Like Willimon’s Farragut North, The Parisian Woman gives audiences an deliciously intimate glimpse at the behind-the-scenes dealings (and double-dealings) in Our Nation’s Capital, with crackerjack Broadway director Pam McKinnon firmly in the driver’s seat.

This time round it’s Chloe who’s doing the power-brokering, the better to insure her husband’s nomination as U.S. Attorney General. To do so means working her feminine wiles on more than one bedmate, and should that prove insufficient to get hubby into the President’s cabinet, well what’s a little blackmail between friends?

 If I’ve been deliberately vague about just who these friends and lovers might be, it is to avoid spoiling any of the surprises Willimon has in store, beginning with a biggie, one for which credit must go to French playwright Henry Becque’s 1885 drama “La Parisienne,” the inspiration for Willimon’s 21st Century take-off. An article at TheatreHistory.com calls this plot twist in Becque’s original “alone worth the price of admission.” The same holds true with The Parisian Woman, and this “I didn’t see that one coming!” revelation is but the first fiendishly clever plot twist Willimon has up his sleeve.

 Besides paying tribute to Becque’s original (and the fact that Chloe spent a particularly formative time of her young adult life in Paris), Willimon’s title character is more Parisian in nature than nationality. After all, what Parisienne worth her salt wouldn’t have at least one lover in addition to her legally wedded spouse, and who but a Parisienne could turn manipulation into a simple matter of feminine wiles?

And who better to play the sexy schemer than film/TV star Dana Delany, who has us in the palm of her hand from first scene to last?

With Delany as Chloe, forget any danger that Willimon’s anti-heroine will turn into a two-dimensional villainess. From her star-making role as Colleen McMurphy on China Beach, girl-next-door likability has been part of Delany’s appeal, and no matter how devious and manipulative Chloe may become, Delany keeps us resolutely on her side. We might not want Chloe as a potentially back-stabbing friend, but as brought by Delany to multi-layered life, we can’t help rooting for the seductive conniver and cheering each stab of the knife. And for an actress who’s done most of her work in the short-take, stop-and-start world of television and film, Delany proves herself a consummate theater pro in a role which has center-stage (and letter-perfect)  in every single scene.

 Steven Culp and Steven Weber provide bang-up support as the men in Chloe’s life, while SCR favorites Linda Gehringer and Rebecca Mozo do their accustomed terrific work as a Washington DC maven and the daughter she wouldn’t mind seeing elected President someday.

As always, one of the great pleasures of a South Coast Rep play is its scenic design, and Marion Williams’ for The Parisian Woman is no exception. Not only is Chloe’s elegant Washington townhouse spot-on, only a theater with SCR’s resources at hand could have this massive set slide smoothly back upstage to allow a pair of equally detailed sets to slide in, one from house left, and the other, later, from house right, a feat no 99-seat theater could hope to replicate.

 David Kay Mickelsen costumes each character to elegant, stylish Washington DC perfection, while Lap Chi Chu’s lighting design and Cricket S. Myers’ sound design are as good as it gets, par for the course for the LADCC Angstrom Career Achievement Award winning Chu and the Tony-nominated Myers.

Kelly L. Miller is dramaturg, Jackie S. Hill production manager, and Sue Karutz stage manager.

Reviewing Willimon’s previous DC-set play, I wrote, “Rarely can I recall an audience more involved in a play’s action and in the twists and turns of its plot than was the case last night. Farragut North is exciting, thought-provoking, conversation-starting theater at its best.” About The Parisian Woman, let me simply say “Ditto,” with Dana Delany as its powerhouse bonus.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
April 23, 2013
Photos: Henry DiRocco/SCR

The killers in question are the Harpe Brothers, an unmatched pair of siblings whose killing spree through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Mississippi in the post-Revolutionary years of our country’s infancy was either a misguided attempt at small-scale counterrevolution or a simple case of blood lust.

As for the music in question, it is 1950s rockabilly, performed live onstage by a sensational three-piece band and sung by the evening’s narrator, the charismatic Banks Boutté as Rockabilly Boy.

 As any Broadway buff can tell you, American Misfit is neither the first nor even the second instance of contemporary music and American history and murder forming the basis of a theatrical piece.  Stephen Sondheim wrote famously about presidential killers in Assassins, and more recently an indeed bloody Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson segued from a run at the Kirk Douglas to an off-and-on-Broadway run.

Those two shows were bona fide musicals, however, and since audience interest remains high whenever Boutté and band are rockabillying away, I can’t help wishing that Philip Owen and Dietz had gone the full-fledged musical route.  That would have given us more of Lee Martino’s sensational choreography, there being not nearly enough of the song-and-dance excitement Martino and cast promise in the show’s infectious, terrifically performed opening number.

 Dietz’ play is best at its most straightforward, since AJ Meijer as Micajah “Big” Harpe and Daniel MK Cohen as Wiley “Little” Harpe do truly compelling work, with crackerjack (make that crackerjill) support from Maya Erskine and Karen Jean Olds as backwoods gals Sue and Betsey, who history tells us became a polygamous Big’s two wives.  Cohen in particular does extraordinarily watchable, touching work as the more height-challenged of the two.

 Act One ends with a sensational, surreal scene of the Harpes and their womenfolk on a mammoth murder rampage, a sequence that gives lighting designer Elizabeth Harper, sound designer Martin Carrillo, and properties and puppet designer Heather Ho the chance to strut their stuff, leaving the stage covered with scarecrow puppet “bodies,” their zippered fronts open to reveal yard upon yard of red streamers in lieu of actual eviscerated innards.

Making her first appearance at the end of Act One is the sublimely lovely Eden Riegel (of All My Children fame) as Sally, the preacher’s daughter who went on to become Mrs. Little, and whose debates with him over issues of democracy vs. monarchy are not only compelling to listen to and watch, they have a transformative effect on her killing spree-prone hubby, thereby adding even greater depth to Cohen’s already memorable work.  (Riegel also gets to sing one of Owen and Dietz’s songs, and exquisitely so.)

The one-and-only Larry Cedar is on hand to play a humorously aristocratic George Washington as well as Sally’s hellfire-and-brimstone preacher Pa, a book-burner if there ever was one, with Sally’s dictionary a particular victim of his “We Don’t Want No Education” policy.

 An excellent P.J. Ochlan plays Moses Doss, the first Harpe Brothers victim, whose only crime was to know their real names.  Later, in American Misfit’s American Misstep, Ochlan returns to soliloquize as Robert E. Lee, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Ronald Reagan, scenes that cross the fine line between cleverness and pretention, most notably in a bizarre dream monolog which has the “father of the atomic bomb” having hot fantasies about none other than Marilyn Monroe.

I couldn’t help thinking how much more I’d have liked American Misfit without these side trips into La La Land and with more, much more of the music and dance that make it come alive.

American Misfit is not a play to go into uninformed.  This reviewer had fortunately done a quick bit of research before the show, an online search which helped immensely in following Dietz’s frenetic narrative. A biographical insert would be of great help to those audience members who might find themselves in desperate need of an Act One synopsis at intermission.

Boston Court’s latest benefits from the multiple contributions of Omar D. Brancato, not only in charge of musical direction and arrangements but also onstage bassist alongside Eric McConnell on guitar and Rosy Rosenquist on drums, and Rockabilly Boy cover at a pair of upcoming understudy performances.

 Nick Santiago’s outstanding scenic design, representing Rockabilly Boy and Band’s performance space, could easily fill a big proscenium stage (with a bunch of multipurpose blue streamers thrown in both for looks and for more practical uses).  Carrillo’s sound design is never more fascinating than when characters suddenly speak in voices so amped that they sound almost lip-synched.  (I’m not sure what that effect was supposed to signify, but it definitely was interesting.)  Ann Closs-Farley’s costumes, a blend of the historical and the fanciful, are quite splendid.  Kudos go also to dialect coaches Tracy Winters and Tuffet Schmelzle.  Gwenmarie White is assistant director, Aaron Henne dramaturg, Nicole Rossi production stage manager, and Julia Flores casting director.

If there’s any L.A. theater known for its “out there” productions, The Theatre @ Boston Court is it, and a number of those offerings have been among this reviewer’s Best Of The Year favorites.  (Last year’s Scenie-winning The Dinosaur Within and The Children come immediately to mind.)  Other Boston Court productions have proven too experimental or avant-garde for my tastes.  American Misfit fits smack dab in the middle.  Though I can’t confess to being a fan of its artsier side trips, while it was on the right track with the Harpe Boys and Sally and with sexy Rockabilly Boy swiveling his hips a la Elvis, I found myself quite enjoying American Misfit’s rockabilly ride.

Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena.
www.bostoncourt.org

–Steven Stanley
April 18, 2013
Photos: Ed Krieger

The spirit of Thornton Wilder is alive and well and living inside playwright Noah Haidle, whose remarkable Smokefall, now getting its World Premiere at South Coast Repertory, bears comparison with Wilder’s Our Town and The Skin Of Our Teeth.

 Like Our Town, Smokefall features a ubiquitous, all-knowing Narrator, whom Haidle calls “Footnote” (Leo Marks), since it is in numbered footnotes that he comments on the action, his words reminiscent of those spoken in Our Town by its “Stage Manager.” Take “Footnote Number One” as an example: “The Grace Episcopal church is well over two hundred years old, making it the oldest building in Grand Rapids. The bells themselves were imported from France. They toll the hours away and everybody hears them in town. No matter how hard they try not to. They are the metronome of their lives. Hour by hour.” Very Grovers Corners. Very Thornton Wilder.

 In place of The Skin Of Our Teeth’s Antrobus family, we have head-of-household Daniel (Corey Brill), his pregnant-with-twins wife Violet (Heidi Dippold), their sixteen-year-old daughter Beauty (Carmela Corbett), and the Colonel (Orson Bean), Violet’s elderly grandfather who lives with them. There’s also Max, the family pet, played to perfection by real-life pooch Sparky (though the program gets their names backwards).

 Though at first glance, these folk might seem to be your average Midwest family circa 1960something, Footnote’s footnotes reveal cracks in their apple-pie surface. Beauty, we are told, suddenly stopped speaking three years ago, her last words being simply, “I have nothing more to say.” Max, we learn, has fallen in love, “completely and hopelessly in love with the neighbor’s cat” and “for the first time in his life … knows the painful agonies of love.” Since the Colonel’s memory isn’t what it used to be, “the truth is that Max is the one who walks him, because without Max, the Colonel could not find his way home.” Violet sings a self-composed lullaby to her about-to-pop twins, to which, Footnote notes, “The twins applaud. They would give a standing ovation if they could.” And as for Daniel, we soon learn that “lying in bed at night, he makes lists in his head of all of his reasons to be grateful, but they only temporarily relieve his general sense of dread and malaise.” Today, Footnote tells us, will be the last one Daniel spends with his family, and this is not the only glimpse into the future that our narrator will offer over the course of Smokefall’s eighty-five minute, intermissionless three acts.

An air of whimsy pervades Smokefall from the get-go. Take the case of Beauty, whom “everyone calls Beauty, and nobody really remembers her name, not even her.” It doesn’t get much more whimsical than a character who “eats very strange things like paste and cardboard …, bark from trees, grass, earth, maple leaves, coffee grounds, envelopes, and the newspaper” and “seems to be perfectly fine, if not thriving, so nobody pays much attention to it anymore.”

If Act One, “What Hours They Forgot,” is whimsical, this is even more true of Act Two, “Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” which takes us inside Betsy’s womb with Brill and Marks as Fetus One and Fetus Two, an adult-sized duo who speak with the wisdom of the sages (“As descendents of Adam, as a consequence of the first sin, of this transgressed hereditary strain, we will be born into an absence of holiness and perfect charity”), duet “Send In The Clowns,” and alternately annoy and adore each other as you might expect two fetuses living in close proximity for nine months to do.

 Act Three, “Awake In The Reality Of Experience,” features Bean as Johnny, i.e. Fetus Two “grown up and grown old,” and Corbett as a now 95-year-old Beauty looking every bit as young as she did at sixteen, and able to tell us in actual spoken words about the years she spent traveling the world following Betsy’s funeral sixty-five years earlier.

My best guess is that all this whimsy may prove too much for some theatergoers. This reviewer had a bit of a knee-jerk resistance to characters who drink paint and converse inside a womb and keep getting interrupted by “footnotes.”

 Fortunately, thanks to a script brimming with humanity and heart, pitch-perfect direction by Anne Kauffman, exquisite performances by the entire cast, and a magical scenic design, this co-production with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre won me over fairly quickly. Smokefall may be whimsical to the nth degree, but its characters and their assorted destinies touched my heart and made me ponder life’s mysteries in ways that The Skin Of Our Teeth and Our Town have done for the past seventy to seventy-five years. (Since Thornton Wilder wrote only two plays, Smokefall sort of makes it a trilogy.)

Bean brings a lifetime of experience (and our shared memories of his six decades on stage and screen) to both the increasingly forgetful yet endearing Colonel and the equally aged yet still vital Johnny, letter-perfect performances that belie the actor’s eighty-four years.

Corbett’s incandescence makes her the ideal choice to play Beauty, and whether expressing herself in silence or in spoken words (without the slightest trace of her native English accent), her work here is as indelible as it was in last year’s Eurydice.

 Dippold is maternal warmth and wifely caring personified as Violet, and having previously starred in Haidle’s Mr. Marmelade, she captures the playwright’s voice to perfection.

Brill invests Daniel with a heartbreaking sadness beneath his outwardly “I’m all right, we’re all right” attitude, making his transition to Fetus One all the more remarkable.

Marks, too, gets a pair of night-and-day different parts, the wry, wise, witty Footnote, and the mischievous, adventurous Fetus Two, both of which he nails, as he has every role I’ve seen him in to date.

Together, Fetus Brill and Fetus Marks are so captivating and touching, their Act Two could easily stand on its own as a one-act.

If the South Coast Rep ensemble is made up of gifted L.A.-based talents (thanks to casting director Joanne DeNaut, CSA), Smokefall’s superb design team are all out-of-town imports whose work makes this World Premiere co-production all the more stunning.

 Scenic designer Martha Ginsberg’s two-story Grand Rapids home looks deceptively simple, an oversized dollhouse made all of blond wood, but it does amazing, earth-shattering things. Melanie Watnick’s costumes, David Weiner’s lighting, and Lindsay Jones’ original music and sound design contribute to making Smokefall every bit the design equal to SCR productions featuring more familiar local names.

John Glore is dramaturg, Joshua Marchesi production manager, and Jamie A. Tucker stage manager.

Smokefall is one of seven plays featured in this year’s SCR Pacific Playwrights’ Festival, five of which will be presented in one-time only readings (from April 26 to 28) for consideration in future SCR seasons, the other two anchoring the festival as fully staged productions. (Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman opens shortly.)

Though its abundance of whimsy might at first prove a tad off-putting to more reality-minded theatergoers, by the time Smokefall has reached its final, transcendent moments, those who have been willing to take the journey Haidle has charted will have found themselves richly rewarded.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
April 9, 2013
Photos: Henry DiRocco/SCR

This is all I knew about Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale going in, and if you wish to be as blown away by this absolutely brilliant, unexpectedly funny, devastatingly powerful new play as I was, ask no questions. Simply reserve your seat at South Coast Repertory and let Hunter, director Martin Benson, and five phenomenal actors do the rest. You’ll thank me for not having given anything but this away.

 If, however, you need more convincing, or simply can’t stand the suspense of knowing only the barest minimum, read on.

The Whale of Hunter’s tale (though this is but one of the play’s title’s several meanings) is Charlie (Matthew Arkin), a 40something divorced man whose weight (somewhere between 550 and 600 pounds) and blood pressure (238 over 134 at last check) keep him housebound, attached by gravity and inertia to the sofa from which he does online tutoring, correcting high school students’ godawful expository writing. (“There were many aspects to the book The Great Gatsby. But I was bored by it because it was about people that I don’t care about and they do things I don’t understand. In conclusion, The Great Gatsby wasn’t so great, LOL.”)

Whatever Charlie’s life may have been like in the past, we soon realize that he’s down to only one friend, a nurse named Liz (Blake Lindsley) who alternately begs him to check himself into a hospital and brings by meatball subs and buckets of KFC. (Can you say enabler?)

With no more than a week or so left to live given his current weight, blood pressure, and a case of congestive heart failure, Charlie decides that it’s now or never to reestablish a relationship with Ellie (Helen Sadler), the teenage daughter he has not seen in fifteen years, not since he left her mother for another man.

Not surprisingly, reconciliation is the last thing his seventeen-year-old daughter has on her mind, not this rebellious monster of a teen whose “hate blog” is her very public way of telling mother and classmates to go fuck themselves.

Still, daughter does pay dad a visit, if only out of curiosity, and when he offers to pay for her companionship to the tune of a whopping $120,000, the small fortune his tutoring—and expense-free life—has allowed him to accumulate, Ellie agrees to take him up on his offer on one condition. Charlie must rewrite the essays she needs to submit in order to be allowed to graduate and he must “write every other essay for the rest of the semester. And they have to be really good.”

 Ellie is not the only unexpected visitor to pop into her father’s life this week. Arriving to find Charlie wheezing and struggling for breath (a side effect of masturbating to Internet porn still on his laptop screen) is Elder Thomas (Wyatt Fenner), a nineteen-year-old Mormon on a mission. Obeying Charlie’s orders to read from a rather bad essay that seems somehow to calm Charlie down (an essay whose significance we will eventually discover), Elder Thomas is somewhat surprised—yet pleased and flattered—when Charlie agrees to let the young missionary come back and talk to him about his church.

Even more surprised (outraged would be the more appropriate term in her case) is Liz, who informs the Mormon lad that the his church has not only caused Charlie a lot of pain, “the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints killed his boyfriend.”

It’s Charlie himself who fills in the blanks about his deceased partner Alan, who, following his own mission abroad, had fallen for the slightly older college professor and abandoned the life and fiancée his parents had chosen for him, yet had never been able to rid himself of the ensuing guilt, guilt which eventually led him to quite literally starve himself to death. (Ironic indeed, since following his death, Charlie began to do precisely the opposite.)

When Elder Thomas expresses confusion as to why Charlie would want to know more about a church he blames for killing his partner, Charlie explains that the “church” he’s interested in is “the one by the U-Haul, by the highway,” the house of worship to which Alan had paid one last Sunday visit on his father’s request, after which “he just stopped everything. He stopped bathing, he stopped eating, he stopped sleeping. And a few months later, he was gone.” And since “Alan wouldn’t tell me what they did to him,” Charlie explains to Elder Thomas, “I was hoping you could find out.”

How about that as a setup for one the most riveting, potentially life-altering theatrical experiences you’re likely ever to experience?

 If playwright Hunter’s name seems familiar to L.A. theatergoers, it’s doubtless because of his previous play, A Brand New Boise, one which generated considerable buzz at Rogue Machine a few months back, it too the story of a parent attempting a reconciliation with an angry young teenager and quite an extraordinary play in its own right.

The Whale is even better, and even more likely to grab you by the heart and guts and not let go.

It’s also surprisingly funny, a combination of Hunter’s way with words and the pitch-perfect performances director Benson has elicited from a couldn’t-be-better cast.

 In “fat suit” and prosthetic makeup that make his transformation from actor to Charlie as visually believable as can be, Arkin gives a performance of such power and grace that it immediately qualifies as one of the year’s best. Never for a moment do you doubt that Charlie’s heft, his wheezing, his struggle to simply to rise from the sanctuary of his sofa, are real. And if Charlie’s heart is damaged beyond repair, never for a moment do you forget that there is a real, human heart still beating under “two feet of fat” and attempting against all odds to heal after having been broken into pieces.

Sadler positively dazzles as Ellie, a teen whose sheer awfulness provokes shocked laughter even as the amazing young actress lets you know that Ellie’s bravado hides some awfully deep pain. Spitting out angry, hurtful words like bullets (“You smell disgusting. Your apartment is disgusting. You look disgusting.”), Sadler is scarcely recognizable as last fall’s enchanting Imogen in A Noise Within’s Cymbeline, and her crisp English accent at Tuesday’s talkback makes her transformation into Ellie all them more astonishing.

 Lindsley provides gritty, gutsy support as Liz, a woman whose love for Charlie may be both the best and worst thing in his life. Equally fine is Jennifer Christopher as Charlie’s ex-wife Mary, whose anger at the husband who left her for a man may remain unabated but whose affection for him and love for a possibly irredeemable daughter cannot be denied.

Last but not least, there is the extraordinary Fenner, whose three Scenie wins (for Dog Sees God, Misalliance, and Anita Bryant Died For Your Sins) have introduced Southern California audiences to one of our most gifted young actors. Fenner gives us an Elder Thomas whose sweetness and purity we take so much for granted that one of The Whale’s unexpected twists comes as quite a surprise indeed. Clutching his bike helmet like a child might his teddy bear (or Linus might his blanket) and wearing his faith as a protective badge, Fenner’s Elder Thomas is but one more unforgettable creation from an actor with quite a career ahead of him.

Though Hunter allows his characters to do a darned good job of demonizing each other, the playwright himself demonizes not a one of them, nor does he himself demonize the Mormon church (though he lets Liz do a darned good job of it when she tells Elder Thomas how it destroyed her brother’s life). At the same time, Hunter has Elder Thomas deliver a sincere and even moving explanation of what he feels makes his church so wondrous, and when Charlie says he’s read The Book Of Mormon several times, you sense that playwright Hunter has too. (Audience members who might suspect Hunter of not doing his homework in having Elder Thomas visit Charlie without the obligatory missionary buddy will find that there is a very good reason for this, just as there is in the F-graded Moby Dick essay Charlie takes such comfort in rereading.)

With writing, directing, and performances as powerful as those onstage at South Coast Rep, The Whale’s equally sensational design comes as icing on the cake, from the cluttered mess of an apartment scenic designer Tom Buderwitz has given Charlie, to Angela Balogh Calin’s character-apt costumes, to Donna & Tom Ruzika’s strikingly effective lighting, to Michael Roth’s original music and “soundscape,” which gives The Whale at South Coast Rep its unique audio underscoring, and not merely the ocean sounds specified in Hunter’s script. And special mention must be made of to Kevin Haney’s lifelike prosthetic design and supervision, which give Arkin’s Charlie a face and neck to match his body and not the thin man’s head sticking out of a fat suit that Charlie had in his New York debut.

Jackie S. Hill is production manager and Jennifer Ellen Butler stage manager. Casting of these superb L.A.-based actors is by Joanne DeNaut, CSA. Kelly L. Miller is dramaturg.

As Tuesday’s longer-than-usual talkback made abundantly clear, Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale is a play you’ll be talking about long after its final, dramatic snap to black. Charlie, Ellie, Elder Thomas, Liz, and Mary are characters you won’t soon forget, nor will you the play which brings them to indelible life.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
March 19, 2013
Photos: Scott Brinegar/SCR

 “Quirky, whimsical, and ultimately quite moving” is how I described Ruhl’s The Clean House a few years back, words that apply equally to Eurydice, a fantasy-myth-fairytale which begins with its romantic heroine and hero (Jules Willcox as Eurydice and Graham Sibley as Orpheus) in vintage 1950s swim gear using language that might sound stilted if it weren’t so darned gorgeous, as when musician Orpheus tells Eurydice, “I’m going to make each strand of your hair into an instrument. Your hair will stand on end as it plays my music and become a hair orchestra. It will fly you up into the sky.” Sigh…

At the heart of Eurydice is memory … and the importance it holds in our lives. Orpheus ties a string around Eurydice’s ring finger to remind her of his love. Soon after, Eurydice’s deceased father (Geoff Elliott) writes her from the underworld that “I am one of the few dead people who still remembers how to read and write. That’s a secret. If anyone finds out, they might dip me in the river again.”

 When A Nasty Interesting Man (Ryan Vincent Anderson) in top hat and flamboyant black opera cape, entices Eurydice from her wedding reception to his apartment with the promise of her father’s letter, his attempted seduction of the young bride sends her fleeing down a flight of stairs and falling to her death, only to arrive in the underworld stripped of memories of her life and unable to read the letters Orpheus has written her from the world above.

 Kelly Ehlert as Loud Stone, Abigail Marks as Big Stone, and Jessie Losch as Little Stone serve as Eurydice’s Greek Chorus, a trio of zanies who behave in the playwright’s words like “nasty children at a birthday party” and describe their language of the dead in quintessentially Ruhlian terms as sounding at once “like if the pores in your face opened up and talked” and “like potatoes in the dirt.”

 Yes indeed, the world of Sarah Ruhl is about as fanciful as worlds get, and never more so than when the previously seen Nasty Interesting Man shows up again as The Lord Of The Underworld in the first of several incarnations. Originally glimpsed as a bratty child on a tricycle, this Underworld Lord in First Grader mode claims to “grow downward, like a turnip” but in fact returns having sprung up (in Ruhl’s words) “at least ten feet tall.”

The universe Sarah Ruhl creates is one quite unlike that of any other playwright I’m familiar with, and one that not all audience members may embrace as enthusiastically as this reviewer. (The New York Observer famously headlined its review of a 2007 production, “Curiouser and Curiouser! Ruhl Wrecks Eurydice With Whimsy”. Ouch!)

Whimsical Eurydice is indeed, as are Ruhl’s other plays reviewed on this site (The Clean House, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and In The Next Room (or the vibrator play), but I for one happen to love Ruhl’s brand of whimsy, and her Eurydice is no exception.

 Director Geoff Elliott wisely has Eurydice’s romantic heroes and our heroine’s father (Elliott himself) play it straight, honest, and real, an approach which allows us to identify with and respond to this classic story of love and forgetfulness, whether it is young lovers (Willcox, gorgeous and captivating, Sibley, dashing and dauntless, and both of them splendid) striving to keep the memory of their love alive, or a father (Elliott, as simple and touching as I’ve ever seen him) striving to teach his daughter a language she has forgotten.

Other characters are allowed to ham things up (in the best possible sense of the verb), beginning with Anderson’s deliciously debonair Nasty Interesting Man, his wild-and-crazy trike-riding brat of a Lord Of The Underworld, and his imposingly ten-foot-tall Lord in Grown-Up mode. As for the three stones, Ehlert, Marks, and Losch simply couldn’t be more hilariously, delightfully ditzy—and in perfect three-stone sync for much of the dialog Ruhl assigns them.

 Sharing credit for the enchantment that takes place on the A Noise Within stage is a crackerjack team of designers who bring Ruhl’s fantasy world to vivid, imaginative life: Angela Balogh Calin’s fabulously fanciful costumes and Monica Lisa Sabedra’s matching hair, wig, and makeup design, Rachel Yaron’s many whimsical props, Meghan Gray’s strikingly gorgeous lighting, Doug Newell’s bewitching sound design, and Jeanine A. Ringer’s simple sky-blue scenic design onto which the evening’s indisputable design star Brian Gale paints the myriad images of his breathtaking projection design. Oh, and composer-musician Endre Balogh stays always close by to provide a live musical underscoring on violin.

Elna Kordjan is stage manager, Gray production manager, Seth Walter technical director, Maria Uribe head stitcher, Yaron assistant scenic designer, Oldga Benenson assistant stage manager, Brandon Hawkinson assistant lighting designer, and Erin Neel dramaturg.

Though not everyone may respond as positively as I did to Ruhl’s classic Greek myth as seen with “Through The Looking Glass” eyes, those willing and to take this whimsical journey through time and space will find it a magical one indeed.

A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Blvd, Pasadena. Through May 19. See website for detailed schedule. Reservations: 626 356-3100 ext. 1.
www.ANoiseWithin.org

–Steven Stanley
March 16, 2013
Photos: Craig Schwartz

No, this isn’t a headline story in The National Inquirer or on TMZ, nor is it the latest reality TV show or nighttime soap. In fact, the mother and daughter in question are from over a century back (when you only needed $40,000 to be a millionaire) and the two lead characters in George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Can you say “ahead of its time?”

Shaw’s 1893 ground-breaker makes an exciting return to Los Angeles as The Antaeus Company premieres another if its couldn’t-be-better revivals starring the incomparable Anne Gee Byrd in the title role. Who could ask for anything more?

 Like Pygmalion and its musical adaptation My Fair Lady, Mrs. Warren’s Profession deals with social issues in the years surrounding the advent of the 20th century, though for Kitty Warren, it wasn’t simply learning “proper” English that elevated her from lower class to so-called decent society. No, indeed, the road up was a good deal more scandalous for the never-wed “Mrs.” Warren, who went from prostitute to high-class madam and owner of a chain of brothels—two in Brussels, one in Ostend, one in Vienna, and two in Budapest.

Mrs. Warren’s 22-year-old daughter, Vivie (Rebecca Mozo*), knows nothing of her mother’s past, and has in fact had little contact with her, having been educated in a series of boarding schools.

As Mrs. Warren’s Profession opens, the two women are about to have their first meeting as adults, and as one might expect, the news of Mum’s profession will not sit well with the highly educated and highly moralistic Vivie.

 Mother and Daughter’s entourage includes Frank Gardner (Ramón de Ocampo*), a charming young scamp more interested in Vivie’s fortune than in true love; Rev. Samuel Gardner (John-David Keller*), Frank’s fuddy-duddy of a father (and possibly Vivie’s as well); Sir George Croft (Tony Amendola*), a nattily dressed yet potentially vicious gentleman with designs on Vivie; and Mr. Praed (Bill Brochtrup*), a rather dapper aficionado of what he calls “the Gospel of Art” and friend of Mrs. Warren.

Besides Shaw’s witty, incisive dialog, what makes Mrs. Warren’s Profession hold up so well more than 110 years after its first London production in 1902 is how very contemporary its themes remain today. Yes, London audiences were probably more outraged by its focus on prostitution and the possibility of an incestuous relationship between Vivie and Frank than today’s might be. Still, these topics remain meaty staples of talk shows, soaps, reality TV, and tabloid rags well into the 21st Century.

Yes, Mrs. Warren’s Profession is wordier than a contemporary version might be, and yes, Mrs. Warren’s defense of the world’s oldest profession is about as close to a twenty-minute monolog as a two-person scene can be. Still, for this reviewer at least, Mrs. Warren’s Profession turns out to be one of Shaw’s least talky plays, and much of its dialog might just as easily come from a modern-day drama as a Shavian classic.

 To helm Mrs. Warren’s Profession this time round, Antaeus has made the savvy decision of bringing on board four-time Scenie-winning director Robin Larsen (for Tryst, Pursued By Happiness, Blackbird, and The Fall To Earth), whose mostly contemporary list of credits makes her an ideal choice to give Shaw’s 120-year-old classic a modern sensibility.

As for the production’s undisputed star, it’s no wonder the brilliant Ms. Byrd is playing Mrs. Warren at all performances, almost unheard of at Antaeus, where roles are customarily “partner-cast.” After all, who could possibly match her command of this most complex of women? (The question is rhetorical.) In her bouffant period wig (unfortunately not shown in production stills), leg o’mutton sleeves, and tightly-corseted full-length skirts, Byrd vanishes into Mrs. Warren more than any previous role I’ve seen her in. From her pitch-perfect accent (upper class vowels not completely obliterating their Cockney roots) to the grit, humor, vulnerability, and depth she gives Mrs. Warren, this is one sensational piece of work, a performance that any student of fine acting owes it to him or herself to see.

Supporting Byrd at the performance reviewed was a proverbial “dream cast,” beginning with the always marvelous Mozo (Byrd’s costar in a pair of night-and-day different roles in The Savannah Disputation) as Vivie, Mrs. Warren’s budding feminist of a daughter, whose embrace of her mother’s pluck turns “hard as nails” (Frank’s description of her) the second she learns that her mum is still in the biz.

 De Ocampo once again proves himself versatility personified; his Frank is good-natured, self-centered, a bit smart-alecky, undeniably appealing, and about the farthest cry imaginable from the Filipino drag queen he played in The Girl Most Likely To. A terrific Amendola gives us a Sir George who may seem at times to be under Mrs. Warren’s thumb, but let her daughter reject him, and see how cold-blooded he can become. Brochtrup is simply splendid as the always amiable, easily embarrassed confirmed bachelor and connaisseur de beauté Mr. Praed. And Keller is excellent too as the pretentious yet well-meaning Reverend Gardner.

As always, Antaeus has assembled a dream team of designers, beginning with scenic designer François-Pierre Couture, whose set is both simple and elegant, easily transforms into the play’s four different locales, and features a slatted upstage backdrop through which director Larsen gives us brief glimpses into Mrs. Warren’s Profession past and present (with the help of Fiona Lakeland* as Young Woman). A. Jeffrey Schoenberg’s period costumes are so authentic looking, they could have been transported directly from 1893 to 2013 via time machine, with special snaps for Mrs. Warren’s two gorgeous outfits, including feathered hats. Jeremy Pivnick’s expert lighting not only signals time of day and indoor/outdoor setting to perfection, it makes Couture’s set and Schoenberg’s costumes look all the more fabulous. Adam Meyer’s topnotch properties design features plenty of well-worn books, an antique shotgun, and other assorted late 19th Century accouterments. Finally, there’s John Zalewski’s sensational sound design with its pulsating musical soundtrack and that trademark Zalewski underscoring to up the dramatic suspense.

 Deirdre Murphy is stage manager and Meyer production manager. Zach Kaufer is assistant director, Jessica Olson assistant costume designer, Christopher Breyer dramaturg, and Richelle Buchmiller assistant stage manager and wardrobe. Antaeus offers additional special thanks to Chuck Olson and Tesshi Nakagawa. Brochtrup, Rob Nagle, and John Sloan are The Antaeus Company’s co-artistic directors.

Nearly a century and a quarter after he wrote it, George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession remains one of the playwright’s best and most accessible works. You don’t have to be a die-hard Shavian to find yourself as compelled by its story and characters as you’d be while watching a TV or movie drama unfold. And the writing’s a heck of a lot better.

The Antaeus Company, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.
www.Antaeus.org

–Steven Stanley
March 15, 2013
Photos: Geoffrey Wade

* At the performance reviewed. All roles but Mrs. Warren are double-cast.

 Recent Ovation Award-wining Best Director (and 5-time Scenie-winning Director Of The Year) Michael Matthews reteams with Yockey as he did in Very Still And Hard To See (one of Matthews’ two current LA Weekly Award directorial noms), and as anyone who saw VS&HTS can well imagine, audiences at the Celebration Theatre are in for one superbly staged and performed rollercoaster ride.

Since every fairy tale must have its narrator, Yockey has provided us with Wolves’ very own, a smart, sexy, spike-heeled young redhead (Katherine Skelton) who interrupts the action whenever the urge strikes to quip or wink or smile knowingly, or to comment on the action with a sweetness that suggests honey spiked with acid.

We can, however, only guess at who this young woman is when we first catch sight of her being serenaded to by a boyishly handsome young man, strumming his guitar and looking about as sweet and harmless as a boy can be as we take our seats inside the Celebration.

Once introductions are out of the way, our luscious narrator informs us that the boy-next door guitarist is Ben (Nathan Mohebbi), a small-town lad who’s fled narrow minds and prejudices for an unnamed big city, one where he soon met—and briefly dated—sexy urban hunk Jack (Matt Magnusson), no longer his boyfriend but still sharing their fifth-floor walk-up as Ben continues to pine for an ex who’s got other pursuits (of the male variety) on his mind.

Whatever Ben’s mental state when the small-town newbie and the big-city native were in the honeymoon stage of their short-lived relationship, since their breakup it would seem to have reached the edge of paranoia, so fearful is Ben of anything outside his apartment’s protective walls and content to stay hermetically sealed inside, just so long as Jack is in there with him, even if platonically so.

Not surprisingly, this arrangement suits Ben considerably better than it does Jack, who finds himself stuck with a roommate so needy and possessive that it’s no wonder the boyfriend-turned-roomie longs for a night on the town.

 Try as he might to convince Jack that there are quite literally wolves prowling just outside their door, Ben’s pleas prove unsuccessful and before we know it, Jack has brought home a muscular bearded stud he’s nicknamed “Wolf” (Andrew Crabtree), despite the fact that a bit of pre-hanky-panky conversation reveals the lupine gent to be more nice guy loner than wolf—that is until sheep’s clothing (i.e. Wolf’s shirt—and Jack’s as well) comes off.

Meanwhile in the adjacent bedroom, Ben’s efforts at trying to shut out the sounds of foreplay prove ineffectual to say the least.

Can you say Recipe For Blood?

Only the least observant audience member will have failed to notice the ax embedded in a pile of wood just outside Ben and Jack’s door, and the metal bucket not that far away, part of Kaitlyn Peitras’s terrific scenic design, one which divides Ben and Jack’s apartment into rooms (and separates it from the outside world) with the white masking tape specified in Yockey’s script for reasons that will eventually become crystal clear.

 Peitras’s set is but one element in one of the year’s most striking, imaginative production designs, highlighted by Cricket S. Myer’s multi-ingredient sound mix which heighten the chill factor at every twist and turn, and by Tim Swiss’s dramatic lighting which, not surprisingly, makes apt and ample use of the color red. Costume-and-properties designer Michael O’Hara scores top marks for his character-appropriate outfits and the production’s multiple props (a number of which won’t last more than a single performance). Oh, and technical director Matthew Brian Denman gets double billed as Blood FX Supervisor… and how cool is that!

Still, even with a sensational design package, crackerjack writing, and brilliant direction, Wolves wouldn’t work nearly as well without a quartet of actors up to the challenge of bringing Yockey’s words and Matthews’ vision to life, and in this the Celebration Theatre has hit a grand slam homer.

Recent West Virginia-to-Hollywood transplant Mohebbi makes an auspicious L.A. theater debut as a young man whose boyishly handsome good looks mask one dangerously loose cannon and a powerful young actor capable of combining sweetness and vulnerability with a darkness and intensity that makes Mohebbi one to watch—and my number one choice to play Norman Bates should Psycho ever hit the musical theater stage.

 Magnusson matches Mohebbi every step of the way, albeit as a considerably less complicated character (Jack just wants to get laid), that is until circumstances place his previously carefree existence into considerable peril. Following the triple-threat’s recent seductive turn in the musical Spring Awakening, Magnusson’s work here reveals an actor whose striking good looks and ability to be constantly “in the moment” bode well for a stellar stage and screen career ahead.

As Wolf, Crabtree follows his standout performances in The War Cycle: Gospel According To First Squad and Very Still And Hard To See with more topnotch work as a young man whose menacing exterior may hide a guy too nice for Jack’s tastes. Later, as the only male character who actually gets to interact with our narrator, the duo’s interchanges allow Crabtree to show off dry comedic chops as the pair inject laughs even as Wolves grows steadily darker.

Finally, there’s Crabtree’s stellar Very Still And Hard To See costar Skelton as our Girl-Next-Door Narrator With An Edge, quipping, flashing a wicked smile, freeze-framing the action whenever it takes her fancy, wandering about the apartment handing out props, and whispering into ears in a performance that recalls Desperate Housewives’ Mary Alice, except that this time we get to see our sexy, omnipotent narrator onstage throughout.

Completing Wolves’ creative and backstage team are assistant directors Ryan Bergmann and Rebecca Eisenberg, orchestrator Brian Morales, fight director Sondra Mayer, and stage manager Marcedes Clanton.

Matthews and Michael A. Shepperd are Celebration Theatre’s co-artistic directors. Wolves is produced by Andrew Carlberg and O’Hara, with Michael C. Kricfalusi and Shepperd serving as Wolves’ executive producers. Casting is by Jami Rudofsky.

Understudies Chasen Bauer, Aaron Goddard, Mary Ann Welshans, and Huntley Woods will take the stage in April in a pair of Wednesday performances, to be announced. (Kudos to the Celebration for this.)

This Celebration Theatre production marks the last of Wolves’ four “Rolling World Premieres” and one distinguished by the presence of one of L.A.’s most gifted directors, a cast drawn from the country’s vastest talent pool, and a design team par excellence. It’s also the first Wolves to be performed on a thrust-stage with the audience only inches from the action, making this Wolves the most screamingly up-close-and-personal of the bunch. In fact, if there’s any drawback to Celebration’s 2013 opener, it’s that at a mere sixty-five minutes, Wolves has its audiences exiting the theater at 9:15 with time left on their hands.

But no matter. For theatergoers with a post-performance game plan in mind, all that remains is to enter Wolves’ darkly comedic world of bloody good thrills and chills … and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Celebration Theatre, 7051B Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.
www.celebrationtheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
March 8, 2013
Photos: Matthew Brian Denman

Things do considerably more than merely go bump in the night when Greg and Jan Sanderson leave the big city for life in a haunted country farmhouse in I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, Peter Colley’s Gaslight-meets-Deathtrap suspense thriller now getting a shriek-a-minute Los Angeles Premiere at Burbank’s Colony Theatre.

 It turns out the countryside is the last place Jan (Joanna Strapp) would choose to be post hospitalization for a recent nervous breakdown, and hardly the right spot to rekindle a marriage gone sour. Still, a husband as strong-willed as archaeologist Greg (Tyler Pierce) is a hard man to say no to, and so, now, here they are with only a wood-burning stove to keep out the chill and a faulty electrical system prone to breaking down the very second the night turns dark and stormy.

Making matters worse are the ghost stories gleefully spun by their grizzly bear of a neighbor George (Ron Orbach), tales of a horrendous murder that took place in the very farmhouse Jan and Greg now call home and of a ghost George claims comes out at night to terrify whoever happens to have rented the home where he met his bloody fate.

 And as if this weren’t already enough to send Jan tout de suite back to the sanatorium, who should show up on their doorstep but Greg’s beautiful, imperious sister Laura (Kate Maher), invited by her brother to keep Jan company, or so he insists, though the mere mention Laura’s name seems likely to provoke Jan’s permanent return to the loony bin.

Can you spell recipe for terror?

I’ll Be Back Before Midnight harks back to those haunted house comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Era in which laughter and screams were bound to go hand in hand. Add to that a Charles Boyer/Ingrid Bergman-esque “Is he trying to drive her crazy?” plot with as many twists and turns as an Ira Levin thriller and you’ve got one of the most entertaining evenings in town for audiences in the mood to be tickled and terrified at the same time.

Colley and Colony Theatre vet David Rose have clearly done their comedy-horror homework, directing I’ll Be Back Before Midnight with a just-right blend of thrills, chills, and chuckles.

 The always marvelous Strapp has created a Jan in classic damsel-in-distress tradition, but one with just enough hidden mettle to give us hope that our beleaguered heroine might just come out on top.

The dynamic Pierce follows his superb dramatic turn in How To Write A New Book For The Bible with a Greg who keeps us guessing vis–à–vis his motives in taking Jan so far away from civilization, and though a shirtless scene reveals musculature toned by an actor’s daily hours at the gym and not the undernourished archaeologist of Colley’s script, no one with an eye for the male physique is likely to complain.

Maher makes for a marvelously bitchy Laura, her Hitchcock Brunette beauty proving every bit as right for Greg’s bitch of a sister as it was for her recent star turn as Alice in You Can’t Take It With You, a gust of bone-chilling winter wind in Greg and Jan’s already chilly country abode.

 Veteran character actor Orbach completes the cast terrifically as a seemingly harmless jokester conveniently twice Jan’s size should George turn out to be not quite as mild-mannered as he seems. Then again, is anyone really who he or she appears to be in Colley’s twisty-turny script?

An expert Colony Theatre design team (scenic designer extraordinaire Stephen Gifford, lighting design whiz Luke Moyer, master sound designer Drew Dalzell, and resident properties design/set dressing dynamos MacAndME) combine forces to up Colley’s script’s built-in thrills and chills. Gifford’s country farmhouse offers plenty of doors and curtains for ghosts to jump out of and a serving hatch between kitchen and living room, the sudden opening and closing of which guarantees gasp after gasp. Add to that Dalzell’s thunderous heartbeats and eerie floorboard creaks and ghostly moans, the dark, foreboding shadows Moyer casts on the walls, and MacAndME’s double-barrel shotgun, stone weaponry, and puddles of blood that appear out of nowhere on the living room floor, and you’ve got a couldn’t-be-better design package, completed by costume designer Diane K. Graebner’s perfectly chosen, character-appropriate garb.

 Leesa Freed is production stage manager, Robert T. Kyle technical director, Bjørn Johnson fight director, Maher fight captain, and Sherilyn Stetz makeup consultant. Gifford doubles as scenic artist, with Keirstin Fernandes serving as assistant scenic designer.

It’s been a while since the Colony offered its audiences a thriller, and with one as entertaining as I’ll Be Back Before Midnight, artistic director Barbara Beckley and company have come up with a winner, one that younger single ticket buyers will enjoy every bit as much as post-retirement age subscribers.

Take it from this reviewer. You’ll laugh. You’ll scream. You’ll have a ghostly, ghastly good time.

Colony Theatre, 555 North Third Street, Burbank.
www.colonytheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
February 22, 2013
Photos: Michael Lamont