: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.

Left to right: Daniel Petzold, Maggie Lacey and Steve Kazee in "Appropriate."               Photo by Jim Cox

        You know that expression “being in the moment”? I’ve been thinking a lot this year about live theater, about how important it is and how singularly immersive it is, and I believe this is why: We are “in the moment” when we sit together in the darkness and watch, hear, feel what’s happening on stage. The artists in front of us, too, are in the moment. Each performance is unique, no matter how many times it’s been repeated. Theater is now, theater is alive, theater is everyone in a sense being in the moment.
        It’s been another stellar year for San Diego theater. My list of the 10 best productions of 2025 do not reflect the full breadth and ambition of what was presented on our local stages. But they stand out for me because in each of them, I found myself in the moment. That wasn’t always comfortable, but it was human. It was genuine.
         So, with much ado …
        1. “Appropriate,” Old Globe Theatre. This harrowing production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony-winning (for Best Revival of a Play) melodrama was absolutely, positively NOT appropriate for the faint of heart. As I wrote way back in January when I reviewed it: “I can’t remember the last time I experienced a dramatic production as unsettling and frequently unpleasant as this one, while at once being completely engrossed.” Ostensibly the story of a disconnected family gathering at a rundown plantation mansion to settle their patriarch’s estate, “Appropriate” quickly escalated into a nasty, no-holds barred battle of words and recriminations. A ferocious cast led in ferocity by Maggie Lacey and directed by Steve H. Broadnax scorched through and savored shock after shock.
        2. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company. Another unnerving family drama set in the South – in this case, New Orleans’ Elysian Fields – Tennessee Williams’ classic “A Streetcar Named Desire” is often produced, and I’ve seen it onstage multiple times. My most memorable so far was Backyard’s bold and haunting (complete with an appearance by a whispering La Llorona) interpretation this summer, directed by Rob Lutfy. Blanche Dubois’ descent from the genteel into madness was portrayed with poignancy and torment by Jessica John, putting her own stamp on one of American theater’s most famous characters. With its two intermissions and its three-hour-plus running time, this production HAD to be compelling. It was.
        3. “3 Summers of Lincoln,” La Jolla Playhouse. A crucial, quintessential American history lesson set to music (by Joe DiPietro and Daniel J. Watts), this richly conceived production gave us an Abraham Lincoln who was less the iconized figure played on film by Henry Fonda or Daniel Day Lewis and more a man of not just complexity and courage, but doubt as well. The titular “3 Summers” are those pitting Lincoln (Ivan Hernandez) against abolitionist Frederick Douglass (Quentin Earl Darrington), with the stakes being the soul and conscience of a nation. The musical score reflected the breadth of Americana, the story a reminder of the tragedy of war but at the same time the causes that need to be fought for. To director Christopher Ashley, now bound for New York’s Roundabout Theatre, bravo. For this and many others in La Jolla.
        4. “Follies,” Cygnet Theatre. The most notable event NOT on a San Diego theater stage in 2025 was without question the opening of a brand-new venue: Cygnet Theatre’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center (aka The Joan) in Liberty Station with its two performance spaces. The larger Joseph Clayes III Theater was inaugurated with a stylish production of the rarely staged musical “Follies,” a 1971 collaboration between Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman. In a daring and inspired choice, Cygnet’s Sean Murray not only brought “Follies” to San Diego for the first time in more than 30 years, but cast many of our theater scene’s most esteemed actresses, including in the ex-showgirl leads Karole Foreman and Sandy Campbell. Even with its bizarro wind-up, “Follies” was sophisticated, nostalgic and often thrilling.
        5. “Beauty’s Daughter,” OnWord Theatre. OnWord Theatre’s first full year producing culminated with a stirring one-person show written by Dael Orlandersmith and performed by OnWord co-founder Marti Gobel. Set in Harlem sometime in the ‘90s, “Beauty’s Daughter” is 31-year-old Diane, a scarred survivor in search of love, inner truth and reconciliation with an inescapable dark past. Over the course of 80 minutes, Gobel changed costumes and personas, becoming those either on the periphery or in the wheelhouse of Diane’s life – a streetwise teenager, a blind, drug addicted surrogate father, a philandering suitor among them. And Beauty herself, bitter and boozed out. All this accomplished in the tiny confines of Diversionary Theatre’s upstairs Blackbox space.
        6. “La Llorona on the Blue Line,” TuYo Theatre. Leading ticket-holders from one vintage light-rail train to another with the wispy elusiveness of a butterfly by moonlight, La Llorona (Vanessa Flores) was the connective thread between three 15- to 20-minute stories written by Mabelle Reynoso and performed inside those retired railway or trolley cars. TuYo Theatre’s immersive production went down at the 1880s-built National City Depot operated by the San Diego Electric Railway Association. Reynoso’s vignettes, acted out practically in one’s lap, mingled haunting moments with evocations of gender equity and tales of women in the South Bay. Of all the site-specific theater events I attended this past year, including those at the Without Walls (WOW) Festival, this one was the most engrossing.
        7. “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder,” North Coast Repertory Theatre. Two artists central to this rousing production of Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak’s hit Broadway show deserve a call-out: First, director Noelle Marion, who succeeded in translating this kinetic – and big -- musical comedy to a smaller stage; and actor Andrew Polec, who reveled in the role of likable but murder-minded Monty Navarro who’s seeking the D’Ysquith family lordship. Fortunately, I’d forgotten most of the Old Globe’s 2013 world premiere of this costumed romp (though not the unforgettable Jefferson Mays), so the North Coast Rep production was almost like seeing “Guide” for the first time. It wasn’t long during the evening before I remembered that this was – and is – one very funny affair.
        8. “Fragment/o/s Of Air/e,” OnStage Playhouse. This year saw a rich offering of lead performances by female artists, including John in “Streetcar,” Gobel in “Beauty’s Daughter” and Deborah Gilmour Smyth in Backyard’s “The Waverly Gallery.” Bravest of all was Valeria Vega’s star turn in OnStage Playhouse’s production of “Fragment/o/s Of Air/e.” Carla Navarro’s tense drama finds the Chilean-born Nina (Vega) and her family, since residing in America, gathered to watch a historic presidential debate in Chile. Looming over the various family conflicts is the psychological torture Nina is enduring – aftermath of another brand of torture and more from the Pinochet years. “Fragment/o/s” was the highlight of OnStage’s ambitious year, a production that stayed with me on the long drive home from Chula Vista to Mission Valley. And beyond.
        9. “Other Desert Cities,” Cygnet Theatre. Families in turmoil seemed to be a recurring theme on San Diego stages in 2025. The Wyeths of Palm Springs were no exception. Cygnet’s production of “Other Desert Cities” came 12 years after the play was staged at the Old Globe. Once again it delivered personal and political confrontations with urgency and ambience. Its most riveting moments were those between mother Polly (Rosina Reynolds) and daughter Brooke (Melanie Lora), the latter whose memoir lit the fuse for what be less than a holly-jolly yuletide family reunion. “Other Desert Cities” is one of those rare politics-minded plays that doesn’t mire itself in polemics and tired, self-important oratory. Of course it helped to have an ensemble like Cygnet’s which also included Debra Wanger, Alan Rust and Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger.
        10. “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” Moxie Theatre. It was back to Harlem, this time in the 1930s, for Moxie’s best production of the year, of Pearl Cleage’s slow-burning about those who live in and around a neighborhood apartment house. Chief among them is a drinking, despairing chanteuse named Angel (Deja Fields) and her best friend Guy (Kevanne La’Marr Coleman), the pair directed by Moxie’s Desiree Clarke Miller. The onstage chemistry between Fields and Coleman carried the day, supported by a cast that also featured Xavier Daniels, Carter Piggee and Janine Taylor. The intertwining character studies, grounded in the social change and music of the period, made “Blues” an absorbing, and heart-rending, few hours in a theater.
        Honorable mention: “The Waverly Gallery,” Backyard Renaissance; “The Heart,” La Jolla Playhouse; “Waitress,” Moonlight Stage Productions; “Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground,” North Coast Rep; Yvonne Brown’s “Fre3sty13,” San Diego International Fringe Festival

Cygnet's "A Christmas Carol" returns, but in a new space.                                   Photo by Rich Soublet II

 t            I’ve been seeing Cygnet Theatre’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol” so long that I can remember the early versions when it was presented as a radio-show telling of Dickens’ yuletide tale. Still, a few years ago I decided that, like “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” at the Old Globe, I didn’t need to see “A Christmas Carol” AGAIN.
            This year I’ve been compelled to do so, and for two very good reasons: First, this “A Christmas Carol” is the first produced at Cygnet’s new home, The Joan, in Liberty Station. Second, there’s a new Ebenezer Scrooge. Patrick McBride, who served admirably as Bob Cratchit for as long as I can remember at Cygnet, has stepped into the starring role, taking over from Sean Murray, the theater’s artistic director, who is still directing “A Christmas Carol.”
            I also took with me on Friday night two people who’d never seen the show at Cygnet. Fresh eyes. Fresh ears. Fresh perspective.
            Because I’ve written about this production so many times, I’ll pay respectful brevity to the qualities that make it an entertaining show. Like the original musical score by Billy Thompson. Like Jeanne Reith’s period costumes and Peter Herman’s wigs and makeup design. Like an ensemble that but for the Scrooge portrayer plays multiple roles, sings and jokes with audiences before the show, and year after year gives this production its all. (The one newcomer this yule is Bryan Banville, taking over the Bob Cratchit role and others.) Like, from that ensemble David McBean, whose Marley’s Ghost and Ghost of Christmas Present have always been and are still priceless fun.
            I should salute the other cast members -- the returning Eileen Bowman, Megan Carmitchel, Jasmine January, Allen Lucky Weaver and McBride.
            The new production space requires entrances from the wings and from behind an upstage door, unlike Cygnet’s Old Town theater where, for example, McBean’s Marley’s Ghost would ascend to the stage from a lower entryway. This much is negligible. Though that upstage door, complete with storied lion knocker, is utilized more hauntingly at The Joan. You’ll see for yourself.
            More haunting still in the new theater is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come – huge and deathly black and billowing. Far more imposing than in Old Town.
            Otherwise, any technical or logistical changes to Cygnet’s “A Christmas Carol” are not noticeable, at least not to me. And that’s fine. If it ain’t broke, you know …
            I’m not quite sure how I feel about McBride’s Scrooge. I’ve been so accustomed to him as the likable, dignified Bob Cratchit that it’s hard – excepting the first 20 minutes of the show or so – to dislike him as Scrooge. The reclamation, the change of heart, the realization of goodness feel inevitable along Scrooge’s ghost-escorted travels rather than his seeming terrified or grudging or disbelieving.
            To be completely fair to McBride, there’s some recency bias here that lingers. I never really bonded with Sean Murray’s Scrooge either, because the late, great Tom Stephenson who played the part for years was so consistently wonderful.
            It feels a little late to complain that this show is over-long (which it is, mainly because the song sequences slow down the narrative as much as enhancing it). There’s also considerable exposition uttered by the supporting cast members when showing would function better than telling.
            There still are, however, many thoughtful and inventive staging touches – and that’s saying something with a story that changes location (including from Scrooge’s past life) as much as “A Christmas Carol” does. Except for the 1984 television film that starred a perfect George C. Scott, I can’t think of any movies or other TV productions that managed to translate Dickens’ tale very memorably, let alone stage versions that did.
            So what did my guests, the newbies, think of Cygnet’s “A Christmas Carol”? They both gave it a thumb’s up, though, they said, more for the comic bits than anything else. The ghouls’ plundering “Mr. Scratch” number was a particular hit.
            They did find the puppets used to “portray” Tiny Tim, the boy Scrooge and others a bit creepy. Me, I’m so used to those puppets (designed by Kris Golojuch and the late Lynn Jennings) that they don’t faze me at all.
            So am I jaded? Have I seen “A Christmas Carol” at Cygnet too many times now? Has the thrill gone?
            Ask me next year – in the audience at The Joan.
            “A Christmas Carol” runs through Dec. 28 at the Joseph Clayes III Theater in Liberty Station, Point Loma.

Wilfred Paloma (left) and Wil Bethmann in "To My Girls."                                               Xing Photo Studio

            Coursing beneath “To My Girls’” blended margaritas and baring of skin and one wild attempt at a DIY Spice Girls dress-up video is some serious baring of soul. It’s not that playwright JC Lee’s high-spirited gathering of three gay millennials for a Palm Springs getaway isn’t Party Central personified. It is. But like most parties this one doesn’t go exactly as planned.
            Many critics pontificating about Lee’s 2013 play, which is enjoying its San Diego premiere at Diversionary Theatre, have in doing so referenced Mart Crowley’s 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band.” That play also revolved around a party, this one a birthday gathering set on the Upper East Side. While “The Boys in the Band” found its characters practically at odds with their sexuality, those in “To My Girls” are proud of theirs – their noisy conflicts and intense self-examinations stem from their faults and frailties as individuals, not just as gay men. The two-hour play, directed at Diversionary with buoyancy and thought by Jesse Marchese, manages well the balance between the outrageous and the interior.
            What the principals of “To My Girls” contend with is in large part a disconnect between queer generations, the millennial characters confronted by a testy boomer (the man who’s rented them the Palm Springs digs) and by a Gen-Zer brought home from a bar. This coupled with the interpersonal dramas going on makes for a VERY busy script, though except for a closing 15 minutes or so that feels tacked on everything coalesces in a diverting manner.
            The party-giver in Lee’s play is Curtis (Wil Bethmann), an Instagram influencer who loves his “girls,” but indications from the very start are that he loves himself and his impulses even more. The first to arrive at the Palm Springs pad (superlatively conceived by Mathys Herbert right down to the hanging chair, wet bar and artsy portraits of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli)) is Castor (Wilfred Paloma), whose uber-flamboyance hides a vulnerability and no paucity of hurt. Leo (Zack King) is a propounder of inter-relational and social media wisdom and, like Castor, someone of depth and disappointments.
            So you have Curtis (white), Castor (Asian-American) and Leo (Black), bound by friendship and history, sharing their queerness and general age but with very different existential perspectives.
            Bernie (Frank DiPalermo), the owner of the house, reveals himself to be a two-time Trump voter, instantly alienating him from the others, though halfway through “To My Girls” it could be said that everyone’s unreasonable to some extent. It’s less politics and more of that aforementioned generational divide from which the tensions roil.
            Omar (Jocorey Mitchell) is the young man brought to the house by Castor, and besides being the youngest man in the room he’s the most accepting and maybe even the sharpest.
            In between its revelries “To My Girls” caroms through its characters’ confrontations, misunderstandings, accusations, recriminations and reconciliations. The playwright’s conceit is that the party never truly stops and the action is weighted more toward entertainment than preaching.
            Still, the quintessential moment of the play is the recitation of a letter, one written and read in a spotlight by Castor. It’s here that Lee may be saying what he wants to say most of all about gay culture and relationships at their most complex.
            It’s fitting that this is Paloma’s scene, for over the two acts his is the production’s most hilarious and also most tender performance.
            Make no mistake, “To My Girls” is party time … but there’s time made for much more.
            “To My Girls” runs through Dec. 7 at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights.

Deborah Gilmour Smyth and Tom Zohar (with William Huffaker in the background) in "The Waverly Gallery." Photo by Michael Makie

            I remember a few years ago I was showing one of the classes I teach at San Diego State a documentary about little robot seals being used in senior-care homes to comfort anxious and disoriented residents. When the film had concluded and the lights in the classroom went up, one of my students said aloud: “Oh my God, I don’t want to get old!”
            It made me wonder on my way out of the Tenth Avenue Arts Center after opening night of Backyard Renaissance’s “The Waverly Gallery” how many people in that audience were thinking during – and afterward – the same thing that student said out loud.
            Gladys Green, the protagonist of Kenneth Lonergan’s play, doesn’t want to hear that it’s terrible getting old, which in so many words her daughter’s husband Howard bluntly tells her. He apologizes for his tactlessness, but who can blame Gladys for snapping? NO ONE wants to hear it.
            One might suspect, given the premise of “The Waverly Gallery” – a small but tight New York family coping with the heart-breaking, painful slipping of their matriarch into the throes of Alzheimer’s – would be a very difficult watch, and it is, but not completely. Lonergan, who’s demonstrated in his thoughtful film scripts such as for “You Can Count On Me” and “Manchester By the Sea" a gift for dramatizing family crises with heart and hope, wrings a good deal of humor out of the story of Gladys Green and her family. It’s not until the last 10 minutes or so that the goings are so upsetting that all one can do is sit, frozen.
            Initially, it is jarring to hear an audience laughing as Gladys (Deborah Gilmour Smyth, brilliant) gabs endlessly, forgets things left and right, repeats herself and tries to over-feed the family’s dog. But as Gladys deteriorates, the laughter in the house is less and less.
            How many thousands (maybe more?) families in America alone are dealing with this terrible predicament: an elder parent or grandparent whose dementia and general health is becoming worse and worse, leaving the family with the choice of putting them “in a home,” provided they could afford the cost of doing so, or, as Gladys’ daughter, Ellen (Katie MacNichol), her husband Howard (Alexander Ameen) and grandson Daniel (Tom Zohar) do, try to care for that elder person themselves?
            In the case of “The Waverly Gallery” as it is for many who in later life suffer from Alzheimer’s, Gladys Green once had a whole life. In younger years she was a successful lawyer and then the proprietor of an art gallery in Greenwich Village. That gallery, where the elder Gladys is now spending most of her time, is scarcely frequented, but it is her lifeline, her best friend.
            The secondary narrative of the play is the arrival at Gladys’ gallery of a budding young artist from Boston, Don Bowman (William Huffaker), whose work we can assume is no great shakes, but Gladys likes him and likes the company. She not only gives him her walls to display his art but a place to live in an unseen back room.
            But the fates are cruel and inevitable. Not only is Gladys’ mental state worsening and her delusions increasing, but the landlord of the gallery space informs the family that he intends to evict Gladys so that he can build a café adjunct to his hotel.
            These circumstances, all of them, are dire and urgent, but “The Waverly Gallery” is equally focused – no, more so – on the relationships of this emotionally embattled family. Grandson Daniel (the play’s narrator) lives in the same building that Gladys does, and he absorbs most of the trauma from his grandmother’s decline. Yet he loves her and is patient until he can’t be patient anymore. The onstage dynamic between Gilmour Smyth and Zohar, who’s never been better, is lovely and wrenching.
            Gladys’ daughter Ellen is losing her inner war with patience and is seemingly on the verge of a breakdown, yet MacNichol exudes the character’s inner strength that somehow keeps Ellen together.
            Ameen’s Howard cares but just can’t help his intermittent lack of diplomacy. I’m sure there are Howards everywhere in a family fraught like this one who does the best he can without being able to wholly get in touch with his feelings.
            The Don Bowman character is sweet and naïve at first, though shows himself to be self-involved and less than understanding of the family’s feelings. Really good Boston accent, by the way, Mr. Huffaker.
            Backyard’s production is directed by Francis Gercke, who co-directed (and performed in) a staging of “The Waverly Gallery” 20 years ago. This “Waverly” is one of Gercke’s finest directing efforts. He’s allowing his stellar cast to tap into every complex feeling and thought instilled in these richly realized Lonergan characters.
            For Gilmour Smyth, this makes three first-rate performances in a row for Backyard Renaissance: as Violet in “August: Osage County” in 2023, as Mag Folan in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” last year, and now “The Waverly Gallery.” In each case I marveled at how she could give all to these incredibly demanding roles performance after performance. Fortunately for theatergoers, she sure can.
            “The Waverly Gallery” runs through Dec. 6 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown.

Left to right: Sandy Campbell, Sara Frondoni and Kyle Adam Blair in "Master Class."  Photo by Tim Botsko

            There’s a singular fascination about watching teachers teach, whether it’s in the movies (‘Stand and Deliver” for one), on television (“Abbott Elementary” or dare I cite “Welcome Back, Kotter”?) or on the stage (“School of Rock,” et al). I’ve been reminded of this by seeing for the second time a production of Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which depicts the august opera diva Maria Callas teaching/bullying hopeful students at the Juilliard School in the early ‘70s.
            It was 10 whole years ago that I saw Sandy Campbell portray Callas in bygone ion theatre’s production of “Master Class.” The play and Campbell are back, this time in a co-production between Roustabouts Theatre and Scripps Ranch Theatre directed by Phil Johnson.
            Because a decade has passed, I’d mostly forgotten the ion “Master Class” other than remembering that Campbell was superb in the role of arguably opera’s grandest and possibly most temperamental legend. The other night at Scripps Ranch Theatre’s Legler Benbough space on the Alliant International University campus it started to come back to me. The premise: a mix of Callas monologue (often addressing the audience) and interactions with three students – two sopranos and a tenor, with intermingling of biographical musings and memories from “La Divina.”
            Campbell is superb once again. That’s not a surprise. What was a bit of a surprise this time around is that those aforementioned biographical musings and vocalized memories are definitely the heart of “Master Class” and the best reason to see it. I was not as patient this time around with the teaching sequences, even though the three performers (Abigail Grace Allwein, Sara Frondoni and Ben Read) are outstanding singers. (Disclaimer: I’m not an opera aficionado, so maybe I’m not qualified to truly judge.) The first act encounter between Callas and Allwein’s Sophie feels repetitive and drawn out. The much more compelling Act Two, in which Callas meets and hears tenor Anthony (Read’s aria is by far the most affecting in the show) and the fiery Sharon whom Frondoni portrays, also culminates with Campbell’s deepest, most emotional monologue, the worth-the-price-of-admission sequence.
            The vocal performances are accompanied by Kyle Adam Blair who besides playing piano gets a few choice lines here and there. Tim Benson makes cameos as a stagehand exasperated by Callas’ orders and complete indifference to his existence.
            The Benbough stage is kind of an odd, horizontal space, but only Campbell moves around much. What is happily surprising is that the sound (designed by Ted Leib, who also supervised the fascinating Callas biographical projections) is excellent. Even the sopranos’ highest notes ring true and pure in the theater.
            Make no mistake, however. This was and is a tour-de-force for Sandy Campbell whose Maria Callas is wry, funny, infuriating, unkind, wounded, unsympathetic AND sympathetic almost all at once. That’s an onerous task for any actor.
            Besides her performance, I took away from seeing “Master Class” a second time that Maria Callas’ sometimes-glamorous life was almost a tragic one, for the one thing she wanted more than anything else – true love – really escaped her. I also took away the fact that paramour Aristotle Onassis was a gazillionaire bully not worthy of her.
            I’m still not very interested in opera but it’s impossible to see “Master Class” and not be interested in – and beguiled by – the towering enigma that was Maria Callas.
            “Master Class” runs through Dec. 14 at the Legler Benbough Theatre on the campus of Alliant International University in Scripps Ranch.

 Marti Gobel in "Beauty's Daughter."                                                                Photo by Bernadette Johnson

            Dael Orlandersmith’s “Beauty’s Daughter” may be set in the Harlem of the 1990s, but considering the often-tragic world in which we all reside, the setting could be anywhere, and there’s something personal of the one-person play’s protagonist, Diane, in each of us.
            The same could be said for the characters whose grueling lives swirl around Diane, all portrayed by Marti Gobel in OnWord Theatre’s West Coast premiere of the 1995 “Beauty’s Daughter.”
OnWord is completing its first-ever season with this staging that stars co-founder Gobel and is directed by another, Danielle Bunch. Next year will mark its first full season with six productions scheduled beginning with one of Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter.”
            The 80-minute “Beauty’s Daughter,” which is being performed in Diversionary Theatre’s upstairs Black Box space, is aching in its honesty and its pain, yet somehow, through Gobel’s inhabiting of the tormented but resilient Diane, is an empowering declaration of self and spirit.
             The tiny Black Box space means that Gobel and the characters she’s playing are as close to you as they must have been to playwright Orlandersmith, who wrote a script (which she originally performed herself) that is as raw and tough as the streets but more than often lyrical and touching. The recorded spoken-word interludes directed by Dana King that are heard during Gobel’s costume changes echo with hard-hewn insight, defiance, the self-realization of a fighter and a survivor.
          “Beauty’s Daughter” opens with Gobel as 31-year-old Diane, preoccupied initially with a misguided dalliance with an Irishman who ultimately tells her, with a terseness not characteristic of an Irishman, that he doesn’t love her. This is only the entry point into Diane’s battle-tested soul.
            What ensues are the arrival and departure of those who must be wearing on her, in some cases haunting her.
            A streetwise Puerto Rican teenager, Papo, begs Diane to write an important term paper for him, initially flattering her in his swaggering way before, when refused, giving her a double dose of the middle finger.
           The most tender shadow is Mary, who is more mother to Diane than her real mother could ever be (we intuit this even before Beauty appears later). Mary’s imagining herself freed from the trials of old age and suddenly upright and 15 years old again with a life unlived ahead of her, proves to be one of Gobel’s most moving turns.
          Diane has a surrogate father in Louis, the blind drug addict who beckons to her from somewhere on the street. His recriminations and resentments are sheathed in a pitiful plea for help – change or folded money, whatever she can – and in his mind – should feed to him.
           There’s a degree of comic relief in Gobel’s transition to the unhappily married young man Anthony, a strutting poser who artlessly tries to pick up on her in a bar. It turns out the two of them share a passion for and an escape into the impetuosity of jazz music – but reality in the form of Anthony’s unwanted wife intrudes.
          The irony of the play’s title manifests itself in Beauty, Diane’s bitter, pathetically alcoholic mother, sprawled on the floor, swigging from Johnny Walker Black, a mean martyr who regards through sodden eyes her only child as a failure and someone who robbed she herself of just about everything.
           Diane returns to deliver a poetical denouement, bound to reconcile the past and the present. It’s a nearly sanguine coda to the sadness that preceded it.
          Gobel’s sensitivity, strength and versatility are all on display in what is a grand performance with just the right touch of restraint. Given the intimate environs of the Black Box, we’re practically in her head with her, and she is the light that shows us the way out of the darkness.
         “Beauty’s Daughter” runs through Nov. 30 at Diversionary Theatre’s Black Box in University Heights.

Steven Lone (left) and Jake Bradford in "The Strangers."                                       Karli Cadel Photography

            The fledgling Chalk Circle Collective (Megan Carmitchel, Michael Cusimano, Frankie Errington) describes its mission and its work as artist-centered, and I quote from its mission statement, to “empower artists to take ownership of the theatrical experience by providing a safe space to collaborate, to risk, and to innovate.”
            This company’s first multi-actor production (following the two-handers “Turn of the Screw” and “Constellations”) couldn’t be more in line with that avowed mission. Christopher Oscar Pena’s epic “The Strangers,” which Chalk Circle is giving its West Coast premiere, is a collaborative effort from a cast of eight local actors, director Coleman Ray Clark, and a sizable production team (for this staging is in the Old Town Theatre, formerly the home of Cygnet). It’s also risky, because “The Strangers” blurs the fourth wall, weaves in and out of fictional storytelling, and is guaranteed to mess with your head by the time its two and a half hours have concluded.
            As for innovative, that will depend on your definition of the word. I will say that I haven’t seen a production quite like this one. “The Strangers” can be unsettling at times and definitely confounding. If it was playwright Pena’s intention to re-imagine Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” to some extent, he’s more than succeeded. These characters, mired in the darkness and inscrutability of a place called Everytown, are not the folksy folks of Grover’s Corners, even at their most troubled.
            All this said, Pena’s storytelling is serpentine and self-indulgent, a piercing inquiry into the ditches and booby traps of life – alienation, disappointment, depression, suicide, ennui – right up to the point that he seems to tell us, as if enervated by his own ruminations, “F-it, neither love nor happiness is destined to win out.”
            A staging of “Our Town” is the backdrop for the story, though it doesn’t factor in any paramount way into what’s going down. Yes, the apparent protagonist cris (Steven Lone) has returned to what may or may not be his hometown because of the production, and there’s a brief snit about who’s made the cast and who hasn’t. But you could take the “Our Town” thing out completely and it would hardly make a difference.
            Of greater exigency for cris is his fast-track attraction to dave (Jake Bradford), who’s there at the outset to show him around town.
            Meanwhile, dave’s sister Emily (Kimberly Weinberger) is, she says, in love with pearl (Michael Amira Temple) but nonetheless urging pearl to go through with her intention to kill herself. Uh, OK.
            There’s niegel (Michael DiRoma), who is passionate about a protest event and is angry that diego (Javier David), cris’ brother, is more interested in canoodling with his girlfriend (Kelsey Venter).
            Leave us not forget a wedding planner (Venter again) and a homeless woman (Lauren King Thompson), both of whom have a lot to say about the state of impermanence and despair respectively.
            Most of the ethnically diverse characters (told you this was not “Our Town”) speak directly to the audience in monologues. Have to say, it’s a device I’ve never warmed to in the theater, though heaven knows it’s been employed a lot.
            There are two gripping monologues just the same, and they are by far the strongest moments of Pena’s text. The first is from the homeless woman, delivered by Thompson in an almost matter-of-fact tone that gives her observations just the right mixture of street wisdom and cynicism. Even better is cris’ second-act-opening soliloquy about his relationship with his Catholic mother, about his homosexuality and his mother’s reaction to it, about his Latinx heritage, about who and what God is, about the elusiveness of a genuine romance or the absence of just being held, and loved.
            That is indeed a hell of a lot to cover in one monologue, yet its very overload of thoughts and emotions compels us to listen and feel. It’s an affecting and impressive turn from Steven Lone, one that the remainder of “The Strangers” has little chance of living up to afterward.
            The story winds its way toward the occasion of a wedding between cris and dave, though one that feels foredoomed. When a betrayal is revealed, the doubts about a union are heightened. What happens next is … let’s leave it at that. Pena will take you somewhere you probably – likely – did not expect to go.
            These characters are strangers when it comes down to it, from each other and from themselves. I can’t be sure that’s what Pena is endeavoring to tell us utmost, but such a conclusion is inescapable.
            Director Clark is a friend of the playwright’s, and Pena himself was present during early rehearsals, so it can be safely assumed that his vision is faithfully translated to the stage. It’s done so with a fine cast in support of Lone (though this is really an ensemble piece). I only wish that Michael Amira Temple, who’s always a dynamic presence onstage, had more to do.
            Though there was a delay in the house on opening night, “The Strangers” proceeded evidently with all its technical enhancements intact, including sound, lighting and fog effects that factor into the production in a startling and revealing way.
            Here’s acknowledging the contributions of Sammy Webster (lighting design) and Syd Showers (assistant lighting design), Steven Leffue (sound design) and technical director Chad Ryan.
            “The Strangers” is a bit strange, but as with innovative that’s a relative term. Even if it’s trying too mightily to be meaningful, it’s an adventurous slice of theater. It’s also a bold step forward for Chalk Circle Collective.
            “The Strangers” runs through Nov. 30 at the Old Town Theatre.