Left to right: Matthew Elijah Webb, Stephanie Berry, Sean Boyce Johnson, Crystal Dickinson and Andrea Agosto in "Purpose."                                                                                      Photo by Rich Soublet II

            In the lushly appointed Chicago home of the Jaspers, what stands out most is a prominent living room shrine to the Civil Rights Movement and in particular, to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. A side portrait of King, looking determinedly ahead as if seeing his Dream in the reachable distance, is a fixture behind the drama of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose.” It is, at the same time, at the forefront of the many trenchant questions posed in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, among them how to navigate the aftermath of activism at its most passionate and what that looks like.
            La Jolla Playhouse could not have chosen a more important and engrossing play to launch its new season. Directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg (following up another estimable and perceptive turn directing August Wilson’s “Fences” at the Old Globe) and featuring a superior cast, all but one of whom onstage for the first time at the Playhouse, “Purpose” demonstrates why it has been such an honored work (Tony winner for Best Play a year ago in addition to the Pulitzer for Drama) and why it’s an important contribution to American theater.
            Jacobs-Jenkins has said he wanted to write about a Black dynastic family, something that hadn’t been done before, but also to reflect its relationship to the American conscience, the American soul. Though inspired by the family of Jesse Jackson, “Purpose” is a product of its own identity, making powerful statements about self and relationships, and able to be both relevant on a broad scale and relatable individually. The events of one snowy weekend at the home  of Rev. Solomon “Sonny” Jasper (Cornell Womack), including a sudden series of emotional explosions around a dinner table, could well mirror those in many homes where fraught or estranged family members sit down together – no matter whether a prayer precedes the meal or whatever color the family.
            In San Diego, “Purpose” arrives about a year after Jacobs-Jenkins’ previous Tony-winning drama “Appropriate” was produced at the Old Globe. (It was my personal favorite production of 2025.) Like “Appropriate,” “Purpose” is a family story but one even more layered, and while just as intense and fervent not as mean-spirited – though those mean spirits have a lot to do with “Appropriate’s” shockingly comic appeal. “Purpose” is also more internalized. In both, the family interrelationships are ever on the cusp of boiling over. In each, the play’s title might as well have been followed by a question mark, as Jacobs-Jenkins’ asks audiences to identify, define and most of all to THINK.
            The play’s Rev. Jasper is a legendary figure in the fight for civil rights, a stalwart voice of justice who marched on Selma, who knew Rosa Parks, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King and John Lewis. He is an icon now in retirement and tending to his hives of bees, yet harboring secrets and resentments that flash with ferocity when his two sons, Solomon Junior (Sean Boyce Johnson) and Nazareth (Matthew Elijah Webb) come to the house after a long time away. A celebration of the pastor’s wife, Claudine’s (Stephanie Berry) birthday is decreed by Claudine herself to be another, more significant celebration: that of Junior’s release from imprisonment.
            A disgraced state senator, Junior has served his time for embezzlement of campaign funds. In a painfully ironic twist, his wife Morgan (Crystal Dickinson) is now herself prison bound, for not paying taxes. The two were allowed to serve their respective terms consecutively in order to not leave their two children in Washington, D.C. parentless.
            Naz, meanwhile, is a nature photographer who has reluctantly abandoned his work in Ontario Canada with its countless lakes and ever-present mist to join the Jasper family from whom he long ago separated on multiple levels. A platonic friend, Aziza Houston (Andrea Agosto), has driven him all the way to Chicago during the threat of a storm, not intending to be part of the family festivities. We learn early on that Naz, who identifies as non-sexual, has agreed to provide the seed of what Aziza hopes will be a longed-for pregnancy.
            Is it any surprise that Aziza ends up occupying a chair at that explosive family table?
            Naz serves as the Fourth Wall-breaking narrator of “Purpose,” not only prefacing scenes and dramas to come but even departing from the unfolding story momentarily to explain to, contextualize for, or warn the audience. “Buckle up,” he says in one conspicuous, pre-dinnertime aside.
            Most of the time I find such a narrator a contrivance, but in “Purpose” Naz is the audience’s confidante, the one who grounds us amid the conflicts and reminds us too that we are all family in some way or another. Naz is not perfect; neither is any of us. The likable and sympathetic Webb is remarkably accessible to us and even when Naz shows himself to be imperfect (at the expense of his good friend Aziza), our connection to him and his storytelling remains strong.
            It’s a good thing we’re told to buckle up before that dinner table scene, which immediately becomes a metaphorical food fight. It starts with the first of many tensions to come between Sonny and Junior over who will say grace and how. Junior’s subsequent birthday gift to his mother – letters she’d written him while he was incarcerated now turned into a book – ramps up the father/son acrimony. Aziza, who’d been told by Naz not to talk about the sperm donation or either of their sexualities, does so – earnestly and in her mind innocently. Strike three.
            It all goes ballistic when Morgan lets the recriminations and accusations fly, for which she ultimately receives a face slap from Claudine. A threat follows.
            Dessert anyone?
            Claudine’s birthday cake goes uneaten (until, tellingly, Morgan helps herself to a slice in the night).
            All this in the first act.
            Yes, “Purpose” is lengthy – nearly three hours in toto. Its dramas-within-the-drama are complex and intertwining. But Jacobs-Jenkins has instilled enough comic dialogue and lightness amid all the fireworks to ensure the following: that there is needed catharsis; and that the behavior of the Jaspers one and all is understandable to us because we see ourselves, despite different circumstances, and we too look for lightness in the dark when we can.
            The Playhouse audience on opening night laughed so hard that some character exchanges were drowned out, or actors paused to let the laughter fade. So deft is “Purpose” in its narrative and emotive affect that it can be invested in as both Greek tragedy and sharp-honed comedy.
            Few contemporary playwrights employ the richness and breadth of language that Jacobs-Jenkins does, yet those in “Purpose” given the most to say – Solomon and Claudine – are not just speechifying. This is a subtle stroke of craft and execution, a synergy between writer, director and actors.
            Womack and Berry as the patriarch and matriarch of the Jaspers are the anchors of the production – parents in turmoil and, as the dust-ups and revelations engulf the house, compelled to reconcile themselves to difficult truths. Claudine is the fierce protector of her children and of the Jasper dynasty up and through the moments when doing so would seem to do as much damage as good. As for the pastor, a man at sea after a lifetime of righteous activism now past him, his shouting is subsumed by his own conscience over his spousal infidelity.
            Jacobs-Jenkins’ script references a crisis of purpose, and it’s this that pervades the lives and fates of each of these characters in some way.
            Johnson’s performance as the unanchored, broken brother Junior is rending, as is Dickinson’s desperate, bitter spouse Morgan.
            It’s great to see locally based actor Agosto getting her Playhouse debut as Aziza, the unaware dinner guest who is subject to all the fire and fury of the Jasper household. She brings energy and humor to the fore, and it’s easy to see why even the very private Naz might have valued their friendship, one that began during the COVID-19 lockdown.
            The Jasper home with its hardwood floors and stately staircase sweeping upward in the light of tall draperied windows behind which skies darken then brighten and snowflakes fall, was designed by Lawrence E. Moten III. It’s deceptively cozy and peaceful given how unsettled are the proceedings within it. Even with all the furnishings and strategic points of light, however, that portrait of MLK is ever-present.
            Dr. King’s courage, idealism and, yes, purpose are there, framed and frozen in another time, in the anxious and joyless Jasper domain.
            For all the Jaspers, even those who knew him, the searching will continue.
            “Purpose” runs through June 7 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre on the UCSD campus.

Left to right: Lyric Boothe, Vanessa Dinning and Dianne Yvette in "A Room in the Castle."  Photo courtesy of Moxie Theatre

            Toward the conclusion of “A Room in the Castle,” Lauren Gunderson’s script carries home the utmost point that her deconstruction of “Hamlet” is trying to make: that another way to look at Shakespeare’s most famous (and most argued about) work is to regard its principal female characters, Queen Gertrude and young Ophelia, not as women who are in the play only to respond to or suffer the consequences of the melancholy Dane, but as fully realized human beings in their own right.
            Actually, that point is made, in more implicit fashion, early on and throughout “A Room in the Castle,” which Moxie Theatre is giving its West Coast premiere. But you know – just in case you aren’t getting it …
            Gunderson is reportedly the most produced playwright in America, and with good reason. Her plays include “I and You,” “The Book of Will” and several that have been produced by San Diego theaters, like “Silent Sky,” “Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight,” “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” and “The Revolutionists,” which Moxie staged in 2017. She’s a champion for women characters, a writer who shines a light on and emphasizes their intelligence, strength and self-determination.
            “A Room in the Castle,” which was commissioned by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and co-produced with the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., takes the both manipulated and victimized Ophelia and Queen Gertrude and gives them agency certainly not present in “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Gunderson utilizes the original play as a backdrop, reinventing its most crucial moments – the Players Scene, the “Get thee to a nunnery!” admonition, the accidental murder of Polonius, Ophelia’s mad scene, et al – and in so doing empowers Ophelia and Gertrude. The playwright, for the most part, liberates them from victimhood, enabling them to choose and pursue their own destinies independent of and in defiance of men (the Dane most of all) who are oppressing them. They may rebel against what has been decreed in the court for them: “Obey, agree, assist.”
            This is an undertaking that might well have been written, as “Hamlet” originally was, for five hours’ worth of tragedian theater. The resourceful Gunderson required only 90 minutes to tell her revenge story, and what’s more hers is rife with clever lines and even bits of comedy. (The prime example of that would be the scene in which the Queen, Ophelia and Ophelia’s fiercely loyal hand maid Anna, played with spark by Vanessa Dinning, break out bottles of wine and party down, Elsinore-style. It’s then that their contempt for the self-indulgent Prince and the patriarchy of the court crystallize.)
            “Hamlet” is hardly ignored in “A Room in the Castle.” Quite the opposite – it’s omnipresent. Gunderson’s tale is supposed to be taking place as the events of Shakespeare’s magnum opus are unfolding, and the name (or princely title) of the most tortured, most famous protagonist in dramatic theater is ever on the lips of all three women. So Gunderson’s play is not an alternative “Hamlet.” It’s not, to evoke “Seinfeld,” a “bizarro world” view of the original either.
            “A Room in the Castle” is set concurrently with “Hamlet’s” Elizabethan era but it definitely has a contemporary sensibility. (Gunderson’s script references direct lines from Shakespeare, but the language is colloquial and current English – Hamlet is derided by Ophelia at one point as “a dick,” for example.) The Queen (Dianne Yvette) is first seen dressed in a power suit, commanding with the swagger and authority of a CEO presiding over a board meeting. Ophelia (Lyric Boothe), with her flowing hair, acoustic guitar and fey little musical ditties, could be some anachronistic Flower Child. Anna, endowed by Gunderson with a fiery resolve and back story well beyond the ladies-in-waiting of most of Shakespeare’s canon, wears power blue suit with confidence, and in fiercely protecting Ophelia is not afraid to defy the dominating Gertrude.
            Ophelia is ostensibly the play’s central character (the action takes place in her chambers at the castle, where she’s all but locked in), but it’s Queen Gertrude who pulls the levers of rebellion, and, frankly it’s Anna who is quickest to identify and decry Prince Hamlet’s exploitation and ill treatment of both mother and his intended.
            This is where “A Room in the Castle” falters. If Anna is the true instigator, what does that say about the newly realized power of Gertrude and Ophelia? And as for Gertrude, the character’s motives and sympathies change much too abruptly for credibility. Even Ophelia’s initial disillusionment with the Prince, prompted by a vaguely dramatized intrusion into her chambers, is without the impact it should have had.
            How the three women decide to rewrite Ophelia’s prescribed fate – a watery grave – is unworthy of Gunderson’s usual inventiveness. The climax of “A Room in the Castle,” then, is a disappointment. I did not expect a “Hamlet”- or “King Lear”-like bloodbath, but the play builds righteously and ominously toward a conclusion more befitting some streaming teleplay reimagination of Shakespeare’s classic.
            Yvette is a stalwart and engaging Gertrude, in every scene the most present woman in the room. The explanation for the Queen’s quick marriage to the murderer of her first husband, the King, is less than buyable, but as she does throughout the production, Yvette forges ahead purposefully.
            Boothe is an experienced musical theater performer, an asset here, as is her acknowledged relative unfamiliarity with “Hamlet”: Her Ophelia is neither informed nor prejudiced by Shakespeare’s source material. That “A Room in the Castle’s” madness scene for her is noisy and frantic rather than suitably devastating is, as with Yvette’s character’s motivations, not the actor’s fault.
            Dinning, as noted earlier, enjoys an Anna (a character that Gunderson created for this play) who is equal among the three in outrage and action. Had there been an “Anna” in “Hamlet,” who knows? Ophelia at least might have been able to tell off her mad betrothed before she met her fate.
            What director Kim Strassburger has brought to “A Room in the Castle” is its chief invention: closed-circuit television that screens for the audience the conflicts onstage, creating the illusion that Ophelia’s chambers and all that goes on within them are under surveillance from the patriarchal big brother outside its walls. It’s as though Ophelia is in jail – and she is.
            The TVs are also employed in transitions between the play’s primarily short scenes, transmitting static and scrambled images that provide mega-second glimpses of the men of all generations who’ve used, abused and sought to dominate women. They are powerful, practically subliminal visuals (created by Michael Wogulis). Too loud in the theater, but perhaps they needed to be.
            In spite of Moxie’s earnest production, “A Room in the Castle” feels as if playwright Gunderson didn’t exactly swing and miss with her “Hamletian” play but, to belabor the baseball metaphor, fouled one off. As one who loves all things Shakespeare, even recontextualizing of it, I had higher hopes.
            “A Room in the Castle” runs through June 7 at Moxie Theatre in Rolando.

Britania Cortez (left) and Leigh Akin in "Lend Me a Soprano."                                   Photo by Ken Jacques

            Nobody does doors better than Ken Ludwig. He writes them to be flung open, slammed closed and flown through as fast and frantically as the actors in the casts of his plays can open, slam and fly.
            These feats of physicality were a major portion of the fun of the playwright’s ‘80s comedy “Lend Me a Tenor,” about a Cleveland opera company and the chaos that ensues when welcoming the world-famous “Il Stupendo” to its stage. It all takes place in a many-doored hotel suite.
            Here we are 40 years later with Scripps Ranch Theatre’s production of Ludwig’s 2022 “Lend Me a Soprano,” about a Cleveland opera company and the chaos that ensues when welcoming the world-famous Elena Firenzi to its stage. It all takes place in a many-doored hotel suite.
           Deja vu? Understandably. Sequel? Not technically. Ludwig may be repurposing his premise and the madcap goings-on, but there’s one big change from “Tenor” to “Soprano”: The principals are women. Besides the sexy and temperamental Elena (Britania Cortez at Scripps Ranch), at the forefront are the Cleveland Grand Opera Company’s blustering manager Mrs.Wylie (Wendy Waddell); the fussy Opera Guild chair Julia (Bobbi Randall); an over-eager bellhop (Hayden St. Clair); and “Lend Me a Soprano’s” sweet, sympathetic and quite-funny-in- her-own-right protagonist Jo (Leigh Akin). She’s tasked with assisting Mrs. Wylie (that alone deserves a big honkin’ raise) and in the story with making sure the wild and unpredictable Elena shows up for the sold-out evening’s performance.
             Scripps Ranch’s “Lend Me a Soprano” is directed by Kate Rose Reynolds who’s ensured that the production’s antics are frantic but never completely careen off the tracks. Most of the laughs in the show stem from physical comedy, double-takes and wide-eyed stares of incredulity. Oh, and those doors that somehow the awkward stage accommodates. (Nice going, set designer Dixon Fish.)
 As things go awry on opening night, Jo must fill in for Elena (that’s as much as I’ll give away) both during the performance and, offstage, interacting with all the others in the story, including three amorous men. The mistaken identity ruse strains believability. But if you want to quibble about that you could make a case that Shakespeare himself didn’t expect total suspension of disbelief the many times he employed it.
            I’ll bestow upon “Lend Me a Soprano” no end of credit for this: As someone who neither appreciates nor particularly enjoys opera, I was engaged and even lulled by the bits of it that are sung in this show. I’m not qualified in any way to judge, but both Akin and especially Cortez more than acquit themselves. Each has experience in the idiom, so that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
           Cortez is a magnetic presence onstage, both singing and performing the comic shtick required of “Lend Me a Soprano.” The Act One scene in which she’s demonstrating to Akin how to put your whole body and soul into opera singing is the production’s money moment.
          It’s Akin who anchors “Lend Me a Soprano” in its particular arena of reality with her comic timing and a restraint that not everyone in the cast exercises. She’s also the yin to Cortez’s yang, which makes the whole shebang work.
         I should reiterate that there are men in the story – Elena’s exasperated husband Pasquale (Durwood Murray), Jo’s boyfriend Jerry (Dennis Peters), who’s more starry eyed for the Elena he idolizes than for Jo, and Leo (Marcel Andre Ferrin), the Cleveland company’s tenor who has hot pants for Elena – and probably would for any woman. Ferrin’s part is the plum of the three; so’s his performance.
           If ever there was a forget-your-troubles show, “Lend Me a Soprano” is it. You might even forget that you’re not wild about opera.
            “Lend Me a Soprano” runs through May 17 at Scripps Ranch Theatre, located on the campus of Alliant International University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aleksander D'Avignon and Ray-Anna Ranae in "The Mercy Seat."                           Photo by Daren Scott

            Playwright Neil LaBute has described what his characters in “The Mercy Seat” engage in for an hour and a half as “emotional terrorism.”
            This may or may not be (but probably is) a reflection of the setting for this 2002 two-hander: a Lower Manhattan loft within horror-producing proximity to the World Trade Center site the day after the Sept. 11 attacks.
            That’s where we find Abby (Ray-Anna Ranae) and Ben (Aleksander D’Avignon), two typically unlikable LaBute protagonists who in spite of the first few minutes of the storytelling have made 9/11 mostly about themselves. Ben especially. Reluctant/unable to tell the wife he’s been betraying for three years that he’s all right in the tragic aftermath he hits on an idea: pretend he was killed in the terror attack so that he and Abby can run away and be together with new lives.
            Did I mention he has a couple of kids too?
            LaBute seems to revel in brutality in the perhaps ironically titled “The Mercy Seat.” The invective-laden confrontations between Abby (who happens to be Ben’s boss too) and Ben are brutal. Their indictments about their sex life are brutal. Their recriminations are too.
            My issue with “The Mercy Seat” is I don’t buy this relationship at all beyond the purely sexual. Are Abby and Ben so angry and wound up and unhappy because it’s the day after one of the most deadly days in American history? Or do they just not like each other that much anyway? Lust, yes. Love, meh. Like, your guess is as good as mine.
            It’s to director Jenn Peters’ credit at OnStage Playhouse and to the visceral performances by her two actors that “The Mercy Seat” is simmering theater in spite of the flaws of its script and its characters. Ranae has definite presence on the stage, and D’Avignon can yell to bring the rafters down.
            When it comes down to it, “The Mercy Seat” is an hour and a half of a relationship-in-crisis. Ben’s craven idea for escape from his marriage aside, the Sept. 11 (well, Sept. 12) backdrop is almost incidental. Yes, the older (by 12 years) Abby accuses Ben of not being “heroic,” and there are references to people walking the ash-covered streets posting photos of their missing loved ones, but there are practically as many references to the Amazing Kreskin, Audie Murphy and Guy Burgess – means of emphasizing the age gap between these two discordant lovers.
            This September will mark a quarter-century since 9/11. In that time, artists in all disciplines have tried to reflect what it meant and what it means. I’m still waiting for one of them to get it right.
            “The Mercy Seat” runs through March 29 at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista.