Jessica John and MJ Seiber in "The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens."                         Photo by Daren Scott

            Eat your heart out. That’s what keeps going through my mind now that I’ve seen “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens.”
            I’m not going to explain that, just as I’m not going to attempt to explain much of what goes down in this world-premiere production at Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company’s Tenth Avenue Arts Center home.
            Playwright Francis Gercke, who is also Backyard’s artistic director, leans on “magical realism” when describing the two-hander he started working on during the COVID-19 pandemic. (No wonder “Dark Heart” has the pulse of a fever dream running throughout it.)
            Magical realism, a device most commonly associated with the work of Latin and South American writers, posits an external world in which the extraordinary intrudes upon the otherwise ordinary – and it’s accepted among its characters without shock or amazement. Think Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” or Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate” or Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits.”
            Gercke’s play (his second) certainly comes with an ordinary setting – a dingy, trash-strewn trailer somewhere in the Southwest desert, the furnishings of which by comparison make my very first apartment look like a suite at the Ritz Carlton. For extraordinary there’s a phone that rings though it’s off the hook, cartons of eggs and cans of Chock full o’ Nuts that materialize in the fridge or in cupboards, and by the way, a sliding opening in the roof atop which is … alien life?
            So I don’t know if this is magical realism as much as it is sci-fantasy, psychodrama or the sort of just-run-with-it spookiness on which the late great David Lynch thrived and into which the likes of J.J. Abrams has ventured.
            There is a premise here. Cindy (Jessica John) is inhabiting this squalid trailer by her lonesome when almost immediately there’s an angry banging on the door. After seeming to take a few shots at the arrival through a window, she reluctantly admits an excited, wounded Dooley Stevens (MJ Seiber). He’s there, he growls at her, to get back something she stole from him.
            That’s just the beginning of a winding, twisting, turning narrative that is variously unpredictable and unfathomable. Intentionally so. If we never truly get to know who Cindy is (even if we do learn why she’s holed up in this trailer) or who or what Dooley is, that’s just one more mystery, one more groping in the darkness, one more plummet down the elevator shaft.
            It’s a testament to the stamina of both actors and the chemistry they share that for two hours they’re able to maintain peak emotional pitch while also exercising physicality when called for and not receding into cartoon characters. Cindy and Dooley are real enough – everything around them? Jury’s out on that.
            Like many newborn plays, “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” could use some refining. One surprise or stunner follows hard upon another, to the extent that even as a wild ride it can be excessive. As the story chugs along fueling apprehension one’s nerves are raw, though the brain may be sore.
            Just don’t think it through? Don’t try to figure it out? Not so easy for somebody like me, but then I’m one who can’t resist seeking order in chaos.
            “Dark Heart” is Hannah Meade’s Backyard directorial debut. This affords me an opening to congratulate her on recently winning a Craig Noel Award from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle (of which I am a member) for directing Chalk Circle Collective’s “Constellations.” Also kudos to “Dark Heart’s” scenic designer Mathys Herbert, who took home a Craig Noel for his work on Cygnet Theatre’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
            “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” runs through March 15 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center, downtown.

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

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

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

PHOTO OF MICHELE SELENE ANG BY RICH SOUBLET II

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

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

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

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

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

            Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” is not a haunted-house drama. Or is it?
          When the extended Lafayette family in the wake of their patriarch’s death descends upon the rundown Arkansas plantation mansion in which he resided the horrors come quickly. First, the discovery of a photo album containing graphic images of lynchings along with a few other “artifacts” in jars that suggest a history of violent racism.
            Second, there’s the horrible family itself.
            The eldest of the Lafayettes, Toni, is raging with anger and bitterness over the many ways in which life has turned against her, all while trying without much luck to be a mother to a troubled teenage son. She’s been named the executor of her father’s estate, the disposition of which has brought her estranged relations to Arkansas.
            Among them is middle brother Beauregard (“Bo”) from New York with his wife and two children, a lot of impatience and no small resentment over Toni being executor. 
            Youngest brother Frank, the acknowledged family f-up, shows up with a much-younger fiancée who’s right out of the Transcendental Granola Catalog. Frank, now calling himself Franz, brings with him a lurid past that includes alcohol and drug abuse and a sex-crime conviction.
            The premise is that the surviving Lafayettes are there to hold an auction and an estate sale to pay off their father’s debts and collect (if not split up evenly) whatever’s left.
            Then the photo album enters the picture.
            The Old Globe Theatre under the direction of Steve H. Broadnax is staging this absolutely wrenching production of “Appropriate,” which last year won the Tony on Broadway for Best Revival of a Play.
            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. Talk about a train wreck you can’t turn away from.
            The battling Lafayettes and those attached to them (Bo’s pugnacious spouse Rachael, Frank’s “enlightened” partner River, Toni’s sulking, self-pleasuring son Rhys) in no time flat turn the magnificently brooding set designed by Arnel Sancianco into an arena of verbal and even physical assault. What the damning photographs mean, what they say about the family patriarch, and what the hell to do with them is only half of the no-holds-barred conflict. The other half is the sibs’ wars with each other, on multiple fronts.
            Toni, played with sheer ferocity by Maggie Lacey, careens from being attacker to martyr and back again. I could sense the recoil in the Globe audience. What would this character say or do next?
            Steve Kazee’s Bo tries to play peacemaker until he no longer can; for a while he’s the only remotely sympathetic sibling, but ultimately his greed will tamp down any sympathy for him.
            Frank (played very much on the razor’s edge by Daniel Petzold) is at the plantation ostensibly to make amends, as his AA or NA rehabilitation would dictate, for the many hurts he caused family members he hasn’t seen in years. He will soon be consumed by the toxic mood, bleak environs and by his demons that can never be stanched completely.
            One yearns for even a moment of genuine tenderness among this bunch but it is elusive if not impossible. Bo and Rachael’s 13-year-old daughter Cassie is the drama’s one guileless character, though I wouldn’t call her innocent.
            The strength of Broadnax’s direction is taking a play that is easily two and a half hours long and, calling upon the skill of a tremendous cast and prizefight pacing, never letting the action and physicality written into the play wane, no matter how talky – let’s make that shouty – the proceedings become.
            The atmospherics at the Globe create a suffocating ambience something like an amalgam of the end of days and “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” Besides Sancianco’s set with its winding, dusty staircase, worn furniture and conspicuous chandelier, the shadowy lighting by Alan C. Edwards and the ever-audible sound of cicadas outside the mansion (design by Curtis Craig) manifest a forlorn and dreary inner world just made for stark confrontations and terrible secrets.
            “Appropriate” has all that -- and an ending you won’t soon forget.
            “Appropriate” runs through Feb. 23 at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park.

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

Tavis Kordell (left) and Matt Loehr in "Some Like It Hot."                                  Photo by Matthew Murphy

            The word “madcap” is frequently employed when describing Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy classic “Some Like It Hot.” This is true.
            Well, the stage adaptation of “Some Like It Hot” with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”) enjoys a wowzer of a madcap moment with the frantic-chasing, door-slamming “Tip, Tap Trouble” number. It’s the comedy highlight of a show that’s never as funny as the film on which it’s based. Though let’s be fair – could any adaptation compete with Tony Curtis and (especially) Jack Lemmon in drag, AND Marilyn Monroe in the bargain?
            As the national touring production of the 2022 “Some Like It Hot” demonstrates, the stage book’s authors, Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin, were smart enough to avoid a gag-by-gag retelling of the original story co-written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. The premise is the same, if tweaked here and there: Down-on-their-luck Chicago jazz musicians Joe (Matt Loehr) and Jerry (Tavis Kordell) witness a mob execution and to escape the baddies dress up as women and join up with Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, an all-female band heading out on the road.
            But with modern sensibility in mind (the film, remember, is now more than 65 years old), Lopez and Ruffin have built gender fluidity and awareness of racial discrimination into the “Some Like It Hot” story – never mind that the it’s still set in the ‘30s. There’s even an acknowledgement out loud by one of Sweet Sue’s troupers that women get paid less than men for doing the same job.
            Trumpers would call these updates to the tale “woke.” Let ‘em. While this musical can be soap-boxy at times, its bid for greater relevance is welcome, and that takes nothing away from the beloved movie.
            Broadway San Diego has brought to town a likable and tap-dance-happy (too much tap for me, I have to say) show that is escapist entertainment and a tribute to if not a copy of Wilder’s film. The star as Jerry/Daphne, just as Lemmon was on screen, is Kordell. Not only is his character the focal point of what the story wants to say about identity and acceptance, but Kordell is a talented dancer and physical actor in general. Really the only problem with this casting is that he’s a head taller than everyone else in the large ensemble, including Edward Juvier who plays the smitten millionaire Osgood Fielding III. Kordell can’t help being tall, so I’ll let that go.
            Loehr is less appealing to me in the Joe/Josephine part, but maybe my judgment’s clouded because I always thought Tony Curtis was the weak link in the movie.
            As the band’s sexy chanteuse Sugar Kane, Leandra Ellis-Gaston gets three tunes to sing – “A Darker Shade of Blue,” “You Coulda Knocked Me Over With a Feather” and “Ride Out the Storm” --  and she possesses the lush voice and high style to deliver each with mood and finesse. Kordell may take the last bow at show’s end, but Ellis-Gaston is the musical star of this production.
            As with the film, supporting characters get their due. Bandleader Sweet Sue’s role in the story is increased considerably onstage, with Tarra Conner Jones well up to the task. Juvier’s Osgood is a more dashing Osgood than Joe E. Brown was in the movie and his immediate infatuation with Jerry/Daphne is more schoolboyish. Devon Goffman’s Spats Columbo gangster is no George Raft.
            “Some Like It Hot’s” musical score ranges from the rousing title tune to the shuddering “Fly, Mariposa, Fly” (Osgood’s entreaty to Daphne, weighed down by precious metaphor-making). Most of the time the songs feel like an excuse for someone or everyone to break out into dance. Tap tap tap. And tap again.
            Few will have this show’s songs in their heads the day after seeing it. Maybe tap lessons signed up for instead?
            The costume design by Gregg Barnes is superb and the choreography by Casey Nicholaw (who also directed) absolutely ace. Is it any wonder this is a dance show?
            This was a relief on opening night: The musical’s script calls for Sweet Sue’s band to head not to Florida as in the movie but to California and the Hotel del Coronado, a clear nod to the location where much of Wilder’s flick was filmed. This being the case, I expected audience howls every time “San Diego” was uttered onstage. Parochialism at its most embarrassing. But thankfully, the howls weren’t that loud. Could it be that San Diego’s finally big enough that we don’t need to applaud its presence in movies, TV or theater?
            Now who’s getting soap-boxy?
            Sorry about that.
            “Some Like It Hot” runs through Feb. 2 at the Civic Theatre, downtown.

Tavis Kordell (left) and Matt Loehr in "Some Like It Hot."                                  Photo by Matthew Murphy

Jin Park (left) and Marielle Young in "The Heart Sellers."                                         Photo by Aaron Rumley

            The first show I’ve seen in 2025 is one I wish that Donald Trump – and everyone who voted for him – would see: a production of Lloyd Suh’s “The Heart Sellers.” Without being a preachy “message” affair, this 85-minute play reminds us that those who immigrate to this country are PEOPLE. People with dreams and vulnerabilities, grateful to be in America even as they miss what and those they left behind in their home countries. But now this – America! – is home, and it’s sometimes as scary as it is full of hope.
            North Coast Rep in Solana Beach, which enjoyed a fine 2024 (namely “Sense of Decency” and “A View from the Bridge”), is off to an auspicious start with its production of “The Heart Sellers,” directed by Kat Yen, the first La Jolla Playhouse Directing Fellow. It’s the story of two young wives (one Filipino, one Korean) whose husbands’ medical residencies have moved them to the United States. The year is 1973, eight years after LBJ signed into law the Hart-Cellar Act that repealed immigration quotas based on race or ethnicity. The day is Thanksgiving, and Luna (Marielle Young) from the Philippines has invited Jane (Jin Park) from Korea, whom she encountered while shopping, to her home for cooking, conversation and companionship.
            That’s the premise. It might seem a scant one for an entire hour and a half, but under Yen’s crisp direction the narrative moves right along, propelled by the gabbier, more emotional Luna who moves excitedly about the ‘70s-motif apartment designed by NC Rep’s Marty Burnett.  The at-first diffident, certainly more timid Jane gradually comes out of her shell, and more than a few swallows of wine gets the two wives talking, confessing, sharing and laughing.
            Being 1973, Richard Nixon is evoked with deserved derision, and as the women get to know one another and open up they express their disgust at power-hungry men in general, from Ferdinand Marcos to Tricky Dick.
            But “The Heart Sellers” is political only up to a point. It’s more personal than political. The strength of Suh’s script, affectingly brought to fruition onstage by Young and Park, is in each woman’s personal struggle with loneliness, with disorientation, with the double-edged sword that is assimilation. Each acknowledges the country she left behind is troubled, even dangerous, but each clings to something still there. (An early, heart-rending admission from Luna is that she regrets she won’t be in the Philippines when the family’s beloved 16-year-old dog dies.)
            Not to be overlooked is that “The Heart Sellers” is frequently quite funny, and not at the expense of either Jane’s broken English or because of hapless sight gags in the kitchen. In fact, there’s far more laughter than tears in the storytelling.
            When “The Heart Sellers” does turn weightier, it’s in Luna’s spoken metaphor that those who give up their country for another are “selling their hearts” in the process. This obviously is where the title of the play originates. To me, it’s a bit heavy-handed and that title aside, a bit pious too.
            In any case, Young and Park are a pleasure to watch, animated and enjoying great chemistry as the two strangers who are destined to become BFFs. Though Park has the more reactive role, at least for the first one-third of the play, she becomes the steadying force by its end.
            “The Heart Sellers” is not the first production I’ve seen in which the setting is two or more actors playing out a story while preparing a meal. The concept’s practically become a dramaturgical trope. Suh’s tale could probably work even without cooking a Thanksgiving turkey.
            As long as the wine was open.
            “The Heart Sellers’ runs through Feb. 2 at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.