathetic character in spite of his common-sense wisdom, only gets to impart these truisms to Sarah well into Act 2. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a show. You wouldn’t have Sarah’s “beau jest.”
            For newbies to this 1989 comedy, Sarah Goldman is a single Jewish woman in her 20s whose helicoptering mother and complicit father don’t approve of her Gentile boyfriend, Chris Cringle (as if there were any doubt that he isn’t Jewish). So to placate them, because she MUST have her parents’ approval even in her 20s, Sarah hires an affable actor named Bob Schroeder (Sam Ashdown, quite good in this production) to portray a Dr. David Steinberg, someone who will meet all of Mother and Father’s requirements as a fitting romantic companion for their daughter.
            Over a series of gatherings in Sarah’s Chicago apartment, Bob stands in beautifully as David, winning over Sarah’s mom (Jill Remez) completely and satisfying her dad (Joel Polis) in the bargain. Only the aforementioned sage brother Joel is suspicious, and we know he has reason to be in spite of Bob’s impressive thespian skills.
            Much laughter is wrung from Bob managing to fit in at the family dinner table, including at a Seder meal, and if physical comedy is “Beau Jest’s” calling card, that can be attributed to director Omri Schein, who’s a master in that department. He’s also performed himself in a production of this show before, at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado. Even then Schein was smart enough to play the role of sage brother Joel.
            That Bob and Sarah fall for each other, leaving Chris Cringle (Benjamin Cole) out in the cold (brrrrr) and foreshadowing a literal moment of truth in front of parents Miriam and Abe is inevitable.
            While the comic material is somewhat old hat by today’s rom-com standards and “Beau Jest” could use a little spicing up, it’s still a drawing-room playground for actors with the spirit, and the North Coast Rep cast one and all has that spirit. Ashdown’s part is the meatiest, and he doesn’t disappoint. Hell, if I had a daughter I’d want her to marry him too.
            Can’t help but feel a little sorry for Chris Cringle – not just for his unfortunate name but that he never really has a chance with the overly emotional, mercurial Sarah.
            But all’s fair, as they say. Maybe Chris found a good, helpful therapist at some point, you know, who told him to get over it.
            “Beau Jest” runs through May 24 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

Emma Ramos (left) and Brittany Bradford in "Alien Girls."                                     Photo by Rich Soublet II

            Who are the aliens in Amy Berryman’s “Alien Girls”? As her thoughtful one-act dramedy at the Old Globe implies, there’s more than one answer.
            At its core, “Alien Girls,” which grew out of the Globe’s Powers New Voices Festival (and was developed in part with Center Theatre Group’s LA Writers Workshop), is about the deep and sometimes fractured friendship between two creative-minded women, Tiffany (Brittany Bradford) and Carolyn (Emma Ramos). The play directed by Jaki Bradley, who also directed the New Voices reading a year ago, flits back and forth in time, from the college years in which the two women meet to a reckoning at the end that determines the fate of their friendship.
            The tightest bond between the two is their shared passion for writing, but this does not necessarily ensure equilibrium. Artistic jealousy and insecurity intrude. Resentment, too, when Tiffany reveals to the friend who was briefly her lover as well that she is pregnant. Carolyn is unable to (or refuses to) understand how that could now be more important to Tiffany than the collaborative writing they’ve been doing together or to Tiffany’s creative muse.
            When Carolyn has published in The New Yorker an essay questioning her friend’s priorities, the dam breaks. Tiffany feels betrayed, and resurrected at the same time is what Carolyn swears was a betrayal of her by her friend – outing her sexuality in front of her mother, who was dying.
            Heavy going as all this is, “Alien Girls” is buoyant with Berryman’s bright, adult brand of humor. Just as important to making the story work is the onstage rapport between Bradford and Ramos, who are easy to buy as BFFs, and we all know that even the best friends have their difficulties with each other.
            Ramos generates most of the comedy inherent in the play, often in simply reacting. Bradford’s character is ostensibly the more serious of the two, but shares Ramos’ sometimes-childlike sense of silliness and irreverence when the script calls for it.
            Karina Curet plays multiple parts during “Alien Girls” and scores with each of them. Most memorable is her superficial bride-to-be who is a mutual friend of Tiffany and Carolyn, and a self-serious, snooty editor from The New Yorker.
            Berryman has employed a device that I have seen onstage before – the meta self-editing of the story as it goes along. Here, Bradford and/or Ramos will, with a “DELETE!” re-do a moment or a line. This suggests that what we’re watching is a script being written by one of the women, or both -- editing as they go along because friendship in all its facets needs editing.
            The storytelling jumps the shark with the arrival of the alien creatures (puppets designed by Helen Q. Huang) that are characters in the young adult book Tiffany has written. They also represent something more, clearly. But the addition of these extraterrestrials, to me, is a contrivance and unneeded.
            Atmospherically there’s a spacey feel to “Alien Girls,” even without the puppets. Jason Sherwood’s scenic design, Rui Rita’s lighting, and sound effects from Sinan Refik Zafar combine to create an otherworld and do so without distracting from the interpersonal drama onstage.
            Among the settings listed in the program for “Alien Girls” is “another planet.”
            Mission accomplished.
            “Alien Girls” runs through May 10 at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre in Balboa Park.

These air guitarists just want to have fun -- even when not performing.                     Xing Photo Studio

            I was never an air guitar guy. More like a tennis-racket-guitar guy. You should have seen me hold that Wilson racket like a Fender Stratocaster and “play” Hendrix doing “Red House” or Clapton doing “Layla.”
            On second thought, no. You shouldn’t have seen me. In retrospect, I was pretty embarrassing, but at least I kept it private, tennis-racket-guitar-playing alone in my living room.
            So I have discovered newfound respect for the serious air guitar players who do their thing not only to entertain each other but live crowds too. They may be nerds of a sort, but they’re somehow cool at the same time.
            This I’ve learned from seeing Chelsea Macantel’s “Airness.”
            Under the direction of Kian Kline-Chilton, Loud Fridge Theatre Group is staging “Airness” (in its San Diego debut) at Moxie Theatre in Rolando. It only runs through Sunday, April 19, and admission is free (donations accepted), so put aside your misconceptions or real-guitar-player snobbery and check it out. It’s worth it.
            To my happy surprise the 100-minute-long, one-act play is more than just air guitarists taking turns with rock favorites blasting. There’s a story here, one populated by six vividly drawn characters, each of them likable (well, except for one that’s intentionally not likable).
            The central figure is Nina (Shelby Garza), a “real” guitarist who ventures into the world of air guitar, ostensibly out of sheer curiosity. (We find out later that she has a much more personal reason for doing so.) Her skepticism of and condescension toward the air guitarists she meets won’t last long once she gets to know them and understand their passion, commitment and camaraderie.
            The encouraging Shreddy Eddy f (Lester Isariuz) becomes her air guitar teacher, initiating her into his world and that of his friends and fellow competitors: the bodacious and aptly named Golden Thunder (Isai Luna) the sensitive and philosophical (for an air guitarist at least) Facebender (William Huffaker) and the in your face with a middle finger Cannibal Queen (Sofia Safidi).
            Hovering over them all is the defending U.S. Air Guitar champion D Vicious (Jacob Lopez), who it turns out is no stranger to Cannibal Queen – or to Nina. If there’s a “bad guy” in “Airness” it’s the also aptly named D Vicious, who before he even shows himself to be a sexist pig has already sold out by starring in commercials for Sprite. Yep, the soft drink. So I suppose you could say D Vicious has gone soft.
            “Airness” follows Nina (who soon will become The Nina) on her path to acceptance among her peers, acceptance among air guitar audiences and (moral of story) acceptance of herself. Interspersed within this narrative journey are air guitar performances by all the others, preliminaries to the U.S. Championship that will be the play’s finale.
            The air guitar bits are abbreviated but undertaken with full throttle sincerity. Each character demonstrates his or her own style, much to the howling delight of the audience at Moxie (patrons are encouraged to get involved and do they ever!).
            For me, Safidi’s Cannibal Queen is by far the most exciting air player – not that I’m any kind of legitimate judge.
            As to who will win in the end, it’s predictable.
            The various interpersonal dramas that occur within the run-up to the championship in NYC are brief but do add to the complexity of the characters who otherwise might have come off as cartoonish. They also give the cast members an opportunity to flex more than their air-guitar muscles. Huffaker is notable as the older, more worldly Facebender and is probably the most sympathetic figure among the bunch. Safidi gets to be fierce and righteous when out of the air guitar spotlight, while Isariuz is convincing as a regular guy who embodies the Ramones song he performs to: “I Don’t Want To Grow Up.”
            Garza’s The Nina is our vicarious initiation into the air guitar kingdom and her various changes are fun to watch as she gains skill and, more important, self-confidence.
            Telling the “Airness” tale in one over-long act is nonetheless entertaining throughout, though the championship ending feels hurried. Satisfying but hurried.
            A bonus is hearing at least parts of so many rock ‘n’ roll tunes from your memory banks, whether they be nuggets like The Donnas’ “Take It Off” or trivialities like REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You.” One person’s clunker is another person’s classic.
            One more thing: “Airness” refers to that state of transcendence that only true, dedicated air guitarists are capable of achieving.
            Something that tennis-racket players won’t understand.
            “Airness” runs through Sunday at Moxie Theatre in Rolando.

High school football player Cory (Omari K. Chancellor) confronts his father Troy Maxson (Dorian Missick) in August Wilson's "Fences."                                                                       Photo by Rich Soublet II

            It would be simple enough to regard August Wilson’s venerable “Fences” in terms of its metaphors – like the fence around Troy Maxson’s Hill District house, the one that keeps the demon away, the one that devoted wife Rose counts on to keep her wayward husband home; and the ever-presence of baseball, the lifeblood of Troy’s younger years, the nexus between his past and present; and an old ball bat itself made not of ash but of broken dreams and frustrations.
            Now that all of this is out of the way – and these metaphors are valid enough – it’s more important to appreciate that “Fences,” the sixth play about Black American life in Wilson’s famed Pittsburgh Cycle, is a work of deeply emotional human drama. It’s a depiction of family that can’t help but course through your blood and a reminder of how loving bonds, already fragile, can be complicated and undermined by the very things that make us human. One man in particular.
            As Troy Maxson himself says: “You’ve got to take the crooked with the straight.”
            The Old Globe’s production of “Fences” does beautiful service to the essence and power of “Fences.” Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, who directed a Cygnet Theatre staging of the play in 2008, has stated how she admires Wilson’s craft of language and also the complexity of his principal character. In her hands, and with an extraordinary performance by Dorian Missick as Troy, this “Fences” is the finest I’ve seen, a realization rich with those eminent words of Wilson’s and pulsing in its considerations of inter-family relationships and a man’s wrestling with himself and with his mortality.
            The son of an abusive sharecropper, 56-year-old Troy Maxson now resides in Pittsburgh with wife Rose (De’Adre Adiza) and their teen son Cory (Omari K. Chancellor). Prominent in the front yard of their house is a baseball hanging on a rope and a bat harking back to Troy’s days as a star Negro League ballplayer but also a bitter reminder that he was never given the chance to play in the Majors. Troy is now a sanitation worker, but, in another perceived slight, not yet the driver of the truck. His larger dreams behind him, he works hard, brings money home to Rose’s hand, brings his singular slice of philosophy and hardened worldview to the shadow of the house’s front porch where he regales co-worker and indulgent friend Jim Bono (Rondrell McCormick).
            Troy’s son by a first marriage, a sometimes-gigging musician named Lyons (Mister Fitzgerald), is a recurring fixture on pay day with a hand out, far from the hard worker that his father is. And there’s Troy’s brother Gabe (Donathan Walters), a veteran of WWII who was severely wounded in combat, and left mentally and psychologically damaged. Gabe is a sweet soul, and Troy cares for him, though we learn early on that the recompense Gabe received for his injury in service became Troy’s means of buying the house in the Hill District.
            That there is so much to contextualize in “Fences” is a testament to its real-life cogency: How intricate, how untidy are the lives of not only the working-class poor, of not only the African Americans about whom Wilson writes, but when it comes to relationships with those in our circle, of us all?
            Hovering over these realities, too, is the same mortality that stares down Troy Maxson, he who defies it as would a stubborn batter braced for “a fastball on the outside corner”?
            Meanwhile, the curve balls in Troy’s mortal life are onerous ones. Son Cory, a high school football player, may be offered a college scholarship -- Troy wants him to work at the A&P, to work hard as he does, to not care about being liked by him or to be like him. Though Rose is as loving and understanding as the wife of a difficult man could be, Troy is straying, and that straying will upset the foundation of their relationship, and of their household.
            The highly charged scenes between Missick and Aziza that ensue are as potent as dramatic theater can get. From that point on, the denouement of “Fences” seems preordained, and it will be one that is hypertense and tender at once.
            Missick and Aziza are supported by an exceptional cast, with Chancellor at the forefront as a young man standing up to an uncompromising father and standing up for an anxious loving mother. McCormick brings likability and no end of common-sense wisdom to Jim Bono, and Walters’ erratic but devil-chasing Gabe is heart rending. It is he who will lead us to the conclusion.
            The set designed by Lawrence E. Moten III at the Globe is the Maxson world as conceived by Wilson down to its tiniest detail, with that front porch being the open door into what Rose has tried to create, even in the face of the harshest truths and most painful disappointments. It is still a home, a base, somewhere that love seeks to prevail.
            It’s shattering in a family when love isn’t enough, when fences alone are unable to contain its preciousness or to keep at bay the forces and the failures that threaten it. That love can survive is more than the demon can abide and, always, our own comfort and salvation.
            “Fences” runs through May 3 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park.

Maya Sofia Enciso (left) and Alejandra Villanueva in "Matt & Ben."  Jason Sullivan / Dupla Photography

            Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ “Matt & Ben” was first seen at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Twenty-four years later it still looks like so many typical Fringe offerings do: rowdy, ragged, a little rebellious.
            You’ll see what I mean next month when the San Diego International Fringe Festival returns.
            The titular “Matt & Ben” are Damon and Affleck, maybe Hollywood’s best buds ever. They met when they were 10 and 8 years old respectively and have forged a tight relationship socially and professionally that has endured 45 years. They also collaborated on a script for what would become “Good Will Hunting,” and that’s the impetus for Kaling and Withers’ one-act bromance comedy set in Affleck’s slop-happy apartment in South Boston in the mid-‘90s.
            New Village Arts in Carlsbad is staging the San Diego premiere of “Matt & Ben” with, as is prescribed, two female actors playing the leads: Maya Sofia Enciso as Damon, the straight man, and Alejandra Villanueva as Affleck, who’s depicted as a dashing doofus with the attention span of a 5-year-old. Maria Patrice Amon is making her New Village directorial debut, which gives this production a welcome all-Latina creative trio at its forefront.
            I can imagine Kaling and Withers, BFFs themselves, rolling on the floor as they composed “Matt & Ben,” written I assume for Fringe length – about an hour. The play it became is about 80 minutes long, which is about 65 minutes more than required for us to “get it.”
            “It” is that Damon and Affleck can’t help but be besties, in spite of competitiveness, professional jealousy, writer’s block or even the intrusions of Gwyneth Paltrow (Villanueva doing double duty) or J.D. Salinger (ditto Enciso).
            Most of the time “Matt & Ben” finds the boys hanging out, fueled by pizza and chips and donuts, trading “Bah-stin” accents and rough-housing more like kids than the young men they were. It’s frankly not that interesting.
            Possibly suggesting that Damon and Affleck stumbled onto the idea for “Good Will Hunting” rather than having toiled for one, Kaling and Withers’ story has the screenplay literally fall from the rafters, written and ready to go. But where the play goes from here is every which way without any particular rise and fall. Things just go down in Ben’s pad and we’re just flies on the wall having already circled the uneaten donuts.
            Performing “Matt & Ben” must be a physicality-minded actor’s dream and Villanueva especially seizes the day. Her Affleck is a human rowdydow. This boy just wants to have fun. Enciso gets her share of horseplay, but the script for “Matt & Ben” implies right away that Damon is the more focused of the two.
            I’m not sure what the “cameos” by Paltrow and Salinger add. I suspect it’s another case of Kaling and Withers going “I know! I’ve got it! Let’s have THIS happen!”
            The NVA production does add a couple of Hollywood touches in the form of clever projection design by Jesus Hurtado: at the start an illustrated depiction of director Amon that materializes before our eyes; at the end the actual Oscars ceremony TV footage from 1998 when then-baby-faced Damon and Affleck accepted their Best Screenplay award for “Good Will Hunting.”
            Seeing “Matt & Ben” may motivate theatergoers to revisit the film or in some cases watch it for the first time. Either way it’s worth it to hear Robin Williams’ psych professor character remind us that “Bad times wake us up to the good times we weren’t paying attention to.”
            That’s a message that transcends the passing years and their prescription that all of us, even Hollywood types, have to grow up sometime.
            “Matt & Ben” runs through April 26 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.

Left to right: Bruce Turk, Jacob Caltrider and Steven Lone in "The Lehman Trilogy."   Karli Cadel Photography

            They were the best of the American Dream and the Worst of the American Dream.
            Cygnet Theatre’s production of the Tony Award-winning “The Lehman Trilogy” begins with a family of immigrants (three brothers) from Bavaria that goes into the cotton business in Alabama and, over the course of more than 170 years and succeeding generations, become kings of Wall Street.
            Until they aren’t any longer.
            That it takes three hours, three acts and two intermissions in the telling is not a surprise given the scope of “The Lehman Trilogy,” which started as a poetic novel (“Qualcosa sui Lehman”) by Stefano Massini and was adapted for the stage by Ben Power. What is a surprise is that under the direction of Kim Strassburger and in the hands of three venerable actors (Bruce Turk, Steven Lone, Jacob Caltrider) it’s able to sustain itself that long, mining taut dramatic tension but also uncovering enough humanity to prevent the eventual titans of finance from becoming villains or at the very least unsympathetic figures. 
            The actors in the round inside Cygnet’s Dottie Studio Theater stand upon, around or sit at movable tables throughout the epic storytelling, which is largely expository in nature, as though they were taking turns reading massive Massini’s novel to the audience. That they rise above what otherwise might be an articulate though static narrative device is the wondrous conceit of “The Lehman Trilogy.” In portraying more than 70 characters between the three of them, Turk, Lone and Caltrider inhabit full, flesh-and-bones, warts-and-all figures, pumping life into the main characters (immigrant brothers Henry, Emanuel and Mayer respectively) and evoking the rich and complicated nature of each man.
            The first and slowest of the three acts (for it must establish who the Lehmans are, their backstories, and their at-the-time modest but noble aspirations) introduces the dignified and commanding Henry, who literally refers to himself as “The Head” of the family; the fiery Emanuel, considered “The Arm”; and the youngest brother Mayer, dismissed by the other two as the softer “Potato.” They are the foundation of what will be a sweeping account over the decades as each man meets his destiny, in one case sadly cut short.
            To backtrack for a moment, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins by referencing the 2008 financial cataclysm that brought the mighty Lehman Brothers firm to its knees; it won’t return to it until the very end of the play. This is not a three-plus-hour recounting of that day of reckoning but rather a dissection of the family of men who began with the simple aspirations of immigrants awed and provided with hope by their new country, and the greed and corruption that overcame them and those who descended from them.
            The second act is the most frankly entertaining of “The Lehman Trilogy,” with diverting moments like Emanuel’s smug son Philip (Turk) choosing “just the right” wife, or Mayer’s son Herbert (Lone) standing up to him in comic exasperation. Also witnessed is the emergence of Philip’s son Bobbie (Caltrider), who will become the dominant and domineering force of the final act.
            “The Lehman Trilogy” is not only the chronicle of a Jewish family initially in quest of belonging, and then later, profit and power. It is a history lesson and a crash course in American economics. The various Lehmans live through and survive the Civil War, the Great Depression (wrenchingly dramatized at the end of Act Two), Pearl Harbor and the Second World War. Simultaneously, the origins of the New York Stock Exchange are explained as is the troubling dichotomy between banking and trading, and most revealing, the tragic and shameless acknowledgement that Americans can be sold – and will buy – anything, whether or not they’ve got any money.
            While the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is a narrative inevitability, it is only the consequence of lifetimes of seduction by the aforementioned lure of power and profit.
            Cygnet’s cast of three is superb. The sheer volume of text and nuance of characters required of the actors is staggering enough. By the time the three are dancing atop tables to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” it’s a wonder that they’ve got the stamina remaining to do so – though their commitment is never in question.
            Turk deftly shifts, for example, between Henry Lehman and Philip Lehman to the degree that they come off as entirely different men to us. Lone is the play’s visceral force in all of his characterizations. Caltrider’s underestimated “Potato” and the Robert Lehman who will regard both himself and his firm as immortal are potent and intuitive creations. (Caltrider also produces the sound of a crying infant like no one I’ve ever heard.)
            The smaller Dottie theater was a smart choice for a production such as this one which asks the audience to closely venture into the souls of these complex men. Projections by Blake McCarty accompany the chronicling, whether looking like the flashing trading updates in the NYSE orthe consuming flames of war. Scenic design (by Matthew Herman), lighting (Sammy Webster) and sound (George Ye) combine to create the illusion of time and space.
            Director Strassburger undertook this challenge with relish and can be duly proud of the result: theater in today’s era of preferred (including by me) 90-minute productions that compels audiences to listen and think for three hours, and more important, to be wary of those who embrace the American Dream but in so doing embrace their darker selves.
            “The Lehman Trilogy” runs through April 26 at Cygnet Theatre in Liberty Station, Point Loma.