November 10 – December 17, 2017
World premiere by the author of the international bestseller “The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.”
Irene awakes from a cryogenic chamber into a future where her terminal cancer has been cured but the world as she knew it no longer exists. She is welcomed by curious humans who command and are commanded by “Platform,” a vast computer network which appears to have replaced all known reality. Has the Singularity occurred? Is there still a recognizable planet where earth once was? In Wake Dahlquist examines society and sociability when lives are long, wants are met, and no need for cooperation beyond the response to solitude.
Reality Bites — If You Can Even Call It Reality — In This Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Satire
Bill Raden | November 20, 2017 | 8:05am
Accorrding to the dictionary, “wake” can mean different things: It can be the vigil held over a corpse on the eve of burial; it can describe the waves trailing a passing ship or left by an extinct civilization; or it can signify the state of being aroused or made aware. According to Wake, Gordon Dahlquist’s rousing sci-fi satire about the ultimate fate of humankind, currently getting a sleek world premiere at City Garage, it also can mordantly embrace all of the above.
The time-leaping tale begins with a venerable science fiction premise: Heroine Irene Suarez (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson), a New York immunologist racked with metastasized pancreatic cancer in 2017, is placed in a cryogenic capsule in Mamaroneck, New York, to be thawed and resuscitated in a hermetic and inconceivably remote future.
In production designer Charles Duncombe’s minimalist arrangement of tiers and ramps, that future is represented as a blandly featureless room without windows or doors. It’s where Irene is greeted by May (Alicia Rose Ivanhoe), a friendly and curious if somewhat linguistically maladroit denizen whose silvery Lycra bodysuit (courtesy of costumer Josephine Poinsot), together with the ever-present visage of an identically coiffed and clothed figure (Megan Kim) projected on the upstage wall, are the first hints that something Orwellian and technologically dystopian might have transpired during Irene’s eons of sleep.
Much of the fun comes from Irene’s attempt to reconstruct the lost years. While May proves maddeningly vague at filling in the whens, wheres and hows, the fragmented hints at the planet’s fate that begin to emerge only increase Irene’s disquiet over her dire predicament. It seems that the Holocene is part of a distant and dimly understood past, whose end came via some sort of climate change–triggered environmental cataclysm. In the desperate hope that one day the species could be reconstituted from its archived DNA, a survivor population designed a global computerized omniscience called the Platform. Embodied by City Garage regular Kim as an affable and accommodating “construct” of the same name, the Platform now regulates the “sentient environment” as well as the society by which Irene finds herself welcomed as a sort of living natural history museum exhibit.
By eliminating the human middleman, society is finally one with the spectacle.
If that all sounds vaguely Matrix-like, the similarity is strictly ironic. Wake trades in — and frustrates — a raft of familiar sci-fi clichés and genre expectations in a wry pastiche that sets the stage for what Polish sci-fi master Stanislaw Lem once called “the drama of cognizance.” By dropping Irene into the Platform, where she is stripped of the taken-for-granted assumptions that ground identity and differentiate the real from the merely represented, Dahlquist lampoons the collective solipsism of all institutionalized systems of belief while underscoring the philosophical problem of agreement on any kind of shared reality.
Irene does not connect with other remnants of humanity in order, say, to organize a revolt and take back the planet from authoritarian oppressors, a trope dating back to H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (1910), the grandaddy of Matrix-like political fantasies. Instead Dahlquist closes off that possibility by eliminating not only the distinction between the real and the virtual but also the urgent need to distinguish it. The Platform proves the most hospitable and accommodating of hosts. Far from a prison, its environment is a constantly morphing place of endless choice and instantaneous gratification — a kind of otherworldly shopping mall from which everything unpleasant has been expelled except for loneliness. Its virtually generated inhabitants, like May and her daft friend Sen (Jeffrey Gardner), are left to contentedly while away their existence with trivial preoccupations around satisfying their every whim and appetite. By eliminating the human middleman, society is finally one with the spectacle.
The only exception proves to be Sarah (Sandy Mansson), another cryogenic survivor from Earth’s 21st-century past — or, more accurately, the Platform-generated memory of what 40 years ago had been Sarah. A middle-aged horse breeder from Pennsylvania, Sarah tells Irene about the 60 additional years she lived among the Platform before boredom finally drove her from its protected, Platonic environs and into the nonexistence of the outside world. What happened then, or what kind of creatures might live there, the Platform cannot say, although Duncombe’s evocative projections of pristine, primordial landscapes slyly suggest an Earth that has returned to the fecund grandeur of a pre-human natural state.
Director Frédérique Michel’s tightly composed staging cannily extends the script’s mechanistic absurdities, both through wittily synchronized movement between Kim and the constructs and with touches like returning “offstage” characters to visible seats in the wings, where they await their next scenes like powered-down cyborgs set to sleep mode. Ivanhoe and Gardner are delightfully deranged as bubbly, wide-eyed human simulacra, but Ivanhoe is especially funny massacring Dahlquist’s fractured, almost aphasic diction. For her part, St. Clair-Johnson nimbly anchors the comedy as an exasperated, disoriented and finally resigned “straight man,” while Mansson contributes poignant notes of human warmth.
Although the ensemble is clearly still fine-tuning its timing, and Wake is consequently guilty of what sometimes feel like overly austere intellectual stretches, the evening’s momentum rarely flags. More importantly, at a moment when headlines seem to trumpet the potential calamities of debasing public policy with alternative facts, the play comes as a timely reminder that the confrontation with the other is ultimately always a confrontation with the self.
City Garage at Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg. T1, Santa Monica. (310) 453-9939, citygarage.org.
Bill Raden is an award-winning reporter and theater critic who reviewed his first play for L.A. Weekly on a typewriter. He still keeps his manual Olivetti inked and oiled, just in case.
Wake Review from Night-Tinted Glasses
Spoilers ahoy!
Audience expectations tend to be tricky things. To some degree this depends upon genre.
Wake by Gordon Dahlquist, if not science fiction, certainly begins and explores a pretty clear and well precedented science fiction trope. Someone wakes from cryogenic sleep far into the future and must adjust. Buck Rogers essentially.
Except, no.
Irene (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson) had advanced pancreatic cancer and used her resources on a wild chance, that someone frozen in liquid nitrogen just might be revived in later centuries. When she wakes in a strange room to the greetings of May (Alicia Rose Ivanhoe), a cheerful young woman with a strange vocabulary, the truth dawns on her pretty quickly. It worked. Behold the future!
Yay?
At this point many a science fiction tale would begin describing the future world, if in fact the story turns out to be some kind of social commentary on the trends of human society. Or it may become some kind of adventure in which the awakened person will prove crucial to history or some such (this was the story of the second JJ Abrams Star Trek movie). I never thought the latter very likely here, but wondered how the first part of that expectation might play out. That at first May seems reluctant to tell Irene much heightened that expectation. At first. But increasingly, as we get to know more about this future, the less terribly important that became. Details all proved important, but not what the story was about.
Irene began and remained the story’s focus, for every moment, and she remained the only character on stage the entire play. All seventy minutes with no intermission. Even as we meet the sentient computer (or something like that) called The Platform (Megan Kim) that both runs and enables, nurtures and learns from the lives of those like May and her would be boyfriend Sen (Jeffrey Gardner), the more we share Irene’s curiosity and frustration. When is this? How much time has passed? Hints given early prove disturbing. Her capsule? Found in sea water. People have very odd beliefs about her own time, not least the amount of violence. No one, not even The Platform, knows what she’s talking about when Irene mentions ancient Egypt or the Pyramids.
Her world is gone. Her context has vanished, evaporated over time. Hardly anyone else was ever found frozen and with enough left to be revived. That was Sarah (Sandy Mansson) who died decades ago.
With us, Irene endures this loss — the realization of being utterly alone, not physically nor literally, but robbed of every single detail that made life make sense. Not by anyone, just by chance. This then proves the exploration, the odyssey of this work — not a revelation of plot or world-building, but of human courage in the face of tremendous loss. All in all, Wake does an astounding almost Haiku-esque job of giving us the heart, the soul of the story and very nearly nothing else.
We see someone find courage to go on. To trust the supremely unfamiliar. To begin to let go of what after all can never come again — the past.
Wake runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm (pay-what-you-can at the door only) until Sunday, December 17, 2017 at the City Garage, Building T1, Bergamont Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica CA 90404.
“Carmen Disruption” by Simon Stephens
September 8 – October 15, 2017
I’ll gather my breath. I’ll walk out of my room. I’ll know exactly where I’m going to go. The voice in my head tells me exactly where to go.
An opera singer lost in the city. A gorgeous male prostitute. A tough-talking taxi driver. A global trader. A teenage dreamer. Everyone’s looking for something they can’t find in this US premiere from acclaimed British playwright Simon Stephens (Heisenberg; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) whose strange and beautiful play re-imagines Bizet’s opera Carmen and explores the possibility of love in a fractured urban world.
“The Singer,” a mezzo-soprano who criss-crosses Europe playing the title role in ‘Carmen’ has arrived in an unidentified city to do so again, but a random incident causes her already nebulous sense of self to start unravelling. Carmen, here a busy “rent boy,” has a disastrous encounter with a client that shakes his sense of self. Don Jose is a taxi-driving mother pining for her son. Meanwhile, a suicidal young girl, dumped by her boyfriend, is the bereft Micaela, and a corrupt futures trader assumes the role of Escamillo.
These are lonely souls, yearning for love, home, a sense of self and real connection in an age of superficial digital communication and narcissistic, illusory identities. Simons uses broken shards of Bizet’s opera to fashion a mosaic of monologues about our infatuation with technology and digital communication, less a recreation of the opera than a deconstruction of it, reflecting on the strangeness of a professional singer’s life and the aching disconnection at the center of our atomized contemporary world.
“Shattering and reimagining our notions of theatre… Carmen Disruption reminds us how thrilling it can be to see a fresh take on a familiar tale…” -The Guardian (London)
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“≈ [Almost Equal To]” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
![“≈ [Almost Equal To]” by Jonas Hassen Khemiri](https://citygarage.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Almost-Equal-To-2831.jpg)
How much do you earn? Who do you serve? The new world economics is built on inequality that threatens us all.
This remarkable new work from one of Sweden’s most celebrated novelists and playwrights takes on this issue in highly personal terms: a young man from an immigrant background trying to find his first job; a professor of economics desperately trying to hold onto the one he has; his wife, who nurses fantasies of an ecologically responsible life in the country; a homeless hustler who might be more than he seems; and a young woman who, in the cut-throat world of her office, may or may not be responsible for the death of a rival co-worker. Think economics is strictly for academics?
This play, with its unforgettable moments of funny and brutal honesty about the human cost of a rigged system, will make you think again.
Third Sunday Q&A:
After the 3:00pm performance on Sunday, June 11, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and crew.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Adam & Evie” by Charles L. Mee
March 24 – April 30, 2017
Much of our life is spent coupling, uncoupling, or recoupling. We’re obsessed by love and sex: how to get it, how to keep it, or how to get out of it and try again. In this new work, multiple-award-winning visionary playwright and poet Charles L. Mee looks at love from Adam and Eve to our own rapidly changing times where the possibilities of thwarting yourself in love expand with every new boundary we cross.
Third Sunday Q&A:
After the 3:00pm performance on Sunday, April 9, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and crew.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Grimly Handsome” by Julia Jarcho
A pair of Christmas tree salesmen secretly wreak havoc in NYC. A pair of detectives are bent on catching a serial killer. A young woman finds herself drawn into a cat-and-mouse game and transformed in ways she could never have imagined. Well, maybe she could’ve. Meanwhile, wild animals have been sighted in the vacant lot across the street. Are they dogs? Raccoons? Or something more ferocious?
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Phoebe Zeitgeist Returns to Earth” by Charles A. Duncombe
September 30—November 13, 2016
A new play inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Blood on the Cat’s Neck
Nudity.
Fourth Weekend Q&A October 23:
After the 3:00pm performance on Sunday, October 23rd, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and crew. Don’t miss it!
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“right left with heels” by Sebastian Majewski
“Director/choreographer Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe have created a marvelous evening of theater.”
July 8—August 14, 2016
right left with heels recounts the story of the Holocaust and post-war Poland from the ironic perspective of a pair of high heel shoes that once belonged to Magda Goebbels, wife of Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda. The shoes, who may have inherited her racist point of view, tell their own story: from their manufacture in Auschwitz to their tragic end on the feet of a transvestite murdered by contemporary Polish “patriots.” Magda Goebbel’s wandering shoes provide a poignant and provocative insight into individual guilt and wickedness, and addresses accountability in the face of history from the end of WW II to today’s frightening rise of the new right.
Fourth Weekend Q&A July 31:
There will be a discussion with the cast and creative staff Sunday, July 31 after the 3:00pm performance. Don’t miss it!
LA WEEKLY: GO! (click here to read full review)
Staged by Frédérique Michel with her customary bold and bawdy panache, the production features two female performers, Lindsay Plake and Alexa Yeames, who, dressed in teasing red and black costumes by Josephine Poinsot, cavort provocatively about the stage while saucily recounting a history of loss, pain and terror.
STAGE RAW Recommended/Our Top Ten! (click here to read full review)
…Director/choreographer Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe have created a marvelous evening of theater. Their style is a distinctive, individual form of dance-theater, using a movement vocabulary that, in the present case, communicates immediately with gestures sometimes like seductive cabaret performance, always with a sense of the pair operating like a single organism — or like female acolytes in a wicked ritual. Those familiar with past productions will recognize common elements of design (hues of red and black in the costumes, vivid graphics as a backdrop) —the elaboration of a singular theater-language…
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Othello/Desdemona” by Charles A. Duncombe
April 15—May 29, 2016
Othello, in the midst of an identity crisis, examines and rejects his status as a servant of the Venetian State. Hungry for political power, he experiments with the idea of self-identifying as white. Desdemona, a Lolita trapped in a caged bed, is a spoiled brat with a mind of her own and a hunger for fame. She’s still deeply in lust for the lover she’s lost, while he struggles with racism and white privilege. Egged on by Iago, hovering like a punk-rock bird of prey, and a sassy, transgender Emilia, this is a love story that, just as in Shakespeare, is going to end badly.
Nudity.
LA TIMES REVIEW:
Playwright, producer and production designer Charles A. Duncombe doesn’t so much deconstruct the tragedy of a noble Moor undone by manipulated jealousy as turn its interior workings into an irreverent dissertation on the post-millennial landscape… With director Frédérique Michel and her valiant cast maintaining a jagged emotional pull beneath the High Performance austerity, “Othello/Desdemona” isn’t exactly shy about upending expectations… It’s a starkly elegant, international-festival-ready staging, with costumer Josephine Poinsot assisting Duncombe’s trademark red-black-and-white scheme. Throughout, typical City Garage audacity is detectable… “Othello/Desdemona” is undeniably unlike anything else in town.
Read the full LA Times review here!
STAGE RAW REVIEW:
“Somewhat reminiscent of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead… Director Frederique Michel’s artful staging cleverly takes the familiar characters and pushes them in unusual directions… The production is full of interesting images and psychological underpinnings… [and] possesses a playfulness that’s undeniably appealing… Michel’s trenchant sense of irony — and the intelligence of the underlying thoughts in the piece – keep us intrigued.”
Read the full Stage Raw review here!
Purchase the text!
Available now on Amazon or at the theater!
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Lear” by Young Jean Lee
“Lee is one of the most vital, rewarding playwrights to arrive on the scene in the past decade.”—Time Out New York
“Lee uses King Lear and some beautifully unconventional additions to flesh out Shakespeare’s themes of loneliness, mortality, and filial responsibility in gratifying and moving depth.” —Variety
February 5—March 13, 2016
The West Coast premiere of this widely-acclaimed recent text. In Lear, experimental playwright Young Jean Lee’s self-described “inaccurate distortion” of the classic, she banishes the title monarch and most of the other male characters to the wings and focuses instead on the younger generation: Lear’s three daughters and Gloucester’s two sons. The absurdist, meta results are irreverent, grotesque, and morally harrowing.
Fifth Sunday Q&A March 6 [PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE]:
After the Sunday, March 6 (not Feb. 28, as previously announced) matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creative staff of City Garage’s production of Young Jean Lee’s Lear.
LOS ANGELES TIMES REVIEW
In the Los Angeles Times David C. Nichols praised Young Jean Lee’s Lear at City Garage:
“Director Frédérique Michel treats the intermissionless proceedings as a hybrid of Renaissance masque, absurdist romp and college counseling session, and her fine-tuned cast follows suit. Posing and pouncing around producer Charles A. Duncombe’s elemental sets and lighting in Josephine Poinsot’s winking costumes, the group sustains itself through to the post-Pirandello climax, which breaks both tone and third wall. Devotees of its author and this cutting-edge company should flock.”
Read the full LA Times review here!
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
Hamletmachine: The Arab Spring
November 13—December 20, 2015
Two Hamlets wander a bizarre, absurd and devastated political landscape from the fall of Communism to the ascendancy of ISIS. Their journey starts as they board the locomotive of the Revolution with mad Uncle Karl at the wheel. Round and round and round they go, at each stop, the bloody disasters of the 20th century, like the stations of the cross for a long-suffering humanity. Thrown from the exploding train, they wander on to meet the ghost of their vengeful father, their Alzheimer’s afflicted mother Gertrude, and finally the fair Ophelia, who has become an Islamic Terrorist.
But that’s only the start of their 21st century adventure through the looking glass. They are hounded by religious fundamentalists, plunged into a digital nightmare of new media, diverted by Ophelia as a stripper, experiment with gender roles, conscripted into a Dolce and Gabbana fashion show, then finally launched headlong into the conflicts and tragedies of the Arab Spring, from which they emerge more dazed, confused, and maddened than ever. “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” intones a grief-stricken Horatio. This way madness lies, indeed. But as they stand in the final snowstorm, facing a bottomless sea, they confront the question with which they began: to be or not to be. What answer do they finally offer?
This is the world premiere of a new version of the seminal work by Heiner Müller that defined post-modern Shakespeare. This jagged, non-linear text breaks open the Hamlet iconography to re-examine the blood-soaked heritage of the 20th century in light of the new reality of Mideast turmoil, global terrorism, and the rise of ISIS.
Fourth Sunday Q&A:
After the Sunday, December 6 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of City Garage’s new Hamletmachine.
The Winter of Our Discontent: Shakespeare in the Digital Age
—Fall 2015 to Spring 2016—
November 13, 2015—December 20, 2015
February 5, 2016—March 13, 2016 (6 week, regular run)
April 8, 2016—May 15, 2016
Come and be a part of the exciting adventure at City Garage. Buy a pass now and get all three shows in this series for $60 (Students/Seniors $50). That’s a 20% savings over regular admission prices! Call our Box Office at 310-453-9939 to purchase today (online ticketing and pass purchase coming soon).
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.