June 14 – July 28, 2013
Cast: Joss Glennie Smith, Leah Harf, Kat Johnston, RJ Jones, Megan Kim, Cynthia Mance, Saffron Mazzia
This smart, ruthlessly funny play, tracks Ophelia’s impossible journey to bridge that vast space. It is a postmodern tale of love, sex, porn, and politics in the fragmented world of our confused emotions and our modern, global, virtual sexuality.
“Opheliamachine embodies a profound understanding of drama, the poetic nature of the stage and the politics of aesthetics. Opheliamachine is a gorgeous new creation.” – Anne Bogart, Director
Third Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, June 30 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of Opheliamachine.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
LA WEEKLY – GO!
By Lovell Estell III
“I expel all the semen which I have received. I transform the milk of my breasts into deadly poison.” Lifted from Heiner Müller’s eternally confounding Hamletmachine, the words are a fitting part of the opening tableau of Polish playwright Magda Romanska’s similarly themed postmodernist drama, now in its world premiere at City Garage.
Seated behind an old typewriter on a stage that’s segmented into halves, Ophelia is realized as something of a triadic entity — brain/narrator, terrorist and madwoman (Kat Johnston, Megan Kim, Saffron Mazzia), while Hamlet (Joss Glennie Smith), situated in the other half of the stage, mostly watches television.
Romanska uses this framework for a vigorous deconstruction of the feminine psyche, image and gender roles, and her script — heavy laden with dense imagery and symbolism — explores love, sex, violence, politics, class sensibilities, feminist aesthetics, the vacuities of mass culture and the timeless mystery of death. This is theater that’s not easily accessible and is devilishly bleak at times, but it’s not without shards of humor, and is relentlessly provocative and challenging under imaginative direction by Frédérique Michel. The production is nicely embellished with a collage of visuals projected on a huge screen and two monitors. Cynthia Mance, RJ Jones and Leah Harf round out the cast.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Opheliamachine an uncompromising vision at City Garage
By Philip Brandes
In her own fashionably postmodern fashion, the title character in the visually stylish “Opheliamachine” at Santa Monica’s City Garage is a tragic figure, though she bears only slight textual ties to Shakespeare’s original archetype.
Instead, Magda Romanska’s fiercely confrontational new play is more directly a response to German avant-garde theater director Heiner Müller’s notorious 1977 deconstruction, “Hamletmachine” (also staged by City Garage, in 1996).
Müller’s play had transformed Ophelia from victim to Electra-fied avenger, but Romanska, not satisfied with its persistent patriarchal baggage, focuses on gender relations and the struggle to liberate feminine identity from its cultural and political determinants. A writer seated at a typewriter, this Ophelia (Kat Johnston), creates her own story through stream-of-consciousness monologues as densely associative and enigmatic as Müller’s, while Hamlet (Joss Glennie-Smith) sits on the sidelines enslaved to TV programming.
Director Frederique Michel launches her staging with Ophelia’s enraged final speech from Müller’s play, neatly bridging the two productions and establishing specificity when Romanska’s Ophelia announces her determination not to identify with the past.
Easier said than done amid contemporary media-driven conformist pressures (smartly expressed in Charles A. Duncombe’s video-saturated production design). Further emphasizing Ophelia’s struggle, Michel employs her “Hamletmachine” device in representing a protagonist’s fractured psyche with multiple actors (Johnston, Megan Kim, Saffron Mazzia, Leah Harf).
Though Ophelia’s quest for self-determination teeters on the brink of inevitable annihilation, compared with perpetually servile Horatio (RJ Jones) or shopaholic Gertrude (Cynthia Mance) she “fails better” (in Samuel Beckett’s sense). With few traditional theater points of reference to navigate by, her uncompromising journey is not for the intellectually incurious.
Difficult comedy of ideas and ideologies honestly stimulates with its perceptiveness, the academic heaviness leavened by a welcomely light-handed production.
By Myron Meisel
Hamlet’s scorned ingenue has long been a potent symbol for feminist theory and enlightened examination of the quandaries of young women, and if the otherwise contemplative Dane callously gave her no mind, the prototypical good girl as victim certainly continues to speak, in contradictory and bedeviling ways, to the experiences of many women in society.
In this world premiere play at City Garage in Santa Monica, Magda Romanska consciously concocts both an homage to and critique of a landmark theatrical composition, 1979’s Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller, the successor to Brecht as both director of the Berliner Ensemble and groundbreaking German experimental playwright. (It’s not so terribly different from Kitty Wells singing It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels as an answer song to Hank Thompson’s The Wild Side of Life.)
Since City Garage has been conscientious over its two decades in presenting Müller’s work locally, it’s appropriate that it should mount Romanska’s fiercely meditative mirror, which quotes excerpts from Hamletmachine at the beginning and the end in both deference and defiance.
The split nature of Ophelia takes form as three actors playing differing aspects of her character. “The Brain” (Kat Johnson) sits at a now-antique typewriter reeling off screeds that ricochet through several successive schools of feminist thought. “The Terrorist” (Megan Kim) enacts violent fantasies of retaliation and revenge against an androcentric society (she kills Horatio (RJ Jones) by smashing his head in with her combat boot). And “The Mad” (Saffron Mazzia) is a timorous prospective bride with so little self-esteem as to be highly impressionable. Hamlet (Joss Glennie-Smith) reduces himself to a bit player with his compulsive absorption in media and pop culture.
If the modern take on Hamlet is that his consciousness inhibits his ability to act, then the ironies of Opheliamachine posit that radical analysis can be the enemy of effective political action, or put another way, that gender awareness is no refuge from the truism that each of us must reckon ourselves as our own most implacable adversary.
Romanska covers a lot of ground as her characters spew erudite invective critiquing the omnipresent oppression of a sexist hierarchy: though less than an hour in length, this is sometimes a crushingly dense exegesis of a half-century of women’s studies and post-modern literary theory. Romanska is a well-versed academic and accomplished dramaturg, and she heeds the cherished advice to write about what she knows. Thankfully, she has a vision comprehensive enough to relish irony and pose deeper questions than mere indictment.
If the world might be viewed more rewardingly without the arbitrary distinctions between the sexes, those prejudices must be confronted if any substantive change is to be accomplished in the world as it is. Romanska dramatizes the wisdom that confrontation comprises only the first essential steps.
House director Frédérique Micheland and her collaborator, producer-designer Charles A. Dumcombe, are well within their element with this potentially intractable material. They bring to bear some of the stage strategies that distinguish their interpretations of Ionesco: capable of underlining emphasis with a graceful hand, sharing with their actors a complete dedication to the singularity of the text and never condescending to simplifying complexity.
This funny yet brutal play needs the inventive mise-en-scene to support its fecundity of ideas amidst the tumult of its conflicting impulses. And don’t be afraid: It is OK, even purgative, to laugh.
Forging Meaning
This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.
Remember the last time you learned another language?
Think about everything that’s necessary to communicate in another’s tongue. You’ve got to have a series of symbols that remain fairly constant. You have to not only learn those symbols but you have to repeat them, re-experience them until they take on deeper personal meaning. And, perhaps most importantly, a community to speak with — so the act of tedious repetition can give way to the poetry of language.
To appreciate City Garage’s world-premiere production of Opheliamachine, it helps to place the project into the larger context of the companies work – to appreciate the theatrical language being created.
Okay, I can hear some of you grumbling – what does all this semiotic mumbo jumbo have to do with theater?
Well take just the title of the show — Opheliamachine. You might think — oh, those are just pretty sounds. Or you might jump to Shakespeare and Hamlet’s tragic love. Or you might get the reference to Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine, a sort of nine-page post-modern proving ground for ambitious avante-garde
The play itself, written by Magda Romanska, is a series of scenes that explore the themes of feminity, power, sex, rage, love, and madness through a faceted portrayal of Ophelia. Our title character is split in three: we have Ophelia the Brain — typing away at a vintage typewriter complete with bell; Ophelia the terrorist clad in black fatigues with a .45 tucked into her bare midriff; and finally Ophelia the Mad confined to a wedding dress and, at times, a wheelchair.
Now, if you’re familiar with director Frederique Michel’s work, you’ll recognize a certain perfection to the world-premiere of Opheliamachine happening at City Garage.
If you’ve never been – here’s what you are almost guaranteed to see at any of their productions: deep blue light, a minimal platform set, bare breasts — both male and female, the color red echoed in scarves, costumes, lipstick. You get the idea.
Now what you make of either Opheliamachine or really City Garage depends on whether you buy into the larger project. A fair criticism would be ‘it all looks the same’ which I’d argue is part of the point. Director Frederique Michel and Producer Charles A. Duncombe are creating a dramatic language and like any language that requires repetition – consistency. If you are willing to do the work the experience becomes larger than a single play: a crazed Ophelia in a red wheelchair evokes their production of Sara Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Plays begin talking to each other – personal connections begin to emerge.
If you’re looking for a play or a company that ties everything into neat little knots – this probably isn’t for you. If you’re willing to tackle a play as much as experience it – you won’t be disappointed you spent 60 minutes in their world.
Opheliamachine plays at City Garage in Santa Monica through July 28.
This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.
“Caged” by Charles A. Duncombe
February 15, 2013—April 21, 2013
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Cast: Nathan Dana Aldrich, Justin Davanzo, Erol Dolen, Kristina Drager, David E. Frank, Leah Harf, R.J. Jones, Megan Kim, Katrina Nelson, Mariko Oka, Heather Pasternak
Two naked specimens in a cage. Visitors come and go, fascinated by them, arguing and wondering about these creatures.
Fourth Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, March 10 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of Caged.
Nudity. Adult Themes.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
LA WEEKLY — Pick of the Week!
Charles A. Duncombe’s new play Caged at Santa Monica’s City Garage is a rumination on the oddities of our species via the exhibition of two naked souls in a museum cage. It’s also this week’s Pick of the Week.
Not long ago, people regarded as exotic or subhuman were tossed into cages for the viewing pleasure of the American public. Such was the dreadful fate of Congo pygmy Ota Benga, who was displayed with monkeys at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. In Charles Duncombe’s world-premiere drama, Caged, Megan Kim and R.J. Jones are naked, snatched-from-the-jungle “noble savages,” who, confined in a cage stocked with toys, convincingly channel primitive angst, lethargically striding about, communicating and reacting with grunts and violent upsurges and hitting each other playfully. Extended commentary about the exhibit is provided by a keeper (Katrina Nelson) and an interviewer (Leah Harf), whose theories and statements of facts are a bladed mix of the outrageously comical and idiotic. But it’s the cavalcade of spectators and their assorted hang-ups that provide the wallop of humor and irony here: a boy with his parents wanting to see tricks; a man meeting another man for a blow job; several couples in distress, mirroring the plight of the captives; a lonely woman seeking affection; an elderly woman with a huge ax to grind. The contrasts and the heavy-handed subtext are striking — and unsettling. Though not overly dramatic, Duncombe’s smartly written script is delightfully provocative and insightful. Performances are sharply calibrated under Frederique Michel’s direction. (Lovell Estell III)
BACKSTAGE
‘Caged’ Reveals Much About the World We Live In
Critic’s Score: B+: The study of a species is fascinating: finding two prime specimens, observing habits and rituals, noting behavioral changes in captivity, determining the creatures’ biological needs and motivations, and taking stabs at understanding their psychological motivations and emotions. Look! They’re just like us! Charles A. Duncombe’s “Caged” is itself a fascinating study, full of sharp, funny, and touching observations about the human species, in all its variations. It’s a smart outing that’s wonderfully presented but in some respects feels more like a theatrical exercise—although a pretty gratifying one—than a compelling dramatic exploration.
We find ourselves in a zoolike institution where visitors enter and gaze at two naked, caged creatures that look remarkably human (Megan Kim and RJ Jones). On Duncombe’s simple but effective set, the audience is on the same side of the bars as the male and female on display. Naturally. We learn from the Keeper (Katrina Nelson) during a documentary-style interview (conducted by Leah Harf) that this is a particularly psychologically complex species, with disturbing behavior patterns that make its members unlike other animals; in the wild, they fall into elaborate hierarchies and actually prey on one another, exhibiting fierce cruelty and extreme violence. Indeed.
The Keeper’s detached commentary is often brilliant and hilarious. Duncombe nails his targets, whether zeroing in on male versus female bonding activities, the difference between the sexes when presented with mirrors and their own reflections, or the inexplicable attraction to religion. Director Frédérique Michel handles the material beautifully, placing Nelson and Harf on opposite sides of the playing area; we see them above one another on video screens, which adds to Nelson and Harf’s suitably distanced delivery.
But what’s even more interesting is watching and listening to the visitors, who are outside of the cage yet surely see projections of themselves within it. They come and go, the dialogue sparkles, and Michel moves the action along seamlessly between interview segments as we observe illicit lovers (Heather Pasternak and Nathan Dana Aldrich), lonely strangers (Kristina Drager and Justin Davanzo), stupid guys (David E. Frank and Erol Dolen), an unhappy older woman (Mariko Oka), and more. All seven actors playing the visitors inhabit multiple roles with ease.
Stylish design details, including Josephine Poinsot’s crisp costumes, work nicely. Duncombe’s lighting showcases the nuanced performances of Kim and Jones superbly.
As “Caged” progresses, we’re pleasantly surprised by many of the conversations and clever interactions, which reveal so much about the world we live in and the people with whom we share it. But what we don’t quite get is that world significantly shaken up or threatened. It’s all pretty safe, even when the animals prove that they are dangerous, and the play’s reach expands in its final moments. (Jennie Webb)
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Two nude actors explore emotion and entrapment at Santa Monica’s City Garage.
Males and females commonly misunderstand one another by interpreting the motives of the other in terms of their own perceptions, certain their view is rational and true because it follows from their assumptions. Science in its own way strives for objectivity, although it, too, is circumscribed by incomplete data and unconscious bias. This new play by City Garage co-founder Charles A. Duncombe in a delicately intricate production explores the kaleidoscopic variations of the push-pull of relationships, remarkably similar whether “primitive” or “civilized.”
It often seems that people who choose to live in gated communities may believe that they are keeping everyone else out when in fact they are confining themselves within. Similarly, the world of Caged presents an inside-out conceit of people gawking at creatures imprisoned in a zoo-like environment who are actually themselves surrounded by the bars of the cages, whilst the naked human specimens (Megan Kim and RJ Jones) wander warily around them in the space outside the bars. Elevated on either far side of the stage sit a scientific researcher (Katrina Nelson) and an interviewer (Leah Harf). Their images appear simultaneously on video monitors above the other, discussing the strange and only partially comprehensible behavior of these wild beasts in captivity.
This effect of multiple vantages of observation and reaction, projection and analysis creates a multidimensional examination of the mating habits of Homo sapiens as both animal and human, “free” and “subjugated,” instinctive and rational. Duncombe’s ultimate point is that while all opinions and emotions expressed have a valid basis from some realistic perspective, the irony flows from the incomplete understanding we have of the limitations of every point of view. We believe most intently that which we project on what we see. Caged would be satire if only it weren’t so inescapably sad.
Duncombe’s observations are often routine and relatively obvious, which allows them to feel accessibly true if not profound. The richness of this show derives not from the text as touchstone but rather the elaboration of the metaphors through evocative design, lighting and orchestrated movement. Director Frederique Michel luxuriantly masters this congenial new space, wrangling the different levels of action subtly with an insinuating tactile sense. The lighting withholds as much as it illuminates, and quick passing character sketches of the visitors who encounter the human animals, while generically conventional, are most gratifying for their rhythmic sense of play with the piece’s ideas. While those ideas can be thin, they are fecund, and Duncombe and Michel spin so many layers with all those wisps of insight that the textured whole becomes piquantly allusive, even haunting.
Kim and Jones spend the duration nude, suggesting an earlier embodiment of natural human animals now entrapped by a civilization of which they appear to know nothing (a mistaken assumption, as Duncombe reveals). Inappropriate tattoos aside, they make their symbolic creatures concretely human as they uneasily prowl, play and court. Nelson once again exerts a magnetic intensity despite her buttoned-down role, and it is one of the continuing pleasures of City Garage, as with many established local companies, to see the progressive development of individual actors over many roles over time: here, for one example, the invariably interesting Mariko Oka makes original, distinctive creations of five small parts. (Myron Meisel)
The Bald Soprano: A Christmas Anti-Play
November 1, 2012—December 23, 2012
Produced by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Mitchell Colley, David E. Frank, Lena Kay, Cynthia Mance, Bo Roberts, Kenneth Rudnicki
matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creative staff behind The Bald Soprano.
PICK OF THE WEEK GO – LA Weekly: Even after 60 years and counting, Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist farce is still one of France’s most popular and frequently produced plays. And as director Frédérique Michel demonstrates in this steadfastly enjoyable revival, it’s still good for a load of laughs. The opening tableau reveals a middle-aged Parisian couple, the Smiths (Jeff Atik, David E. Frank in drag, skillfully blending impertinence and camp), relaxing at home. She decorates the Christmas tree and discusses banal details about dinner, while he responds with outbursts of guttural gibberish from behind a newspaper. Things turn even more bizarre with the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Martin (Bo Roberts, Cynthia Mance) — who initially don’t seem to even know each other — and a loquacious Fire Chief (Mitchell Colley). The evening gradually segues into a frenetic outbreak of meaningless chatter, jarring non sequiturs, grade-school storytelling and oddball silliness, all of which Michel and her cast (which includes Lena Kay as a ditzy maid) serve up with impeccable comedic skill and élan. Ionesco satirizes middle-class manners and banality, and at the same time constructs a dramatic environment where logic, language and reality are wittily disassociated, and therein is the fun and laughs in the piece. Cast performances under Michel’s direction are first-rate. (Lovell Estell III)
Critic’s Score: A – Backstage: Just in time for the banal bantering, household hopping, and gourmet gorging about to fill our holiday platters, City Garage gives us a remounting of its 2007 production of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic “The Bald Soprano,” newly subtitled as “A Christmas Anti-Play.” The setting has been relocated to the suburbs of Paris in a new translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles A. Duncombe. Presented with an oddball reverence and dripping with mid-20th-century style, the production is a real treat.
Directed by Michel, “The Bald Soprano” opens with a scene of stunningly skewed retro domesticity on Duncombe’s picture-perfect setting. David E. Frank is in hostess apparel as a suitably manic Mrs. Smith, trimming the tree and setting the world aright one nail-polish color at a time as the clock strikes 17, while Jeff Atik’s squat Mr. Smith, sporting an eye-catching leopard smoking jacket, is lost in his newspaper. (Meow for Josephine Poinsot’s spot-on costumes.) The couple’s oblique cat-and-mouse games soon take the form of inane, circular, loaded conversations, and the actors are more than up to the challenge.
When the Smith’s dinner guests finally arrive, the addition of the nervously cheerful Martins (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts) raises our expectations. We can’t wait to find out what’s really behind the awkward social moments, painful forced smiles, and desperate need to find some element of excitement in everyday life. But of course we never really do, despite the efforts of the acerbic maid Marie (Lena Kay) to set everyone straight and an unexpected diversion from the Fire Chief (Kenneth Rudnicki) during a most fortuitous visit.
This is only the second production in City Garage’s spiffy new performance space, and it’s wonderful to see this dependably outrageous company stretch out and get a bit more breathing room. Michel seems right at home, directing with a customarily sure hand and careful attention to detail, choreographing each movement and sound onstage. Duncombe’s lighting and Paul M Rubenstein’s sound add more polished layers.
Kudos to the solid company of performers, who are savvy enough to trust Michel and the material and get full mileage out of everything they collectively bring to the party. There’s a particularly hilarious moment involving a Santa hat. Especially if you’ve got a taste for the absurd, this is one of those holiday gatherings you won’t want to miss. (Jennie Webb)
**** (4-stars) – Total Theater: City Garage successfully revisits its 2007 production of The Bald Soprano, the famous absurdist comedy by Eugene Ionesco. City Garage’s French-born artistic director Frederique Michel is an Ionesco specialist, as this production proves yet again.Working from her own English translation/adaptation, Michel sets the story at Christmas time (hence the play’s new subtitle). On view are a Dali-esque Christmas tree, an upside down clock, and a parking meter, with Santa and the elves suspended overhead in a toy gondola. Otherwise, the living room of Mr & Mrs Smith looks perfectly normal, elegant and bourgeois (kudos to set designer Charles Duncombe).
Ionesco’s maniacal assault on all things suburban — language, logic and family — begins with Mrs. Smith, herself. Played in drag by David E. Frank, she babbles mindlessly about banal things, while Mr Smith (Jeff Atik) sits reading a business newspaper and mouthing non sequiturs in a largely incomprehensible tongue. Then a young couple, the Martins (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts), arrive and, after some desultory small talk, discover that they are married to each other.
Other bizarre characters include a cheeky and sexy French maid (Lena Kay) and a fire chief (Mitchel Colley, alternating with Kenneth Rudnicki). Their disconnected and ditzy dialogue is punctuated with the tolling of bells and clocks and the crowing of unseen roosters. The cast delivers Ionesco’s mad little play easily and stylishly (having served in Michel’s ensemble for many years, they know how to give the director exactly what she wants).
The Bald Sopranois fresh and funny this time around, but it left me wishing City Garage had put a second Ionesco play on the bill. (Willard Manus)
Orestes 3.0: Inferno
September 21 — November 25, 2012
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Cast: Justin Bardales, Mitchell Colley, Nathan Dana, Justin Davanzo, Erol Dolen, Megan Kim, Samantha Geraci-Yee, Leah Harf, Katrina Nelson, Mariko Oka, Johanny Paulino, Megan Penn, Daryl Keith Roach, Bo Roberts
A Visual Feast of the Greeks
By Charlotte Stoudt, Sept. 28, 2012
The House of Atreus looks good on leather. Leather couches that is — part of the seating at T1, the Bergamot Station Arts Center and new home of City Garage. The company’s inaugural production, the skin-flashing, free-associative “Orestes 3.0: Inferno” suits this funky black box space.
Playwright Charles L. Mee has made a career out of tweaking the Greeks, and this world premiere is a mash-up of two of his plays. Director Frédérique Michel’s visually striking result plays something like sampling: dynamic, but diffuse.
Orestes (an intense Johanny Paulino) faces trial for killing his mother, Clytemnestra. Helen of Troy (Katrina Nelson), the Kato Kaelin of the pageant, shows up in swimwear and platform sandals, while Electra (Megan Kim) anxiously twirls en pointe. Apollo hosts this media circus like a Valley dude in boardshorts, but he can’t match the mojo of Menelaus (Daryl Keith Roach), who delivers a rockin’ cover of the Bo Diddley salvo “I’m a Man.” (Justin Bardales performs the onstage music.)
Like Mee, Michel’s work tends to feel like an experiment rather than finished product. You admire her willingness to swing for the fences, even when the hits fall short. Did “Orestes 3.0” shed new light on Euripides’ dense and ancient text? Not really. But Michel stages one of the year’s most startling tableaux: A son tenderly covering his naked, beautiful and very dead mother. That image is worth Mee’s thousands of words.
Playwright Charles M. Lee takes on Euripides in this production by avant-garde company City Garage
By Myron Meisel, Oct. 1, 2012
The Bottom Line: Bold and vigorous reimagining of Euripides tragedy made trenchantly relevant to contemporary moral issues, enhanced by a striking, stylish and focused production.
Times are bad, life is tough, and things have gone horribly wrong. Who do we blame: the gods, someone (anyone) else — me? Do we share culpability? Does it matter? How do we respond to the dreadful actions of others, or of ourselves? How do we distinguish justice from self-justification, in others or in ourselves? What is to be done?
Such questions of undeniable pertinence to contemporary life and politics can trace their origins to the classical Greeks. Playwright Charles L. Mee (bobrauschenbergamerica, Big Love, The Berlin Circle) has previously wrought impressive adaptations from the Athenian theater (Agamemnon, Orestes 2.0) but he has surpassed himself in this world premiere created especially for Santa Monica’s premier avant-garde company, the City Garage, inaugurating their new and highly felicitous space at the Bergamont Art Complex.
Mee stays true to the original myth though he freely spins the narrative through a most contemporary sensibility. Agamemnon has returned from Troy to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to appease the gods of war. In turn, her children, Orestes (Johanny Paulino) and Electra (Megan Kim), have revenged their father by killing their mother and her lover. The city has turned upon them, and where Orestes would have been king, the only issue before the tribunal is whether they should be stoned, or their throats cut.
The action opens after the murders, the proceedings emceed by a most Dionysian Apollo (Erol Dolen, inspired and original in his creepiness), a feral satyr who takes great joy in toying with bloody human folly: after all, the gods may order the mortals to commit atrocities, but why need they obey? The playwright Sophocles is recruited for meditations on human responsibility. Menelaus (Daryl Keith Roach), King of Sparta and uncle to the accused, feels motivated by the kinship of blood to help, yet military weakness forces him to be pragmatic. Their grandfather, Tyndareus (Bo Roberts), sets aside familial bonds to be rigorously vindictive for the murder of his daughter. Orestes, remorseful but unrepentant, is goaded by his pal Pylades (Justin Davanzo) into terrorist hostage-taking as his only hope for salvation.
Everyone makes an articulate advocate for a different viewpoint, and Mee simultaneously makes each case and reveals its flaws, scrupulously avoiding judgment. The common thread is that we make principles out of our perceptions of self-interest, and above all, we preserve the capacity for denial that ensures we never recognize our own responsibility.
The most original of all the creations is Mee’s Helen (Katrina Nelson), modeled on familiar stereotypes of the Westside trophy wife yet executed with such perfect pitch she becomes unerringly fresh. Appalling, obtuse, self-absorbed yet oddly frank, even honest, Nelson’s brilliant turn conveys both acute irony and deep embodiment of character. She’s not merely a cliché, nor a pop culture reference. She’s a vivid axiom who cannot (and will not) be dismissed, enabled by breathtakingly witty couture.
All of Mee’s intellectually stimulating myriad of arguments could not take life without the animation of Frédérique Michel’s continuously inventive direction. The corps is superbly drilled, and the pace furiously drives us from one lucid speech to another. Anachronisms and modern references may abound, yet they never seem to be forced signifiers, always enlightening the point. For once the Furies in a modern realization genuinely integrate into the narrative.
Mee never lapses into the glib, even as his speakers may. His vision of human subterfuge is comprehensive in its many variations. He calls for us to examine our lives in productive ways. It is a forthright and courageous challenge, and while there is no way to gauge if this play has a life in the future, it indubitably speaks with force and cogency to the way we live now in this very moment. This has to be one of the highest callings for the theater.
To Pillage
By Anthony Byrnes, Sept. 25, 2012
Chuck Mee is not your typical playwright…[He] is not playing the same old game. And more than idle words, he stands by them as a writer. You can experience not only this ethos but also the wonderful ‘pillaging’ in his new play Orestes 3.0:Inferno, receiving its world premiere at City Garage. As the title suggests, the play takes as it’s jumping off point the tale of Orestes. Back from the Trojan War, Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra and now with his sister Electra must stand trial. But describing simple plot is to miss the point of Mr. Mee’s work. His plays are less about story arcs and more about assemblage and collage. He culls texts the way an artist might find the magic in a “found object.” Take the first lines spoken by Helen of Troy, who appears in the City Garage production in a ruby red pin-up bathing suit and sunglasses. She announces, “First of all, I cleanse my skin with products that cleanse but don’t dry, products that are natural.” Could there be any more perfect introduction to the face that launched 1,000 ships?
Now contained in these lines is both the genius and the challenge of Mr. Mee’s plays. Because he juxtaposes the classical rhythms of Euripides with the pedestrian beats of found text, the audience and the actors have to make tremendous leaps. In one instant you are in a Greek tribunal. In the next, an actor is confessing his erotic secrets. When it works it’s thrilling. When it doesn’t it feels a bit like channel surfing. Go . . . but know that you’ll have to do the work of making sense of it all, which, when you think about it, is really Chuck Mee’s point.”
Gods and Monsters
By Samuel Bernstein, Sept. 25, 2012
“A work of passion, intelligence, and mischief… Mee and Michel collaborate with graceful eclecticism as they seek to bring a modern sensibility to this ancient tragedy; employing music, dance, and a mélange of performance styles… Michel directs her actors with evident authority and imagination… It’s clever, fresh, and feels inspired.”
Neil LaBute’s “Filthy Talk For Troubled Times”
January 6—February 25, 2012
“Michel and Duncombe have… fully inhabited their new space with this production”—LA Stage Times
Cast: Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Kye Kinder, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Katrina Nelson, Heather Leigh Pasternak, Vera Petrychenka, Kenneth Rudnicki
Review Excerpts:
“What marks this staging as different from the others is the brilliant and meticulous production by Artistic Director Frédérique Michel and the nude women’s additional dialogue by Producing Director Charles A. Duncombe….Nothing is superfluous. This production is Dada or Surrealism, call it whatever you like. “Filthy Talk” takes a poke at the art world and its often decorative pretensions, and the world of male/female relations it presents is “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus” on steroids—mega steroids. If what you are after is a short (75 minute) stunning and provocative production that leaves you asking questions as you leave, this is your ticket.”
—Karen Weinstein, Culture Vulture
“Long mistaken as an anti-female misogynist, LaBute’s understandable rage over the way men (and by extension, male dominated religion) hurt women (and themselves) by not acknowledging the valid differences between the genders is dramatically muscular, funny, as well as spot-on….It is fascinating to see how Michel’s always avant-garde productions (normally featuring female and male nudity) mesh with LaBute’s phallic fetishizing of male boorish behavior. It is very European, refreshingly free from middle-class moralizing that mars so much of American culture….This is an exciting production, beautifully mounted, and does justice to the author’s intent.”
—Dale Reynolds, Stage Happenings
“This ‘installation’ can be seen in different ways—as a Brechtian framing of the objectification of human beings that’s already apparent in LaBut’e writing and/or as a sly satirical comment on the art world…..Michel and Duncombe demonstrate a refreshing eagerness to reflect LaBute’s vision back on their own audience. If his characters were still in a topless bar, it would be far too easy for the people who are likely attend adventurous theater within an art gallery—and who are unlikely to enter a topless bar—to distance themselves….It’s clear that Michel and Duncombe have finally fully inhabited their new space with this production. Now I’m looking forward to the variety of creative works that might result from this juxtaposition of theater and the visual arts.”
—Don Shirley, LA Stage Times
“A strong directorial vision adds to a strong script…Neil LaBute’s series of potent statements about how badly men think of women—and, as it turns out, how badly women behave toward men—is writing on the finer side about ourselves at our worst. The prose sounds rarefied until one hears exactly what we think of each other, as if cartoon bubbles floated over our heads, in the most profane words. Frédérique Michel’s direction adds contrasting grace and beauty, paired with the glorious production design by Charles Duncombe—who provides “art talk” text in addition to LaBute’s words.”
—Dany Margolies, Backstage
“In a savvy move, company artistic director (and the play’s director) Frédérique Michel has switched the original setting for LaBute’s play about angry men and women from a topless bar in New York to restage the piece in a high-end art gallery. The men who were formerly chit-chatting over drinks as they longingly gazed at erotic dancers now find themselves at a pretentious art exhibit installation comprising of naked, fair-skinned women. Make that three gorgeous, slim, all-natural, lovely naked women with serious expressions on their Caucasian faces, clutching bright red hatboxes strategically placed to afford their nakedness a modicum of cover. Ingeniously, Michel has cracked LaBute’s play wide open by giving these perambulating and naked objects d’art speaking roles. The women utter abstract words, (these ‘speeches’ were newly written by Charles Duncombe), while several drunk male patrons of the play, and a couple of bitter waitresses working at the gallery, remain just as conflicted, angry and baffled as ever by the eternal mystery of the opposite members of their species. It’s an intriguing staging concept and wholly appropriate for the Bergamot Station location.”
—Pauline Adamek, ArtsBeat LA
“Neil LaBute’s first produced play, “Filthy Talk for Troubled Times,” presaged the “men-as-irredeemable-pigs” genre that LaBute has explored more fully in later works. Beginning with that 1990 debut, LaBute has always courted controversy….Director Frédérique Michel and production designer Charles Duncombe revisit LaBute’s seldom-produced play in a bold…production at City Garage’s Bergamot Station space. The play’s setting has been shifted from a topless bar to the aesthetic precincts of an art gallery –- a risky innovation obviously designed to point out the crass objectification of the female form. Three nude women (Kye Kinder, Heather Leigh Pasternak and Vera Petrychenka), carrying hatboxes –- anachronistic artifacts of vanished conventions –- stalk through Duncombe’s stark set like automata, ultimately freezing into a human triptych. The increasingly drunken male characters (Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Dave Mack and Kenneth Rudnicki) banter salaciously and ogle the nude “art objects” like a wolf pack as two waitresses (Cynthia Mance and Katrina Nelson) recount sordid past sexual episodes…..Duncombe’s new text, coupled with Michel’s ever-rigorous staging, heightens LaBute’s sophomorically sensational work into a serious examination of semantics, sin and the human imperative for connection…”
— F. Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times
“The lights go down and three beautiful, statuesque women slowly enter carrying blood red hat boxes in front of their completely naked bodies. That got your attention, didn’t it?That’s largely the point of City Garage’s new staging of Neil LaBute’s Filthy Talk for Troubled Times. In truth, the piece is a mash-up of a 20 year old LaBute script with a new setting and new interstitial text provided by City Garage’s Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe.The original 1989 script is set in a nudie bar “out near the airport” and it feels like an early dress rehearsal for LaBute’s play-come-film In the Company of Men. The dialogue is vintage LaBute: men being men or men being misogynistic uncouth pigs … depending on your point of view. As the men ogle, they expound on their personal philosophies of relationships, sex, race, and particularly vivid, and frightened, descriptions of female genitalia. Director Frederique Michel has replaced the strip club setting with an art exhibit – fitting given the play takes place in the Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station….Conceptually, it’s a clever staging of the theory of the “Male Gaze.” As a counterpoint to the drunken machismo, Director Michel offers the silent simplicity of the female form. As the men down plastic tumbler after plastic tumbler of free art opening wine, their tirades become darker and increasingly lewd – yet the statuesque women remain unfazed….Maybe it’s fitting that by revealing the unflinching honesty of the naked female form, Frederique Michel has made Neil LaBute’s men dramatically impotent.”
—Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater KCRW.
4.48 Psychosis
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Justin Davanzo, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Kenneth Rudnicki, Ann Colby Stocking
NOTE: Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis ran in rep with Sganarelle in the Track 16 Gallery space at the Bergamot Station Arts Complex in Santa Monica.
by Paul Birchall, August 16, 2011
GO Playwright Sarah Kane’s kaleidoscopic drama premiered shortly after her suicide in 2000. At the time, one British theater critic called the work a “70 minute suicide note” – and, of course, even with the best will in the world, it is almost impossible to separate the intense and ferociously angry text of the work from the tragic real world story surrounding it. This is particularly true when you consider that the lyrical writing overtly deals with issues of depression and mental illness from the point of view of the sufferer – it may be one of the best plays to depict suicidal depression from the inside out.
Set, as the program notes, “inside a deranged brain,” the work consists of a series of fragmented exchanges that often take the form of inchoate expressions of rage twinned with frustrated awareness of a lack of control. A clearly unstable young woman (Cynthia Mance) sits center stage, bracketed by two figures in chairs behind her and another figure, a seemingly severed head in a bird cage — all of whom mutter abrasive vituperations at the hapless girl. There is also a pair of other performers who portray the doctors attempting to treat her – even though they offer only the coldest comfort to the angst-ridden heroine — offering utterances like “I know nothing of you, but I like you!”
Frederique Michel’s harrowing and edgy production, replete with eerie sound effects and dialogue interspersed with characters suddenly lurching into rhythmic spasms and twitching, hauntingly captures the state of mind of someone with tunnelvision perception in which all thoughts, excuses, and opinions inevitably lead to one ultimate act self-negation. Designer Charles Duncombe’s sterile hospital room-like set and the eerie, percussive sound effects suggest the heroine’s matter-of-fact view of her own madness and feelings of emptiness. The production delivers a disturbing and striking theatrical experience. City Garage at Track 16 Gallery (Building C) at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Blvd, Santa Monica; Thurs.-Fri., 8 p.m.; thru Sept. 9. (310) 319-9939.
Molière: Sganarelle or The Imaginary Cuckold
July 23—September 11, 2011
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Justin Davanzo, David E. Frank, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Kenneth Rudnicki, Bo Roberts, Ann Colby Stocking
NOTE: Sganarelle ran in rep with Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in the Track 16 Gallery space at the Bergamot Station Arts Complex in Santa Monica.
Moliere’s sparkling classic comedy of errors in a lively new version for City Garage. In this wicked piece of satire on fidelity and honor, two couples mistakenly believe they have betrayed each other. The more they argue, scheme, plot, and attempt to revenge themselves, the more deeply they get entangled in their own delusions. And of course, in best Moliere fashion, when their fury and wounded vanity at last reaches a fever pitch, new complications make things even worse! A fast and furious romp of jilted lovers, deceived husbands, conniving wives, and devious young girls doing their very best to, in the end, do nothing but fool themselves.
Paradise Park at Track 16
Paradise Park at Track 16
February 12—March 13, 2011
NOTE: After City Garage moved out of its longtime home in an alley behind Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, this production re-opened for a limited five-week engagement at the Track 16 Gallery in the Bergamot Arts Center.
Directed by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Bo Roberts, Kenneth Rudnicki, Ann Colby Stocking, K.C. Wright, Reha Zamani
This program was made possible, in part, by a grant from the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
City Garage is supported, in part, by the Los Anegles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
City Garage recognizes the Wells Fargo Foundation for its generous support.
Presented by special arrangement with International Creative Management.
It’s a Postcard from Paradise
By David C. Nichols, Sept. 23 2010
“Because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be.
That summation from “Paradise Park” encapsulates both Charles L. Mee’s absurdist comedy and its breakneck, breathtaking L.A. premiere at City Garage, the company’s final outing in its alley space after 15 years.
As fans and detractors alike know, playwright Mee is an iconoclast without compare. In a kaleidoscopic series of amusement-park vignettes, Mee touches on themes of existential alienation and, ultimately, love like a trapeze artist leaving inexplicably hilarious, obliquely touching motion traces in his wake.
Director Frédérique Michel’s signature blend of loopy and sardonic is on full display, and designer Charles Duncombe turns his trademark usage of specific colors and isolated elements — for example, a wading pool sporting a crocodile — into pure ethos.
The cast, swanning about to sound designer Paul Rubenstein’s eclectic scoring, wearing Josephine Poinsot’s coy costumes with abandon, is terrific. Bo Roberts and the redoubtable Cynthia Mance as shakily married tourists perfectly counter K.C. Wright’s edgy daughter and Tim Orona’s cross-dressing inamorata. Kenneth Rudnicki’s park newcomer dovetails with Reha Zemani’s dream-troubled Midwesterner. Lena Kouyoumdjian’s serene violinist and Jeff Atik’s antic jack-of-many-trades — including a chicken — make potent opposite poles. Company stalwart Troy Dunn merges wryness and poignancy as clown Vikram, and Ann Stocking’s ventriloquist is mesmerizing, no mean feat given that David E. Frank turns his bipolar dummies into a tour de force.
So is “Paradise Park,” though it’s hardly for all tastes. Still, to miss this representative valedictory is unthinkable.
By Steven Leigh Morris, Sept. 20 2010
A profoundly despondent fellow (Kenneth Rudnicki) wanders into an amusement park for distraction from his agony. Inside, he slips into a fantasia of scenes – including his own romance with a young woman (Reha Zemani) from the Midwest, igniting a bundle of neuroses that keeps them estranged; a ventriloquist/philosopher (Ann Stocking) and his bifurcated dummy (David E. Frank); a tourist couple (Bo Roberts and Cynthia Mance) at the end of the tether that’s barely holding their marriage together; their irate young daughter (KC Wright) who yearns, in vain, for an effete Cuban (Tim Orona); a psychotic pizza-delivery boy (Jeff Attik); a wandering violinist (Lena Kouyoumdjian); a circus clown (Troy Dunn) and, in a directorial flourish, a guy in a chicken costume.
Charles Mee’s comedy is like a sonnet with a couple of repeated motifs: distraction, love and the general feeling of being cast adrift in cultural waters that are partly enchanting, partly evaporating, and partly polluted by the refuse of our ancestors, of our families, of our determination to follow impulses we barely comprehend, and to wind up unutterably lost. He’s one of this company’s favorite scribes, and mine, for the way in which, with the literary touch of a feather, he conjures primal truths of what keeps us at odds with ourselves and with eachother, keeps us yearning for the unattainable. And though there’s obviously psychology at work, the driving energy of the language and of the drama are subconscious, cultural and historical currents. Production designer Charles Duncombe anchors his platform set with a wading pool stage center, in which sits an alligator, and he decorates it above with strings of festival lights on a string. Josephine Poinsot’s costumes are thoroughly whimsical with primary colors and a feel for an America of the late 1950s – with the possible of exception of the married couple’s matching shorts and T-shirts that read, “Kiss my ass, I’m on vacation.” Director Frederique Michel stages the poetical riffs of text in her typically arch style, and it serves the play almost perfectly, except for the pizza delivery scene, where the choreography distracts from the psychosis that lies at the core.
Even so, I found the evening to be indescribably affecting, tapping emotions that lurk beneath the machinery of reason. This is the last production to be staged at this back-alley venue in Santa Monica, where the company has been putting on plays for 15 years. The ventriloquist’s lines couldn’t have been more ironic and true: “Then, because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be . . . that theatre, properly conceived, is not an escape either but a flight to reality, a rehearsal for life itself, a rehearsal of these human relationships of which the most essential, the relationship that defines most vividly who we are and that makes our lives possible, is love.”
Paradise Park
September 17—November 28, 2010
“GO!” — “indescribably affecting” LA Weekly
Directed by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Bo Roberts, Kenneth Rudnicki, Ann Colby Stocking, K.C. Wright, Reha Zamani
This program was made possible, in part, by a grant from the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.City Garage is supported, in part, by the Los Anegles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
City Garage recognizes the Wells Fargo Foundation for its generous support.
Presented by special arrangement with International Creative Management.
It’s a Postcard from Paradise
By David C. Nichols, Sept. 23 2010
“Because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be.
That summation from “Paradise Park” encapsulates both Charles L. Mee’s absurdist comedy and its breakneck, breathtaking L.A. premiere at City Garage, the company’s final outing in its alley space after 15 years.
As fans and detractors alike know, playwright Mee is an iconoclast without compare. In a kaleidoscopic series of amusement-park vignettes, Mee touches on themes of existential alienation and, ultimately, love like a trapeze artist leaving inexplicably hilarious, obliquely touching motion traces in his wake.
Director Frédérique Michel’s signature blend of loopy and sardonic is on full display, and designer Charles Duncombe turns his trademark usage of specific colors and isolated elements — for example, a wading pool sporting a crocodile — into pure ethos.
The cast, swanning about to sound designer Paul Rubenstein’s eclectic scoring, wearing Josephine Poinsot’s coy costumes with abandon, is terrific. Bo Roberts and the redoubtable Cynthia Mance as shakily married tourists perfectly counter K.C. Wright’s edgy daughter and Tim Orona’s cross-dressing inamorata. Kenneth Rudnicki’s park newcomer dovetails with Reha Zemani’s dream-troubled Midwesterner. Lena Kouyoumdjian’s serene violinist and Jeff Atik’s antic jack-of-many-trades — including a chicken — make potent opposite poles. Company stalwart Troy Dunn merges wryness and poignancy as clown Vikram, and Ann Stocking’s ventriloquist is mesmerizing, no mean feat given that David E. Frank turns his bipolar dummies into a tour de force.
So is “Paradise Park,” though it’s hardly for all tastes. Still, to miss this representative valedictory is unthinkable.
,
A profoundly despondent fellow (Kenneth Rudnicki) wanders into an amusement park for distraction from his agony. Inside, he slips into a fantasia of scenes – including his own romance with a young woman (Reha Zemani) from the Midwest, igniting a bundle of neuroses that keeps them estranged; a ventriloquist/philosopher (Ann Stocking) and his bifurcated dummy (David E. Frank); a tourist couple (Bo Roberts and Cynthia Mance) at the end of the tether that’s barely holding their marriage together; their irate young daughter (KC Wright) who yearns, in vain, for an effete Cuban (Tim Orona); a psychotic pizza-delivery boy (Jeff Attik); a wandering violinist (Lena Kouyoumdjian); a circus clown (Troy Dunn) and, in a directorial flourish, a guy in a chicken costume.
Charles Mee’s comedy is like a sonnet with a couple of repeated motifs: distraction, love and the general feeling of being cast adrift in cultural waters that are partly enchanting, partly evaporating, and partly polluted by the refuse of our ancestors, of our families, of our determination to follow impulses we barely comprehend, and to wind up unutterably lost. He’s one of this company’s favorite scribes, and mine, for the way in which, with the literary touch of a feather, he conjures primal truths of what keeps us at odds with ourselves and with eachother, keeps us yearning for the unattainable. And though there’s obviously psychology at work, the driving energy of the language and of the drama are subconscious, cultural and historical currents. Production designer Charles Duncombe anchors his platform set with a wading pool stage center, in which sits an alligator, and he decorates it above with strings of festival lights on a string. Josephine Poinsot’s costumes are thoroughly whimsical with primary colors and a feel for an America of the late 1950s – with the possible of exception of the married couple’s matching shorts and T-shirts that read, “Kiss my ass, I’m on vacation.” Director Frederique Michel stages the poetical riffs of text in her typically arch style, and it serves the play almost perfectly, except for the pizza delivery scene, where the choreography distracts from the psychosis that lies at the core.
Even so, I found the evening to be indescribably affecting, tapping emotions that lurk beneath the machinery of reason. This is the last production to be staged at this back-alley venue in Santa Monica, where the company has been putting on plays for 15 years. The ventriloquist’s lines couldn’t have been more ironic and true: “Then, because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be . . . that theatre, properly conceived, is not an escape either but a flight to reality, a rehearsal for life itself, a rehearsal of these human relationships of which the most essential, the relationship that defines most vividly who we are and that makes our lives possible, is love.”
The Marriage of Figaro
April 16, 2010—June 20, 2010
“CRITIC’S PICK” – LA Times
“GO” – LA WeeklyDirected by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles Duncombe
Cast: Maria Christina Benthall, Amelia Rose Blaire, Janae Burris, Brennan Cipollone, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Cynthia Mance, Maximiliano Molina,Bo Roberts, Cheryl Scaccio
LA TIMES:
Theater review: ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ at City Garage
A shrewd use of artifice as content distinguishes “The Marriage of Figaro” at City Garage. Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe’s new adaptation of Pierre Beaumarchais’ 1784 assault on the aristocracy, the source of Mozart’s deathless opera, hits its arch marks from the opening prologue and continues thus thereafter.
The second in Beaumarchais’ trilogy of Figaro plays – between “The Barber of Seville” and “The Guilty Mother” – “Marriage” savages class inequities (Louis XVI understandably banned it). Echoing Mozart librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, director Michel and designer Duncombe knowingly use the lunatic convolutions of farce to strike more profound cultural targets.
As ever, Figaro (Troy Dunn, never better) must learn from his betrothed Suzanne (delightfully unaffected Janae Burris) that Count Almaviva (David E. Frank, aptly smarmy) intends to exercise his droit du seigneur, the feudal custom wherein a nobleman could bed a servant bride before her wedding night.
How Figaro and Suzanne, in league with the long-suffering Countess (Cynthia Mance, having a field day), circumvent their dilemma is hardly Beaumarchais’ only complication. Accordingly, Michel sends the stalwart cast, bedecked in Josephine Poinsot’s droll costumes, pirouetting around Duncombe’s spare rococo setting with calibrated panache.
Amelia Rose Blaire excels as adolescent Chérubin, whose requited attraction to the Countess does not hinder his wooing Suzanne’s cousin Fanchette (wonderful Maria Christina Benthall). Rafael Clements gives gardener Antonio and judge Don Guzman a tickling urban edge. As Figaro’s longstanding nemeses, Bo Roberts and Brennan Cipollone are amusingly old school, while Ann Colby Stocking is seriocomic intensity personified as marital claimant Marceline.
Though adroitly articulate, the text and execution are only nominally provocative, perhaps the most benign outing in City Garage’s history, and sound designer Paul Rubenstein overuses Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” at the expense of Mozart. Such quibbles are trivial against the deft accomplishments of this charming realization.
– David C. Nichols
“The Marriage of Figaro,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. Alley, Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 5:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 30. $25. Pay what you can on Sundays. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.
LA WEEKLY:
Oh, Those Riotous Comedies:
The Marriage of Figaro and The Playboy of the Western World
By Steven Leigh Morris
published: April 22, 2010
Pierre Beaumarchais finished his five-act play, The Marriage of Figaro (the basis for Mozart’s opera), in 1778, but it wasn’t performed until 1784. This wasn’t because the author was developing it in some Paris playwrights lab, nor was he trying to find investors — that wouldn’t have been an issue after the success of Beaumarchais’ prior play, The Barber of Seville. No, the delay was due to Figaro being banned for its unseemly depiction of the French aristocracy, reflecting the kind of debauchery that tapped into the growing ire that would lead to the French Revolution.Some 140 years later, in 1927, Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky reset the play in the months leading up to that revolution in a production at the Moscow Art Theatre. Meanwhile, in 1907, crowds rioted during the opening performance of John Millington’s Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The problem there was twofold: A Sinn Féin contingent of nationalists believed that all Irish theater should be overtly political. Synge actually was a nationalist for a while, but his plays have different concerns; then there was the issue of unflattering references to the denizens of County Mayo, where the play is set: The men are the kind of drunken fellas who projectile-vomit at wakes, and hang dogs on clotheslines for the entertainment of watching them screech and wriggle.
Also, actresses depicting the women of the province appeared in their shifts, implying loose morals.
The sensitivity was over Irish stereotypes, and when the play premiered in New York four years later, it was met with a similar reception, including stink bombs being hurled at the stage.
All this gives one an almost gooey, nostalgic feeling for a time when theater was protested with such vitriol, notwithstanding the ignorance and circumscribed imaginations of the protesters.
Among the enduring aspects of each play is the eternal verity of how we leap to false conclusions based on misinformation. In The Marriage of Figaro, the gaffes are ruses and decoys set in motion by some of the characters with ulterior motives — keeping a lecherous Count at bay, putting somebody in debt in order to force him into marriage, etc.
In the larger scheme of things, this suggests that fools are the victims of the machinations of smarter people, and that this has less to do with God, or the gods, as with schemers of the human variety. There is some variation on this theme when the schemers get slightly lost inside their own puzzle, which implies a more universal folly, in which God is the trickster. Such is the foundation for French Farce, derived via Shakespeare from Roman comedy — a foundation director Frédérique Michel underscores by turning her production of Figaro at Santa Monica’s City Garage (in a new translation by Michel and Charles Duncombe) into a kind of puppet show with human actors. The puppetry lies in the arch gestures, actors scampering into place through an almost sadistic mayhem of intricate choreography in order to land at a specific point on the stage, body positioned with balletic discipline, for the purpose of delivering one line, before scampering again for the next. When you have two characters exerting such energy for simple exchanges of information, you get what looks like style over substance. That’s not really the case. The style is the substance: The idiocy of so abusing the limited energy we’re given in one lifetime is a statement on the way we feel so obliged, if not honored, to be tethered to puppet strings. These characters think they and their self-interest are all so clever, while somebody on the other side of the footlights is laughing at their stupidity. Behind all this lies the unspoken cloud of a brewing revolution, suggesting that the abuses of the puppeteers will have expensive consequences. And that may not be just an 18th-century problem.
Figaro (Troy Dunn) and Suzanne (Janae Burris) are about to be wed. Figaro is valet to the Count (David E. Frank), while Suzanne is chambermaid to the Countess (Cynthia Mance). At play’s start, Suzanne watches Figaro measuring the proportions for a bed that’s to be installed in their new quarters — within earshot of the Count. A bit of a dolt, Figaro doesn’t realize (until Suzanne fills him in) that the closeness of the quarters to their respective employers is actually in the service of the Count’s lechery. And so begins a series of traps to ward off the indignity of the Count’s attempted restoration of an old right called primae noctis, in which the master of the house is entitled to deflower a bride from a lower class before her wedding.
Following the plot’s intricacies is like trying to follow the motions of moths around a lamp, though it does sort itself out, not unlike the ribbons and bows in Josephine Poisot’s period costumes. And the new translation transfers the subtleties of French idiom very smoothly into English — with the added delight of actors occasionally lip-synching from excerpts of Mozart’s opera.
The technique on display in Michel’s production isn’t yet pristine, but on opening night, it was close enough to make its point. The shenanigans unfold on Duncombe’s production design of burgundy and blue, accented by two suspended chandeliers. The set’s symmetry and elegance work in pleasing juxtaposition against the mayhem of interlopers hurling themselves out of windows, or pretending to. The solid ensemble works in tight conformity to the style: Frank’s lecherous Count is a comic standout of barely concealed slime, offset by the grace of Mance’s weary, dignified Countess. And Maria Christina Benthall offers vivacious delight as the libidinous niece of the gardener.
In The Playboy of the Western World, in a new production at A Noise Within, young drifter Christopher Mahon (Michael Newcomer) wanders into a rural, Irish public house, confessing that he has just murdered his father during a brawl between the pair, having knocked him on the head with a loy. The bar mistress, Pegeen Mike (fiery Lindsay Gould) initially goads this reluctant confession from the exhausted, witless fellow, but as it’s met with reverence, and “Christy” becomes a local hero and object of desire among the village girls, he retells the story of the murder with growing extravagance and pride. This is all fine, until his father (director Geoff Elliott) shows up with a seething head wound, and Christy tries again to do the job correctly. In the eyes of the locals, he’s now not only a liar but a murderer.
The “great gap between a gallant story and a dirty deed” is the crux of the tale, and its meandering morality is part of what incited its initial audience to riot.
Both plays are about lies, the difference being that Christy believes at all times he’s the telling the truth. This quality, and the murkiness of what we take to be true, gives the story its ancient Greek foundations. At the start of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus has no idea he’s killed his father, and is just as cocky in his blindness. And though both Playboy and Figaro are comedies, Playboy contains underpinnings of tragedy stemming from Christy’s earnestness and loneliness, and his betrayal by Pegeen Mike. And for all its perversity and farce, it contains some of the most fetching and lyrical love scenes in contemporary literature.
Elliot’s staging is the inverse of Michel’s — imbued with naturalistic detail (Soojin Lee’s mud-stained, torn costumes, Stephen Gifford’s rustic set with sheaths of hay dangling from the ceiling, streaks of rain sliding down the one window) and an acting style to match. Elliot’s pacing is just right, gentle enough to catch the emotion and the beauty of the language yet brisk and smart enough to serve the comedy. Among the lovely performances are Jill Hill’s Widow Quinn (who shares the dainty, word-wise qualities of Mance’s Countess in Figaro); the eccentric and idiosyncratic William Dennis Hunt’s Philly Cullen, and Apollo Dukakis’ skeptical Michael James Flaherty. Elliot’s biggest misstep is miscasting himself as the elder Mahon, when in his own production there are actors who could obviously capture the requisite anarchic lunacy. Elliott is of a classical mold, and imbues the rusty nail of a character with far too much decorum and elegance, in voice and manner.
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO | By PIERRE BEAUMARCHAIS, in a new translation by FRÉDÉRIQUE MICHEL AND CHARLES DUNCOMBE | CITY GARAGE, 1240 ½ Fourth St. (alley entrance), Santa Monica | Through May 30 | (310) 319-9939
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD | By JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE | A NOISE WITHIN, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale | Through May 22 | (818) 240-0910