Abbi Hoffpauir (left) and Samantha Gorjanc in "Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help." Photo by Aaron Rumley The so-called fourth wall isn’t just broken in Katie Forgette’s “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help.” It was never there to begin with.
In this North Coast Repertory Theatre comedy that spoofs the ‘70s and punctures Catholic parish hypocrisies the protagonist, graduate school-bound Linda O’Shea, opens by introducing herself and her at-once traditional and dysfunctional Irish-American family to the audience. Linda, played with likable pluck by Samantha Gorjanc, will face the crowd and share cutting commentary throughout the two-hour play. So will Shana Wride as the feisty, sardonic and uber-clever Aunt Terri. It’s like Linda’s doing standup and starring in a wacky family story at the same time. But the character tells us at the outset that this is a memory play and that not everything in it happened exactly the way it’s portrayed. This becomes incidental once we’re caught up in the tale. The slower first act has to take some time fleshing out the members of the O’Shea clan. Besides Lind they area: Her 13-year-old sis Becky (Abbi Hoffpauir), who likes to don a trench coat and pretend she’s Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. (It seems a bit of a reach that a girl of that age would be as conversant with films from the ‘40s as she is, but whatever.) The girls’ mom, Jo (Erin Noel Grennan), devoutly Catholic and a hard-working “housewife” – a contrast to the liberated Linda, herself devoted to the enlightenment of the fledgling women’s movement. Loud and commanding dad Mike O’Shea (Tom Dugan, in one of three roles in “Incident” – more on this), a lunch-pail guy with a lunch-pail bellow. And Aunt Terri (Wride), who’s living with the family in the wake of a broken marriage. In spite of her bitterness she is the smartest one in the room. Unseen but very much heard from upstairs in the O’Shea home is Grandma, who can out-shout Mike. Now you know everybody. There’s the usual extended family back and forth until the moment that Jo asks – make that tells – daughter Linda to clue in Becky on menstruation. And while she’s at, the facts of life too. This scene alone, the frankest, funniest truth-telling from one sister to another that you’re ever likely to hear, is playwright Forgette at her best, and at North Coast Rep Gorjanc and the stunned, wide-eyed Hoffpauir nail it. The play's titular “Incident” arises from this graphic tell-all: Unknown to Linda, the precocious Becky has secretly recorded their discussion (she likes to play at private eye, remember?) and the illicit recording has been heard by their parish priest Father Peter. Forgette will maneuver some laughs from that name later. That’s not all. The first act winds up with a reveal that literally freezes the reacting characters. Director Jenny Sullivan has her hands full with a busy script complicated by built-in theatrical devices like the freezes and the monologues to the audience and Dugan’s shifting characterizations. On top of all that “Incident” takes a more serious turn in the second act as the conflicts are addressed, highlighted by a showdown between Aunt Terri and Father Peter (also Dugan). Happily, everything comes together and this pointed comedy wrings laugh after laugh from its sendup of a strange decade and of Catholic church/school tropes that many theatergoers will remember all too well. “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” is an entertaining affair that doesn’t bog down into issue commentary but relies instead on a winning cast’s fun with what could be called PG-13 sitcom comedy. The costumes by Elisa Benzoni are appropriately ‘70s bland but also include Becky’s Catholic school uniform of a plaid jumper and peter pan collar. Set designer Marty Burnett’s O’Shea house has that olive-green couch and splashes of orange and avocado that, again, we have the ‘70s to “thank” for. Seriously speaking, we should thank Tom Dugan and Shana Wride for their memorable performances in this show – Dugan does a Peter Sellers special, playing three parts including one as a woman, while Wride burnishes her rep as one of the most dependable actors in town. For a survivor of parochial school like myself, “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” is a vivid reminder of what I had to survive in the first place. “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” runs through XX at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.
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Veronica Burgess and Julian Ortega in "Masa." Photo courtesy of OnStage Playhouse Playwright Salomon Maya may not have set out to create a work of magical realism with “Masa,” but his textured drama about family and grief has more than mere shades of the artistic genre characterized by the extraordinary inhabiting the otherwise ordinary.
In Maya’s world premiere at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista, Lolita, the widow of a beloved husband killed in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, believes that Carlos “speaks” to her in the form of Beatles songs that seem to randomly start playing on the family radio. Then there’s the masa itself, the dough with which Lolita makes her popular tamales. It becomes food for inspiration and athletic greatness among the members of the Argentine futbol team, which is in Mexico City competing for the 1986 World Cup. It’s just eight months after the deadly quake that took at least 10,000 lives. Whether there’s any magic in Lolita’s radio or the tamales she lovingly creates is purely speculative, but these narrative contrivances add a fanciful and even touching aspect to the story of a woman so immersed in grief that she cannot leave her home. That is a source of frustration and pain for her soon-to-be-18-year old son, Santiago. The boy is grieving himself, but rather than seeking comfort in songs before his time emanating from a radio, he’s working on rebuilding one of the fallen edifices from the quake. The fates of Lolita, beautifully played by Veronica Burgess, and Santiago (an earnest Julian Ortega) are soon impacted by the arrival of Gaston (the playwright Maya), who works for the Argentine futbol team. He brings news to Lolita that its players, and most especially its star playmaker Diego Maradona, crave her tamales for performance power; for the searching Santiago, Gaston brings hope of a future out of his claustrophobic home in spite of his deep devotion to his mother. “Masa’s” fourth character is Dorotea (Denise Lopez), Lolita’s friend and neighbor who has been “tia” to Santiago all his life. She is the story’s comic relief but also perhaps its most worldly wise presence. It takes convincing Lolita to hide under a table – a flashback to their shared earthquake experience – to begin bringing her friend around. The charm of “Masa,” directed by James Darvas, is the dedication to and passion for these characters that the entire cast exhibits. Conversations are fast and frantic at times and emotions jumbled. But Lolita, Santiago, Dorotea and even Gaston feel very real and totally sympathetic. Burgess’ Lolita is the play’s heartbeat. Her sadness and her confronting her inner strength constitute the arc of the story. The Beatles tunes on the radio, though whimsical, don’t even feel necessary. The masa is, naturally, a metaphor, but Maya doesn’t allow it to become heavy-handed. His is a story of family and friends. The masa is an ingredient. An important one, yes, but it’s her love that nourishes those she cares so much about. “Masa” continues through Oct. 27 at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista. Erica Marie Weisz (left), AJ Knox, Samantha Ginn and Kenny Bordieri in "The Thanksgiving Play." Jason Sullivan / Dupla Photography When do good intentions become extremes?
When they’re in “The Thanksgiving Play,” Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse’s spoof about a teacher, an historian, a street performer and an actress, all of them White, collaborating on a politically correct elementary-school play principally about Native Americans. If you took a “Saturday Night Live” skit and had the luxury of stretching it out from say four minutes to 90 you’d have “The Thanksgiving Play,” now onstage at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad. This breakneck comedy stops at nothing when it comes to satirizing the collaborators’ overly sincere efforts to be culturally sensitive and, if you’ll excuse the buzzword, woke. For much of the going, the PC talk is overshadowed by wild onstage antics, from dressing up like turkeys to perform a Thanksgiving-themed take on “The 12 Days of Christmas” to (I swear I’m not making this up) using human-head props as bowling balls. Complete with leaking “blood.” With “The Thanksgiving Play,” FastHorse was the first female Native American playwright to have a work produced on Broadway. She undoubtedly is skeptical of the adopted campaigns in theaters and schools alike to more accurately reflect Native Americans like herself (as well as other marginalized groups). Who can blame her? Many who try seem to be either doing the bare minimum or, as is the case depicted in “The Thanksgiving Play,” going overboard to the point that the campaign is minimized or degraded. So FastHorse has something important to say. It makes for a thoughtful script to read, I imagine. As live theater, it’s hit and miss. That woke talk and all the chaotic hijinks are rather excessive, even in a one-act show. Looking at it from outside the audience point of view, “The Thanksgiving Play” has to be one of those shows that’s an absolute kick to be in. The actors get to exercise their physical comedy muscles, don some outrageous costumes (by Sandra Ruiz) and show off their onstage endurance and their improvisational skills. At New Village, director Daniel Jaquez ensures that his cast, led by one of the most gifted physical comedians in town, Samantha Ginn, gets loads of latitude. She’s complemented by Kenny Bordieri as her equally “aware” boyfriend/collaborator/street performer Jaxton (what a name!), AJ Knox as the stuffy historian Caden and Erica Marie Weisz as Alicia, the sexy L.A. actress who is mistakenly hired on a diversity-grant tab. It’s a fun if nearly out-of-control troupe. Just as the characters, led by Ginn’s schoolteacher Logan, make up their Thanksgiving play as they go, THIS “Thanksgiving Play” has the feel of something behind improvised, something being itself made up from moment to moment. With comedy, that doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t always work here. The laughs are big ones, but there could be more of them. I’ve long held that “message stories” told with comedy are more effective (and less ham-handed) than those told with drama. If FastHorse had written this as a serious play its characters’ ardent “sensitivity” might have been deadening. She knew what she was doing. “The Thanksgiving Play” runs through Nov. 3, giving you lots of time to think about its commentary before the actual holiday rolls around on the 28th. And if you miss it, San Diego State’s Department of Theatre, Television, and Film will stage its own “The Thanksgiving Play” beginning on Nov. 1. Alex Guzman and Eileen Bowman in "Looped." Photo by Daren Scott The title of what would be her last film, “Die! Die! My Darling!”, sounds like something Talullah Bankhead would have told someone with whom she was royally pissed off.
Near the end of her life, however, around the time this horror film was produced, she may have been most pissed off with herself. That’s just one comment playwright Matthew Lombardo makes in his two-act tragicomedy “Looped.” By 1965, when “Die! Die!” was in post-production as it is in this play, Bankhead had long immersed herself in a regimen of heavy drinking, chain smoking, drug use and random acts of sexual activity, with men or women. She may have come off like an aged party girl with the cutting wit of Dorothy Parker and the profane vocabulary of Joe Pesci in “Good Fellas,” but again as we surmise from “Looped,” Bankhead was broken and even rueful about the at-times-respected career onstage and in film that she’d abandoned. “Looped” imagines a fictitious moment in time in ’65 in which a staggering Bankhead is summoned to an L.A. studio to “loop” or record one leftover line for “Die! Die! My Darling.” Suffering the slings and arrows of her unpredictability is a young film editor, Danny, whose frustration level soon ventures off the charts. Roustabouts Theatre Co.’s current production of “Looped” at the Legler Benbough Theatre in Scripps Ranch is mesmerizing and, as you might figure with a story like this one, funny and sad at the same time. Its star is Eileen Bowman, who does wonder work as Bankhead, a flawed force of nature with a glass of bourbon (or Scotch in this case) in one hand, a cigarette in another, and a head full of recriminations, sodden memories and an eccentric sort of worldly wisdom earned during a long if on-the-downhill career. Alex Guzman’s Danny is suitably flummoxed and infuriated by Talullah. In a pretty much telegraphed plot turn, he gets to do much more in the play’s second act. Completing the cast and only briefly seen is studio engineer Steve (Chris Braden). As much as Lombardo’s entertaining script does, director Phil Johnson accomplishes the tricky feat of maintaining dramatic tension while also allowing the proceedings, especially in Act One, to be frothy and nostalgic. Even when Bankhead is bordering on out of control she’s just human enough, just sympathetic enough, to make us care, even worry for her. Much of that credit also goes to Bowman, who in this vivid characterization is no doubt introducing many theatergoers to a personage whose name they may have heard -- but that’s it. In point of fact, Talullah Bankhead had her stellar turns as an actor, both in film (Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”) and on stage. Lombardo’s script pointedly addresses Bankhead’s experience with Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” how she turned down the part of Blanche DuBois, how she later played the character in a revival in Florida, mocking herself as the audience mocked her. It’s in this conflict-within-a-conflict that “Looped” is at its most affecting, as is Bowman. The play’s second act is quite a departure from the first and to some extent heavy-handed and edging toward sentimentality. But the larger-than-life Bankhead, with a dedicated Bowman in her high-heeled shoes and wrap-around fur, is decidedly not one for sentiment. Even if she calls everyone “dah-ling.” “Looped” runs through Oct. 20 at the Legler Benbough Theatre in Scripps Ranch on the campus of Alliant International University. |
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
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