September 8—October 22, 2006
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ed Baccari, Juni Buchér, Irene Casarez, Joan Chodorow, Justin Davanzo, Katherine Dollison, Duff Dugan, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Joel Nuñez, Nita Mickley, Mariko Oka, Julie Weidmann, Mark Woods
LA WEEKLY — GO!
THE BACCHAE
By Steven Mikulan
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Charles L. Mee’s take on Euripides’ Theban tragedy is an acquired taste. Written in the early 1990s, it’s a kind of postmodern celebration of Minoan matriarchy, with scoops of other people’s sexually charged writing thrown in, with authors ranging from Georges Bataille to Valerie Solanas. So it can be lyrically beautiful or sound like open-mike night at A Different Light. King Pentheus (Troy Dunn) is a staunch advocate of heterosexual rationalism and black suits. He loathes the carnal chaos represented by the god of wine, Dionysus (Justin Davanzo) and the Bacchae, his woman followers who live without men in the wilderness. Or does he? Halfway through this 75-minute production, we realize that Pentheus has quite a few secret sides to him, especially when he dresses in women’s garments to infiltrate the cliff-dwelling women’s camp. There’s not much in the way of linear “storytelling” here, and the show relies upon movement, music and declarative oration as much as dialogue. Director FrederÌque Michel displays a confident scenarist’s eye in her stage compositions, and her production shimmers with a languid beauty. She’s ably assisted by production designer Charles A. Duncombe, whose weathered shoreline set, complete with beached boat, gives a sense of shipwrecked ambition, and whose velvety lighting bathes the ensemble, many of whom appear nude or seminude. Josephine Poinsot’s witty costuming swings from modern to timelessly diaphanous.
Backstage West — PICK!
Three By Mee: Part 2, The Bacchae
September 14, 2006
By Hoyt Hilsman Charles
Mee’s reinvention of Euripides’ cosmic battle of nature and civilization, of gods and man, is enacted with a stinging contemporary edge in FrederÌque Michel’s production at City Garage. Mee’s Pentheus (Troy Dunn) is a modern-day neoliberal, an apologist for the fragile veneer of civilization that binds us into a moral and cultural society but also pits us against one another in violent conflict. When the Bacchae — women under the metaphorical spell of Dionysus (Justin Davanzo) — reject Pentheus’ bargain and abandon “civilization” to live in a state of bacchanalian nature on the cliffs above the sea, Pentheus sets out to conquer them. All this is against the advice of the elder statesmen, Tiresias (Ed Baccari) and Kadmos (Bo Roberts), who are inclined to be more forgiving of the women’s return to a natural state of existence. When Pentheus is forced into a Faustian pact to disguise himself as a woman and then is killed by his own mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), the tragedy of all human endeavors in the name of progress is writ large.
Euripides and Mee, as his successor playwright, do not shy from the largest, most gripping and disturbing of themes. Here is a fifth-century Greek playwright, in league with the modernist Mee, rejecting all human pretenses to decency and morality, casting us back into a state of nature that is animalistic, brutish, and tragic. The ultimate destination of civilization, say Euripides and Mee, is its destruction by the hand of coarse Nature, here represented by Dionysus — certainly a dark message for a segment of society that is currently dedicated to saving civilization from the threats of terror, global warming, and nuclear annihilation.
Michel’s direction is right on target for this piece, illuminating Mee’s evocative text with a beautiful stillness of imagery and performance. Dunn, in a strong portrayal, is alternately convincing and repulsive as the voice of civilization, arguing in a vacuum for a cause that already seems doomed. Davanzo is darkly seductive as Dionysus, luring us into the pleasures of the natural world, while toying with our frailties as mere mortals. The rest of the ensemble is solid, supporting the disturbing and provocative tone of the piece. The marvelous set by Charles Duncombe adds to the cosmic subtext.
Los Angeles Times — RECOMMENDED!
A Greek King at Odds With a God
September 15, 2006
By F. Kathleen Foley
As fascinating as it is flawed, Charles L. Mee’s adaptation of “The Bacchae,” the second offering in City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season, updates Euripides’ tragic tale about a Theban king whose stringent propriety puts him at odds with the god Dionysus. Thanks to FrederÌque Michel’s insightful staging, the play retains its requisite sense of mystery and menace. But the intellectual sweep of Mee’s hyper-poetical text is often interrupted by surreally puerile chatter that makes us feel as if we are trapped on a phone-sex line in limbo.
Michel’s languorous staging is a departure from her typically metronomic pacing but is fitting for these bare-breasted bacchantes, whose wild carousing has badly rattled Pentheus (impressively measured Troy Dunn), the kingdom’s repressed ruler. In Charles Duncombe’s superb production design, the action opens on a drifting vessel filled with drowsing women resting between their revels. Live music punctuates the proceedings, while shrieking gulls, creaking timbers and lowering light eerily presage the disaster.
Michel effectively plays up the homoerotic frisson between Pentheus and Dionysus (Justin Davanzo), a stranger whom Pentheus does not recognize as a wandering god. Pentheus is intent upon returning the errant females, including his mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), to hearth and home. Capricious Dionysus’ main interest is pulling the wings off these human flies and watching them wriggle.
Mee brilliantly illustrates the cataclysmic imbalance that results when a male-dominated society marginalizes its women and, conversely, the tragedy that can follow when women become warlike aggressors. But Mee’s leering concupiscence robs the tragedy of much of its sacramental magic. And the fact that Agave’s bloody deed is murder – even though she does not recognize the victim as her own son – is simply confusing, especially considering her subsequent protestations that she has killed a wild animal instead of a person.
KCRW
Greek to Mee & Classic Getty
September 21, 2006
[Listen to the show] This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk.
It’s always been a great irony that Santa Monica’s most avant-garde, European-style theater is next door to a Hooters restaurant. This juxtaposition reaches even more ridiculous heights this month as City Garage stages The Bacchae, Charles Mee’s radical reworking of the tragedy by Euripides which tells of lusty females who devote their lives to the god of sexuality.
Not knowing the prices at Hooters, I can’t say what $20 gets you there; but I suspect that unless guys are really there for the spicy wings, they’d be getting a much better deal next door, where a ticket to this Bacchae delivers much more bust for your buck.
Frederique Michel’s fleshy production is the type of show that would have been shut down by the authorities 40 years ago, which again adds to the irony since her theater is situated in an old police garage. This collision of tastes and sensibilities is a perfect backdrop for Charles Mee’s work. Mee’s Bacchae is almost Dadaist theater, as he assembles a rough outline of the story, using fragments of Euripides and roughly 12 other texts.
Given the play’s subject matter–women who leave the city to form their own society–many of these texts are feminist manifestos. But just as Mee is no slave to Euripides, Ms. Michel is no slave to Mee. The opening stage directions call for Tiresias and Kadmos to appear in Brooks Brothers suits, whereas as Michel has them attired in shorts, red polo shirts and loud argyle socks–this as a bevy of naked bacchanalians writhe around on the other side of the stage. In this way, Michel is a perfect match for the playwright’s work, because rather than simply amplify Mee’s remix of the Bacchae, she remixes it again in her own way. My one quibble with the production is that much of the music chosen was not as daring as the visuals–though I suppose the topless violinist might disagree.
Frederique Michel and Charles Mee’s postmodern take on Euripides stands in sharp contrast to the more traditional view of ancient Greece’s last, great tragedian showing at the Getty Villa. The Villa’s recent renovation includes a new outdoor performance space built in the style of a classic Athenian amphitheater.
The Getty’s inaugural production showcases Euripides’ earlier, less controversial play, Hippolytos. This tragedy about the Phaedra myth was performed in a new translation by Anne Carson, which is notable for its sprinkling of modern American vernacular–expressions like “cut the chitchat” and “work with me”–into the dialogue. The staging was entrusted to Stephen Sachs, an artistic director at the Fountain Theatre. As in his excellent productions of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances and Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, Sachs again contributes clean, clear direction that gets out of the way. There’s no Iraq war posturing, no Brechtian fussing about. True, some of the soldiers’ costumes look like Navajo kilts, but for the most part everyone is dressed in good old-fashioned togas.
The result is a tasteful evening, that elegantly showcases the new venue and its possibilities; but this Hippolytos feels a little too much like an artifact to be viewed behind glass. A 2,400 year-old play can’t simply be cleaned up and presented in attractive lighting. The director’s hands-off approach is noble, but if the spotlight is to be on acting in the future at the Getty, the museum will have to start a program that teaches authentic Greek performance technique, much like the Globe Theatre’s Mark Rylance did with Elizabethan-style productions. Without this, the Getty will have to turn to directors like Michel who will reinterpret classics by stressing the fashions of today. Interestingly, one aspect of Hippolytos did come alive in the Malibu night air–the music composed by David O. His score blended a cappella singing and vocal percussion. As performed by the small chorus, the music created an evocative mood that managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.
Hippolytos runs through this weekend at The Getty Villa’s Fleischman Theater, The Bacchae continues through October 22 at City Garage in Santa Monica.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
LA Weekly – Theatre Feature
Rage Against the Sex Machine: Why Greek tragedy is no toga party
By STEVEN MIKULAN
September 27, 2006
A flute and violin moan somberly as bodies slowly stir in the hull of a beached rowboat; strained light drizzles upon the naked flesh of women and their leader, Dionysus. So begins director Frédérique Michel’s 75-minute City Garage production of Charles L. Mee’s The Bacchae, an elegant interpretation that shimmers with languid beauty but whose telling sometimes sinks under the playwright’s dense blocks of speech. Mee’s 1993 reinterpretation of the Greek tragedy includes quotes, he says in the play’s introduction, from ‘Euripides, Georges Bataille… “insane” texts from the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, Joan Nestle’s Femme-Butch texts’ . . . So the evening can be lyrically haunting or sound like open-mike night at A Different Light.
The story is not really about the Bacchae, the wild women inflamed by retsina and lust. Nor is it about their idol, Dionysus (Justin Davanzo), god of wine and fertility, the happy-hour god who was the last of the Greek deities to take up residence on Mount Olympus. Instead, it concerns the king of Thebes, Pentheus (Troy Dunn), Dionysus’ implacable foe and a mortal who embodies our own personal conflicts between eros and civilization. Here, Pentheus appears to be a staunch advocate of heterosexual rationalism and black suits. He and his bodyguard-like aids (David E. Frank and Joel Nuñez) are scandalized to find his grandfather Kadmos (Bo Roberts) and the blind old seer Tiresias (Ed Baccari) lounging on the beach attired in the red colors associated with Dionysus’ followers.
The king prefers order and the grace of symmetry to the carnal chaos represented by Dionysus. Or does he? During some puritanical declarations, Pentheus admits to many forbidden desires and appears torn between an allegiance to art and beauty and the hankering for a goatier life of disheveled sensuality.
Toward play’s end, Dionysus persuades Pentheus, before he wages war on the Bacchae, to disguise himself as a woman and infiltrate the camp of these cliff-dwelling females. After being ceremonially crowned with a wig and swathed in black fabric (‘because it is the color of forbidden love between men,’ says Dionysus, helpfully quoting German sociologist Klaus Theweleit), the king hovers at the edge of the women’s base and gets an earful from the Bacchae.
‘There are times,’ says Tattooed Woman (Nita Mickley), ‘when you can put matchsticks or little wooden objects into your vaginal piercings, and then, after a while . . . just have anal intercourse if you want to use a dildo.’
Exactly, Pentheus must be thinking just before he is discovered and unmasked, whereupon his mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), kills him with her bare hands – not because of his transvestism but because, under the spell of wine, the women mistook him for a wild animal.
The war between Apollonian ideals and Bacchantic debauchery runs in and out of vogue in art and literature. The 1960s were definitely Dionysus’ last heyday, a kind of Topanga Age (or was it Spahn Ranch Republic?) to which people fled from what they saw as the tyranny of logic and the sickness of ideas. Still, after watching the horror on Chodorow’s face when she realizes what she has done, one cannot imagine a worse hangover than that suffered by her and the Bacchae after the wine’s spell has worn off.
Director Michel’s two leads establish a suitably tense chemistry, with Dunn’s Pentheus being a one-man civil war of desires who’s ripe for the seductive suggestions of Davanzo’s deus sex machina. From her dolorous choreography of the Bacchae (whose other members include Juni Buchér, Irene Casarez, Katherine Dollison, Mariko Oka and Julie Weidmann) to the precision of her cast’s deliveries, Michel exercises a laudable restraint with Mee’s script. Production designer Charles A. Duncombe’s weathered-shoreline set and velvety lighting plot lend a subliminal unease to the proceedings, while Josephine Poinsot’s witty costumes swing from the modern to timelessly diaphanous.
Agamemnon
June 9—July 23, 2006
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ed Baccari, Justin Davanzo, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Maximiliano Molina, Bo Roberts, Ben Shields, Marie-Françoise Theodore, Ilana Turner
LA WEEKLY — PICK OF THE WEEK
Wednesday, June 15-21, 2006
Charles L. Mee’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy (the first in this theater’s season, called ‘Three by Mee’) concentrates, like Homer’s The Odyssey, on the impulses behind cruelty and war. This is the story of the eponymous general (Troy Dunn) upon his return from a 10-year military campaign to his wife, Clytemnestra (Marie-Françoise Theodore), who seethes that her husband sacrificed their daughter to the gods for favorable sea winds.
Frédérique Michel stages the play as a choreographed recitation, with a Greek chorus of what appear to be decapitated heads, one of which is a figurehead bust, bolted to the stem of a boat. Michel juxtaposes the violence of the words with, for her, an uncharacteristically gentle staging – as sensuous as it is disciplined in movement and tone, so that the barbaric epic unfolds with a blend of eroticism, religiosity and moments of ironic humor.
This is one of the most rarefied and beautiful productions around, aided by shifting, projected images of ancient stone in Charles A. Duncombe’s production design, and recordings of Arvo Pärt’s haunting choral backdrops.
LA TIMES — RECOMMENDED
June 16, 2006
(capsule) Frédérique Michel’s keenly syncopated staging and Charles A. Duncombe’s striking production design highlight Charles L. Mee’s sanguinary reconsideration of the Agamemnon legend — the first in an ambitious season of three Greek tragedies by Mee. Vaultingly poetic in tone, Mee’s passionately antiwar drama is timely and resonant, despite an occasional lapse into gratuitous overstatement. (F. Kathleen Foley)
(full review) Agamemnon’s’ Antiwar Polemic
Charles L. Mee is a generous playwright. Mee urges readers of his plays, many of which are posted on his website, to freely borrow from his work, as he has freely borrowed from the ancient Greek dramas that have so richly inspired him.
“Agamemnon” – the first offering in City Garage’s ambitious season of three radically considered Greek classics by Mee – is a generous play, vaultingly poetic and rich, as was “Big Love,” Mee’s surprisingly humorous tale of forced marriage and mass murder based on Aeschylus’ “The Danaides.” Of course, “Agamemnon” treats the legend of Agamemnon’s homecoming after the Trojan War, and his subsequent murder by his vengeful wife, Clytemnestra. Far grimmer in tone, for obvious reasons, “Agamemnon” poses the salient question: Is it ever possible to overstate the horrors of war?
A bucket of bloody eyeballs later, we conclude that it is. Granted, Homer didn’t cut corners on sanguinary description in “The Iliad.” But Mee’s antiwar polemic, however timely and resonant, occasionally lapses into gratuitous overstatement.
That seems a quibble, in light of Mee’s passion and craft, but it does shatter our empathy at intervals. Not so Frédérique Michel’s razor-sharp staging, which is as effectively spare as a Zen sand garden, inspiring our contemplation, if not our serenity. A crack cast fulfills Michel’s vision without a motion to spare. Troy Dunn is a likely Agamemnon, the conquering hero who has angered the gods, while Clytemnestra (Marie-Françoise Theodore) is as scary as she is seductive.
Charles A. Duncombe’s inspired production design features a chorus of “disembodied” human heads – actually actors whose bodies are cunningly concealed by the set. It’s an uncanny effect echoing recent beheadings in the Middle East, a bitter reminder of how little mankind has changed over the course of the centuries. (F. Kathleen Foley)
KCRW’s THEATRE TALK
June 29, 2006
In Medias Res
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk.
It’s a gimmick as old as Homer: starting in the middle of a story. The City Garage in Santa Monica is staging two works from Charles Mee‘s quartet of plays titled “Imperial Dreams“–but they’re starting with Part III and then coming back to Part I later this year. FrÈdÈrique Michel‘s company is known for doing things differently, but mounting Mee’s metrology in medias res isn’t avant-garde posturing–it’s downright old-fashioned… and appropriate, as Homer himself is one of the characters in Mee’s Agamemnon.
The program notes read: “Mee tears apart and reconstructs the classic tragedy by Aeschylus.” Now, this is avant-garde posturing. Mee may reconstruct classic works, but he doesn’t tear them apart. His method isn’t violent, it’s celebratory and playful. His magnanimous style breathes life into plays from the past, using today’s language and music to retell these familiar stories.
As staged by Michel and her designer Charles A. Duncombe, Mee’s Agamemnon is a solemn affair. One that’s bathed in blue light, suggesting lonely nights spent staring out at the Mediterranean Sea. The play opens with a nude Clytemnestra reclining in an empty tub. Without clothes, it’s instantly clear that Michel’s vision of Clytemnestra is the opposite of Mee’s, whose stage directions describe her as “pale white, as the moon.”
Casting the dark, voluptuous Marie-Françoise Theodore is more than just a gimmick however, as the actress strongly conveys Clytemnestra’s grief and bitterness. Likewise, the Greek chorus of severed heads might seem like a cheap effect when described, but in the context of Michel’s staging it’s underplayed and sustains a quiet power throughout the 70-minute performance.
The director can’t help drawing parallels between the Trojan War and the current war in Iraq, but whatever one’s opinions about either campaign, Frédérique Michel’s realization of Charles Mee’s play is as poetic as it is political. Her Agamemnon is haunting, and often beautiful. It’s also a rare local example of serious, European-style director’s theater. The first installment of City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season suggests that Agamemnon is the start–or middle–or something big. Charles Mee’s Agamemnon runs through August 6 at City Garage in Santa Monica.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
The Battle: ABC
Novemer 11, 2005—January 29, 2006
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Justin Davanzo, David E. Frank, Sharon Gardner, Bo Roberts, Paul M. Rubenstein
LA Weekly — Pick of the Week
by Steven Leigh Morris
November 17-23, 2005
What a pleasure to see a theater company — once defined by its presentations of somewhat cryptic material staged with the stomping heavy-handedness of some provincial German cabaret — evolve through the decades. This is perhaps the most tender production by City Garage to date, reflections by the late German scribe Heiner Müller subtitled Heiner Müller on Times of War (translation by Marc von Henning).
Four actors playing multiple roles, and sharing the narration, depict scenes from cities, German and Japanese, broken by war. A boy remembers his father taken away in the night, and later visits him in prison, and, decades later, in an old-age home. A gentle wave goodbye through a suspended window frame is about as devastating an image of loss and separation as one is likely to find. Though there is the pounding of feet — a trademark of director Frederique Michel — this time around, Michel seems as much influenced by the gentle formality of Japanese Noh theater.
Charles A. Duncombe’s production design is perfect in its simplicity — a stage floor of maple slabs, a bed to the side, and a screen containing judiciously employed documentary images from the war-torn cities being described. David E. Frank, Bo Roberts and Paul M. Rubenstein effortlessly carry the sometimes arch style, but Sharon Gardner is particularly fine, with her pained, pale face, her throaty voice and unrelenting poise.
Backstage West — CRITIC’S PICK
November 17-23, 2005
by Paul Birchall
Director Frederíque Michel’s powerful staging of this drama by the late German playwright Heiner Müller is of a thematic piece with some of the City Garage company’s most notable past productions of plays by Müller, who is considered by some to be the most important German playwright since Brecht. The plays deal with cruelty and the reduction of humanity to the level of pure bestiality. Yet what makes The Battle even more striking is its comparative accessibility.
That’s not to say this is an evening of easy theatre. It isn’t, and the show crackles with ambiguous images and often perplexing exchanges that are the standard leitmotif of Müller’s and Michel’s artistic styles. However, because so much of the drama consists of Müller’s autobiography, or at least what he presents as such, the piece has a personal quality that makes it unusually engaging. At the same time, this quality makes the acts of onstage cruelty all the more horrifying.
A narrator (Paul Rubenstein), whom we can only assume is intended to represent Müller, opens by recounting a horrifying memory of childhood in Nazi Germany, watching as his father (Bo Roberts) is hauled off as an enemy of the state. From here, the work fragments into a visual representation of the chaos of postwar Germany.
After Hitler’s suicide and the defeat of Germany, a miserable man (David E. Frank) shoots his screaming wife (Sharon Gardner) and daughter (Justin Davanzo) but is unable to kill himself. Later four soldiers, left alone in a wintry wilderness, draw straws to decide who of them will be killed and eaten by the others. Then another defeated man is stalked by a shadowy figure, whom he beats and ultimately kills, simply because the guy is always there.
Müller’s play is less about war than it is about the chaos and malice that follows it. And the work also tries to figure out what it was in the German psyche during the 20th century that gave rise to so much wickedness, despotism, and hatred. Michel’s staging offers sharply focused tension and intensity, which is cut with a droll irony—and the play seethes with an intellectual keenness that is rarely seen in LA. shows. The ensemble work is tight. Particularly notable turns are offered by Gardner, playing a haunted, debased German girl—turned-prostitute, and by Frank as the deadpan, deeply embittered narrator.
Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream
June 10—August 28, 2005
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Juni Buchér, Justin Davanzo, David E. Frank, Sophia Marzocchi, Stephen Pocock, Christie D’Amore
Los Angeles Times
Alternate visions of ‘Don Quixote’
June 17, 2005
by David C. Nichols
At City Garage, Kathy Acker’s scabrous post-feminist crib from Cervantes gets a searing realization.
“Being dead, Don Quixote could no longer speak. Being born into and part of a male world, she had no speech of her own. All she could do was read male texts, which weren’t hers.”
That epigraph cements the point of “Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream” at City Garage. It cannot convey the emblematic perversity with which director-adaptor Frederique Michel, production designer Charles A. Duncombe and an amazing cast realize the 1986 novel by Kathy Acker.
The late Acker’s scabrous post-feminist crib from Cervantes is a profanity-drenched phylum unto itself. Multiple influences, William S. Burroughs being only the most obvious, orbit about “Don Quxote’s” title abortion-seeker (Sophia Marzocchi). Acker pulls this bipolar surrogate into a picaresque, politically questioning head trip, analogous to the paintings of Sherrie Levine.
Under Michel’s assured direction, the players show seamless commitment. Marzocchi is a lithe, enigmatic discovery with the arcane beauty of a Roman deity. The riveting Justin Davanzo casually enters his Hobbesian debate with David E. Frank’s tickling Nixon wearing only periwig and boots. Stephen Pocock becomes an imposing Angel of Death by simply standing before the wings adorning one of the set’s trees. Juni Buchér and Christie D’Amore inhabit their pansexual archetypes with gusto, and Maureen Byrnes deftly passes off the polymorphous narrative viewpoint.
Duncombe’s evocative décor suggests Levine having at Joseph Cornell’s id, while Josephine Poinsot’s costumes trace Jean Paul Gaultier details onto Jean Cocteau doodles. True, Michel’s adaptation is faithful to a fault. Acker’s cascading polemic and graphic poetry risks static repetition in the flesh. Yet, though “Don Quixote” needs either further distillation or an intermission, audiences up for provocative theater of ideas will find its adults-only dreamscape hypnotic.
LA Weekly
June 17-23, 2005
by Steven Leigh Morris
Director Frederique Michel’s adaptation of Kathy Acker’s novel is largely faithful to the spirit of the late post-punk novelist’s writing — a sexually obsessed, fetishistic stroll, barefoot, along a road strewn with shattered glass. Because Michel’s cast is so fresh-scrubbed attractive, Acker’s grunge aesthetic gets a facelift. What Acker borrowed from the tones of Miles Davis and the images of William Burroughs, Michel distills into something more like an S&M tango, comparatively formal, snappy and manicured — all dressed up and then, literally, stripped bare.
The play is a meaning-of-life examination of female identity, literature, sexuality and the connivances of oppression (Thomas Hobbes [Justin Davanzo] and Richard Nixon [David E. Frank] both put in cameos) through the dream-journey of a female Don Quixote (Sophia Marzocchi, a strong presence who really needs more range) during her abortion. She partners with a self-flagellating saint (Davanzo), who turns into a dog, and she meets the Angel of Death (Stephen Pocock), who hangs around for the play’s final quarter. The characters spout Acker’s oblique riffs with a higher regard for sound and inference than for structure or reason.
Michel’s physically crisp staging matches Charles Duncombe’s production design that includes projected motifs from Raphael to Paul Klee, and a highly symbolic set. The production, like Acker’s novel, is searching, groping for an alternative language in a world defined by abuse and brutality.
The Lesson
October 22, 2004—January 20, 2005
LA Times — Recommended!
Cast: Justin Davanzo, David Frank, Liz Pocock
The Lesson (La Leçon) It’s hardly news that Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 classic one-act comedy about an insane professor tutoring a brick-brained student helped usher in the Theater of the Absurd. Though an obsequious maid warns the professor not to get too carried away by frustration, the professor’s growing exasperation leads to his increasingly loopy teachings. The student simply cannot grasp the most remedial aspects of mathematics or philology and suffers growing head pains in direct proportion to the rising lunacy of the professor’s lectures, until their mutual rage ascends to a lethally deranged pitch. So much for the virtues of reason.
Director Frederique Michel flips the genders of each character so that the Professor (Liz Pocock) is a lisping woman, dominating and erotically teasing an arrogant, lunk-headed male (Justin Davanzo). This puts to bed the mythologies of political correctness and male authority under a single blanket. When David E. Frank’s bow-tied Butler opens the play striding across the stage with one of Monty Python’s funny walks, we’re instantly in an arch cartoon, and director Michel never lets the rigidly choreographed Warner Bros. style slip for a moment. You fear, near the start, that the physical intensity of Pocock bursting-at-the-seams has nowhere to go, yet her animation keeps growing until, by play’s end, she’s a whiplashed, quivering ball of sweat, still hitting every mark and sibilant “S” on cue. Davanzo and Frank are also fine.
When the homicidal professor dons a Republican National Committee armband, you might think Michel’s joking about No Child Left Behind, or you might just be pissed off by the intrusive topicality within Ionesco’s allegory. Charles A. Duncombe’s elegant, simple production design places the focus on the actors, right where it belongs.
Los Angeles Times
An Unorthodox ‘Lesson’ Plan
By Philip Brandes
Special to The Times
Leave it to City Garage, Santa Monica’s bastion of European avant-garde theater, to put a refreshingly unorthodox spin on Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic “The Lesson.”
Written in 1951, this darkly comic one-act depicts a nonsensical and increasingly menacing tutorial between a deranged professor and an obtuse pupil — an encounter laced with unsparing critiques of learning, authority and sexual politics.
With undiminished savagery, director Frederique Michel’s revival slyly turns Ionesco’s subtext of patriarchal domination on its head by switching the genders of the Professor (Liz Pocock) and her student (Justin Davanzo).
This risky tampering pays off in spades. Pocock’s stodgy, bespectacled Professor is a hilarious, pitch-perfect portrait of Freudian repression, complete with nervous tics, sputtering lisp and a horror of physical proximity to her overeager pupil. Far from neutralizing sex roles, the gender reversal highlights them in unexpected ways, as the initially timid, deferential Professor becomes aggressively dominant in the face of the pupil’s failure to live up to her impossible standards.
Her deteriorating grip on propriety and reality is the play’s centerpiece, which Pocock sustains with subtle mannerisms and equally accomplished broad physical slapstick in Michel’s demanding, highly choreographed movements. Charles A. Duncombe’s sparse, elegant production design contributes atmosphere without undue intrusion.
In pursuing his doctorate in “total knowledge,” Davanzo’s student gamely submits to the escalating abuse, his naive exuberance giving way to bewildered victimization in the face of feminist impulses run grotesquely amok.
Changing the Professor’s servant (David Frank) from maid to butler gives additional heft to his smarmy commentary, particularly in a finale seething with psychosexual overtones.
Backstage West – Critic’s Choice!
“La Leçon/The Lesson”
Reviewed By Paul Birchall
In Frederique Michel’s delightful production of Eugene Ionesco’s darkly absurdist comedy, a young Student (Justin Davanzo) arrives at a Paris home, excited for his first lesson with his new tutor: a tightly wound Professor (Liz Pocock). At first the Professor is diffident and unsure of himself, and the Student seems confident and optimistic. However, as the lesson continues, the balance of power shifts. The Student discovers he doesn’t know any of the answers, and an escalating toothache prevents him from concentrating on the Professor’s lecture. The Professor becomes increasingly unhinged, and he concludes his class by presenting his student with a long, hard, brutal gift that is anything but a diploma.
In most productions of Ionesco’s play, the Student is portrayed by a cheerful young female, while the role of the increasingly oppressive Professor is played by a man.
However, in her subtle staging, Michel flips the genders, adding an intriguing and indefinably disturbing sexual charge to the piece. The interactions have the feel of a creepy role-playing game, the characters playing out their parts in costumes that give them their personalities.
Michel’s direction, with blocking that’s choreographed to the slightest gesture and nuanced glance, boasts unusually focused comic timing. That said, a jarring, clumsy note is sounded the show’s final coda, in which the Professor dons an armband showing the emblem of the Republican Party. In most other productions, the armband is a Nazi swastika–the change is a thematic conceit that represents an awkward parallel with the modern day. In any case, Davanzo and Pocock play off each other hilariously in this otherwise cracklingly smart and intellectually bracing production. If you’ve never seen any Ionesco, this serves as a great introduction.
Patriot Act
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Tom Killam, Bo Roberts, Paul M. Rubenstein, Kathryn Sheer
LA Weekly — RECOMMENDED
July 15, 2004
by Steven Mikulan
When Dominic Behan wrote his bitter Irish anthem, “The Patriot Game,” he didn’t envision an actual competition to see which players are the most patriotic. That kind of contest would be foreign to anyone who lives in a country where the national flag usually flies only above post offices and at football games — most countries in the world, that is. Such a game, however, might not seem out of place here, in America, where the Stars and Stripes fly, row upon row, at gas stations, used-car lots and swap meets. Playwright Charles A. Duncombe knows this; he mixes reality-TV shows with exhibitionist patriotism and adds a helping of post-9/11 paranoia to create a harrowing night of theater.
Patriot Act: A Reality Show begins in darkness with jingoistic country & western songs pumped into Santa Monica’s City Garage theater, followed by the late Ray Charles’ soulful rendition of “America the Beautiful” and the “Bush” version of “The United States of Whatever,” while a game-show contestant (Bo Roberts) takes a seat within the wooden frame of some kind of isolation booth. He’s here as part of a winnowing process for American Patriot — a Fox TV spinoff of American Idol in which TV viewers choose who will win a million dollars for being the show’s most patriotic person. Elsewhere on Duncombe’s spare set, three interviewers (Kathryn Sheer, Paul M. Rubenstein and Tom Killam), whom the man cannot see but only hears through speakers, put him at ease before they begin a screening session.
At first our player, sporting a flag T-shirt, is confident he has what it takes to make the show’s final cut. After all, he supports the president, the troops, the war, the camps, the laws — everything that has grown out of the ashes of the World Trade Center. Especially, though, the Patriot Act and its proscriptions on civil rights, although he does pause now and then when asked about the government’s right to pry into reading and Web-surfing habits. Those pauses, however, draw his inquisitors to take a closer look at their would-be millionaire, who, it turns out, is about to lose his job as a restaurant-supply salesman because of a corporate takeover of his company.
By degrees, as the man’s interviewers begin circling his booth like vultures, their conversational drift moves from affable softball questions to Socratic inquiry to a brutal interrogation in which the man continually trips up over the logic of his own answers. After 90 minutes, the sound booth has come to resemble a holding cell, and, sure enough, that’s where the man voluntarily remains, waiting to be taken into custody.
Patriot Act is a very simple piece of political theater but not a simplistic one. Like the would-be contestant, we don’t realize until it’s too late that each of the man’s answers to his interviewers’ questions has clicked a lock on his freedom. The frightening thing is that no matter what replies the man (or we) supplies, the judges are likely to interpret them as unreliable and persuade their prisoner that even if he were innocent of any suspected wrongdoing, it is in the country’s best interests that he go along with whatever the government declares as truth.
There are clearly echoes of the Room 101 chapter from George Orwell’s 1984, and just as Winston Smith’s avuncular interrogator assures him that they will meet in a place where there is no darkness, so do Duncombe’s interviewers claim that in our burgeoning surveillance state, there will come “a time when everything will be recorded.” Patriot Act is not at all a disposable piece of agitprop likely to fade with the legislation for which it is named. It is a peculiar examination of gullible America’s trust in authority that finds us fatally incurious about the matter. Ably directed by Frédérique Michel, the show has problems that stem from the stage architecture imposed by the story. Bo Roberts is confined to his booth, while the other actors must stand outside and talk to him, separated by invisible walls. Michel gives them some Pinteresque choreography (the bouncing of balls, clapping of hands, crossing of legs) that initially hints at menace but before long merely looks like an attempt to compensate for a static stage. Perhaps Duncombe’s characters can’t break the fourth wall dividing them from the audience, but they might do well at least to intrude into Roberts’ space or momentarily draw him into their dark corners — not unlike the government.
LA Weekly
July 8, 2004
by Steven Mikulan
Charles A. Duncombe’s satire begins as an audition for a game show in which contestants will compete to be voted the program’s “most patriotic,” and ends as a Grand Inquisitor scene for post-9/11 America. Although the nature of Duncombe’s setting locks his characters into fairly static poses, this is a smart show that moves beyond taking potshots at easy political targets, and director Frederique Michel always keeps the wordplay in focus.
The Empire Builders
March 19—April 25, 2004
LA Weekly — Pick of the Week!
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Jake Eberle, Katharina Lejona, Bo Roberts, Cristian YoungMiller
LA WEEKLY — Pick of the Week!
Political Toys in the Attic: The Empire Builders takes City Garage up a step
by Steven Leigh Morris
April 15, 2004
Santa Monica’s City Garage is the most politically charged theater in a city that traditionally believes that e-mail, not theater, is for messages. Sacred Fools and the Actors Gang in Hollywood tie for second. Though Sacred Fools is currently running Theresa Rebeck’s lame Clinton-era comedy, View of the Dome, a far braver choice was its pre-2000-election play, Ric Keller’s Dubya 2000 – a grotesque commedia parody of the Bush family that ended with a narrator begging the audience to vote and to keep George W. out of the White House. Dubya 2000 was largely dismissed by critics for being overt and rude, which of course was its driving purpose. It was also horrifyingly prophetic in its suggestion of catastrophes to come, arising from the Texas clan’s cloistered, Orwellian lunacy. The play ran for about a month and died. It was brilliant.
The following year, City Garage crashed the gates of propriety with a rage of similar intensity, staging Charles A. Duncombe’s original adaptation of a text by Heiner Müller, Frederick of Prussia: George W.’s Dream of Sleep. As the 18th-century Prussian ruler (having had inclinations to poetry knocked out of him by his sadistic father) disemboweled great swaths of Europe, our own president sat perched center stage, dozing through the history lesson. Shortly into the run, a trio of passenger airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and City Garage found itself with a patriotism problem. The producers shuttered the production within a week or two. Occasionally, theater changes the world. Unfortunately, in this case, it was the other way around.
In the intervening years, defiant critiques of American culture and foreign policy have emanated from the City Garage stage. But this time, a changing world – or at least accruing evidence of falsehoods, duplicities and cloistered, Orwellian lunacy on the political stage – has contributed to rising public disillusionment and anger that well serve City Garage’s greater purpose. Sometimes, when people are sufficiently furious, they really crave more than mere entertainment in their downtime. With its sardonic, belligerent satire, City Garage has become the Air America Radio of local theater. Furthermore, this year the troupe reconfigured its ensemble, which, in its latest production (Boris Vian’s 1958 farce, The Empire Builders), now executes resident director Frederique Michel’s rigorous cabaret stylizations almost without a hitch or a wobble – lapses that cursed former CG productions with an earnest quality. (If your play is trying to connect industrial pollution, pornography and violent intervention in foreign countries, the quality you most want to avoid is earnestness.) Here, the actors portray elastic cartoons so perfectly calibrated, their slapstick wrenches the gut.
A stairwell forms the centerpiece of Duncombe’s production design. A Father (Jake Eberle), Mother (Katharina Lejona), their daughter, Zenobia (Maia Brewton), and Maid (Maureen Byrnes) flee up that stairwell to a series of ever smaller apartments whenever they hear a horrifying noise that sounds like a heartbeat from some unknown source. Up and up they go, costumed in black and red, cheerfully celebrating their capacity for survival while blithely pummeling a bandaged scapegoat (Cristian YoungMiller), whom they label ‘danger’ and who appears in each abode, perennially wounded and groaning in misery.
Zenobia is the one character who acknowledges the nightmare – at least, she expresses it in exasperated shrieks while clutching her temples when a Neighbor (Bo Roberts) meets her for the fourth time as though they’ve never met. Waiting for Godot, anyone? One by one, the family members fall away from Father who, like Eugene Ionesco’s Berenger in Rhinoceros, wrestles with capitulation. Vian and Ionesco both wrote about feelings evoked from childhood memories of the Nazis.
They both also expanded that terror into a broader philosophy on the nature of existence, where death at the end of a firing squad is not so different from death at the end of old age, where the pointlessness of death suggests the pointlessness of life, where meaning is an arbitrary construct. And though the French were colonizing Algeria at the time, Ionesco’s and Vian’s were peacetime reflections.
We, however, are at war. That Michel douses the action with speeches on Homeland Security (sound design by Paul M. Rubenstein) funnels the interpretation to Bush’s war of terror, whereby perpetual fear engulfs the nation so that we’re goaded to clamber up the stairs. Perhaps in an election year and with our democracy at stake, Michel’s narrower take is more urgent than just narrower. After all, it’s not oblivion that lies at the top of Duncombe’s stairwell, it’s a Diebold voting machine.
BACKSTAGE WEST
March 31, 2004
Reviewed By Laura Weinert
It is irresistible and possibly worthwhile to take a politically inspired allegory about the ever-present fear of a mysterious, invisible enemy and weld connections to current issues: the purportedly ubiquitous terrorist threat, the dangerous state of panic and helplessness that results. Boris Vian’s 1959 play tells the story of a middle-class family pursued by an inexplicable noise that forces the family members to flee upward through their own home to progressively smaller quarters, leaving behind all the comforts they once enjoyed while maintaining a semblance of calm and denial. Their only release seems to come when they beat on a mysterious, dark-skinned, bandaged man who appears in the corner everywhere they go.
The program notes inform us that they play was based on Vian’s childhood experience of the Nazi occupation, and that it was also written at a time when French colonialism in African and Asian territories was coming to an end, a time when France was experiencing an increased influx of “dark-skinned immigrants.” Vian died before this play would be produced, debated, scrutinized for relevance and meaning. It seems important, however, to note that Vian’s friend and translator, Simon Watson-Taylor, has related this anecdote: When a friend of Vian suggested this play was a satire on French colonial policy, Vian replied, “Ha! A splendid idea! But I hope you’ll agree that doesn’t prevent an absolutely mythical myth from assuming any number of other meanings.”
Frederique Michel’s direction seems determined to contextualize the play as a kind of potential indictment of current American policy, with program notes that discuss the administration’s aggression, arrogance, and implicit use of fear to prevent scrutiny. We hear recorded voiceover speeches on “homeland security” between scenes. Yet not only do these elements encourage a more limited interpretation of the play than Vian might be comfortable with, they also seem to intrude upon what is most compelling about the production: the tight, terrifying, absurdist, French world that Michel and her cast so skillfully create.
Michel’s staging is often dance-like, each character possessing an odd assortment of physical ticks. A few moments of physical theatre are a pure delight to watch, particularly between Jake Eberle, as our desperately “prudent” father, and his sophisticated, aquiline wife, played by Katharina Lejona. Maia Brewton is well cast as their defiant daughter Zenobia, the only one in the play who admits and addresses the madness their lives have become. Maureen Byrnes is their quirky, amusingly repetitive maid Mug.
Charles A. Duncombe’s functional, mobile set evokes the oppressive, shrinking world of this play. And of course the production could not work without Paul M. Rubenstein’s carefully crafted sound design that creates a noise so haunting and horrific, yet so eerily unidentifiable.
LA WEEKLY – Pick of the Week!
March 25, 2004
by Steven Leigh Morris
French scribe Boris Vian’s brutal postwar comedy instantly brings Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to mind – the same style of absurdist, domestic farce later used by Christopher Durang, but here saturated in political allegory. Perpetually fleeing the roar of an enigmatic heartbeat, a couple and their daughter keep finding refuge upstairs in a series of ever-smaller apartments attached to the same stairwell. Like Ionesco’s villagers, they try to make the best of the growing menace, while blithely pulverizing a bandaged scapegoat figure (‘danger’) who’s present in each abode. Vian was alluding to the Nazi threat; 50 years later, his politics of terror have an entirely new resonance. Under Frederique Michel’s direction, the ensemble crackles with delirious wit so that the underlying horror is felt in the marrow.
OedipusText: Los Angeles
August 15— September 23, 2003
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maureen Byrnes, Simon Burzynski, Tina Fallon, David E. Frank, Eric Jung, Jennifer Piehl, Jason Piazza, Thomas Ramirez, Paul M. Rubenstein
August 22, 2003
by David C. Nichols
Symbolist tactics and City of Angels targets mutate throughout “OedipusText: Los Angeles” in Santa Monica. This adroit City Garage deconstruction imbues Sophocles’ ageless saga of the incestuous king of Thebes with modern elements ranging from self-help to trip-hop. It transpires, as usual with this company, in a self-contained abstract ethos. Author-designer Charles A. Duncombe draws Jocasta’s lines from Helene Cixous’ opera “The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body,” but his esoteric text is otherwise original and impressive. Fredereque Michel’s staging of this melange of neoclassical restraint, shock-radio sass and Freudian polemic attains droll kinetic cohesion, moving a unified ensemble around Duncombe’s screen-dominated minimalist set with invisible ease. Duncombe’s concentrated lighting, Paul M. Rubenstein’s wry videography and Teckla de Bistrovlnovska’s color-coded costumes are invaluable in locating the reference points. Simon Burzynksi’s intense hero is a leather-jacketed Tom Cruise Jr., while Maureen Byrnes’ Jocasta is a riveting column of white who recalls the late Irene Worth. Rubenstein’s sidesplitting DJ is scandalously effective, and David E. Frank is brilliant, whether playing a Nehru-dressed, rocker-voiced Tiresias or a shrieking Dr. Laura-esque harpy. Three red-capped gangbangers (Eric Jung, Jason Piazza and Thomas Ramirez) share chorus duties, alternating as isolated urbanites whose interactions with Tina Fallon’s brittle chat-room fraud and Jennifer Piehl’s unfettered online exhibitionist punctuate Oedipus’ downward spiral. However, their visceral maneuvers just miss pathos: The compressed ideology is intellectually arresting but emotionally bloodless. Even so, the group aesthetic is imposing, analogous to (though opposite from) Sons of Beckett’s current sendup “Oedipus the King,” which recommends “OedipusText” as a Greek reconsideration to be reckoned with.
August 21, 2003
by Steven Leigh Morris
Freud’s Oedipus complex is borrowed from Sophocles’ mystery; adaptor Charles A. Duncombe lobs the ball back into Sophocles’ court with an absorbing 90-minute shot propelled by modern psychology’s Papa. The plague upon Thebes is here sexual dysfunction in an L.A. of tomorrow: Internet and telephone romances that skirt the terrors of flesh-to-flesh contact; porno and erotic power games all perverted from a primal, forbidden love of mama. Unlike in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus’ mom, Jocasta (the fine Maureen Byrnes), knows what’s going on, and merely waits for Oedipus (Simon Burzynski) to figure it out. Blind prophet Tiresias (the excellent David E. Frank) morphs into a drag queen who imposes glib S&M fetishes on Oedipus. (It’s a delicate line between myth and cliché, and this production wobbles between the two.) Duncombe takes a gamble by diffusing the murder-mystery and relegating the play to a semipolitical recitative. A shock jock (Paul Rubenstein) — a passé device — serves as chorus leader for an analysis that’s more or less narrated by the entire ensemble. (It can be argued that Oedipus’ bewildered soul is actually disseminated among a quartet of characters who are looking for love in all the wrong places.) Rubenstein’s video collages (the hull of a ‘50s convertible stranded in South-Central, a woman’s breast, an upper thigh) play in stark counterpoint to the argument on the boards that modern alienation — exacerbated by consumerism and high tech — has roots in antiquity. Frederíque Michel’s arch staging elegantly complements Duncombe’s rhetorical text (with segments by Helene Cixous). When the actors get it, the event soars, but then callow performances diminish its altitude. Still, the underlying idea, however blemished, is a provocative provocation, and attention seldom wanes.
The Sweet Madness
June 6 – July 20, 2003
by Simone de Beauvoir
Adapted for the stage and Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Cynthia Mance, Szilvi Naray-Davey, Jennifer Piehl, Liz Pocock, Cheryl Scaccio
BACKSTAGE WEST — CRITIC’S PICK!
July 02, 2003
Reviewed By Paul Birchall Director
Frederique Michel’s elegantly presented adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s novella meshes poetry, surreal onstage imagery, and dream-like movement to create a complicated but nuanced portrait of a borderline delusional soul. Inhabiting the complex and occasionally oblique play’s core is Murielle, a petulant and embittered woman who has isolated herself through her own irresponsibility and selfishness. Fortunately for her, though, Murielle happens to be played by four women, who, dressed like the backup singers from the old 1980s “Addicted to Love” music video, writhe about the stage, voicing her thoughts and feelings. One good thing about talking to yourself: At least you’re talking to someone who listens. Michel’s dynamic and visually enthralling staging opens with the arresting sight of the body of the woman’s dead daughter lying naked onstage, while around her the various fragments of Murielle’s mind shriek like harpies, slapping the ground with their shoes. This image sets a compelling mood of near-inchoate anger that simmers throughout the entire show. Before long, the reasons for Murielle’s wrath become evident: She has been dumped by her husband, who has taken their son away. To make matters worse, her daughter has recently committed suicide–the result of Murielle’s interference with her love for another woman. Yet even as Murielle wheedlingly justifies herself, we start to recognize the truth of her own self-deception. And, as we look between the lines of what the character says, we’re given the impression of what it’s like to be Medea–from the inside out. Splitting Murielle into four different figures (played by Cynthia Mance, Szlivi Naray-Davey, Elizabeth Pocock, and Cheryl Scaccio) is a fascinating conceit that cleverly and engrossingly suggests the fragmented and disconnected anger that roils within the character. And while none of the four performers is realized as an individual, they work together as one emotional unit, providing a haunting and strangely touching portrait of the woman they’re portraying. In the end, Michel’s taut, eerie production crafts the sense of a woman who is glimpsed through increasingly tragic facets.
LA TIMES — RECOMMENDED!
A BOLD DANCE OF RAGE AND MEMORY
June 13, 2003
by F. Kathleen Foley
“At City Garage, de Beauvoir’s feminist polemic is alloyed with bracing humor. And more.”
“The Sweet Madness” (La Folie Douce) at City Garage has been adapted from “The Monologue,” the middle novella in Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist triptych, “The Woman Destroyed.” The piece is essentially a harrowing rant delivered by Murielle, a deeply narcissistic woman wracked with righteous anger over the dissolution of her latest marriage, and lingering guilt over the suicide of her young daughter.
Murielle’s monologue lends itself nicely to dramatization and has been done before as a one-woman play. No such obvious measures for innovative director-adapter FrederÌque Michel, the longtime artistic director of City Garage. Here, Murielle is played by four actresses — Cynthia Mance, Szilvi Naray-Davey, Elizabeth Pocock and Cheryl Scaccio.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and these Murielles, wearing identical black cocktail dresses, are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Alone, desperate, filled with rage, they recount past wrongs, real and imagined. Through it all, the lurking shade of Murielle’s dead daughter (Jennifer Piehl) looks on in sad and silent recrimination.
It’s an audacious and carefully syncopated staging. Framed against the backdrop of Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s effectively stark set, the women move in precise unison — dancing in mincing steps, ticking their heads from side to side, hammering their high-heeled shoes in percussive rage. Acid memories overlap in staccato bursts. With few missteps, the actresses go through their rounds with the precision of clockwork Rockettes.
Granted, De Beauvoir’s work is partly a feminist polemic, but Michel brings a bracing humor to the fore, and Murielle — vain, self-deluded, unsympathetic yet pitiable — is so richly complex that she is seldom reduced to mere political exponent.
Katzelmacher (Cat Screwer)
March 21 — May 11, 2003
LA WEEKLY – PICK OF THE WEEK!
by Rainer Fassbinder
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Laurence Coven, Szilvi Naray-Davey, David E. Frank, Mathew Gifford, Katharina Lejona, Steve Najarro, Bo Roberts, Kathryn Sheer
LA WEEKLY — PICK OF THE WEEK
March 26, 2003
by Steven Leigh Morris
KATZELMACHER is the German slang for “cat screwer,” which actually refers to somebody with an unbridled sex drive. In the case of Jorgos (Steve Najarro, bearing an expression of sweet bewilderment), in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s very first (1968) play, the label is a misnomer, an ethnic slur applied to this Greek (“foreign”) laborer in a provincial German town. Katzelmacher (in Denis Calandra’s translation) is some thing of an etude in which Fassbinder shows the stock jealousy and xenophobia that ensues after the migrant worker, who barely speaks the language, beds his employer (Maureen Byrnes) and draws the romantic attentions of the local women (Kathryn Sheer, Katharina Lejona and Szilvi Naray-Davey). Mean while, the guys (Mathew Gifford, Bo Roberts, Laurence Coven and David E. Frank) are barely employed yet too proud to work for the low wages that Jorgos plans on sending home to his wife and kids. Fassbinder is really looking at the psychological effects of money, at how the town’s orgasmic violence stems from its economic malaise — which, though a truthful idea, does little to explain the sadism of the rich. Frederique Michel smartly evokes the play’s 1966 setting (with Brigitte Bardot flip ‘dos and costume designer Erin Vincent’s one-piece leather minis) with an ensemble bereft of Hollywood lip enhancements and repaired teeth. Rather, they look plucked from the regions — perfect for this play’s ambiance. Michel stages the episodic scenes in the style of a cabaret, propelled by sound designer Jason Piazza’s percussion. Occasionally, the actors’ simultaneous foot stomping and tapping of the rails get a bit arch, but the production is a mostly disciplined and cogent examination of “otherness” that’s, distressingly, more apt than ever.
LA TIMES
Fassbinder looks at youth culture
March 28, 2003
by David C. Nichols
The provocative genius of the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder dominates “Katzelmacher,” now at City Garage in Santa Monica. This 1968 debut by the icon of the Anti-Theatre receives a polished, pertinent realization. Set outside Munich in 1966, the plotless narrative traverses a group of lower- brow Bavarians. Embodying the restless youth culture then exploding across Europe, these miscreants are as promiscuous and casually deluded as their author is clear-eyed and acerbic in his objective delineation of their existence. Enter immigrant Jorgos (Steve Najarro, in the part originated by Fassbinder), the subject of the title epithet, an obscene allusion to foreign sexual behavior. This unwitting Greek unleashes a swirl of xenophobia, leading to sudden, primal violence.
Director Frédérique Michel and translator Denis Calandra honor Fassbinder’s ethos, linking the vignettes with hieratic interludes and rhythmic techniques. In tandem with Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s production design and Erin Vincent’s costumes, the ultra-stylized approach suggests Bob Fosse doing Günter Grass on absinthe. Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Laurence Coven, David E. Frank, Mathew Gifford, Katharina Lejona, Szilvi Naray-Davey and Bo Roberts offer avid counterpoint to Najarro’s sweet incomprehension. Kathryn Sheer is touching as his paramour, a role created by Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla.
Curiously, Fassbinder’s deliberate detachment feels less viscerally compulsive than in the 1969 film. The tactics command intellectual attention without consistently demanding emotional reaction. This may be an inevitable casualty of 21st century desensitization, and the arid topicality of “Katzelmacher” couldn’t be more obvious, or recommended, regardless.
BACKSTAGE WEST
March 26, 2003
Reviewed By Leigh Kennicott
“Katzelmacher” is Bavarian slang for a foreigner but translates to something like “someone who screws like a cat.” Therein lies this simple yet arbitrarily violent tale “at the intersection of prejudice and fear,” by the German phenomenon Rainer Fassbinder. Into the small-town doldrums of disaffected youth in the mid-1960s the first of a wave of “guest workers” arrives from Greece. Jorgos (Steve Najarro) is accorded much credit for mythological sexual prowess. When he takes up with Marie (Kathryn Sheer), the ire of the hometown boys cannot be contained. Under the tightly controlled direction of Frederique Michel, the 70-minute play records the rising tension that finally explodes into senseless violence.
Fassbinder is known for his gritty, uncompromising portraits of Germany during the social upheaval of the late ’60s and early ’70s. This, his first play, throbs with misplaced sexuality and ennui. But Michel has transcended his short, shocking, cinematic playwriting technique to create a uniquely stylized and ultimately compelling portrait of that period, and opened up the play by incorporating elements from Fassbinder’s subsequent film.
Her production opens on Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s eminently workable set: four spaces interspersed around the central courtyard of an apartment block where the out-of-work-youth congregate. The couples come together, part, and return to one another in a metaphoric, driving dance, thus setting a tone that will repeat at each of Fassbinder’s blackout transitions. Michel’s technique smoothes but does not camouflage his disjointed, brutal snippets of dialogue.
The actors are put through their paces with a uniform precision reminiscent of Edward Gordon Craig, who once advocated actors as marionettes. Yet they manage to imprint their characters with unique qualities. Lawrence Coven plays a pathetic clown, who has to pay to peep at Ingrid’s (Szilvi Naray-Davey) lovely breasts. Naray-Davey’s long body works well to convey the disgust and disdain she has for her steady source of income. Mathew Gifford is the jilted jittery town heartthrob, who must exact revenge. David E. Frank and Maia Brewton do the most with their sidekick roles. Katherine Lejona is the epitome of mod. As the powerful factory owner, Maureen Byrnes exudes disdain, especially for her live-in lover (Bo Roberts). All the production elements work well to convey a sense of this not-so-distant era. Along with the aforementioned set design, the costuming by Erin Vincent is eerily on target. The music, also designed by Duncombe, helps as well.