July 11 – August 17, 2014
Cast: George Villas, Kristina Drager, Nicole Gerth, Nili Rain Segal, Johanny Paulino
City Garage presents nine-time Obie-winner Maria Irene Fornes’s chilling tale of torture and love.
Orlando, an angry young military officer, bitter about his low rank, blames his misfortunes on his uncontrollable sex drive and his marriage to Leticia, his uneducated wife. Determined to rise within the regime of an unnamed Latin American country, he becomes addicted to the dirty work of torture and interrogation. He abducts a homeless young girl who he hides in the basement and repeatedly abuses sexually to satisfy his self-destructive appetites. Incapable of expressing love, he becomes a monster, both in his public and private life, psychologically punishing the woman who loves him.
The play is a fragmentary and frightening examination of the complex way power is exchanged between torturer and victim.
Adult Themes.
Fourth Sunday Q&AAfter the Sunday, August 3 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creative staff of The Conduct of Life.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
“Bulgakov-Moliere” by Charles A. Duncombe
“RECOMMENDED” – Stage Raw
April 4 – June 1, 2014
Cast: Nathan Dana Aldrich, David E. Frank, Andy Fitzgerald, Jeffrey Gardner, RJ Jones, Kat Johnston, Megan Kim, Jordan Kurztman, Jeremy Lelliot, Alex Pike, Bo Roberts, Nili Rain Segal, Renee Ulloa-McDonald, George Villas
Over the course of a mysterious, hallucinatory night, the Devil and his entourage pay a midnight visit to Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov, whose recent work Molière has just been shut down by the authorities. By magic, these characters, having escaped from Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, transform themselves and perform the play, transposing the playwright’s 1930s attack on censorship and hypocrisy in Stalin’s Soviet Union to the America of today: a government paralyzed by vicious partisanship and a society obsessed with celebrity. Is the Artist a revolutionary and provocateur or does the machinery of mass culture co-opt every act, even the act of subversion itself?
Fourth Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, April 27 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of Bulgakov/Molière.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
By Lovell Estell III, April 8, 2014
RECOMMENDED / TOP TEN
Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1929 play about Molière’s post-Tartuffe miseries gets a splendid reworking by playwright Charles Duncombe and director Frederique Michel. The play’s real purpose was to protest the mindless censorship and plight of artists in Stalin’s Russia, and in Duncombe’s clever rendering, it becomes a gravid means of satirizing and mirroring our similarly fraught cultural and political milieu.
We first see a despairing Bulgakov (David E. Frank) in quarters with his lover and secretary Elena (Nili Rain Segal), who is typing a letter Bulgakov will send to the Red Czar, while he feverishly rants about his persecution by the authorities and press (“I’ve had 301 reviews, three are positive”) and soothes his angst with liberal measures of Cognac. After passing out, he is visited by five ghostly characters from his novel The Master and Margarita, who transport him to a dream-world where he takes his seat in an opera box (a slick component of Duncombe’s utilitarian set design), and sees his play performed onstage. It’s a humorous packaging of backstage drama and political satire, where we encounter the puffy, self-obsessed Molière (the outstanding George Villas), and the equally puffy, ultra dandified, P.R.- conscious King Louis XIV (Alex Pike, also excellent), whose bloated sense of majestic eminence – and ineptitude — provide many laughs. Forced to kowtow in order to survive, Molière becomes successful, but his growing popularity is seen as a threat to “good, simple virtue” by religious zealots led by the enigmatic Professor Woland (Nathan Dana Aldrich), whose devilish machinations set in motion the playwright’s undoing.
For Bulgakov, all this works out as a blessing, as he returns home with a renewed backbone, to write his novel with Elena at his side. Duncombe has stitched a lot of thematic motifs about the ills of our times into this epic saga (nearly three hours), but it’s a shrewd piece of writing that’s irresistibly stimulating and funny. Equal credit goes to a superlative ensemble and to the director, Michel, for bold, imaginative direction. Josephine Poinsot also deserves praise for her attractive assemblage of costumes.
City Garage’s Bulgakov/Molière Connects Two Famous Satirists
By Jenny Lower, April 18, 2014
In the late 1920s, when Mikhail Bulgakov debuted Molière, or The Cabal of Hypocrites, his theatrical account of the French playwright’s post-Tartuffe troubles, the Russian provocateur depended on audiences to recognize their own oppression under Stalin’s regime in the 17th century satirist’s struggle against religious hypocrisy and absolutism. Apparently, they did.
The production was banned after only seven performances, and Bulgakov himself finally sent a missive to Stalin appealing for freedom to continue his artistic work – a career that would culminate in his fantastical anti-Soviet masterpiece, The Master and Margarita – or go abroad. Stalin extended his protection, and the author continued in his homeland before eventually dying of kidney disease.
City Garage’s world premiere Bulgakov/Molière, playwright and producer Charles A. Duncombe’s work about this series of events, demands similar leaps of its audience, using the lens of 1930s Russia and France under Louis XIV to refract America’s religious right, the tyrannies of public opinion and political correctness and even non-profit arts management.
The Frédérique Michel-directed play opens on Bulgakov (David E. Frank) dictating the infamous letter and admitting that he has thrown the Master and Margarita manuscript into the stove. That night, the denizens of his aborted novel visit Bulgakov for an unearthly staging of Molière, while the playwright retreats to watch the proceedings from a private box and argue with the players over the role of the artist.
Packed with contemporary, literary and historic allusions and running nearly three hours, this show isn’t for the faint of heart. I found myself wishing that the large ensemble’s weaker players possessed the acting chops and precise physicality to consistently deliver on Michel’s ambitious vision.
But the show is whip smart and blessed with sumptuous production design, a wicked sense of humor and excellent principal players. As Molière, George Villas captures the artist intent on lampooning buffoons who’s here rendered both ridiculous and tragic by his passion for a young woman who (gulp) might also be his daughter.
Alex Pike’s Louis XIV provides brilliant comic relief as a divine monarch beset by low polling numbers and right-wing radio pundits. Nathan Dana Aldrich’s Professor Woland, the Mephistophelean Master in Bulgakov’s tome, doubles as a disturbing minister-cum-interrogator.
“Moskva” by Steven Leigh Morris
October 18 – December 15, 2013
Cast: Nathan Dana Aldrich, Steven Amendola, Ben Bandel, Jonathan Bargiel, Barret Crane, Justin Davanzo, Kristina Drager, Erol Dolen, David E. Frank, Jeffrey Gardner, Kat Johnston, Megan Kim, Jordan Kurtzman
Moskva is a comic, macabre fantasy, based on the Russian masterpiece The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
On a hot spring afternoon, the Devil and his entourage, trailing fire and chaos in their wake, emerge from the shadows of the underworld and weave themselves into the absurd and brutal realities of today’s Moscow. They encounter lovers, mafia king-pins, drug-dealers, hit-men, a crippled novelist, Pontius Pilate, Christ, and various bewildered apparatchiks of Putin’s Russia.
Moskva is a contemporary, historical, and musical carnival, an homage to Bulgakov and to people everywhere struggling against the unjust and lunatic incursions of their governments.
Fourth Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, November 10 matinee, we will host a special discussion with playwright Steven Leigh Morris and noted historian of Stalinist Russia Professor Arch Getty from UCLA.
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.
What the critics have been saying:
“City Garage reaches for the stars and dazzles visually and theatrically…”
-Sarah Spitz, Santa Monica Daily Press
“A signal accomplishment…”
-Myron Meisel, The Hollywood Reporter
“nobly ambitious… a fearless cast…”
-David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times
“Opheliamachine” by Magda Romanska
June 14 – July 28, 2013
Cast: Joss Glennie Smith, Leah Harf, Kat Johnston, RJ Jones, Megan Kim, Cynthia Mance, Saffron Mazzia
This smart, ruthlessly funny play, tracks Ophelia’s impossible journey to bridge that vast space. It is a postmodern tale of love, sex, porn, and politics in the fragmented world of our confused emotions and our modern, global, virtual sexuality.
“Opheliamachine embodies a profound understanding of drama, the poetic nature of the stage and the politics of aesthetics. Opheliamachine is a gorgeous new creation.” – Anne Bogart, Director
Third Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, June 30 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of Opheliamachine.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
LA WEEKLY – GO!
By Lovell Estell III
“I expel all the semen which I have received. I transform the milk of my breasts into deadly poison.” Lifted from Heiner Müller’s eternally confounding Hamletmachine, the words are a fitting part of the opening tableau of Polish playwright Magda Romanska’s similarly themed postmodernist drama, now in its world premiere at City Garage.
Seated behind an old typewriter on a stage that’s segmented into halves, Ophelia is realized as something of a triadic entity — brain/narrator, terrorist and madwoman (Kat Johnston, Megan Kim, Saffron Mazzia), while Hamlet (Joss Glennie Smith), situated in the other half of the stage, mostly watches television.
Romanska uses this framework for a vigorous deconstruction of the feminine psyche, image and gender roles, and her script — heavy laden with dense imagery and symbolism — explores love, sex, violence, politics, class sensibilities, feminist aesthetics, the vacuities of mass culture and the timeless mystery of death. This is theater that’s not easily accessible and is devilishly bleak at times, but it’s not without shards of humor, and is relentlessly provocative and challenging under imaginative direction by Frédérique Michel. The production is nicely embellished with a collage of visuals projected on a huge screen and two monitors. Cynthia Mance, RJ Jones and Leah Harf round out the cast.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Opheliamachine an uncompromising vision at City Garage
By Philip Brandes
In her own fashionably postmodern fashion, the title character in the visually stylish “Opheliamachine” at Santa Monica’s City Garage is a tragic figure, though she bears only slight textual ties to Shakespeare’s original archetype.
Instead, Magda Romanska’s fiercely confrontational new play is more directly a response to German avant-garde theater director Heiner Müller’s notorious 1977 deconstruction, “Hamletmachine” (also staged by City Garage, in 1996).
Müller’s play had transformed Ophelia from victim to Electra-fied avenger, but Romanska, not satisfied with its persistent patriarchal baggage, focuses on gender relations and the struggle to liberate feminine identity from its cultural and political determinants. A writer seated at a typewriter, this Ophelia (Kat Johnston), creates her own story through stream-of-consciousness monologues as densely associative and enigmatic as Müller’s, while Hamlet (Joss Glennie-Smith) sits on the sidelines enslaved to TV programming.
Director Frederique Michel launches her staging with Ophelia’s enraged final speech from Müller’s play, neatly bridging the two productions and establishing specificity when Romanska’s Ophelia announces her determination not to identify with the past.
Easier said than done amid contemporary media-driven conformist pressures (smartly expressed in Charles A. Duncombe’s video-saturated production design). Further emphasizing Ophelia’s struggle, Michel employs her “Hamletmachine” device in representing a protagonist’s fractured psyche with multiple actors (Johnston, Megan Kim, Saffron Mazzia, Leah Harf).
Though Ophelia’s quest for self-determination teeters on the brink of inevitable annihilation, compared with perpetually servile Horatio (RJ Jones) or shopaholic Gertrude (Cynthia Mance) she “fails better” (in Samuel Beckett’s sense). With few traditional theater points of reference to navigate by, her uncompromising journey is not for the intellectually incurious.
Difficult comedy of ideas and ideologies honestly stimulates with its perceptiveness, the academic heaviness leavened by a welcomely light-handed production.
By Myron Meisel
Hamlet’s scorned ingenue has long been a potent symbol for feminist theory and enlightened examination of the quandaries of young women, and if the otherwise contemplative Dane callously gave her no mind, the prototypical good girl as victim certainly continues to speak, in contradictory and bedeviling ways, to the experiences of many women in society.
In this world premiere play at City Garage in Santa Monica, Magda Romanska consciously concocts both an homage to and critique of a landmark theatrical composition, 1979’s Hamletmachine by Heiner Müller, the successor to Brecht as both director of the Berliner Ensemble and groundbreaking German experimental playwright. (It’s not so terribly different from Kitty Wells singing It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels as an answer song to Hank Thompson’s The Wild Side of Life.)
Since City Garage has been conscientious over its two decades in presenting Müller’s work locally, it’s appropriate that it should mount Romanska’s fiercely meditative mirror, which quotes excerpts from Hamletmachine at the beginning and the end in both deference and defiance.
The split nature of Ophelia takes form as three actors playing differing aspects of her character. “The Brain” (Kat Johnson) sits at a now-antique typewriter reeling off screeds that ricochet through several successive schools of feminist thought. “The Terrorist” (Megan Kim) enacts violent fantasies of retaliation and revenge against an androcentric society (she kills Horatio (RJ Jones) by smashing his head in with her combat boot). And “The Mad” (Saffron Mazzia) is a timorous prospective bride with so little self-esteem as to be highly impressionable. Hamlet (Joss Glennie-Smith) reduces himself to a bit player with his compulsive absorption in media and pop culture.
If the modern take on Hamlet is that his consciousness inhibits his ability to act, then the ironies of Opheliamachine posit that radical analysis can be the enemy of effective political action, or put another way, that gender awareness is no refuge from the truism that each of us must reckon ourselves as our own most implacable adversary.
Romanska covers a lot of ground as her characters spew erudite invective critiquing the omnipresent oppression of a sexist hierarchy: though less than an hour in length, this is sometimes a crushingly dense exegesis of a half-century of women’s studies and post-modern literary theory. Romanska is a well-versed academic and accomplished dramaturg, and she heeds the cherished advice to write about what she knows. Thankfully, she has a vision comprehensive enough to relish irony and pose deeper questions than mere indictment.
If the world might be viewed more rewardingly without the arbitrary distinctions between the sexes, those prejudices must be confronted if any substantive change is to be accomplished in the world as it is. Romanska dramatizes the wisdom that confrontation comprises only the first essential steps.
House director Frédérique Micheland and her collaborator, producer-designer Charles A. Dumcombe, are well within their element with this potentially intractable material. They bring to bear some of the stage strategies that distinguish their interpretations of Ionesco: capable of underlining emphasis with a graceful hand, sharing with their actors a complete dedication to the singularity of the text and never condescending to simplifying complexity.
This funny yet brutal play needs the inventive mise-en-scene to support its fecundity of ideas amidst the tumult of its conflicting impulses. And don’t be afraid: It is OK, even purgative, to laugh.
Forging Meaning
This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.
Remember the last time you learned another language?
Think about everything that’s necessary to communicate in another’s tongue. You’ve got to have a series of symbols that remain fairly constant. You have to not only learn those symbols but you have to repeat them, re-experience them until they take on deeper personal meaning. And, perhaps most importantly, a community to speak with — so the act of tedious repetition can give way to the poetry of language.
To appreciate City Garage’s world-premiere production of Opheliamachine, it helps to place the project into the larger context of the companies work – to appreciate the theatrical language being created.
Okay, I can hear some of you grumbling – what does all this semiotic mumbo jumbo have to do with theater?
Well take just the title of the show — Opheliamachine. You might think — oh, those are just pretty sounds. Or you might jump to Shakespeare and Hamlet’s tragic love. Or you might get the reference to Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine, a sort of nine-page post-modern proving ground for ambitious avante-garde
The play itself, written by Magda Romanska, is a series of scenes that explore the themes of feminity, power, sex, rage, love, and madness through a faceted portrayal of Ophelia. Our title character is split in three: we have Ophelia the Brain — typing away at a vintage typewriter complete with bell; Ophelia the terrorist clad in black fatigues with a .45 tucked into her bare midriff; and finally Ophelia the Mad confined to a wedding dress and, at times, a wheelchair.
Now, if you’re familiar with director Frederique Michel’s work, you’ll recognize a certain perfection to the world-premiere of Opheliamachine happening at City Garage.
If you’ve never been – here’s what you are almost guaranteed to see at any of their productions: deep blue light, a minimal platform set, bare breasts — both male and female, the color red echoed in scarves, costumes, lipstick. You get the idea.
Now what you make of either Opheliamachine or really City Garage depends on whether you buy into the larger project. A fair criticism would be ‘it all looks the same’ which I’d argue is part of the point. Director Frederique Michel and Producer Charles A. Duncombe are creating a dramatic language and like any language that requires repetition – consistency. If you are willing to do the work the experience becomes larger than a single play: a crazed Ophelia in a red wheelchair evokes their production of Sara Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Plays begin talking to each other – personal connections begin to emerge.
If you’re looking for a play or a company that ties everything into neat little knots – this probably isn’t for you. If you’re willing to tackle a play as much as experience it – you won’t be disappointed you spent 60 minutes in their world.
Opheliamachine plays at City Garage in Santa Monica through July 28.
This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.
“Caged” by Charles A. Duncombe
February 15, 2013—April 21, 2013
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Cast: Nathan Dana Aldrich, Justin Davanzo, Erol Dolen, Kristina Drager, David E. Frank, Leah Harf, R.J. Jones, Megan Kim, Katrina Nelson, Mariko Oka, Heather Pasternak
Two naked specimens in a cage. Visitors come and go, fascinated by them, arguing and wondering about these creatures.
Fourth Sunday Q&A
After the Sunday, March 10 matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creators of Caged.
Nudity. Adult Themes.
This project is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Wells Fargo Foundation.
LA WEEKLY — Pick of the Week!
Charles A. Duncombe’s new play Caged at Santa Monica’s City Garage is a rumination on the oddities of our species via the exhibition of two naked souls in a museum cage. It’s also this week’s Pick of the Week.
Not long ago, people regarded as exotic or subhuman were tossed into cages for the viewing pleasure of the American public. Such was the dreadful fate of Congo pygmy Ota Benga, who was displayed with monkeys at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. In Charles Duncombe’s world-premiere drama, Caged, Megan Kim and R.J. Jones are naked, snatched-from-the-jungle “noble savages,” who, confined in a cage stocked with toys, convincingly channel primitive angst, lethargically striding about, communicating and reacting with grunts and violent upsurges and hitting each other playfully. Extended commentary about the exhibit is provided by a keeper (Katrina Nelson) and an interviewer (Leah Harf), whose theories and statements of facts are a bladed mix of the outrageously comical and idiotic. But it’s the cavalcade of spectators and their assorted hang-ups that provide the wallop of humor and irony here: a boy with his parents wanting to see tricks; a man meeting another man for a blow job; several couples in distress, mirroring the plight of the captives; a lonely woman seeking affection; an elderly woman with a huge ax to grind. The contrasts and the heavy-handed subtext are striking — and unsettling. Though not overly dramatic, Duncombe’s smartly written script is delightfully provocative and insightful. Performances are sharply calibrated under Frederique Michel’s direction. (Lovell Estell III)
BACKSTAGE
‘Caged’ Reveals Much About the World We Live In
Critic’s Score: B+: The study of a species is fascinating: finding two prime specimens, observing habits and rituals, noting behavioral changes in captivity, determining the creatures’ biological needs and motivations, and taking stabs at understanding their psychological motivations and emotions. Look! They’re just like us! Charles A. Duncombe’s “Caged” is itself a fascinating study, full of sharp, funny, and touching observations about the human species, in all its variations. It’s a smart outing that’s wonderfully presented but in some respects feels more like a theatrical exercise—although a pretty gratifying one—than a compelling dramatic exploration.
We find ourselves in a zoolike institution where visitors enter and gaze at two naked, caged creatures that look remarkably human (Megan Kim and RJ Jones). On Duncombe’s simple but effective set, the audience is on the same side of the bars as the male and female on display. Naturally. We learn from the Keeper (Katrina Nelson) during a documentary-style interview (conducted by Leah Harf) that this is a particularly psychologically complex species, with disturbing behavior patterns that make its members unlike other animals; in the wild, they fall into elaborate hierarchies and actually prey on one another, exhibiting fierce cruelty and extreme violence. Indeed.
The Keeper’s detached commentary is often brilliant and hilarious. Duncombe nails his targets, whether zeroing in on male versus female bonding activities, the difference between the sexes when presented with mirrors and their own reflections, or the inexplicable attraction to religion. Director Frédérique Michel handles the material beautifully, placing Nelson and Harf on opposite sides of the playing area; we see them above one another on video screens, which adds to Nelson and Harf’s suitably distanced delivery.
But what’s even more interesting is watching and listening to the visitors, who are outside of the cage yet surely see projections of themselves within it. They come and go, the dialogue sparkles, and Michel moves the action along seamlessly between interview segments as we observe illicit lovers (Heather Pasternak and Nathan Dana Aldrich), lonely strangers (Kristina Drager and Justin Davanzo), stupid guys (David E. Frank and Erol Dolen), an unhappy older woman (Mariko Oka), and more. All seven actors playing the visitors inhabit multiple roles with ease.
Stylish design details, including Josephine Poinsot’s crisp costumes, work nicely. Duncombe’s lighting showcases the nuanced performances of Kim and Jones superbly.
As “Caged” progresses, we’re pleasantly surprised by many of the conversations and clever interactions, which reveal so much about the world we live in and the people with whom we share it. But what we don’t quite get is that world significantly shaken up or threatened. It’s all pretty safe, even when the animals prove that they are dangerous, and the play’s reach expands in its final moments. (Jennie Webb)
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Two nude actors explore emotion and entrapment at Santa Monica’s City Garage.
Males and females commonly misunderstand one another by interpreting the motives of the other in terms of their own perceptions, certain their view is rational and true because it follows from their assumptions. Science in its own way strives for objectivity, although it, too, is circumscribed by incomplete data and unconscious bias. This new play by City Garage co-founder Charles A. Duncombe in a delicately intricate production explores the kaleidoscopic variations of the push-pull of relationships, remarkably similar whether “primitive” or “civilized.”
It often seems that people who choose to live in gated communities may believe that they are keeping everyone else out when in fact they are confining themselves within. Similarly, the world of Caged presents an inside-out conceit of people gawking at creatures imprisoned in a zoo-like environment who are actually themselves surrounded by the bars of the cages, whilst the naked human specimens (Megan Kim and RJ Jones) wander warily around them in the space outside the bars. Elevated on either far side of the stage sit a scientific researcher (Katrina Nelson) and an interviewer (Leah Harf). Their images appear simultaneously on video monitors above the other, discussing the strange and only partially comprehensible behavior of these wild beasts in captivity.
This effect of multiple vantages of observation and reaction, projection and analysis creates a multidimensional examination of the mating habits of Homo sapiens as both animal and human, “free” and “subjugated,” instinctive and rational. Duncombe’s ultimate point is that while all opinions and emotions expressed have a valid basis from some realistic perspective, the irony flows from the incomplete understanding we have of the limitations of every point of view. We believe most intently that which we project on what we see. Caged would be satire if only it weren’t so inescapably sad.
Duncombe’s observations are often routine and relatively obvious, which allows them to feel accessibly true if not profound. The richness of this show derives not from the text as touchstone but rather the elaboration of the metaphors through evocative design, lighting and orchestrated movement. Director Frederique Michel luxuriantly masters this congenial new space, wrangling the different levels of action subtly with an insinuating tactile sense. The lighting withholds as much as it illuminates, and quick passing character sketches of the visitors who encounter the human animals, while generically conventional, are most gratifying for their rhythmic sense of play with the piece’s ideas. While those ideas can be thin, they are fecund, and Duncombe and Michel spin so many layers with all those wisps of insight that the textured whole becomes piquantly allusive, even haunting.
Kim and Jones spend the duration nude, suggesting an earlier embodiment of natural human animals now entrapped by a civilization of which they appear to know nothing (a mistaken assumption, as Duncombe reveals). Inappropriate tattoos aside, they make their symbolic creatures concretely human as they uneasily prowl, play and court. Nelson once again exerts a magnetic intensity despite her buttoned-down role, and it is one of the continuing pleasures of City Garage, as with many established local companies, to see the progressive development of individual actors over many roles over time: here, for one example, the invariably interesting Mariko Oka makes original, distinctive creations of five small parts. (Myron Meisel)
The Bald Soprano: A Christmas Anti-Play
November 1, 2012—December 23, 2012
Produced by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Mitchell Colley, David E. Frank, Lena Kay, Cynthia Mance, Bo Roberts, Kenneth Rudnicki
matinee, please join us for an informal discussion with the cast and creative staff behind The Bald Soprano.
PICK OF THE WEEK GO – LA Weekly: Even after 60 years and counting, Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist farce is still one of France’s most popular and frequently produced plays. And as director Frédérique Michel demonstrates in this steadfastly enjoyable revival, it’s still good for a load of laughs. The opening tableau reveals a middle-aged Parisian couple, the Smiths (Jeff Atik, David E. Frank in drag, skillfully blending impertinence and camp), relaxing at home. She decorates the Christmas tree and discusses banal details about dinner, while he responds with outbursts of guttural gibberish from behind a newspaper. Things turn even more bizarre with the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Martin (Bo Roberts, Cynthia Mance) — who initially don’t seem to even know each other — and a loquacious Fire Chief (Mitchell Colley). The evening gradually segues into a frenetic outbreak of meaningless chatter, jarring non sequiturs, grade-school storytelling and oddball silliness, all of which Michel and her cast (which includes Lena Kay as a ditzy maid) serve up with impeccable comedic skill and élan. Ionesco satirizes middle-class manners and banality, and at the same time constructs a dramatic environment where logic, language and reality are wittily disassociated, and therein is the fun and laughs in the piece. Cast performances under Michel’s direction are first-rate. (Lovell Estell III)
Critic’s Score: A – Backstage: Just in time for the banal bantering, household hopping, and gourmet gorging about to fill our holiday platters, City Garage gives us a remounting of its 2007 production of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic “The Bald Soprano,” newly subtitled as “A Christmas Anti-Play.” The setting has been relocated to the suburbs of Paris in a new translation by Frédérique Michel and Charles A. Duncombe. Presented with an oddball reverence and dripping with mid-20th-century style, the production is a real treat.
Directed by Michel, “The Bald Soprano” opens with a scene of stunningly skewed retro domesticity on Duncombe’s picture-perfect setting. David E. Frank is in hostess apparel as a suitably manic Mrs. Smith, trimming the tree and setting the world aright one nail-polish color at a time as the clock strikes 17, while Jeff Atik’s squat Mr. Smith, sporting an eye-catching leopard smoking jacket, is lost in his newspaper. (Meow for Josephine Poinsot’s spot-on costumes.) The couple’s oblique cat-and-mouse games soon take the form of inane, circular, loaded conversations, and the actors are more than up to the challenge.
When the Smith’s dinner guests finally arrive, the addition of the nervously cheerful Martins (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts) raises our expectations. We can’t wait to find out what’s really behind the awkward social moments, painful forced smiles, and desperate need to find some element of excitement in everyday life. But of course we never really do, despite the efforts of the acerbic maid Marie (Lena Kay) to set everyone straight and an unexpected diversion from the Fire Chief (Kenneth Rudnicki) during a most fortuitous visit.
This is only the second production in City Garage’s spiffy new performance space, and it’s wonderful to see this dependably outrageous company stretch out and get a bit more breathing room. Michel seems right at home, directing with a customarily sure hand and careful attention to detail, choreographing each movement and sound onstage. Duncombe’s lighting and Paul M Rubenstein’s sound add more polished layers.
Kudos to the solid company of performers, who are savvy enough to trust Michel and the material and get full mileage out of everything they collectively bring to the party. There’s a particularly hilarious moment involving a Santa hat. Especially if you’ve got a taste for the absurd, this is one of those holiday gatherings you won’t want to miss. (Jennie Webb)
**** (4-stars) – Total Theater: City Garage successfully revisits its 2007 production of The Bald Soprano, the famous absurdist comedy by Eugene Ionesco. City Garage’s French-born artistic director Frederique Michel is an Ionesco specialist, as this production proves yet again.Working from her own English translation/adaptation, Michel sets the story at Christmas time (hence the play’s new subtitle). On view are a Dali-esque Christmas tree, an upside down clock, and a parking meter, with Santa and the elves suspended overhead in a toy gondola. Otherwise, the living room of Mr & Mrs Smith looks perfectly normal, elegant and bourgeois (kudos to set designer Charles Duncombe).
Ionesco’s maniacal assault on all things suburban — language, logic and family — begins with Mrs. Smith, herself. Played in drag by David E. Frank, she babbles mindlessly about banal things, while Mr Smith (Jeff Atik) sits reading a business newspaper and mouthing non sequiturs in a largely incomprehensible tongue. Then a young couple, the Martins (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts), arrive and, after some desultory small talk, discover that they are married to each other.
Other bizarre characters include a cheeky and sexy French maid (Lena Kay) and a fire chief (Mitchel Colley, alternating with Kenneth Rudnicki). Their disconnected and ditzy dialogue is punctuated with the tolling of bells and clocks and the crowing of unseen roosters. The cast delivers Ionesco’s mad little play easily and stylishly (having served in Michel’s ensemble for many years, they know how to give the director exactly what she wants).
The Bald Sopranois fresh and funny this time around, but it left me wishing City Garage had put a second Ionesco play on the bill. (Willard Manus)
Orestes 3.0: Inferno
September 21 — November 25, 2012
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Cast: Justin Bardales, Mitchell Colley, Nathan Dana, Justin Davanzo, Erol Dolen, Megan Kim, Samantha Geraci-Yee, Leah Harf, Katrina Nelson, Mariko Oka, Johanny Paulino, Megan Penn, Daryl Keith Roach, Bo Roberts
A Visual Feast of the Greeks
By Charlotte Stoudt, Sept. 28, 2012
The House of Atreus looks good on leather. Leather couches that is — part of the seating at T1, the Bergamot Station Arts Center and new home of City Garage. The company’s inaugural production, the skin-flashing, free-associative “Orestes 3.0: Inferno” suits this funky black box space.
Playwright Charles L. Mee has made a career out of tweaking the Greeks, and this world premiere is a mash-up of two of his plays. Director Frédérique Michel’s visually striking result plays something like sampling: dynamic, but diffuse.
Orestes (an intense Johanny Paulino) faces trial for killing his mother, Clytemnestra. Helen of Troy (Katrina Nelson), the Kato Kaelin of the pageant, shows up in swimwear and platform sandals, while Electra (Megan Kim) anxiously twirls en pointe. Apollo hosts this media circus like a Valley dude in boardshorts, but he can’t match the mojo of Menelaus (Daryl Keith Roach), who delivers a rockin’ cover of the Bo Diddley salvo “I’m a Man.” (Justin Bardales performs the onstage music.)
Like Mee, Michel’s work tends to feel like an experiment rather than finished product. You admire her willingness to swing for the fences, even when the hits fall short. Did “Orestes 3.0” shed new light on Euripides’ dense and ancient text? Not really. But Michel stages one of the year’s most startling tableaux: A son tenderly covering his naked, beautiful and very dead mother. That image is worth Mee’s thousands of words.
Playwright Charles M. Lee takes on Euripides in this production by avant-garde company City Garage
By Myron Meisel, Oct. 1, 2012
The Bottom Line: Bold and vigorous reimagining of Euripides tragedy made trenchantly relevant to contemporary moral issues, enhanced by a striking, stylish and focused production.
Times are bad, life is tough, and things have gone horribly wrong. Who do we blame: the gods, someone (anyone) else — me? Do we share culpability? Does it matter? How do we respond to the dreadful actions of others, or of ourselves? How do we distinguish justice from self-justification, in others or in ourselves? What is to be done?
Such questions of undeniable pertinence to contemporary life and politics can trace their origins to the classical Greeks. Playwright Charles L. Mee (bobrauschenbergamerica, Big Love, The Berlin Circle) has previously wrought impressive adaptations from the Athenian theater (Agamemnon, Orestes 2.0) but he has surpassed himself in this world premiere created especially for Santa Monica’s premier avant-garde company, the City Garage, inaugurating their new and highly felicitous space at the Bergamont Art Complex.
Mee stays true to the original myth though he freely spins the narrative through a most contemporary sensibility. Agamemnon has returned from Troy to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to appease the gods of war. In turn, her children, Orestes (Johanny Paulino) and Electra (Megan Kim), have revenged their father by killing their mother and her lover. The city has turned upon them, and where Orestes would have been king, the only issue before the tribunal is whether they should be stoned, or their throats cut.
The action opens after the murders, the proceedings emceed by a most Dionysian Apollo (Erol Dolen, inspired and original in his creepiness), a feral satyr who takes great joy in toying with bloody human folly: after all, the gods may order the mortals to commit atrocities, but why need they obey? The playwright Sophocles is recruited for meditations on human responsibility. Menelaus (Daryl Keith Roach), King of Sparta and uncle to the accused, feels motivated by the kinship of blood to help, yet military weakness forces him to be pragmatic. Their grandfather, Tyndareus (Bo Roberts), sets aside familial bonds to be rigorously vindictive for the murder of his daughter. Orestes, remorseful but unrepentant, is goaded by his pal Pylades (Justin Davanzo) into terrorist hostage-taking as his only hope for salvation.
Everyone makes an articulate advocate for a different viewpoint, and Mee simultaneously makes each case and reveals its flaws, scrupulously avoiding judgment. The common thread is that we make principles out of our perceptions of self-interest, and above all, we preserve the capacity for denial that ensures we never recognize our own responsibility.
The most original of all the creations is Mee’s Helen (Katrina Nelson), modeled on familiar stereotypes of the Westside trophy wife yet executed with such perfect pitch she becomes unerringly fresh. Appalling, obtuse, self-absorbed yet oddly frank, even honest, Nelson’s brilliant turn conveys both acute irony and deep embodiment of character. She’s not merely a cliché, nor a pop culture reference. She’s a vivid axiom who cannot (and will not) be dismissed, enabled by breathtakingly witty couture.
All of Mee’s intellectually stimulating myriad of arguments could not take life without the animation of Frédérique Michel’s continuously inventive direction. The corps is superbly drilled, and the pace furiously drives us from one lucid speech to another. Anachronisms and modern references may abound, yet they never seem to be forced signifiers, always enlightening the point. For once the Furies in a modern realization genuinely integrate into the narrative.
Mee never lapses into the glib, even as his speakers may. His vision of human subterfuge is comprehensive in its many variations. He calls for us to examine our lives in productive ways. It is a forthright and courageous challenge, and while there is no way to gauge if this play has a life in the future, it indubitably speaks with force and cogency to the way we live now in this very moment. This has to be one of the highest callings for the theater.
To Pillage
By Anthony Byrnes, Sept. 25, 2012
Chuck Mee is not your typical playwright…[He] is not playing the same old game. And more than idle words, he stands by them as a writer. You can experience not only this ethos but also the wonderful ‘pillaging’ in his new play Orestes 3.0:Inferno, receiving its world premiere at City Garage. As the title suggests, the play takes as it’s jumping off point the tale of Orestes. Back from the Trojan War, Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra and now with his sister Electra must stand trial. But describing simple plot is to miss the point of Mr. Mee’s work. His plays are less about story arcs and more about assemblage and collage. He culls texts the way an artist might find the magic in a “found object.” Take the first lines spoken by Helen of Troy, who appears in the City Garage production in a ruby red pin-up bathing suit and sunglasses. She announces, “First of all, I cleanse my skin with products that cleanse but don’t dry, products that are natural.” Could there be any more perfect introduction to the face that launched 1,000 ships?
Now contained in these lines is both the genius and the challenge of Mr. Mee’s plays. Because he juxtaposes the classical rhythms of Euripides with the pedestrian beats of found text, the audience and the actors have to make tremendous leaps. In one instant you are in a Greek tribunal. In the next, an actor is confessing his erotic secrets. When it works it’s thrilling. When it doesn’t it feels a bit like channel surfing. Go . . . but know that you’ll have to do the work of making sense of it all, which, when you think about it, is really Chuck Mee’s point.”
Gods and Monsters
By Samuel Bernstein, Sept. 25, 2012
“A work of passion, intelligence, and mischief… Mee and Michel collaborate with graceful eclecticism as they seek to bring a modern sensibility to this ancient tragedy; employing music, dance, and a mélange of performance styles… Michel directs her actors with evident authority and imagination… It’s clever, fresh, and feels inspired.”
Neil LaBute’s “Filthy Talk For Troubled Times”
January 6—February 25, 2012
“Michel and Duncombe have… fully inhabited their new space with this production”—LA Stage Times
Cast: Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Kye Kinder, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Katrina Nelson, Heather Leigh Pasternak, Vera Petrychenka, Kenneth Rudnicki
Review Excerpts:
“What marks this staging as different from the others is the brilliant and meticulous production by Artistic Director Frédérique Michel and the nude women’s additional dialogue by Producing Director Charles A. Duncombe….Nothing is superfluous. This production is Dada or Surrealism, call it whatever you like. “Filthy Talk” takes a poke at the art world and its often decorative pretensions, and the world of male/female relations it presents is “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus” on steroids—mega steroids. If what you are after is a short (75 minute) stunning and provocative production that leaves you asking questions as you leave, this is your ticket.”
—Karen Weinstein, Culture Vulture
“Long mistaken as an anti-female misogynist, LaBute’s understandable rage over the way men (and by extension, male dominated religion) hurt women (and themselves) by not acknowledging the valid differences between the genders is dramatically muscular, funny, as well as spot-on….It is fascinating to see how Michel’s always avant-garde productions (normally featuring female and male nudity) mesh with LaBute’s phallic fetishizing of male boorish behavior. It is very European, refreshingly free from middle-class moralizing that mars so much of American culture….This is an exciting production, beautifully mounted, and does justice to the author’s intent.”
—Dale Reynolds, Stage Happenings
“This ‘installation’ can be seen in different ways—as a Brechtian framing of the objectification of human beings that’s already apparent in LaBut’e writing and/or as a sly satirical comment on the art world…..Michel and Duncombe demonstrate a refreshing eagerness to reflect LaBute’s vision back on their own audience. If his characters were still in a topless bar, it would be far too easy for the people who are likely attend adventurous theater within an art gallery—and who are unlikely to enter a topless bar—to distance themselves….It’s clear that Michel and Duncombe have finally fully inhabited their new space with this production. Now I’m looking forward to the variety of creative works that might result from this juxtaposition of theater and the visual arts.”
—Don Shirley, LA Stage Times
“A strong directorial vision adds to a strong script…Neil LaBute’s series of potent statements about how badly men think of women—and, as it turns out, how badly women behave toward men—is writing on the finer side about ourselves at our worst. The prose sounds rarefied until one hears exactly what we think of each other, as if cartoon bubbles floated over our heads, in the most profane words. Frédérique Michel’s direction adds contrasting grace and beauty, paired with the glorious production design by Charles Duncombe—who provides “art talk” text in addition to LaBute’s words.”
—Dany Margolies, Backstage
“In a savvy move, company artistic director (and the play’s director) Frédérique Michel has switched the original setting for LaBute’s play about angry men and women from a topless bar in New York to restage the piece in a high-end art gallery. The men who were formerly chit-chatting over drinks as they longingly gazed at erotic dancers now find themselves at a pretentious art exhibit installation comprising of naked, fair-skinned women. Make that three gorgeous, slim, all-natural, lovely naked women with serious expressions on their Caucasian faces, clutching bright red hatboxes strategically placed to afford their nakedness a modicum of cover. Ingeniously, Michel has cracked LaBute’s play wide open by giving these perambulating and naked objects d’art speaking roles. The women utter abstract words, (these ‘speeches’ were newly written by Charles Duncombe), while several drunk male patrons of the play, and a couple of bitter waitresses working at the gallery, remain just as conflicted, angry and baffled as ever by the eternal mystery of the opposite members of their species. It’s an intriguing staging concept and wholly appropriate for the Bergamot Station location.”
—Pauline Adamek, ArtsBeat LA
“Neil LaBute’s first produced play, “Filthy Talk for Troubled Times,” presaged the “men-as-irredeemable-pigs” genre that LaBute has explored more fully in later works. Beginning with that 1990 debut, LaBute has always courted controversy….Director Frédérique Michel and production designer Charles Duncombe revisit LaBute’s seldom-produced play in a bold…production at City Garage’s Bergamot Station space. The play’s setting has been shifted from a topless bar to the aesthetic precincts of an art gallery –- a risky innovation obviously designed to point out the crass objectification of the female form. Three nude women (Kye Kinder, Heather Leigh Pasternak and Vera Petrychenka), carrying hatboxes –- anachronistic artifacts of vanished conventions –- stalk through Duncombe’s stark set like automata, ultimately freezing into a human triptych. The increasingly drunken male characters (Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Dave Mack and Kenneth Rudnicki) banter salaciously and ogle the nude “art objects” like a wolf pack as two waitresses (Cynthia Mance and Katrina Nelson) recount sordid past sexual episodes…..Duncombe’s new text, coupled with Michel’s ever-rigorous staging, heightens LaBute’s sophomorically sensational work into a serious examination of semantics, sin and the human imperative for connection…”
— F. Kathleen Foley, Los Angeles Times
“The lights go down and three beautiful, statuesque women slowly enter carrying blood red hat boxes in front of their completely naked bodies. That got your attention, didn’t it?That’s largely the point of City Garage’s new staging of Neil LaBute’s Filthy Talk for Troubled Times. In truth, the piece is a mash-up of a 20 year old LaBute script with a new setting and new interstitial text provided by City Garage’s Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe.The original 1989 script is set in a nudie bar “out near the airport” and it feels like an early dress rehearsal for LaBute’s play-come-film In the Company of Men. The dialogue is vintage LaBute: men being men or men being misogynistic uncouth pigs … depending on your point of view. As the men ogle, they expound on their personal philosophies of relationships, sex, race, and particularly vivid, and frightened, descriptions of female genitalia. Director Frederique Michel has replaced the strip club setting with an art exhibit – fitting given the play takes place in the Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station….Conceptually, it’s a clever staging of the theory of the “Male Gaze.” As a counterpoint to the drunken machismo, Director Michel offers the silent simplicity of the female form. As the men down plastic tumbler after plastic tumbler of free art opening wine, their tirades become darker and increasingly lewd – yet the statuesque women remain unfazed….Maybe it’s fitting that by revealing the unflinching honesty of the naked female form, Frederique Michel has made Neil LaBute’s men dramatically impotent.”
—Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater KCRW.
4.48 Psychosis
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Justin Davanzo, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Kenneth Rudnicki, Ann Colby Stocking
NOTE: Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis ran in rep with Sganarelle in the Track 16 Gallery space at the Bergamot Station Arts Complex in Santa Monica.
by Paul Birchall, August 16, 2011
GO Playwright Sarah Kane’s kaleidoscopic drama premiered shortly after her suicide in 2000. At the time, one British theater critic called the work a “70 minute suicide note” – and, of course, even with the best will in the world, it is almost impossible to separate the intense and ferociously angry text of the work from the tragic real world story surrounding it. This is particularly true when you consider that the lyrical writing overtly deals with issues of depression and mental illness from the point of view of the sufferer – it may be one of the best plays to depict suicidal depression from the inside out.
Set, as the program notes, “inside a deranged brain,” the work consists of a series of fragmented exchanges that often take the form of inchoate expressions of rage twinned with frustrated awareness of a lack of control. A clearly unstable young woman (Cynthia Mance) sits center stage, bracketed by two figures in chairs behind her and another figure, a seemingly severed head in a bird cage — all of whom mutter abrasive vituperations at the hapless girl. There is also a pair of other performers who portray the doctors attempting to treat her – even though they offer only the coldest comfort to the angst-ridden heroine — offering utterances like “I know nothing of you, but I like you!”
Frederique Michel’s harrowing and edgy production, replete with eerie sound effects and dialogue interspersed with characters suddenly lurching into rhythmic spasms and twitching, hauntingly captures the state of mind of someone with tunnelvision perception in which all thoughts, excuses, and opinions inevitably lead to one ultimate act self-negation. Designer Charles Duncombe’s sterile hospital room-like set and the eerie, percussive sound effects suggest the heroine’s matter-of-fact view of her own madness and feelings of emptiness. The production delivers a disturbing and striking theatrical experience. City Garage at Track 16 Gallery (Building C) at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Blvd, Santa Monica; Thurs.-Fri., 8 p.m.; thru Sept. 9. (310) 319-9939.
Molière: Sganarelle or The Imaginary Cuckold
July 23—September 11, 2011
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Justin Davanzo, David E. Frank, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Kenneth Rudnicki, Bo Roberts, Ann Colby Stocking
NOTE: Sganarelle ran in rep with Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis in the Track 16 Gallery space at the Bergamot Station Arts Complex in Santa Monica.
Moliere’s sparkling classic comedy of errors in a lively new version for City Garage. In this wicked piece of satire on fidelity and honor, two couples mistakenly believe they have betrayed each other. The more they argue, scheme, plot, and attempt to revenge themselves, the more deeply they get entangled in their own delusions. And of course, in best Moliere fashion, when their fury and wounded vanity at last reaches a fever pitch, new complications make things even worse! A fast and furious romp of jilted lovers, deceived husbands, conniving wives, and devious young girls doing their very best to, in the end, do nothing but fool themselves.