November 10 – December 17, 2017
World premiere by the author of the international bestseller “The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.”
Irene awakes from a cryogenic chamber into a future where her terminal cancer has been cured but the world as she knew it no longer exists. She is welcomed by curious humans who command and are commanded by “Platform,” a vast computer network which appears to have replaced all known reality. Has the Singularity occurred? Is there still a recognizable planet where earth once was? In Wake Dahlquist examines society and sociability when lives are long, wants are met, and no need for cooperation beyond the response to solitude.
Reality Bites — If You Can Even Call It Reality — In This Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Satire
Bill Raden | November 20, 2017 | 8:05am
Accorrding to the dictionary, “wake” can mean different things: It can be the vigil held over a corpse on the eve of burial; it can describe the waves trailing a passing ship or left by an extinct civilization; or it can signify the state of being aroused or made aware. According to Wake, Gordon Dahlquist’s rousing sci-fi satire about the ultimate fate of humankind, currently getting a sleek world premiere at City Garage, it also can mordantly embrace all of the above.
The time-leaping tale begins with a venerable science fiction premise: Heroine Irene Suarez (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson), a New York immunologist racked with metastasized pancreatic cancer in 2017, is placed in a cryogenic capsule in Mamaroneck, New York, to be thawed and resuscitated in a hermetic and inconceivably remote future.
In production designer Charles Duncombe’s minimalist arrangement of tiers and ramps, that future is represented as a blandly featureless room without windows or doors. It’s where Irene is greeted by May (Alicia Rose Ivanhoe), a friendly and curious if somewhat linguistically maladroit denizen whose silvery Lycra bodysuit (courtesy of costumer Josephine Poinsot), together with the ever-present visage of an identically coiffed and clothed figure (Megan Kim) projected on the upstage wall, are the first hints that something Orwellian and technologically dystopian might have transpired during Irene’s eons of sleep.
Much of the fun comes from Irene’s attempt to reconstruct the lost years. While May proves maddeningly vague at filling in the whens, wheres and hows, the fragmented hints at the planet’s fate that begin to emerge only increase Irene’s disquiet over her dire predicament. It seems that the Holocene is part of a distant and dimly understood past, whose end came via some sort of climate change–triggered environmental cataclysm. In the desperate hope that one day the species could be reconstituted from its archived DNA, a survivor population designed a global computerized omniscience called the Platform. Embodied by City Garage regular Kim as an affable and accommodating “construct” of the same name, the Platform now regulates the “sentient environment” as well as the society by which Irene finds herself welcomed as a sort of living natural history museum exhibit.
By eliminating the human middleman, society is finally one with the spectacle.
If that all sounds vaguely Matrix-like, the similarity is strictly ironic. Wake trades in — and frustrates — a raft of familiar sci-fi clichés and genre expectations in a wry pastiche that sets the stage for what Polish sci-fi master Stanislaw Lem once called “the drama of cognizance.” By dropping Irene into the Platform, where she is stripped of the taken-for-granted assumptions that ground identity and differentiate the real from the merely represented, Dahlquist lampoons the collective solipsism of all institutionalized systems of belief while underscoring the philosophical problem of agreement on any kind of shared reality.
Irene does not connect with other remnants of humanity in order, say, to organize a revolt and take back the planet from authoritarian oppressors, a trope dating back to H.G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes (1910), the grandaddy of Matrix-like political fantasies. Instead Dahlquist closes off that possibility by eliminating not only the distinction between the real and the virtual but also the urgent need to distinguish it. The Platform proves the most hospitable and accommodating of hosts. Far from a prison, its environment is a constantly morphing place of endless choice and instantaneous gratification — a kind of otherworldly shopping mall from which everything unpleasant has been expelled except for loneliness. Its virtually generated inhabitants, like May and her daft friend Sen (Jeffrey Gardner), are left to contentedly while away their existence with trivial preoccupations around satisfying their every whim and appetite. By eliminating the human middleman, society is finally one with the spectacle.
The only exception proves to be Sarah (Sandy Mansson), another cryogenic survivor from Earth’s 21st-century past — or, more accurately, the Platform-generated memory of what 40 years ago had been Sarah. A middle-aged horse breeder from Pennsylvania, Sarah tells Irene about the 60 additional years she lived among the Platform before boredom finally drove her from its protected, Platonic environs and into the nonexistence of the outside world. What happened then, or what kind of creatures might live there, the Platform cannot say, although Duncombe’s evocative projections of pristine, primordial landscapes slyly suggest an Earth that has returned to the fecund grandeur of a pre-human natural state.
Director Frédérique Michel’s tightly composed staging cannily extends the script’s mechanistic absurdities, both through wittily synchronized movement between Kim and the constructs and with touches like returning “offstage” characters to visible seats in the wings, where they await their next scenes like powered-down cyborgs set to sleep mode. Ivanhoe and Gardner are delightfully deranged as bubbly, wide-eyed human simulacra, but Ivanhoe is especially funny massacring Dahlquist’s fractured, almost aphasic diction. For her part, St. Clair-Johnson nimbly anchors the comedy as an exasperated, disoriented and finally resigned “straight man,” while Mansson contributes poignant notes of human warmth.
Although the ensemble is clearly still fine-tuning its timing, and Wake is consequently guilty of what sometimes feel like overly austere intellectual stretches, the evening’s momentum rarely flags. More importantly, at a moment when headlines seem to trumpet the potential calamities of debasing public policy with alternative facts, the play comes as a timely reminder that the confrontation with the other is ultimately always a confrontation with the self.
City Garage at Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg. T1, Santa Monica. (310) 453-9939, citygarage.org.
Bill Raden is an award-winning reporter and theater critic who reviewed his first play for L.A. Weekly on a typewriter. He still keeps his manual Olivetti inked and oiled, just in case.
Wake Review from Night-Tinted Glasses
Spoilers ahoy!
Audience expectations tend to be tricky things. To some degree this depends upon genre.
Wake by Gordon Dahlquist, if not science fiction, certainly begins and explores a pretty clear and well precedented science fiction trope. Someone wakes from cryogenic sleep far into the future and must adjust. Buck Rogers essentially.
Except, no.
Irene (Natasha St. Clair-Johnson) had advanced pancreatic cancer and used her resources on a wild chance, that someone frozen in liquid nitrogen just might be revived in later centuries. When she wakes in a strange room to the greetings of May (Alicia Rose Ivanhoe), a cheerful young woman with a strange vocabulary, the truth dawns on her pretty quickly. It worked. Behold the future!
Yay?
At this point many a science fiction tale would begin describing the future world, if in fact the story turns out to be some kind of social commentary on the trends of human society. Or it may become some kind of adventure in which the awakened person will prove crucial to history or some such (this was the story of the second JJ Abrams Star Trek movie). I never thought the latter very likely here, but wondered how the first part of that expectation might play out. That at first May seems reluctant to tell Irene much heightened that expectation. At first. But increasingly, as we get to know more about this future, the less terribly important that became. Details all proved important, but not what the story was about.
Irene began and remained the story’s focus, for every moment, and she remained the only character on stage the entire play. All seventy minutes with no intermission. Even as we meet the sentient computer (or something like that) called The Platform (Megan Kim) that both runs and enables, nurtures and learns from the lives of those like May and her would be boyfriend Sen (Jeffrey Gardner), the more we share Irene’s curiosity and frustration. When is this? How much time has passed? Hints given early prove disturbing. Her capsule? Found in sea water. People have very odd beliefs about her own time, not least the amount of violence. No one, not even The Platform, knows what she’s talking about when Irene mentions ancient Egypt or the Pyramids.
Her world is gone. Her context has vanished, evaporated over time. Hardly anyone else was ever found frozen and with enough left to be revived. That was Sarah (Sandy Mansson) who died decades ago.
With us, Irene endures this loss — the realization of being utterly alone, not physically nor literally, but robbed of every single detail that made life make sense. Not by anyone, just by chance. This then proves the exploration, the odyssey of this work — not a revelation of plot or world-building, but of human courage in the face of tremendous loss. All in all, Wake does an astounding almost Haiku-esque job of giving us the heart, the soul of the story and very nearly nothing else.
We see someone find courage to go on. To trust the supremely unfamiliar. To begin to let go of what after all can never come again — the past.
Wake runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 3pm (pay-what-you-can at the door only) until Sunday, December 17, 2017 at the City Garage, Building T1, Bergamont Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica CA 90404.
“Grimly Handsome” by Julia Jarcho
A pair of Christmas tree salesmen secretly wreak havoc in NYC. A pair of detectives are bent on catching a serial killer. A young woman finds herself drawn into a cat-and-mouse game and transformed in ways she could never have imagined. Well, maybe she could’ve. Meanwhile, wild animals have been sighted in the vacant lot across the street. Are they dogs? Raccoons? Or something more ferocious?
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Phoebe Zeitgeist Returns to Earth” by Charles A. Duncombe
September 30—November 13, 2016
A new play inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Blood on the Cat’s Neck
Nudity.
Fourth Weekend Q&A October 23:
After the 3:00pm performance on Sunday, October 23rd, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and crew. Don’t miss it!
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Othello/Desdemona” by Charles A. Duncombe
April 15—May 29, 2016
Othello, in the midst of an identity crisis, examines and rejects his status as a servant of the Venetian State. Hungry for political power, he experiments with the idea of self-identifying as white. Desdemona, a Lolita trapped in a caged bed, is a spoiled brat with a mind of her own and a hunger for fame. She’s still deeply in lust for the lover she’s lost, while he struggles with racism and white privilege. Egged on by Iago, hovering like a punk-rock bird of prey, and a sassy, transgender Emilia, this is a love story that, just as in Shakespeare, is going to end badly.
Nudity.
LA TIMES REVIEW:
Playwright, producer and production designer Charles A. Duncombe doesn’t so much deconstruct the tragedy of a noble Moor undone by manipulated jealousy as turn its interior workings into an irreverent dissertation on the post-millennial landscape… With director Frédérique Michel and her valiant cast maintaining a jagged emotional pull beneath the High Performance austerity, “Othello/Desdemona” isn’t exactly shy about upending expectations… It’s a starkly elegant, international-festival-ready staging, with costumer Josephine Poinsot assisting Duncombe’s trademark red-black-and-white scheme. Throughout, typical City Garage audacity is detectable… “Othello/Desdemona” is undeniably unlike anything else in town.
Read the full LA Times review here!
STAGE RAW REVIEW:
“Somewhat reminiscent of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead… Director Frederique Michel’s artful staging cleverly takes the familiar characters and pushes them in unusual directions… The production is full of interesting images and psychological underpinnings… [and] possesses a playfulness that’s undeniably appealing… Michel’s trenchant sense of irony — and the intelligence of the underlying thoughts in the piece – keep us intrigued.”
Read the full Stage Raw review here!
Purchase the text!
Available now on Amazon or at the theater!
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
“Lear” by Young Jean Lee
“Lee is one of the most vital, rewarding playwrights to arrive on the scene in the past decade.”—Time Out New York
“Lee uses King Lear and some beautifully unconventional additions to flesh out Shakespeare’s themes of loneliness, mortality, and filial responsibility in gratifying and moving depth.” —Variety
February 5—March 13, 2016
The West Coast premiere of this widely-acclaimed recent text. In Lear, experimental playwright Young Jean Lee’s self-described “inaccurate distortion” of the classic, she banishes the title monarch and most of the other male characters to the wings and focuses instead on the younger generation: Lear’s three daughters and Gloucester’s two sons. The absurdist, meta results are irreverent, grotesque, and morally harrowing.
Fifth Sunday Q&A March 6 [PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE]:
After the Sunday, March 6 (not Feb. 28, as previously announced) matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creative staff of City Garage’s production of Young Jean Lee’s Lear.
LOS ANGELES TIMES REVIEW
In the Los Angeles Times David C. Nichols praised Young Jean Lee’s Lear at City Garage:
“Director Frédérique Michel treats the intermissionless proceedings as a hybrid of Renaissance masque, absurdist romp and college counseling session, and her fine-tuned cast follows suit. Posing and pouncing around producer Charles A. Duncombe’s elemental sets and lighting in Josephine Poinsot’s winking costumes, the group sustains itself through to the post-Pirandello climax, which breaks both tone and third wall. Devotees of its author and this cutting-edge company should flock.”
Read the full LA Times review here!
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
Hamletmachine: The Arab Spring
November 13—December 20, 2015
Two Hamlets wander a bizarre, absurd and devastated political landscape from the fall of Communism to the ascendancy of ISIS. Their journey starts as they board the locomotive of the Revolution with mad Uncle Karl at the wheel. Round and round and round they go, at each stop, the bloody disasters of the 20th century, like the stations of the cross for a long-suffering humanity. Thrown from the exploding train, they wander on to meet the ghost of their vengeful father, their Alzheimer’s afflicted mother Gertrude, and finally the fair Ophelia, who has become an Islamic Terrorist.
But that’s only the start of their 21st century adventure through the looking glass. They are hounded by religious fundamentalists, plunged into a digital nightmare of new media, diverted by Ophelia as a stripper, experiment with gender roles, conscripted into a Dolce and Gabbana fashion show, then finally launched headlong into the conflicts and tragedies of the Arab Spring, from which they emerge more dazed, confused, and maddened than ever. “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” intones a grief-stricken Horatio. This way madness lies, indeed. But as they stand in the final snowstorm, facing a bottomless sea, they confront the question with which they began: to be or not to be. What answer do they finally offer?
This is the world premiere of a new version of the seminal work by Heiner Müller that defined post-modern Shakespeare. This jagged, non-linear text breaks open the Hamlet iconography to re-examine the blood-soaked heritage of the 20th century in light of the new reality of Mideast turmoil, global terrorism, and the rise of ISIS.
Fourth Sunday Q&A:
After the Sunday, December 6 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of City Garage’s new Hamletmachine.
The Winter of Our Discontent: Shakespeare in the Digital Age
—Fall 2015 to Spring 2016—
November 13, 2015—December 20, 2015
February 5, 2016—March 13, 2016 (6 week, regular run)
April 8, 2016—May 15, 2016
Come and be a part of the exciting adventure at City Garage. Buy a pass now and get all three shows in this series for $60 (Students/Seniors $50). That’s a 20% savings over regular admission prices! Call our Box Office at 310-453-9939 to purchase today (online ticketing and pass purchase coming soon).
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
Tartuffe by Moliere: A Reality Show
September 11 – November 1, 2015
City Garage continues its tradition of ribald, contemporary versions of Molière’s classic comedies with a new take on his masterpiece about religious hypocrisy, Tartuffe.
Welcome to the glitzy, gaudy Beverly Hills mansion of the delightfully deluded businessman Orgon Pernelle. He rescues a homeless hustler from the street who pretends to be a pious preacher, but his family sees what he doesn’t see: a masterly con-man. His trophy wife, his rebellious, spoiled children, and his naughty maid all want the cunning pervert to be thrown out. Step by step, the imposter Tartuffe seduces his victim until the man is ready to sign over everything he owns to him—all in the name of purifying himself spiritually! Will Tartuffe get away with it or will the family expose his evil scheme?
Fourth Sunday Q&A:
After the Sunday, October 4 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of City Garage’s Tartuffe.
September 11, 2015—November 1, 2015
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Santa Monica Arts Commission; and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
“The Break of Noon” by Neil LaBute
“[A] smart and striking staging, and from the talents of an astute and talented ensemble…” LA WEEKLY
April 3 – May 17, 2015
Cast: Courtney Clonch, Kristina Drager, Nicole Gerth, Kat Johnston, Katrina Nelson, Alex Pike, George Villas
What if God told you to be a better person but the world wouldn’t allow it?
Such is the dilemma facing Joe Smith, a run-of-the-mill white-collar businessman who survives an office shooting and is subsequently touched by what he believes to be a divine vision. His journey toward personal enlightenment—past greed and lust and the other deadly sins—is, by turns, tense, hilarious, profane, and heartbreaking. Break of Noon explores the narrow path to spiritual fulfillment and how strewn it is with the funny, frantic failings of humankind, while in the process showcasing Neil LaBute at his discomfiting best.“There is no playwright on the planet these days who is writing better than Neil LaBute.” —John Lahr, The New Yorker
“The bad boy of American theater….Dangerous and devastatingly funny.” —Jumana Farouky, Time
Nudity, adult situations.
Fourth Sunday Q&A:
After the Sunday, April 26 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the director, producer, and cast of Break of Noon.
LA Weekly
“[A] smart and striking staging, and from the talents of an astute and talented ensemble, with George Villas rendering a terrific performance in the lead role….The [performers]deliver many incisive moments, especially Kristina Drager as the liberated ex-spouse who wants nothing more to do with John and Kat Johnson as his mercenary attorney. Courtney Clonch is also spot on as the smirking TV host who ridicules John on air…In the end, the production turns on Villas’ performance. Wild-eyed and weirded out, his storytelling mesmerizes. You’re right there with him as he discovers the body of a young assistant by the copy machine, her throat slit, and later, on the edge of your seat as the killer ominously approaches, gun in hand, with John having nowhere to run.”
Deborah Klugman, LA Weekly
KCRW
“Neil LaBute is a playwright who likes to get under your skin. Love him or hate him, he’s going to push your buttons, challenge your assumptions. City Garage is tackling his 2011 play The Break of Noon and it’s no exception.”
Anthony Byrnes, KCRW
LA TIMES
In the aftermath of a mass shooting, the sole survivor narrating Neil LaBute’s “The Break of Noon” at City Garage resolves to mend his selfish ways, attributing his escape to divine intervention…Naturally, there’s another shoe to drop — it’s a LaBute play — and Villas’ excellent performance systematically exposes the cracks in Smith’s professed redemption. Bad habits reemerge in his serial encounters with a sleazy lawyer (Kat Johnston), his skeptical ex-wife (Kristina Drager), his tacky mistress (Katrina Nelson), a cynical talk show host (Courtney Clonch), a shooting victim’s daughter (Nicole Gerth) and a suspicious cop (Alex Pike) whose interrogation gives new meaning to “getting in your face” thanks to inventive video projections by Anthony M. Sannazaro….The ensemble provides impressively detailed characterizations…Director Frédérique Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe attempt a bit of redemption of their own with a stylish visual deconstruction that amplifies the script’s artifice: During the successive encounters, the “on-deck” character perches motionless off to the side.”
Phillip Brandes, Los Angeles Times
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Santa Monica Arts Commission; and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
“Timepiece” by Charles A. Duncombe
January 23 – March 1, 2015
Cast: Renee Ulloa-McDonald, Anthony Sannazaro, Bo Roberts, Katrina Nelson, Nili Rain Segal, Megan Kim, Johanny Paulino, Jeffrey Gardner
A Betty thought she had all the time in the world to fall in love. Bob wishes she would love him. Bernice is afraid to go home, and Burt is just plain angry at everything.
What happens if someone unexpectedly tells you that you are running out of time and exactly how much you have left? What does it mean—for her and the others?
Bob wants to help but the rest of them just argue. Bebe wanders in to announce that time has no meaning. Billie emerges from a refrigerator with ideas of her own. Finally, Superman holds them all hostage, demanding compassion at the point of a gun.
This witty new absurdist comedy by playwright Charles A. Duncombe helps us laugh at our ultimately silly and illogical view of love, life, and death.
Fourth Sunday Q&A:
After the Sunday, February 15 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of Timepiece.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Santa Monica Arts Commission; and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
“When the Rain Stops Falling” by Andrew Bovell
SPECIAL ENCORE PERFORMANCE ADDED! SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13 @ 8PM
“Vivid impressions linger from Frédérique Michel’s fierce staging… admirably uniform performances…” – LA TIMES
“Compelling theatre with an engaging plot… I highly recommend “When The Rain Stops Falling…” – SANTA MONICA DAILY PRESS
“A thought-provoking meditation on coping with the tragedies of life…” – LA WEEKLY
compelling theatre with an engaging plot<>LA WEEKLY
October 10 – November 23, 2014 and December 13, 2014
Cast: David E. Frank, George Villas, Courtney Clonch, Ann Bronston, Scarlett Bermingham, Karen Kalensky, Stephen Christopher Marshall, Andrew Loviska
A fish drops from the sky and a lonely middle-aged man is launched on a magical and emotional journey across four generations of family wrestling with the awful legacy of a secret buried deep in the past.
In this award-winning drama from Australian playwright Andrew Bovell, each of the characters is trapped in a longing they cannot bear. They reach toward each other, tentatively, uncertainly, but time after time fail to connect.
The tragic love story of a young Englishman, Gabriel, whose father has disappeared, and a young Australian girl from the Coorong, Gabrielle, is at the center of this haunting drama that reaches back to London in 1960 and reaches forward to Alice Springs in 2039—from a time when the world began to change, to a future in which environmental catastrophe is the harvest of that change.
Adult Themes.
Fourth Sunday Q&AAfter the Sunday, November 2 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creative staff of When the Rain Stops Falling.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
Crossed signals across generations in ‘When the Rain Stops Falling’
By Philip Brandes
When it comes to the heartbreaking silences between parents and children, Australian playwright Andrew Bovell observes that “having nothing to say is just another way of having so much to say that you dare not begin.”
In its handsomely staged L.A. premier at Santa Monica’s City Garage, Bovell’s “When the Rain Stops Falling” traces this legacy of estrangement through four generations, linking the recent past to a near-future environmental apocalypse.
The cycle begins in 1960s London, where the marital tensions of a seemingly ordinary couple (George Villas, Courtney Clonch) only hint at fissures that, 20 years later, will cause their son (Andrew Loviska) to seek a new life in Australia with an equally troubled local (Scarlett Bermingham).
In 2013, the fallout from their ill-fated marriage drives away their own son (David E. Frank), despite his affection for a well-meaning stepfather (Stephen Christopher Marshall). Only in 2039, under the shadow of global extinction, does the playwright allow a chance to break the cycle.
Keeping the timelines straight is particularly challenging due to the overlapping presence of characters from the differing timelines, with older versions of the women played by Ann Bronston and Karen Kalensky sharing the stage with their younger selves.
There’s no sugarcoating the relentlessly downbeat mood here. Vivid impressions linger from Frédérique Michel’s fierce staging, which underscores the play’s austere geometric narrative structure with underplayed, admirably uniform performances and abstract choreography; the pent-up emotional floodgates open only in carefully controlled doses.
Charles A. Duncombe’s black and red production design and Anthony Sanazzaro’s rain-swept video projections create a stunning visual tableau that takes some of the sting out of the end of the world.
There’s Lots of Precipitation and Fish Soup in City Garage’s When the Rain Stops Falling
By Mayank Keshaviah
Known for its avant-garde and absurdist fare, City Garage takes a turn for the slightly more naturalistic with its current offering, When the Rain Stops Falling, from Australian playwright and screenwriter Andrew Bovell. But only slightly. Bovell’s widely produced award-winning play skips back and forth in time, providing familial filaments in two-character scenes that are eventually woven into a multi-generational saga of fathers and sons, loss and longing, secrets and regrets.
Gabriel Law (Andrew Loviska), who is tired of his mum Elizabeth’s (Ann Bronston) fish soup and the off-white walls of her small London flat in 1988, sets out for Australia to trace the steps of his long-missing father Henry (George Villas). There, on the Coorong, he becomes involved with local girl Gabrielle York (Scarlett Bermingham). Though their affair remains brief, the ripples of it travel backward and forward through scenes involving Henry and younger Elizabeth (Courtney Clonch) in 1960s London, older Gabrielle (Karen Kalensky) and her husband Joe (Stephen Christopher Marshall) in Adelaide in 2013, and Gabriel York (son of Gabriel Law and Gabrielle York, played by David E. Frank) and his own estranged son Andrew (Loviska) in Alice Springs in 2039. Present throughout these interactions are the nonstop rain and fish soup, as well as echoed lines and metaphors.
Director Frédérique Michel’s placement of non-speaking characters silently observing or otherwise paralleling younger or older versions of themselves is evocative. Equally appealing is her employ of colorful props and a score consisting of aboriginal chant in the balletic interstitials. Sound designer Paul Rubenstein’s steady downpour and Anthony Sanarazzo’s video design provide the perpetually drizzly ambience of the scenes, offsetting the relatively sparse set.
Among the capable cast, Villas showcases range (especially when compared to his character in this summer’s The Conduct of Life), Bermingham has a feistiness that is mirrored by Kalensky’s vivacity and ferocity (as the older version of the same character), and Frank exudes a melancholy, quiet, self-awareness that carries the weight of the family’s dark deeds across the years.
From a fish magically dropping from the sky at the outset to the literal unpacking of family history at an intergenerational “last supper” of sorts, the play rewards those with a temperament for non-linear storytelling (and the stamina for two hours sans intermission) with a thought-provoking meditation on coping with the tragedies of life.
Fish from the sky
Fish From the Sky
By Sarah Spitz
CULTURE WATCH — A fish falls from the sky and a story told across multiple generations begins. “When The Rain Stops Falling” is the latest offering by City Garage, written by award-winning Australian playwright Andrew Bovell. It’s compelling theatre with an engaging plot and not a typical City Garage production.
City Garage often features experimental, non-linear, stylized stage productions frequently including nudity (though not gratuitously).
Not so this time. Relatively speaking this is a more conventional drama, albeit punctuated with the trademark artistic, choreographic and theatrical design elements that City Garage is renowned for, especially under the direction of Frédérique Michel. Stark contrasting colors, multi-level platforms and synchronized movements mark this work.
Be prepared: the play runs just under two hours and there’s no intermission. Plus there’s the constant sound of rain and water. But I can’t think of a single place in the play that would lend itself to a break. So just sit back and let it wash over you.
We meet 50-year-old Gabriel in Alice Springs, Australia in 2039, where he has just caught a fish that dropped out of the sky. An environmental disaster is unfolding globally and it has been raining relentlessly for years in the driest heart of this remote continent.
Gabriel has received word that his son, Andrew, wants to visit; they have not had contact for years and he has nothing to make for lunch … until the fish arrives. He knows instinctively that Andrew is seeking to find himself and understand where he came from. The visit will send Gabriel into nervous action trying to make a good impression, cleaning up his tiny flat, painting it, and fussing in a way that will have very little impact on its appearance.
This theme is repeated in other settings and times. Rain, soup and fish are some of the other constants throughout this time-tripping plot, in which we follow past, present and future iterations of Gabriel and his family. Hidden emotions, silent bitterness, fear and distrust, deep love, deep hurt and dark secrets mark this emotional journey, told in language that is often poetic and a bit incantatory, repeated verbatim from scene to scene.
Scenes unfold in 1960s and 1980s London, 2013 Adelaide, Australia and 2039 Alice Springs, near legendary Ayers Rock. Projected on a screen behind the actors are changing images of rain against a window, lapping tidal waves, a lightning-streaked starry sky that time-lapses across the night, and other scenes that establish geographical locations.
We meet Henry Law and his wife Elizabeth in 1960s London, where Elizabeth is feeling emotionally and sexually frustrated. The play’s great secret lies in Henry’s other longings.
When we next meet Elizabeth, it’s 28 years later and her son Gabriel is visiting, still trying to find out why she drinks to get through her life. Gabriel tells her he is leaving to go to Australia, where his father disappeared mysteriously after his secret was revealed. Gabriel wants to know what happened to him.
Along the southern shore of Australia, Gabriel, now 28, meets Gabrielle, aged 24, at a roadside diner and is smitten. She’s taken with him, too, but is far more cynical about the way things turn out in real life. She lost her parents early; and when they were children, her brother was kidnapped and never seen again.
Gabriel insists on journeying to Ayers Rock where his father disappeared, and while driving there with Gabrielle another dark secret is revealed.
Next in 2013, we meet Gabrielle at 50 with Joe Ryan, her husband and stepfather to her son, Gabriel, the result of her encounter with the other Gabriel.
The thread of the plot weaves in and out of these scenes and others, building to a surprising twist which I won’t reveal, but it’s not saying too much to tell you that Gabriel dies in an accident with Gabrielle carrying his child.
That child is 50-year-old Gabriel, and we will return to his flat in Alice Springs, and the anxiously anticipated visit from his estranged son, Andrew. As familial patterns repeat through time, we are finally brought full circle and left vaguely hopeful, as the rain does stop at the end, perhaps bringing these disruptive cycles to a close.
I highly recommend “When The Rain Stops Falling” at City Garage, located at the westernmost end of Bergamot Station, onstage Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. through Nov. 23. Call (310) 453-9939 or visit www.citygarage.org.