June 2—October 18, 2000
L. A. Weekly — Pick of the Week!
L.A. Times — Critic’s Pick!
Based on the Medea texts by Heiner Müller
adapted for City Garage by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Jeff Boyer, Jennifer Dion, David Frank, Ilana Gustafson, Liz Hight, Andrea Isco, Katarina Lejona, Cynthia Mance, Jody Moschetti, Stephen Pocock, Christian YoungMiller
L. A. Weekly — Pick of the Week!
MEDEATEXT: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore
by Tom Provenzano
For a director or an audience to tackle a work by Heiner Müller is almost, by definition, a great adventure. The German dramatists plays consist of brief, fragmented scenes — in part linear storytelling but mostly surreal musings on characters and events. His plays are meant to be entirely reconfigured by adaptors, directors and actors to create unique stagings. In this difficult and rewarding production, Müller’s convoluted MedeaTexts are a great match for one of L.A.’s most determined advocates for European theater, director Frederique Michel. Her work here with adaptor Charles A. Duncombe Jr., based on Carl Weber’s translation of the original manuscript, delivers the mythical story of Medea and Jason into a contemporary Los Angeles filled with rampant greed and enshrouded with the cult of celebrity. The classic tale follows Medea’s murderous revenge upon her unfaithful husband Jason, for whom she had helped secure the legendary Golden Fleece. A number of actors play Medea simultaneously, creating characterizations ranging from a highly sexualized woman to an unfettered intellectual. Several Jasons likewise move in and out of the scenes, exposing horrible aspects of maleness. The mise en scene, all designed by Duncombe, is beautifully gruesome, beginning with the opening image of a naked. bloody Medea kneeling in sand. Duncombe’s transformation of the story to a grotesque vision of locally induced egoism is often a simple, elegant retelling. But the production becomes most exciting when the performers fracture the story (almost beyond recognition) into a series of events – from clownish pantomimes to poetry to live video documentary interviews.
LA Times — Critic’s Pick!
Challenging ‘MedeaText’ Plugs Into Modern Culture Theater
Review By F. KATHLEEN FOLEY
June 9th, 2000
Director Frédérique Michel and her longtime associate Charles A. Duncombe, Jr scale exhilarating heights in “MedeaText:Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore,” a radical retelling of the Medea legend based on Heiner Müller’s original play, as translated by Carl Weber. The production has its rough edges, including a couple of amateurish performances and the occasional slip into tonal excess — a not-uncommon City Garage failing. Despite these shortcomings, an atmosphere of rigorous professionalism prevails, from Michel’s stringent staging to Duncombe’s wonderfully evocative production design to Lee C. Smith’s inventive costumes, which feature such bizarre innovations as a see-through cellophane hoop skirt — a melding of Old World decorum and New Age license that is very much to the philosophical point.
Set in a bleak, postindustrial Los Angeles dreamscape, the play opens with Medea (at least, one of them — the role is played by three actresses) sitting in a sandbox, nude. Medea’s hands are red with the gore of her recent slaughter, yet she stares expressionlessly out at the audience, devoid of affect or emotion. White masks are evenly interspersed among the trash-strewn sandboxes that border the stage — a double-edged symbol of Los Angeles as terminus, both geographical and spiritual, where the land drops abruptly into the sea but the sewage of Hollywood mass culture seeps ever outward. The female anatomy is prominently on display throughout, although not in any exploitative sense. The play evolves into a piercing examination of male entitlement and female rage, with a particular emphasis on the constant objectification of the female form, from network television to Internet porn.
Challenging and abrasive stuff, this is far from a feminist diatribe. The dialectic is evenly balanced and surprisingly funny. In one amusing video segment, projected live on an screen, “scholars” face off in front of cameras to discuss Medea’s motivations, each passionately promoting his or her own skewed agenda. Various Jasons in Armani chat glibly on cell phones while a fetish-clad chorus cavorts hilariously. Medea’s alter egos, pale women in black leather jackets, sweep about like birds of prey. And all the while, Medea sits, staring. In Michel’s clockwork staging, the actors move with the eerie inexorability of automata, dehumanized and pitiless. But it is Duncombe’s adaptation of Müller’s meager text that is the true triumph of the evening. A theatrical exegesis that expounds brilliantly upon the original, Duncombe’s reworking plugs into the malaise of modern culture — that dreary, fleshly round — and sharply illuminates the spiritual emptiness that results when human beings are relentlessly reduced to objects.
LA Weekly
Grave New Worlds
by Steven Leigh Morris
City Garage is situated in an alley adjoining Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade — that mecca of consumerism around which the other legit stages in the immediate area devote themselves to sketch comedy and other comparatively feel-good entertainments. But where such troupes as Second City, at the Mayfair Theater, swiftly folded, City Garage, in its little cabin behind Fourth Street, has for the last decade been slogging away at cryptic, newish European writing. This is a theater that, over the past three seasons alone, has devotedly put on plays by Ginka Steinwachs, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Michel Tournier and now Heiner Müller — heady, abstract works by playwrights from France, Poland and Germany whose writings, if not for City Garage, would remain unknown to most Angelenos, plays that nobody else in the region has had the savvy, or the gall, to touch.
I suspect that one of the reasons City Garage has endured over the years — despite chorus lines that clump rather than snap, mangled dialogue and a general sense that the company is floundering in material that’s stylistically beyond its reach and training — is that so many of the actors have paraded onstage in the buff, or in fetishist attire, in ways only dubiously justified by the material. It’s a shrewd strategy: When the novelty of all that flesh wears off, you can tune in to Fassbinder — and vice versa.
Pinch me if I’m dreaming, but if its current production of MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore is any indication, City Garage appears, at last, to be growing up. Never before has this company looked so much like an ensemble, moved with such synchrony and poise. Never have director Frederique Michel’s stage pictures seemed so rarefied, so cleansed of the kind of redundancy and excess that’s characterized many of her productions in the past. Never before has the nudity made such sense or been executed with such acute sensitivity to gesture and body language. This intoxicating production may not be perfect, but it’s certainly the best work by this theater to date.
Charles A. Duncombe Jr. has adapted Müller’s rather dense Medea texts — the sum of which is only a few pages — into a full-length play set in and around Los Angeles. The result, powerfully enhanced by Michel’s staging, is a kind of semijocular SoCal dystopia, a garbage-strewn beachscape collage in which masked demons spout poetry, movie execs snort coke, and the faces of various academics, commenting on the action from the wings, are beamed live via an upstage video screen. This chorus of sorts deconstructs the deconstruction, wrapping themselves in ontological knots — in the middle of which sits bloodied, naked Medea (Andrea Isco, one of three actors who share the title role), whose beautiful, tormented visage embodies this production’s soul.
In Euripides’ legend about betrayal and revenge, Medea is a young woman so devoted to her husband, Jason, she helps him steal the coveted golden fleece from her father, King Ae’tes, then sacrifices her own brother, sending him in the lethal path of Jason’s pursuers, in order to protect her husband. For her trouble, many years later, Jason dumps his aging wife for a princess (Jody Moschetti). Medea responds by murdering her own children by Jason — an understandable, if excessive, gesture.
The story has received countless cinema, opera and stage adaptations over the years. In his late-’60s play The Golden Fleece, A.R. Gurney Jr. used the legend to serve up a fairly linear commentary on contemporary American marriage. Here, however, Müller’s primary interest is neither family nor storytelling; he chooses instead to shatter the story, as though throwing a vase against a wall. In the shards one can find glimmers of insight, images whose very disarrangement speaks to the fragmentation of society. Duncombe Jr., in his adaptation, expands upon Müller’s concerns, filtering the myth through a prism of mid-’80s feminism. When Medea gets dumped for a nubile younger woman, the adapter connects this to the lure of pornography and its disembodied images. In an amusing monument to male selfishness and egocentrism, Cristian YoungMiller, one of three briefcase-toting Jasons, explains how really, truly difficult it is for a fellow down at the studio. (“I’m sorry, this is about me.”) Near play’s end, a chorus of women preen as they mock lurid phone-sex come-ons, exemplifying through words the pictures of disassociated body parts that pass for sexuality in our disassociated culture.
The drawback is that these are exactly the images one would expect from a play subtitled Los Angeles/ Despoiled Shore — generic images already too much in circulation to describe with much nuance our city and the pop/porno culture of greed it has come to represent. The work is so bereft of references to L.A.’s subterranean and minority cultures, you’d think it had been created by artists from Munich, London or Seattle, rather than by people who’ve been digging artistic trenches in our own back yard for more than a decade. There’s a reason L.A. sets fire to itself every 30 years or so, and it seems odd to exclude that from a locally situated play about rage.
Marriage Blanc (White Wedding)
November 12th — December 19th, 1999
Written by: Tadeusz Rozewizc
Translated by: Adam Czerniawski
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Annette Culp, Jennifer Dion, Richard Grove, Justine Klineman, Katerina Lejona, Jonathan Liebhold, Cynthia Mance, Laura McCann, Eileen O’Connell, Bo Roberts, Cheryl Scaccio, Erin Vincent, Gene Williams
Los Angeles Times
review by Philip Brandes
“A surreal erotic fable chock full of Freudian themes and imagery, “Marriage Blanc” (White Wedding) is a good fit for the libido-drenched avant antics of Santa Monica’s City Garage. Nudity, emotional confrontation, socio-political satire and absurdism abound in this tale of a girl’s frightened resistance to an arranged marriage and her own emerging womanhood. But Tadeusz Rozewizc’s wry allegory also lets the ensemble demonstrate its facility with more traditional performance and stagecraft, thanks to linear narrative, continuity of character, and turn-of-the-century setting.
In a striking departure from the company’s frequent forays into stark, existential modernism, production designer Charles A. Duncombe Jr’s ornate period scenery and warm-hued lighting prove well-suited to the 1968 play’s deliberate construction as a distant fairy tale — necessary to avoid censorship in the playwright’s native Poland.
Cynthia Mance gives a sympathetic, multilayered central performance as Bianca, a tom-boy whose terror of sexuality manifests itself in fanciful visions almost as strange as her peculiar family. Particularly effective are her philandering father (Richard Grove), who furtively chases the domestic help; her uptight mother (Katherina Lejona), who derives her only sexual gratification reciting mail-order catalogs for china and undergarments; and her lecherous grandfather (Gene Williams), who has no qualms about preying on his own descendants.
Initial naturalistic presentation gives way to increasingly menacing hallucinations that torment Bianca with the approach of her marriage to a pompous, inexperienced poet (Jonathan Liebhold), who appears to be sporting a phallic mushroom with angry red cap; the other males follow suit and ultimately mutate via animal masks into grunting beasts at the wedding feast.
Metaphorically extending paternalistic sexual dominance into the political sphere with a thinly veiled assault on government, Rozewizc’s point doesn’t require quite this extended a treatment. Despite director Frédérique Michel’s often inventive flourishes, the final third bogs down in restatement but redeems itself with a haunting finale.”
Beverly Hills Outlook Online Magazine
review by Charles Lonberger
“On November 14th, in the rarified ambience of Santa Monica’s City Garage, amidst the smell of sawdust and the taste of wine, the City Garage Theater troop presented a good-humored version of Tadeusz Rosewicz’s whimsical “White Wedding” (Marriage Blanc), a play of quirky, imaginative and coherent greatness.
The production itself, which was dedicated to Jan Kott, was notable for the open and wide breath of Charles Duncombe’s sets and costuming of Michele Gingembre and Eric Vincent that convincing]y recalled the epoch in which the action was placed, and for the brilliant, eccentric and eclectic direction of company director Frédérique Michel, whose work has, in the past, not always been untouched by the polemic, but who was here consistently on the mark, calling on the songs of birds and crickets, chants and the sounds of a summer rain amid a riot of phallic mushrooms and virile masked beasts, in bemusedly bringing this tale of the Ribald Power of Life to life.
The cast, which included many company debuts among them, was uniformly outstanding, and set a new level of ensemble achievement at this venue. In particular, Cynthia Mance’s Bianca was a creation of brilliant, believable hysterics, a powerful glue that held the entire production together, and was well-played off against the healthy, robust earthiness of Erin Vincent’s Pauline, who gave us a glorious St. Verbona sequence. As their father, Richard Grove was invigoratingly lecherous, while Katharina Lejona brought a pinched frigidity to the role of their other. The part of the Aunt was fleshed out to its fullest capacity by Cheryl Scaccio. Gene Williams’ grandfather was a work of great acting depth, resonant and of deep substance. Also exceptional was Jennifer Dion as the cook, who imbued her potential throwaway part with the Force of Life itself. Laura McCann’s Ghost of the Grandmother was read with a melodious cadence, while Jonathan Liebhold lend a dazed David Manners touch to his work as Benjamin. The whole of this production perfectly meshed in delivering a particularly riveting confessional scene, an inspired marriage of text, cast, and direction that well served the exceptional translation of Adam Czerniawski.
A visual motif running throughout the drama like an invisible commentary were Annette Culp, Eileen O’Connell, and Justine Kleinman as Maids who at times cavorted in and out of the shadows like figures from Matisse, while, at other times, silently stalking the stage.
Readers of this publication are strongly advised to keep a close eye on this venue near the beach. Their productions, while not uniformly successful, are always thought provoking and well mounted, giving local audiences an early view of European trends in contemporary theater.”
Pre-Paradise Sorry Now
Fall 1999
Written by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Tatiana Alvarez, Ruth Crossley, Greg Hecht, Andrea Isco, Jonathan Liebhold, Christian Youngmiller, Jody Moschetti, Freddy Nager, Mark Rebernik, Bo Roberts, Paradorn Thiel, Doria Valenzuela, Gustav Vintas
Backstage West
review by Paul Birchall
Director Frédérique Michel’s production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s elementally disturbing black comedy is depraved, loathsome, and vile. And, in this unique case, those are all meant to be compliments. Exploring Fassbinder’s bleakly ironic and ghoulishly jaundiced world view through exotic visual spectacle and often surreal imagery, Michel’s staging is unusually well matched with bizarre and over-the-top psychotic text.
Fassbinder’s play is equal parts self-indulgent sleaze fest, penetrating social satire, and Natural Born Killers (The German Version). It’s unfortunate that the show is also entirely hard to stomach: the mix of monsterous acts of cruelty and wince-inducing jags of debased sexuality — presented with a melancholy, jaded insouciance — create a show that is both compelling and disgusting. The production is frequently quite effective at chilling the blood. But it’s certainly not for everyone.
As a video monitor plays a quick-paced montage of clips from appalling slasher movies (all available on video, I believe), we’re treated to a staged biography of serial killer lovers Ian Brady (Jonathan Liebhold) and his girlfriend Myra Hindley (Andrea Isco), who were responsible for a series of torture killings in the 1960s. Brady and Hindley are indeed sick cookies: He happily masturbates to DeSade’s Justine, while she lets herself be whipped senseless for spending her weekly pocket money too quickly. Both sincerely believe themselves to be more highly evolved than the rest of humanity, which by their lights gives them the right to torture their hapless captives to death.
As the pair accomplish their dreadful deeds, the play also focuses on a number of other revolting characters — a transvestite prostitute who gets beat up by her john, two doctors who mercilessly ignore the human test subject they’ve punished into catatonia, and a soldier who is forced to perform push-ups on top of a knife. These blackout sequences are subsequently all repeated, but this time with the tortured person playing the oppressor, and vice versa.
Michel stages the play’s cruelty with an eye for detail that’s simultaneously horrifying and humorous. The performances crackle with intensity and venom, particularly Liebhold’s cooly restrained Brady and Isco’s creepily devoted Myra. Also amusingly grotesque in supporting roles are Greg Hecht, as an extremely lurid male stripper, and Gustav Vintas, doing his dead-on Maurice Chevalier impersonation as the consummately creepy narrator.
Calling Pre-Paradise Sorry Now unwholesome is like saying the Son of Sam was mildly irritated. This is a deeply distasteful and provocative show.”
The Shepard Project – Early Works by Sam Shepard
March to May 2, 1999
Chicago
Icarus’s Mother
Killer’s Head
Four H Club
Written by: Sam Shepard
Chicago, Icarus’s Mother, Killer’s Head directed by: Frédérique Michel
Four H Club directed by Stephen Pocock
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Produced by: Stephen Pocock
Cast: Carlos Alvarado, Jeff Boyer, Scott Collins, Liz Davies, Jeff Decker, Andrea Isco, Paul Rubenstein, Shan Serafin, Leonard Shields, Raquel Silva
LA Times
Emotional ‘Shepard Project’ Shows Playwright as a Work-in-Progress
April 16, 1999
By. F. KATHLEEN FOLEY
Bristling with youthful experimentation, “The Shepard Project: The Early Works of Sam Shepard” at City Garage gives a fascinating glimpse into Shepard’s artistic progression. For anyone not a die-hard Shepard fan, however, the works are limited in scope and execution, punk playlets by an unformed writer who had not yet found his voice, performed by actors not always sure of theirs.
The characters in all four pieces are emotionally isolated losers with elemental longings–for the sea, for the sky, for the wide open spaces of the American West. The opener, “Chicago,” ably helmed by Frederique Michel, is essentially an absurdist monologue delivered in a bathtub (or perhaps it is a docked boat) by a heavily tattooed man (Stephen Pocock) whose lover (Liz Davies) is leaving him.
The most wickedly funny piece of the evening, “4-H Club,” directed by Pocock, concerns three hormonally fueled young men (Carlos Alvarado, Paul Rubenstein and Shan Serafin) who share the unfettered destructive capacity of children. These guys are geniuses at smashing things, but when it comes to anything constructive–like picking up their mosh pit of an apartment–they are helpless.
Michel also directs “Icarus’s Mother,” in which a quintet of holiday picnickers (Jeff Boyer, Andrea Isco, Raquel Silva, Jeff Decker and Alvarado) play twisted mind games until interrupted by a spectacular air disaster. Evocative of Ambrose Bierce, “Killer’s Head,” the closer, also staged by Michel, features F. Scott Collins as a condemned cowboy who dreams of the open range in the moments before his electrocution. The metal headgear Collins wears entirely obscures his eyes–a serious shortcoming in a one-character play. Otherwise, Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s austere production design is highly effective.
Journeys Among the Dead
January 29 — March 14, 1999
Written by: Eugene Ionesco
Translated by: Barbara Wright
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Produced by: Steven Pocock
Cast: Strawn Bovee, Jennifer Dion, Scott Donovan, Joel Drazner, Richard Grove, Patricia Raquel Lopez, Anna Pond, Valerie Ramirez, Bo Roberts, Paul Rubenstein
Backstage West
18 February 1999
Review by Anne Louise Bannon
“It’s seldom that I run across something as difficult to describe as Journeys Among the Dead, Eugene Ionesco’s autobiographical last play. The City Garage’s production, directed by Frederique Michel, is compelling, beautifully paced, nicely performed for the most part, and yet… How do you wrap words around what is essentially an old man’s dream journey to find his mother and confront the guilt and anger that has plagued him since childhood? Simple enough to say, but it doesn’t quite convey what seeing this play is like.
Do read the excellent program notes. They provide the factual background and give a little structure to the performance. If you’re a fan of Jungian dream analysis, or even Freudian analysis, go to town.
While this is an ensemble piece, it is held together by the old poet named Jean — essentially Ionesco. Richard Grove gives the old man a tenderness and sense of wonder not easily accomplished, since the emotional throughlines are seldom clear from the text. Grove’s work with the young Jean, Paul Rubenstein, is seamless. The two seem to have a single vision for the character and it works well. But Scott Donovan, as Jean’s father, occasionally falls a little flat. The rest of the ensemble holds up nicely, with some lovely performances by Stawn Bovee as Jean’s mother and Jean’s grandmother, Patricia Raquel Lopez as Jean’s stepmothre, and Valerie Ramirez in her role as Violette.
Charles A. Duncombe Jr has outdone even himself with his lighting and particularly his sound design, pulling together sound effects and music that feed the production as a whole, as opposed to overpowering it, as so often happens. He also did the very simple but effective set.
Probably the highest achievement belongs to Michel. You have to assume that some of the bits and action were directed in, but it is really hard to tell what came from the script’s stage dircetions and what was Michel’s work. Michel is an extremely intellectual director, and her work serves this piece very well. Even better is the way she paces the play: one of the difficulties of Theatre of the Absurd is that it has the capacity to be relentlessly boring. Michel takes time where it’s warranted, but lets things run at a nice clip otherwise.
It’s not the easiest play on the planet to do well. City Garage has done it well.”
Georges Sand: An Erotic Odyssey in Seven Tableaux
September 25 — November 22, 1998
Four LA Weekly Award Nominations — BEST ENSEMBLE! BEST LEADING FEMALE! BEST LIGHTING! BEST DIRECTION!
LA Weekly — PICK OF THE WEEK!
Back Stage West — CRITIC’S PICK!
Written by: Ginka Steinwachs
Translated by: Sue-Ellen Case, Jamie Owen Daniel, Katrin Sieg
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: John Burton, Ruthie Crossley, Jeff Decker, Joel Drazner, Hope Easton, Vanessa Hopkins, Bo Roberts, Valerie Ramirez, Paul Rubenstein, Paradorn Thiel, Doria Valenzuela
LA Weekly — PICK OF THE WEEK!
review by Miriam Jacobson
“French Novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, a.k.a. George Sand, was at the center of the 1848 European revolutionary movement that gave rise to communism; she was a femme fatale “who changed lovers more often than her shoes” and whose beaux included Karl Marx, Chopin, Schubert, Balzac and Flaubert; she dabbled in lesbianism, left her marriage to a country baron and supported herself through her writings, employing a male pseudonym.
The seven hallucinatory tableaux composing German playwright Ginka Steinwachs’ intoxicating, impressionistic study of Sand (brilliantly translated by Sue-Ellen Case, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Katrin Sieg) bleed into each other, each constructed around a single idea taken from pivotal events on the writer’s life. We see, for instance, Sand nude from the waist down, obtaining mens’s trousers, as scandalized, swishy tailors look on. The play is a wild kaleidoscope of sex, politics and art, sprinkled with allusions to the 20th century.
Director Frederique Michel has found the perfect actor to play Sand in the free-spirited, tattooed Venssa Hopkins, who even resembles the iconoclast, and the stunning ensemble don animal masks to hilarious effect as they slip in and out of multiple roles. Steinwachs’ play ultimately indicts Sand’s persecutors — the moralizing, infantile prudes who keep (to this day) attacking drugs, sexuality and art, as though these were really the causes of human misery.
Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s intricate set and lighting incorporate slide projections and simply take your breath away; the barrage of visuals and wordplay is so forceful that this production should be seen more than once to be fully appreciated.”
Back Stage West/Drama-Logue — CRITIC’S PICK!
Reviewed by Anne Louise Bannon
“The one thing you don’t want to do while watching George Sand is think. That can come later. For this City Garage presentation directed by Frederique Michel is not so much a play as a performed poem — the sort of performance art piece that stretches our definition of theatre.
And it does so brilliantly. Keep in mind, this is coming from someone with an unfashionable but decided preference for plot and narrative. In this case, you can almost close your eyes and lose yourself in the rich language and still get the larger essence of the piece.
The play is about, but not quite, George Sand, the 19th-century French woman writer who adopted men’s dress and a brace of lovers, the most famous of whom was Chopin. Postmodern German playwright Ginka Steinwachs has used the character of Sand literally as an icon — a symbol which, when reflected upon, becomes a window into deeper understanding. Of course, this is where the post-performance intellectual discussion comes in. Because while Steinwachs is definitely looking at Woman’s place in the World, what she actually thinks that place is is certainly open to interpretation and debate.
The translation by Sue-Ellen Case, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Katrin Sieg who worked with Steinwachs, is not literal, but uses purely American terms-equivalents rather than word for word. As such, it’s filled with tremendously rich images, just on the edge of making sense, and while the effect is often silly, it doesn’t devolve into pseudo-intellectual nonsense. The play, which tips its hat to Ionesco at least twice, has pulled off that difficult element of Theatre of the Absurd: somehow managing to play up the ridiculousness of its images without falling into the self importance trap that makes performance art such a joke much of the time. The acting is lyrical, and the players have the good sense to go with the absurdity rather than worry about “the message.” As Sand, Vanessa Hopkins, the only actor p]laying a single role, is the linchpin; she carries the play without overwhelming it. While she stands out from the unit that is the ensemble, she is at the same time a part of the cohesive whole.
While the visual elements seem a]most secondary to Steinwachs’ words, they are at least as rich as the language. Charles R Duncombe Jr.’s set is sumptuous, playing upon the rich excesses of the Romantic period with red curtains, doors, and mirrors in the background of the spare playing area.The lighting, also by Duncombe, is a triumph of logistics — not only are there the mirrors to contend with, but slides projected onto a cloth-covered door at up center.
The extensive program notes notwithstanding, it is better to experience the play first, because it is a feast for the senses. Once the experience has trickled through your psyche, there will be plenty to think about.”
Noises
June 18 — July 25, 1999
Back Stage West: Critic’s Pick
Written by:Enzo Cormann
Translated by Priscilla and Michael Sheringham
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Produced by Stephen Pocock
Cast: Jeff Boyer, John Burton, Victoria Coulson, Liz Hight, Elizabeth Oakes, Mark Phelan, Stephen Pocock, Anna Pond, Paradorn Thiel, Doria Valenzuela, Erin Vincent
Back Stage West
Review by Anne Louise Bannon
“I am constantly and consistently amazed by the work done by City Garage. Its current production, Noises, by French Playwright Enzo Cormann, is basically 90-odd minutes of watching petty, nasty people with too much money on their hands (and snorting the coke to prove it) getting progressively more drunk and more spiteful. Not exactly my cup of tea, and yet, under Frederique Michel’s beautifully paced direction, it works, and it works well.
Often enough, I will enjoy a show in the moment but, upon reflection afterwards, feel like I wasn’t fed enough, as if there wasn’t enough there to grab onto. The reverse inevitably happens with a City Garage show: I may feel a little antsy at first, waiting for the play to find its direction, but by the end I am completely drawn in, and on reflection afterwards I’m hard pressed to edit down the many, many thoughts and feelings I have to fit in this small review space.
Noises, while somewhat straightforward, is much more like the jazz riffs Cormann has based it on. It is noisy, seemingly without direction, and there are no conclusions to be made. Even as the relationships among the four couples disintegrate, you suspect that most of them will repeat the same sordid pattern soon enough.
Playing drunkenness is no mean trick. It’s too easy to fall into stereotypes, not to mention having to be under perfect control while creating the illusion of a total lack of control. Doria Valenzuela, as Vera, one of the wives, nails it right on the head, so much so that one almost wonders if she has indeed been drinking — which is impossible, because she can still hold for the many stylized freeze sections that pop up through the play.
The rest of the cast is equally strong, from Stephen Pocock as Hugo, a famous writer facing terminal writer’s block, to Mark Phelan as the charming bastard movie producer, Will, to everyone, really. It’s an incredibly tight ensemble, each piece fitting together perfectly.
If I have to pick on something, there were the periodically late light cues on the night reviewed. But the set, by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr., is perfect, as are Michele Gimgenbre’s elegant costumes. Either these people have a terrific budget, or they really know how to make a set and clothes look like they do.
But a lot of praise goes to Michel, also the company’s artistic director. She not only has a real knack for picking the best of offbeat modern drama out there — she can make it work, which is saying a great deal.