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
The Trojan Women
November 6, 2009—February 21, 2010
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maria Christina Benthall, June Carryl, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Michael Galvin, Jules Hartley, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Alisha Nichols, Mariko Oka, Amelia Rose, Kenneth Rudnicki, Crystal Sershen, Garth Whitten, Reha Zamani
LA Times
Friday, November 13, 2009
By David C. Nichols
A high level of invention suffuses “The Trojan Women” at City Garage. Deconstructing Euripides’ classic tragedy into a multifarious current-day collage, adaptor-designer Charles Duncombe and director Frederíque Michel pull few punches in the wake of burning Illium.
The geopolitical realities in Duncombe’s freewheeling text range from harrowing statistics of recent genocides to sardonic swipes at our blog-infested society. Darfur, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, overpopulation, climate change and more punctuate the same gender positions that have driven this saga since its Peloponnesian War premiere.
Hecuba (June Carryl, magnificently composed) suggests a traditional African queen, clothed at the outset by title mourners whose burkas are but one of costumer Josephine Poinsot’s inspirations. Cassandra (Mariko Oka) devolves from culture vulture to a naked, feral creature of website contours. Andromache (the touching Amelia Rose) turns the society trophy wife into a figure of post-millennial pathos, rending against Troy Dunn’s quietly insidious Greek envoy.
And when an assured Alicia Nichols turns up as Helen of Troy, here a Britney Spears clone with nude dancing boys and hip attitude, her face-off with Michael Galvin’s intense, Billy Connolly-flavored Menelaus crystallizes the enterprise. Dave Mack’s empathetic diplomat, Crystal Sershen’s understated Hermione and Cynthia Mance’s entertainment reporter are among the other standouts in a marvelous ensemble effort.
Dividing focus between the keening women and the marauding men, Duncombe gets a slew of modern context in (Euripides is understandably absent from the credits). The approach risks overload, some things unnecessarily explained, and director Michel occasionally struggles to keep the tone consistent. Still, if the aim is to yank “Trojan Women” into our consciousness, this company benchmark, though overstuffed, is a triumph.
LA Weekly – GO!
Thursday, November 12, 2009
By Steven Leigh Morris
In his adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy (So freely swiped from the original that Euripides’ byline doesn’t appear on the program), Charles Duncombe takes a macroscopic, brutal and unrelenting look at the end of the world. Genocide in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, unsustainable population growth and climate change carry the day, and the play, with excursions into a theme that’s punctuated Duncombe’s earlier adaptations of texts by Sophocles and Heiner Müller: the relationship between gender and power.
Scenes depicting physical mutilation and rape in war zones – choreographed by director Frederique Michel – contain an excruciating authenticity, even in the abstract. Michel undercuts this harrowing tone by incorporating elements of farce in other scenes. One is a gem of understatement and humor: The reunion of fluttery Helen of Troy (Alisha Nichols, attired like a dancer in a strip club, and employing all those powers of manipulation) with the Greek king Menelaus (stoic, furious Michael Galvin) from whom she fled and started this bloody mess (the Trojan War, that is).
This is where the adaptation and direction congeal and captivate. This is still very much a work-in-progress, conceived for all the right reasons. As is, the directorial tones wobble like a top, and the adaptation contains far too much explication. The evening also reveals why theater matters, and how this kind of work wouldn’t stand a chance in any other medium. It’s too smart and too passionate to dismiss.
LA Weekly: Theater Feature
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Rotten Families: The Trojan Women and Tree, and what we mean to each other
By Steven Leigh Morris
Euripides’ The Trojan Women, the most famous in a trilogy of dramas written about the Trojan War, features the saga of the Trojan horse — the famous trick played out in Troy, when the Greeks gifted the Trojans a large, wooden horse during the Peloponnesian War. It’s hard to build trust after something like that, no matter how progressive one’s politics. The play is a post-traumatic wail by Troy’s surviving royal women, whose husbands and sons have been butchered, and who have now been sold into slavery to various Greek kings.
The Trojan Women is performed frequently around the world, which isn’t bad for a dour lament first produced in 415 B.C. Yet when Euripides dutifully entered his trilogy into the Dionysus Festival, it went nowhere. First prize was taken by a playwright named Xenocles, whom almost nobody has heard of since. That should tell you all you need to know about playwriting competitions and new-play festivals.
In his new adaptation of The Trojan Women, Charles Duncombe has spun it into a macroscopic view of human barbarity, depicting scenes of rape and genocide from Rwanda and Sierra Leone (which director Frederique Michel stages as a balletic dance of death), with running news commentary by an actor on the side (Cynthia Mance), who keeps asking the bludgeoned and dismembered how they feel. So even in the depiction of unbearable human brutality, Duncombe adds cutting shards of satire, aimed at the way we receive the news — something Euripides steered away from. (Then again, Euripides didn’t have to contend with FOX News or CNN.)
Early in the production, a Dummy and a Ventriloquist (David E. Frank and Michael Galvin) give a slapstick explanation of the Trojan War, and why nobody cares because it was so long ago, and is therefore irrelevant to our lives. This may be a preemptive rebuttal to those who question why such a dark play should be put on, but if the production is as good as this one often gets, the scene is largely beside the point.
When the story settles in on Hecuba, Queen of Troy (June Carryl), who portrays her fallen woman as an emblem of pained and stoic dignity, and her coterie of female Trojan royalty (Mariko Oka, Crystal Sershen, Cynthia Mance, Maria Christina Benthall, Reha Zemani and Amelia Rose) we slide into the literary-liturgical world of a theatrical prayer. Poor Andromache (Rose), the deranged wife of slain Hector, doesn’t comprehend the dire ramifications of her surrendering her infant boy, who provides her only purpose in life, to Archaean envoy Talthybius (Troy Dunn). This is a scene plucked from Euripides, and it’s as powerful now as it’s been through the ages, thanks in large part to Rose’s flittering, bewildered, widowed queen, inflated with self-importance. You’d want to slap her for her bloated and unearned sense of entitlement were she not clutching the handle of the insane asylum’s door.
It’s the kind of scene that needs no explanation, but Duncombe has added plenty of that as well — not about Andromoche in particular but about the state of the world in general. Frequently, such explications are pedantic and a disservice to Duncombe’s many wonderful scenes that play themselves out between the lines. His model may be Bertolt Brecht, who loves to explain and ruminate upon his parables. But this is no parable; it’s an epic. And what this is about is as clear as the black smoke of war.
The play’s strongest scene concerns Helen of Troy (Alisha Nichols, like a generic blond stripper, pouty lips, playing dumb but rat-smart), returning to her furious husband, Menelaus (Galvin at his best — a seething volcano of curses and spite), whom she abandoned for Paris, thereby provoking the brother of her cuckolded husband to launch 1,000 ships, and the decades-long war.
She’s now home, eyes-a-flutter, apologizing. Does Menelaus take the bait? He just said he wanted her torn apart by tanks in a slow and agonizing death. But sex toys like Helen have their power, too. This may be the point of Michel’s use of nudity throughout the production.
In A Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse, director Lee Breuer had Maude Phillips’ Nora strip off in his adaptation of Ibsen’s anthem to feminism, but she also removed a flowing wig, so that, in the flesh, she was bald. That image of a woman finding herself in a world of masquerade balls was nakedness rather than nudity.
For her Trojan Women, Michel has her women costumed in froufrou dresses and heels, and one hand gloved to the elbow. When lithe Mariko Oka strips down to everything but the glove and little white boots, it’s an image of both defiance and erotic seduction in the same gesture, of sexual vulnerability. Whether that’s an also an image of power is a question laced with ambiguity. There’s no question, however, that the flesh keeps everyone paying attention. Perhaps this dovetails into Duncombe’s parody of TV news, and of a voyeuristic culture imploding before our eyes.
With all its ambiguities and the sometimes wobbly tones, this admirable production demands respect. It’s a work-in-progress worth investigating.
Julie Hébert’s family dramaTree, set in Chicago’s South Side around 2000, tells the story of a now demented African-American woman named Jessalyn Price (Sloan Robinson), who lives mostly upstairs, and is cared for by her world-wearied son, Leo (Chuma Gault).
If Duncombe goes overboard with political explications of his macroscopic view, Hébert commits the inverse, having Jessalyn spout oblique lyrical fragments from her withering recollections, imposed upon what’s really a microscopic view of one family, and one long-ago love affair. Through the microscope, however, you can see the larger patterns of the society that shaped their lives, and ours. It too is a portrait of warring clans and their brittle attempts at reconciliation and acceptance.
Into the household wanders a Caucasian interloper from Louisiana, named Didi (Jacquelyn Wright), bereft over the recent death of her father and determined to learn the truth of a possible affair he had with the now-demented woman upstairs. Turns out Leo and Didi may even be siblings. Uh-oh.
And so begins not only a very testy relationship between the family in Chicago, including Leo’s sweet-smart daughter JJ (nicely played by Tessa Thompson), but also gender-ambiguous, smarty-pants Didi.
Another family drama about unearthing secrets? This could be an exercise in tedium, were it played out the way it usually is, with people suddenly confessing with melodramatic flourish to past sins, for no particular reason other than to expiate their own guilt, and the playwright’s tug on the puppet strings.
Not so here. Hébert structures her play as an anthopological dig. When old and difficult truths emerge, they do so from the exigencies of empirical evidence — correspondences that finally emerge, as well as the persistence of Didi, a truth-seeker whose curiosity borders on the belligerent. That’s probably what it takes to get to the heart of anything.
Hébert is a lovely writer, who avoids propelling her drama with glib Gothic parodies, a technique bountifully employed in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County. The friction here comes from personalities, not presumptions. The play finds its stride through people clashing, even gently, and their conflicting needs. When Jessalyn rambles on, especially near the play’s start, and despite Robinson’s meticulous and endearing performance, under Jessica Kubzansky’s direction, the forced poeticism has the texture of jam on top of honey.
The Chairs
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Cynthia Mance, Bo Roberts, Garth Whitten
Backstage
August 5, 2009
Reviewed by Danny Margolies
An old couple sleeps, snoring loudly. The husband awakens first and looks at his wife. He gazes at her with love, tenderness, fear, a lifetime of memories—and the audience is quickly engaged. In whatever way one interprets the enigmas of the script—and many scholars have tried—the couple in this production seems as real as any. Each adores the other, each is happily familiar with the other’s faults, and in the hands of actors Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts they are an odd delight.
Eugène Ionesco’s script, translated by Donald Allen—did we catch a fleeting reference to the Internet?—is a magnificent gift to actors and to the audience. As with the best of couples, Mance is the physical comedian—turning the wife into a lively, clowning companion—while Roberts makes the husband the true romantic, fully real in his quiet adoration of his wife and a former flame. Portraying the Orator, Garth Whitten silently greets the “guests,” bemusedly eyeing the extremely tall couple, then delivers Ionesco’s intentionally unintelligible oration. The set, designed by Charles Duncombe, has the melancholic feel of a Van Gogh room.
At first one wonders why Frederíque Michel put her couple in gray hair, when this play is so abstract that nothing else is spelled out. But by the play’s end, when the husband and wife are bounding across the stage in the great ballet of the chairs, the hair serves as a reminder to us that the characters are indeed old—and yet eternal.
The audience will work hard to stay with this piece. It’s only fair; the actors and director did so for weeks before putting Ionesco’s words into action. But we are also graced with the production’s surprising emotional impact—a rare treat in an increasingly absurd world.
KCRW-Theatre Talk
September 17, 2009
Reviewed by James Taylor
Lost Allusions
In years past, when dramatists wanted to make an allusion or use history to suggest a metaphor, chances are they would look to the bible — or some ancient Greek, Roman or even Norse mythology.
[…]
Across town in Santa Monica, another production makes reference to Tristan and Isolde: The City Garage’s revival of The Chairs the 1952 “Tragic Farce” by Eugene Ionesco. Here, allusion seems like a throwaway Ionesco’s Old Man says to one of his guests, “Will you be my Isolde and let me be your Tristan.” Like in LaBute’s play, this shout-out foreshadows the climax of the drama, but in Ionesco’s text, and in Frederique Michel’s staging, the allusion is subtle and folds in into the movement of the play. In Helter Skelter, the allusion rings out like a siren and instantly you know how the play is going to end.
Unlike many past City Garage stagings, this revival of The Chairs stays pretty close to the text. Besides doing away with a blackboard and updating a line about the radio (it’s changed now to say “the internet”) Michel delivers a vision of The Chairs that is clear and accessible. The director needs no gimmicks since the two lead actors, Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts, play Ionesco’s Husband and Wife (and their many guests, ranging five decades in age) with both focus and dedication. It’s not a revelatory production, but a sober presentation of an absurdist play that remains both daring and timeless.
Ionesco’s The Chairs runs through Sunday at the City Garage; The Elixir of Love continues at LA Opera through September 30.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
The School for Wives
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Bo Roberts, Jessica Madison, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Ken Rudnicki, David E. Frank, Jeff Atik, Troy Dunn, Michael Galvin, Trace Taylor
LA Weekly – GO!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
By Steven Leigh Morris
The central character in Molière’s comedy, here translated and adapted by Frédérique Michel & Charles Duncombe could be and often is a punching bag. But not here. Arnolphe is another in a stream of Molière’s aging, patronizing nitwits (like Orgon on Tartuffe) who presume that they can control the devotions and passions of young women in their care. In Tartuffe, when Orgon’s daughter protests his insistence that she break her wedding plans to her beloved suitor in order to marry the clergyman he prefers, Orgon figures her rebellion is just a impetuous, child-like phase.In The School for Wives, there’s a similar mind-set to Arnolphe (Bo Roberts), who has tried to sculpt his young ward, Agnes (Jessica Madison), into his future wife. He’s known her since she was 4, and he’s strategically kept her closeted, as though in a convent, hoping thereby to shape her obedience and gratitude. Just as he’s about to wed her, in stumbles young Horace (Dave Mack) from the street below her window, and the youthful pair are smitten with eachother, soon conniving against the old bachelor. Horace, not realizing that Arnolphe is the man keeping Agnes as his imprisoned ward, keeps confiding in the older man about his and Agnes’ schemes, fueling Arnolphe’s exasperation and fury.
Perhaps it’s the use of director Michel’s tender, Baroque sound-tracks, or the gentle understatement of Roberts’ performance as Arnolphe, but the play emerges less as a clown show, and more as a wistful almost elegiac rumination on aging and folly. Arnolphe tried to create a brainless wife as though from a petri dish, an object he can own, and the more she rejects him, the more enamored he becomes of her, until his heart breaks. The pathos is underscored by the obvious intelligence of Madison’s Agnes – an intelligence that Arnolphe is blind to.
The production’s reflective tone supersedes Michel’s very stylized, choreographic staging (this company’s trademark). The ennui is further supported by a similarly low-key portrayal by David E. Frank as Arnolphe’s blithe friend and confidante, Chrysalde. In In fact, when lisping, idiot servants (Cynthia Mance and Ken Rudnicki) keep running in circles and crashing into each other, Michel’s one attempt at Commedia physicality is at odds with the production rather than a complement to it. Company costumer Josephine Poinsot (surprising she doesn’t work more) provides luscious period vestments and gowns, and Duncombe’s delightful production design, includes a gurgling fountain, a tub of white roses, and abstract hints of some elegant, Parisian court.
The Bourgeois Gentilhomme
November 7, 2008—May 8, 2009
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Matt Cook, Ruthie Crossley, Troy Dunn, Michael Galvin, Deborah Knox, Edgar Landa, Jessica Madison, Cynthia Mance, Max Molina, Alisha Nichols, Mariko Oka, Ken Rudnicki, Trace Taylor, Garth Whitten, John Willard
LA Times – Critic’s Choice!
Friday, November 14, 2008 By David C. Nichols
A ‘Gentilhomme’ for our times
With a generous soupçon of witty anarchy, “The Bourgeois Gentilhomme” tumbles into Santa Monica. This sleek City Garage take on Molière’s deathless satire of nouveau riche pretensions and aristocratic machinations is nominally avant-garde, mainly an unguarded hoot.
First performed in 1670 before Louis XIV, “Gentilhomme” concerns Monsieur Jourdain (the riotous Jeff Atik), his father a wealthy merchant who retained middle-class contours. Hopelessly oafish Jourdain thus obsesses over not just the trappings of nobility, which elude him despite the fawning efforts of a slew of tutors, but over trapping the nobles.
That explains Dorante (aptly acerbic Troy Dunn), a sponging count who pretends to help Jourdain woo Dorimène (Deborah Knox, exquisitely poised), Dorante’s own paramour. While everyone mocks Jourdain behind his back, his acidulous wife (Ruthie Crossley) openly bemoans his aspirations, such as marrying off daughter Lucile (Alisha Nichols) to royalty, though she loves commoner Cléonte (Garth Whitten). Assisted by Cléonte’s valet (the avid Max Molina), a melee of duplicity ensues, leading to a demented faux-Turkish resolution.
Conceived by Molière as a comédie-ballet, “Gentilhomme” carries many wicked analogies to modern mores. Director Frédérique Michel and designer Charles Duncombe slyly tailor our times into their tart adaptation, complete with anachronisms, nonstop postures and purposely limp songs by Duncombe and John Gregory Willard. The design scheme seamlessly weds the red-black-and-gilt elegance of Duncombe’s set and lighting to Josephine Poinsot’s splendid costumes.
Goaded by Atik’s clueless climber, equal parts Bert Lahr, Don Rickles and a tea cozy, the nimble cast has a stylized field day. Ken Rudnicki’s tippling servant, Matt Cook’s dance master, Michael Galvin’s music master and Edgar Landa’s master chef are standouts, but everyone embraces the formalized mischief with élan.
Actually, their devotion to the detailed concept sometimes halts the antic fizz. Nonetheless, if full abandon is still finding its way, this hardly diminishes such a gracefully loopy soufflé.
LA Weekly – GO!
Thursday, November 13, 2008 By Steven Leigh Morris
You’d think, from reading the world press, that racism and, by extension, classism, had suddenly been vanquished from the nation — overnight, by a stunning national election. Such is the power of symbolism and hope. Sooner or later, we will settle into a more realistic view of who we are, and were, and how we have evolved in ways perhaps more subtle than the current “we are the world” emotional gush would lead one to believe. It’s in this more self-critical (rather than celebratory) frame of mind that Molière’s 1670 comedy – a satire of snobbery and social climbing – will find its relevance renewed. For now, however, Frederique Michel (who directed the play) and Charles Duncombe’s fresh and bawdy translation-adaptation serves up a bouquet of comedic delights that offers the caution that — though celebrating a milestone on the path of social opportunity is worthy of many tears of joy — perhaps we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves with self-congratulations.
The Bourgeois Gentleman was first presented the year after Tartuffe, and it contains many of the hallmarks of its more famous cousin: a deluded and pompous protagonist (Jeff Atik); a con man (Troy Dunn) aiming for social advancement by speculating on the blind arrogance of his patron; and the imposition by the insane master of the house of an arranged marriage for his crestfallen daughter (Alisha Nichols). The play was originally written as a ballet-farce, for which composer Jean-Baptiste Lully performed in the production before the court of Louis XIV. Michel’s visually opulent staging features scenery (designed by Duncombe) that includes a pair of chandeliers, and costumes (by Josephine Poinsot) in shades of red, maroon and black. Michel employs Lully’s music in a nod to the original. (The singing is far too thin even to support the jokes about its competence.) Michel also includes a lovely ballet by performers in mesmerizing “tears of a clown” masks, a choreographed prance of the fops, and she has characters bounding and spinning during otherwise realistic conversations, mocking style over substance. Comedy has a maximum refrigeration temperature of 75 degrees, and when that temperature was exceeded during Act 1 during the performance I attended, the humor ran off the tracks – despite the broad style being sustained with conviction by the performers. By Act 2, the heat problem had been remedied and the comedy began playing again as it should.
I haven’t seen a comic tour de force the likes of Atik’s Monseiur Jordain since Alan Bomenfeld’s King Ubu at A Noise Within. As Jourdain is trying to woo a countess (the striking Deborah Knox), Atik plays him attired in silks and bows of Ottoman extravagance, with a blissfully stupid expression – every dart of his eyes reveals Jordain’s smug self-satisfaction, which is embedded with delirious ignorance.
Backstage – Critic’s Pick!
Thursday, December 4, 2008 By by Neal Weaver
High style and low comedy merge in this new adaptation of Molière’s classic tale of nouveau riche Parisian shopkeeper Monsieur Jourdain (Jeff Atik), whose ambition to mingle with the aristocracy leads to his being swindled by shady Count Dorante (Troy Dunn), humiliated by his daughter’s suitor Cleonte (Garth Whitten), and deceived by all.
But fortunately for him, he’s too self-obsessed to notice he’s been hornswoggled. In their free adaptation, director Frederíque Michel and designer-managing director Charles Duncombe have added unexpected elements to the 17th century classic — including a martial arts instructor (Mariko Oka) for M. Jourdain, a transvestite cooch dancer (Matt Cooke), raunchy one-liners, and a handful of songs by Duncombe and John Gregory Willard.
Though Molière’s stock-in-trade was the combining of extravagant artifice with down-to-earth commonsense, director Michel’s penchant for stylization sometimes results in her treating artifice a bit too artificially, but the prevailing wit, buffoonery, and slapstick provide necessary grounding. And Michel has assembled a large and able crew of farceurs. Atik’s vain and dim M. Jourdain is painted in broad strokes, and Ruthie Crossley captures Madame Jourdain’s bourgeois practicality. Cynthia Mance and Max Molina provide sly feistiness as prototypical, scheming Molière servants. Dunn is a snootily supercilious Dorante, and Deborah Knox adds a note of elegance as the beautiful Countess Dorimène, vainly pursued by M. Jourdain. Alisha Nichols and Whitten offer blond good looks and charm as the young lovers, and the ensemble acquits itself nimbly as Jourdain’s various teachers, servants, and hangers-on. Duncombe has created the handsome set, and Josephine Poinsot deftly mingles lavish — and sometimes loony — period costumes with modern dress.
Santa Monica Mirror
Thursday, November 20, 2008 By Lynne Bronstein, Mirror Staff Writer
Comedy can be a lot of things, but sometimes it’s just plain silly. Moliere’s reputation as the classic playwright of France has modern Americans thinking that Moliere plays are really deep. Truth is, Moliere wrote comedies with roots in the broad farces of the ancient Romans and the Italian comedia dell’arte, usually revolving around a character who’s too foolish to see reality.
The Bourgeois Gentilhomme (gentleman) is one such play, an episodic farce about a man who aspires to being high-society. In City Garage’s production, it’s almost like a Marx Brothers movie – but then again, the Marx Brothers are but another link in the unbroken chain of comedies about stuffed-shirts who get their comeuppance.
Monsieur Jourdain (Jeff Atik) is the Bourgeois Gentleman. Rotund and bewigged, he indulges his desire, using his wealth (probably recently acquired) to be a real upper-class twit. He employs many instructors in music, dance, philosophy, even martial arts. He’s so dense that when his philosophy professor (Trace Taylor) explains to him that all speech is either verse or prose, he exclaims “Amazing! I’ve been speaking prose for 40 years and I never knew it!” Strutting around in outfits that look like Halloween in West Hollywood, he provokes ridicule from his down-to-earth wife (Ruthie Crossley), daughter Lucile (Alisha Nichols), and Nicole the maid (Cynthia Mance). But he ignores their warnings – after all, they’re just women.
Jourdain wants to move in higher circles, so he courts the friendship of a rather affected Count (Troy Dunn) and his lady friend, the Countess Dorimene (Deborah Knox). Jourdain lends the Count money and jewels, which the Count uses for his own purpose of wooing Dorimene. Talk about an enabler! The Count sees right through Jourdain’s silliness, but as long as he’s getting advantages from the foolish gentleman, he’s willing to go along with Jourdain’s pretensions.
In the meantime, a nice young man named Cleonte (Garth Whitten) wants to marry Lucile – but the Bourgeois Gentleman only wants to wed his daughter to a blueblood. Cleonte’s servant Covielle (Max Molina) hits upon a scheme straight out of the old fairy tale “Puss in Boots.” By the end of the play, there’s a happy ending and three couples prepare to tie the knot, thanks to the escalating nonsense of Covielle’s mega-put-on. And Monsieur Jourdain suspects nothing. He’s gained not one bit of insight. Larry David would probably approve.
City Garage is known for staging experimental and politically radical plays, more often than not featuring bare flesh. The Bourgeois Gentilhomme is tame material for this company, but director Frederique Michel has found opportunities to make the 17th century comedy feel more modern without glaring anachronisms. The translation and adaptation of the text, by Michel and Charles Duncombe, uses modern colloquialisms and a healthy dose of risque epithets. Many of the performances are appropriately broad and cartoon-like, especially Atik as the title character. Don’t be misled, though, by the ease with which Atik seems to play this foolish man – the role requires much energy and is undoubtedly physically exhausting.
Crossley is to be commended for playing Madame Jourdain with restraint, making her the practical ballast to her husband’s nonsense. Dunn is suitably epicene and sleazy as the Count.
The play also features songs, by Duncombe and John Gregory Willard, with a strong flavor of Monty Python, especially the “Food” song that closes the first act. As for bare flesh – it doesn’t get any more bare than a belly dancer (Lejla Hadzimuratovic). Moliere may not have envisioned a belly-dancer, but her dancing is there to enjoy. And The Bourgeois Gentilhomme is two hours of guilt-free enjoyable silliness.
Bad Penny
August 1—September 7, 2008
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Cynthia Mance, Alisha Nichols, Mariko Oka, Kenneth Rudnicki
LA Times: Happy this Penny Turns Up
Friday, August 8, 2008
By Philip Brandes
“A bad penny always turns up” is a platitude that packs an unexpected existential punch, at least in the sardonic world of New York playwright Mac Wellman. In Wellman’s Obie Award-winning short play, the titular “Bad Penny” opens a portal to the metaphysical abyss that yawns beneath the banality of a summer’s day in Central Park — and, by extension, beneath a society shaped by clichéd thought.
Staged with an austere pitch to the intellect by Frederíque Michel at Santa Monica’s City Garage, the play’s obsession with poetically fractured logic is sounded in the opening meditations of a recovering mental patient named Kat (Cynthia Mance), who wonders whether even the sky above is simply “a fake image of the true image of the sky.”
Having just found a penny by a nearby fountain, Kat is plagued with superstitious misgivings about bad luck coming to those who touch it: They could suffer the pharaoh’s curse, be eaten by trolls or be taken by the Boatman of Bow Bridge — a latter-day Charon ferrying lost souls across the Central Park pond, in one of Wellman’s sly juxtapositions of classical mythology.
Ducking fate, Kat gives the cursed penny to Ray (Troy Dunn), a toxic waste dump worker from Montana in search of a fix for the flat tire he’s hauling, Sisyphus-like, through the park. Skeptic to the end, Ray ignores Kat’s warning, oblivious to the ominous Boatman gliding up behind them.
Juggling illusions of normality, acquiescence to authority, paranoid conspiracy theories and toxic cheese, Wellman’s witty, abstract use of language is consistently challenging. The presence of other characters does little to bridge the sense of isolation that permeates this monologue-heavy piece. The ensemble delivery is clear and capable, though some of the outlandishly petty bickering cries out for the humorous inflections of New York accents. When the entire ensemble comes together to sing a few verses of “You’re Out of the Woods” from “The Wizard of Oz,” the effect is pure irony — no one gets off the hook here.
Though originally written for a site-specific staging at Central Park’s Bow Bridge, Charles Duncombe’s stylish production design effectively uses projected images and lighting to ease the translation to an enclosed space.
Backstage
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
By Neal Weaver
If you spot a penny lying tails up on the ground, don’t pick it up: It’s a bad penny and may put you in peril of being carted away by the Bad Boatman of Bow Bridge, a troll who lives in Central Park. That seems to be the message of Mac Wellman’s quirky one-act.
One day in Central Park, we encounter Woman One (Cynthia Mance), a daffy lady with a red umbrella and a bad penny, who claims to have been born in the Place of the Solitary Shoe. Also present is Woman Two (Alisha Nichols), who feeds the pigeons and wears red gloves. Man One (Troy Dunn) hails from Big Ugly, Mont., and seeks to change a tire on his possibly mythical Ford Fairlane. And he does not wear red. Man Two (David E. Frank) is a painter–with an easel, a painting of two dressmaker’s dummies, and a red scarf. Man Three (Kenneth Rudnicki) apparently lives in a cardboard box and wears one red sock. The Chorus of Six (Mariko Oka) appears in various guises–including what looks like a wedding gown, with a red heart-shaped cushion suspended around her neck. She rows past from time to time in an imaginary boat.
Woman One gives the bad penny to Man One, and the Bad Boatman carries him off. For what it’s worth, both Woman One and Man One claim to have had dogs named Meathead. All the characters sound off about the things that bug them in modern society and the human condition.
The piece seems both slight and enigmatic. And as to what it all means, it’s anyone’s guess. But director Frederíque Michel gives it an able cast and an elegantly impeccable production, and Charles Duncombe’s handsome set uses projections to suggest the changing seasons.
The Mission (Accomplished)
April 25—June 1, 2008
LA Weekly — GO!
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ishani Das, John Deschamps, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Amanda Mayen, Maximiliano Molina, Bo Roberts
LA WEEKLY – GO!
Scott Ritter and The Mission (Accomplished) Empire and its discontents
By STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
Monday, April 28, 2008 – 7:01 pm Last month, the first installment in Moving Arts Theater’s monthly discussion program, “The War Plays Project,” consisted mostly of local writers who had written plays about the U.S. invasion(s) of Iraq, and who were trying to fathom the public’s disinterest in movies and plays about those wars.
Theories abounded: public fatigue from overexposure to either press coverage of the war or rhetoric by proponents and opponents alike, or perhaps a general desire for distraction from all the vitriol. I suspect something else is going on — something that involves the very language of the theater.
When I was in graduate school at UCLA, there existed a bias in that school’s theater department against allegorical plays in general, and absurdist plays in particular. Preferred were well-constructed dramas and docudramas about recognizable human emotions, and issues plucked from newspapers, magazines and talk radio. I remember one influential new faculty member dismissing Edward Albee as a living anachronism. “Theater of the Absurd is dead,” he proclaimed. Within the year, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Before you could name a leftist Latin American nation whose duly elected government we weren’t trying to topple, we were being sold the Star Wars defense shield for protection from those pesky Russians, along with the argument that Pacific Coast redwoods were a source of air pollution and that only the logging industry could save us from the scourge of toxic trees. Not even Eugene Ionesco could have come up with a script like that.
The absurd and Orwellian reports coming from the White House have since grown even more obviously duplicitous, and the lack of counterargument from mass-media journalists is almost Soviet. And that’s the source of my hunch: Smart people who attend theater have learned to distrust the indignant “newspaper speak” in which topical, political plays converse. David Hare’s docudrama about the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, Stuff Happens, and Tim Robbins’ chronicle of grunts and journalists in that same war, Embedded, pinned their bid for “importance” on overfamiliar arguments. But the larger cause of these plays’ being so dated, even on their opening nights, wasn’t that we’d already been bludgeoned by such arguments in the press, but that we’d been so transparently lied to by that press. Political discourse itself grows wearying in the theater, no matter whose side it espouses, because the truth it lays claim to has been so tortured and abused.
The political dramas that draw crowds these days speak through allegories — like political plays in any society whose politics have become too dogmatic for rational exchanges. These plays’ abstractions are decoded through ancient Greek tragedies, or through a misunderstood green witch railing against the hypocrisy of power and conformity in Wicked. These are fairy tales that those professors at UCLA in 1980 would have dismissed as frivolous, when actually they’re loaded politically and metaphysically, without any character uttering a single policy statement.
Enter Scott Ritter, chief weapons inspector for the U.N. Security Committee from 1991 to 1998. Ritter was speaking at the Hayworth Theatre last Wednesday night on issues ranging from relations with Iraq and Iran to the absence of a viable antiwar movement in the United States. Ritter’s comments (and a second-half interview by journalist Jason Leopold) were part of what he described as a performance piece in development, inspired by his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement.
Ritter is a big man, physically and morally. Were he just an actor on a local stage rather than a player on the world stage, his performance would be just another slightly overacted one-man show. But Ritter redefines “suspension of disbelief” through the verifiable authority of his actions in life. He resigned on principle as weapons inspector to protest Iraq’s expulsion of his inspection team, and the failure of both the United States and the United Nations to press for enforcement of the U.N. resolution demanding that Iraq allow his U.N. inspectors to do their job. He had a wife and twin 5-year-old daughters when Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned him that if he resigned his post, the FBI would come after him. Ritter resigned anyway, and he felt Berger’s wrath through an arrest on false and unfiled charges by the FBI that he solicited dates with minors in an Internet sting operation.
Things then grew even more surreal. The Iraqis had kicked out the inspectors, they said, because the CIA was using weapons inspectors as spies in order to obtain intelligence — not to dismantle an illegal weapons program but to plan an invasion of their country. Slowly, with a deepening sense of Washington’s betrayal, Ritter realized that the Iraqi argument was well-founded.
Now, Ritter insists, the decision in Washington to bomb Iran has already been made. It’s too late to stop it, and on this matter it’s irrelevant who is elected in November.
“Both Clinton and Obama spoke of Iran as a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the CIA report that there is no evidence of a weapons program today. Iran has a nuclear-enrichment program that is authorized by the United Nations and signed off by Iran and the United States. Iran poses no threat to the United States. This is not a war of necessity. We’ll regret this decision. But the American people have been imprinted, as they were last time.”
To make his larger points, however, Ritter speaks in allegories. Example: Because we love firefighters doesn’t mean we love fire. No, we arrest arsonists. Because we love our soldiers doesn’t mean we have to love war. But America does love war, at least the idea of winning one. There is no viable antiwar movement in this country, Ritter says, and there has to be in order for anything to change — that, and the replacement of all members of Congress who voted for the war in Iraq. Disapproval of the war reflected in the polls is not a reflection of our antipathy to war, Ritter argues, but of our antipathy to losing a war. Were we not stranded in a quagmire, few would be questioning the rationale or the legality of the 2003 invasion.
So now we’ll bomb Iran to punish it for the 30-year natural-gas contract it struck with China, Ritter says.
“Our aggression is to dictate the terms of development of China and India through the Middle East. Global empire is what we need to be frightened of. All empires end, most empires badly. I don’t want this for my country.”
At Santa Monica’s City Garage, Charles Duncombe’s adaptation of Heiner Müller’s text The Mission, which Duncombe retitled The Mission (Accomplished), takes Müller’s saga of three French insurgents (Troy Dunn, Bo Roberts and David Mack) in 1798 who tried to instigate a slave rebellion in British-ruled Jamaica, then juxtaposes that poem about regime change gone awry with images of a ruminative George W. Bush (John Deschamps), Donald Rumsfeld (David E. Frank), Dick Cheney (Roberts) and an American soldier in Iraq (Maximiliano Molina). Punching such a hole in the wall of history is a technique Duncombe endeavored in a 2001 adaptation of a different Müller text, Frederick of Prussia: George W.’s Dream of Sleep. The two productions are City Garage’s bookends to the Bush II presidency and could, taken together, be called Empire Lost.
Duncombe sails on stormy artistic waters, imposing a topical American context onto Müller’s historical allegory. Every rule in the book says this should fail, like those productions of Julius Caesar in which the title character emerges wearing a U.S. flag pin and throws the word nucular into the prose. Yet Duncombe pulls it off, largely because his own writing style matches Müller’s careful and tender poeticism. The other lifeboat comes from director Frédérique Michel, who guides the American portraits away from caricature.
Aside from that, Michel’s production is as visually elegant and erotic as the text is intellectually rigorous. Wonderful performances come from by Ishani Das, Cynthia Mance and Amanda Mayen. How a portrait of such brutality can emerge so sensually is a trick that defies description. There’s a subtle hint in this production that matches Ritter’s sentiments: that the end of empire need not mean the end of the world; life’s richness and beauty can persevere, if we allow it.