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.
Paradise Park at Track 16
Paradise Park at Track 16
February 12—March 13, 2011
NOTE: After City Garage moved out of its longtime home in an alley behind Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, this production re-opened for a limited five-week engagement at the Track 16 Gallery in the Bergamot Arts Center.
Directed by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Bo Roberts, Kenneth Rudnicki, Ann Colby Stocking, K.C. Wright, Reha Zamani
This program was made possible, in part, by a grant from the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.
City Garage is supported, in part, by the Los Anegles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
City Garage recognizes the Wells Fargo Foundation for its generous support.
Presented by special arrangement with International Creative Management.
It’s a Postcard from Paradise
By David C. Nichols, Sept. 23 2010
“Because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be.
That summation from “Paradise Park” encapsulates both Charles L. Mee’s absurdist comedy and its breakneck, breathtaking L.A. premiere at City Garage, the company’s final outing in its alley space after 15 years.
As fans and detractors alike know, playwright Mee is an iconoclast without compare. In a kaleidoscopic series of amusement-park vignettes, Mee touches on themes of existential alienation and, ultimately, love like a trapeze artist leaving inexplicably hilarious, obliquely touching motion traces in his wake.
Director Frédérique Michel’s signature blend of loopy and sardonic is on full display, and designer Charles Duncombe turns his trademark usage of specific colors and isolated elements — for example, a wading pool sporting a crocodile — into pure ethos.
The cast, swanning about to sound designer Paul Rubenstein’s eclectic scoring, wearing Josephine Poinsot’s coy costumes with abandon, is terrific. Bo Roberts and the redoubtable Cynthia Mance as shakily married tourists perfectly counter K.C. Wright’s edgy daughter and Tim Orona’s cross-dressing inamorata. Kenneth Rudnicki’s park newcomer dovetails with Reha Zemani’s dream-troubled Midwesterner. Lena Kouyoumdjian’s serene violinist and Jeff Atik’s antic jack-of-many-trades — including a chicken — make potent opposite poles. Company stalwart Troy Dunn merges wryness and poignancy as clown Vikram, and Ann Stocking’s ventriloquist is mesmerizing, no mean feat given that David E. Frank turns his bipolar dummies into a tour de force.
So is “Paradise Park,” though it’s hardly for all tastes. Still, to miss this representative valedictory is unthinkable.
By Steven Leigh Morris, Sept. 20 2010
A profoundly despondent fellow (Kenneth Rudnicki) wanders into an amusement park for distraction from his agony. Inside, he slips into a fantasia of scenes – including his own romance with a young woman (Reha Zemani) from the Midwest, igniting a bundle of neuroses that keeps them estranged; a ventriloquist/philosopher (Ann Stocking) and his bifurcated dummy (David E. Frank); a tourist couple (Bo Roberts and Cynthia Mance) at the end of the tether that’s barely holding their marriage together; their irate young daughter (KC Wright) who yearns, in vain, for an effete Cuban (Tim Orona); a psychotic pizza-delivery boy (Jeff Attik); a wandering violinist (Lena Kouyoumdjian); a circus clown (Troy Dunn) and, in a directorial flourish, a guy in a chicken costume.
Charles Mee’s comedy is like a sonnet with a couple of repeated motifs: distraction, love and the general feeling of being cast adrift in cultural waters that are partly enchanting, partly evaporating, and partly polluted by the refuse of our ancestors, of our families, of our determination to follow impulses we barely comprehend, and to wind up unutterably lost. He’s one of this company’s favorite scribes, and mine, for the way in which, with the literary touch of a feather, he conjures primal truths of what keeps us at odds with ourselves and with eachother, keeps us yearning for the unattainable. And though there’s obviously psychology at work, the driving energy of the language and of the drama are subconscious, cultural and historical currents. Production designer Charles Duncombe anchors his platform set with a wading pool stage center, in which sits an alligator, and he decorates it above with strings of festival lights on a string. Josephine Poinsot’s costumes are thoroughly whimsical with primary colors and a feel for an America of the late 1950s – with the possible of exception of the married couple’s matching shorts and T-shirts that read, “Kiss my ass, I’m on vacation.” Director Frederique Michel stages the poetical riffs of text in her typically arch style, and it serves the play almost perfectly, except for the pizza delivery scene, where the choreography distracts from the psychosis that lies at the core.
Even so, I found the evening to be indescribably affecting, tapping emotions that lurk beneath the machinery of reason. This is the last production to be staged at this back-alley venue in Santa Monica, where the company has been putting on plays for 15 years. The ventriloquist’s lines couldn’t have been more ironic and true: “Then, because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be . . . that theatre, properly conceived, is not an escape either but a flight to reality, a rehearsal for life itself, a rehearsal of these human relationships of which the most essential, the relationship that defines most vividly who we are and that makes our lives possible, is love.”
Paradise Park
September 17—November 28, 2010
“GO!” — “indescribably affecting” LA Weekly
Directed by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Lena Kouyoumdjian, Cynthia Mance, Tim Orona, Bo Roberts, Kenneth Rudnicki, Ann Colby Stocking, K.C. Wright, Reha Zamani
This program was made possible, in part, by a grant from the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission.City Garage is supported, in part, by the Los Anegles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
City Garage recognizes the Wells Fargo Foundation for its generous support.
Presented by special arrangement with International Creative Management.
It’s a Postcard from Paradise
By David C. Nichols, Sept. 23 2010
“Because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be.
That summation from “Paradise Park” encapsulates both Charles L. Mee’s absurdist comedy and its breakneck, breathtaking L.A. premiere at City Garage, the company’s final outing in its alley space after 15 years.
As fans and detractors alike know, playwright Mee is an iconoclast without compare. In a kaleidoscopic series of amusement-park vignettes, Mee touches on themes of existential alienation and, ultimately, love like a trapeze artist leaving inexplicably hilarious, obliquely touching motion traces in his wake.
Director Frédérique Michel’s signature blend of loopy and sardonic is on full display, and designer Charles Duncombe turns his trademark usage of specific colors and isolated elements — for example, a wading pool sporting a crocodile — into pure ethos.
The cast, swanning about to sound designer Paul Rubenstein’s eclectic scoring, wearing Josephine Poinsot’s coy costumes with abandon, is terrific. Bo Roberts and the redoubtable Cynthia Mance as shakily married tourists perfectly counter K.C. Wright’s edgy daughter and Tim Orona’s cross-dressing inamorata. Kenneth Rudnicki’s park newcomer dovetails with Reha Zemani’s dream-troubled Midwesterner. Lena Kouyoumdjian’s serene violinist and Jeff Atik’s antic jack-of-many-trades — including a chicken — make potent opposite poles. Company stalwart Troy Dunn merges wryness and poignancy as clown Vikram, and Ann Stocking’s ventriloquist is mesmerizing, no mean feat given that David E. Frank turns his bipolar dummies into a tour de force.
So is “Paradise Park,” though it’s hardly for all tastes. Still, to miss this representative valedictory is unthinkable.
,
A profoundly despondent fellow (Kenneth Rudnicki) wanders into an amusement park for distraction from his agony. Inside, he slips into a fantasia of scenes – including his own romance with a young woman (Reha Zemani) from the Midwest, igniting a bundle of neuroses that keeps them estranged; a ventriloquist/philosopher (Ann Stocking) and his bifurcated dummy (David E. Frank); a tourist couple (Bo Roberts and Cynthia Mance) at the end of the tether that’s barely holding their marriage together; their irate young daughter (KC Wright) who yearns, in vain, for an effete Cuban (Tim Orona); a psychotic pizza-delivery boy (Jeff Attik); a wandering violinist (Lena Kouyoumdjian); a circus clown (Troy Dunn) and, in a directorial flourish, a guy in a chicken costume.
Charles Mee’s comedy is like a sonnet with a couple of repeated motifs: distraction, love and the general feeling of being cast adrift in cultural waters that are partly enchanting, partly evaporating, and partly polluted by the refuse of our ancestors, of our families, of our determination to follow impulses we barely comprehend, and to wind up unutterably lost. He’s one of this company’s favorite scribes, and mine, for the way in which, with the literary touch of a feather, he conjures primal truths of what keeps us at odds with ourselves and with eachother, keeps us yearning for the unattainable. And though there’s obviously psychology at work, the driving energy of the language and of the drama are subconscious, cultural and historical currents. Production designer Charles Duncombe anchors his platform set with a wading pool stage center, in which sits an alligator, and he decorates it above with strings of festival lights on a string. Josephine Poinsot’s costumes are thoroughly whimsical with primary colors and a feel for an America of the late 1950s – with the possible of exception of the married couple’s matching shorts and T-shirts that read, “Kiss my ass, I’m on vacation.” Director Frederique Michel stages the poetical riffs of text in her typically arch style, and it serves the play almost perfectly, except for the pizza delivery scene, where the choreography distracts from the psychosis that lies at the core.
Even so, I found the evening to be indescribably affecting, tapping emotions that lurk beneath the machinery of reason. This is the last production to be staged at this back-alley venue in Santa Monica, where the company has been putting on plays for 15 years. The ventriloquist’s lines couldn’t have been more ironic and true: “Then, because the theatre is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships, then theatre is the art, par excellence, in which we discover what it is to be human and what is possible for humans to be . . . that theatre, properly conceived, is not an escape either but a flight to reality, a rehearsal for life itself, a rehearsal of these human relationships of which the most essential, the relationship that defines most vividly who we are and that makes our lives possible, is love.”
The Marriage of Figaro
April 16, 2010—June 20, 2010
“CRITIC’S PICK” – LA Times
“GO” – LA WeeklyDirected by Frederíque Michel
Production Design by Charles Duncombe
Cast: Maria Christina Benthall, Amelia Rose Blaire, Janae Burris, Brennan Cipollone, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Cynthia Mance, Maximiliano Molina,Bo Roberts, Cheryl Scaccio
LA TIMES:
Theater review: ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ at City Garage
A shrewd use of artifice as content distinguishes “The Marriage of Figaro” at City Garage. Frédérique Michel and Charles Duncombe’s new adaptation of Pierre Beaumarchais’ 1784 assault on the aristocracy, the source of Mozart’s deathless opera, hits its arch marks from the opening prologue and continues thus thereafter.
The second in Beaumarchais’ trilogy of Figaro plays – between “The Barber of Seville” and “The Guilty Mother” – “Marriage” savages class inequities (Louis XVI understandably banned it). Echoing Mozart librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, director Michel and designer Duncombe knowingly use the lunatic convolutions of farce to strike more profound cultural targets.
As ever, Figaro (Troy Dunn, never better) must learn from his betrothed Suzanne (delightfully unaffected Janae Burris) that Count Almaviva (David E. Frank, aptly smarmy) intends to exercise his droit du seigneur, the feudal custom wherein a nobleman could bed a servant bride before her wedding night.
How Figaro and Suzanne, in league with the long-suffering Countess (Cynthia Mance, having a field day), circumvent their dilemma is hardly Beaumarchais’ only complication. Accordingly, Michel sends the stalwart cast, bedecked in Josephine Poinsot’s droll costumes, pirouetting around Duncombe’s spare rococo setting with calibrated panache.
Amelia Rose Blaire excels as adolescent Chérubin, whose requited attraction to the Countess does not hinder his wooing Suzanne’s cousin Fanchette (wonderful Maria Christina Benthall). Rafael Clements gives gardener Antonio and judge Don Guzman a tickling urban edge. As Figaro’s longstanding nemeses, Bo Roberts and Brennan Cipollone are amusingly old school, while Ann Colby Stocking is seriocomic intensity personified as marital claimant Marceline.
Though adroitly articulate, the text and execution are only nominally provocative, perhaps the most benign outing in City Garage’s history, and sound designer Paul Rubenstein overuses Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” at the expense of Mozart. Such quibbles are trivial against the deft accomplishments of this charming realization.
– David C. Nichols
“The Marriage of Figaro,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. Alley, Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 5:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 30. $25. Pay what you can on Sundays. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.
LA WEEKLY:
Oh, Those Riotous Comedies:
The Marriage of Figaro and The Playboy of the Western World
By Steven Leigh Morris
published: April 22, 2010
Pierre Beaumarchais finished his five-act play, The Marriage of Figaro (the basis for Mozart’s opera), in 1778, but it wasn’t performed until 1784. This wasn’t because the author was developing it in some Paris playwrights lab, nor was he trying to find investors — that wouldn’t have been an issue after the success of Beaumarchais’ prior play, The Barber of Seville. No, the delay was due to Figaro being banned for its unseemly depiction of the French aristocracy, reflecting the kind of debauchery that tapped into the growing ire that would lead to the French Revolution.Some 140 years later, in 1927, Russian director Constantin Stanislavsky reset the play in the months leading up to that revolution in a production at the Moscow Art Theatre. Meanwhile, in 1907, crowds rioted during the opening performance of John Millington’s Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. The problem there was twofold: A Sinn Féin contingent of nationalists believed that all Irish theater should be overtly political. Synge actually was a nationalist for a while, but his plays have different concerns; then there was the issue of unflattering references to the denizens of County Mayo, where the play is set: The men are the kind of drunken fellas who projectile-vomit at wakes, and hang dogs on clotheslines for the entertainment of watching them screech and wriggle.
Also, actresses depicting the women of the province appeared in their shifts, implying loose morals.
The sensitivity was over Irish stereotypes, and when the play premiered in New York four years later, it was met with a similar reception, including stink bombs being hurled at the stage.
All this gives one an almost gooey, nostalgic feeling for a time when theater was protested with such vitriol, notwithstanding the ignorance and circumscribed imaginations of the protesters.
Among the enduring aspects of each play is the eternal verity of how we leap to false conclusions based on misinformation. In The Marriage of Figaro, the gaffes are ruses and decoys set in motion by some of the characters with ulterior motives — keeping a lecherous Count at bay, putting somebody in debt in order to force him into marriage, etc.
In the larger scheme of things, this suggests that fools are the victims of the machinations of smarter people, and that this has less to do with God, or the gods, as with schemers of the human variety. There is some variation on this theme when the schemers get slightly lost inside their own puzzle, which implies a more universal folly, in which God is the trickster. Such is the foundation for French Farce, derived via Shakespeare from Roman comedy — a foundation director Frédérique Michel underscores by turning her production of Figaro at Santa Monica’s City Garage (in a new translation by Michel and Charles Duncombe) into a kind of puppet show with human actors. The puppetry lies in the arch gestures, actors scampering into place through an almost sadistic mayhem of intricate choreography in order to land at a specific point on the stage, body positioned with balletic discipline, for the purpose of delivering one line, before scampering again for the next. When you have two characters exerting such energy for simple exchanges of information, you get what looks like style over substance. That’s not really the case. The style is the substance: The idiocy of so abusing the limited energy we’re given in one lifetime is a statement on the way we feel so obliged, if not honored, to be tethered to puppet strings. These characters think they and their self-interest are all so clever, while somebody on the other side of the footlights is laughing at their stupidity. Behind all this lies the unspoken cloud of a brewing revolution, suggesting that the abuses of the puppeteers will have expensive consequences. And that may not be just an 18th-century problem.
Figaro (Troy Dunn) and Suzanne (Janae Burris) are about to be wed. Figaro is valet to the Count (David E. Frank), while Suzanne is chambermaid to the Countess (Cynthia Mance). At play’s start, Suzanne watches Figaro measuring the proportions for a bed that’s to be installed in their new quarters — within earshot of the Count. A bit of a dolt, Figaro doesn’t realize (until Suzanne fills him in) that the closeness of the quarters to their respective employers is actually in the service of the Count’s lechery. And so begins a series of traps to ward off the indignity of the Count’s attempted restoration of an old right called primae noctis, in which the master of the house is entitled to deflower a bride from a lower class before her wedding.
Following the plot’s intricacies is like trying to follow the motions of moths around a lamp, though it does sort itself out, not unlike the ribbons and bows in Josephine Poisot’s period costumes. And the new translation transfers the subtleties of French idiom very smoothly into English — with the added delight of actors occasionally lip-synching from excerpts of Mozart’s opera.
The technique on display in Michel’s production isn’t yet pristine, but on opening night, it was close enough to make its point. The shenanigans unfold on Duncombe’s production design of burgundy and blue, accented by two suspended chandeliers. The set’s symmetry and elegance work in pleasing juxtaposition against the mayhem of interlopers hurling themselves out of windows, or pretending to. The solid ensemble works in tight conformity to the style: Frank’s lecherous Count is a comic standout of barely concealed slime, offset by the grace of Mance’s weary, dignified Countess. And Maria Christina Benthall offers vivacious delight as the libidinous niece of the gardener.
In The Playboy of the Western World, in a new production at A Noise Within, young drifter Christopher Mahon (Michael Newcomer) wanders into a rural, Irish public house, confessing that he has just murdered his father during a brawl between the pair, having knocked him on the head with a loy. The bar mistress, Pegeen Mike (fiery Lindsay Gould) initially goads this reluctant confession from the exhausted, witless fellow, but as it’s met with reverence, and “Christy” becomes a local hero and object of desire among the village girls, he retells the story of the murder with growing extravagance and pride. This is all fine, until his father (director Geoff Elliott) shows up with a seething head wound, and Christy tries again to do the job correctly. In the eyes of the locals, he’s now not only a liar but a murderer.
The “great gap between a gallant story and a dirty deed” is the crux of the tale, and its meandering morality is part of what incited its initial audience to riot.
Both plays are about lies, the difference being that Christy believes at all times he’s the telling the truth. This quality, and the murkiness of what we take to be true, gives the story its ancient Greek foundations. At the start of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus has no idea he’s killed his father, and is just as cocky in his blindness. And though both Playboy and Figaro are comedies, Playboy contains underpinnings of tragedy stemming from Christy’s earnestness and loneliness, and his betrayal by Pegeen Mike. And for all its perversity and farce, it contains some of the most fetching and lyrical love scenes in contemporary literature.
Elliot’s staging is the inverse of Michel’s — imbued with naturalistic detail (Soojin Lee’s mud-stained, torn costumes, Stephen Gifford’s rustic set with sheaths of hay dangling from the ceiling, streaks of rain sliding down the one window) and an acting style to match. Elliot’s pacing is just right, gentle enough to catch the emotion and the beauty of the language yet brisk and smart enough to serve the comedy. Among the lovely performances are Jill Hill’s Widow Quinn (who shares the dainty, word-wise qualities of Mance’s Countess in Figaro); the eccentric and idiosyncratic William Dennis Hunt’s Philly Cullen, and Apollo Dukakis’ skeptical Michael James Flaherty. Elliot’s biggest misstep is miscasting himself as the elder Mahon, when in his own production there are actors who could obviously capture the requisite anarchic lunacy. Elliott is of a classical mold, and imbues the rusty nail of a character with far too much decorum and elegance, in voice and manner.
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO | By PIERRE BEAUMARCHAIS, in a new translation by FRÉDÉRIQUE MICHEL AND CHARLES DUNCOMBE | CITY GARAGE, 1240 ½ Fourth St. (alley entrance), Santa Monica | Through May 30 | (310) 319-9939
THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD | By JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE | A NOISE WITHIN, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale | Through May 22 | (818) 240-0910
The Trojan Women
November 6, 2009—February 21, 2010
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maria Christina Benthall, June Carryl, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Michael Galvin, Jules Hartley, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Alisha Nichols, Mariko Oka, Amelia Rose, Kenneth Rudnicki, Crystal Sershen, Garth Whitten, Reha Zamani
LA Times
Friday, November 13, 2009
By David C. Nichols
A high level of invention suffuses “The Trojan Women” at City Garage. Deconstructing Euripides’ classic tragedy into a multifarious current-day collage, adaptor-designer Charles Duncombe and director Frederíque Michel pull few punches in the wake of burning Illium.
The geopolitical realities in Duncombe’s freewheeling text range from harrowing statistics of recent genocides to sardonic swipes at our blog-infested society. Darfur, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, overpopulation, climate change and more punctuate the same gender positions that have driven this saga since its Peloponnesian War premiere.
Hecuba (June Carryl, magnificently composed) suggests a traditional African queen, clothed at the outset by title mourners whose burkas are but one of costumer Josephine Poinsot’s inspirations. Cassandra (Mariko Oka) devolves from culture vulture to a naked, feral creature of website contours. Andromache (the touching Amelia Rose) turns the society trophy wife into a figure of post-millennial pathos, rending against Troy Dunn’s quietly insidious Greek envoy.
And when an assured Alicia Nichols turns up as Helen of Troy, here a Britney Spears clone with nude dancing boys and hip attitude, her face-off with Michael Galvin’s intense, Billy Connolly-flavored Menelaus crystallizes the enterprise. Dave Mack’s empathetic diplomat, Crystal Sershen’s understated Hermione and Cynthia Mance’s entertainment reporter are among the other standouts in a marvelous ensemble effort.
Dividing focus between the keening women and the marauding men, Duncombe gets a slew of modern context in (Euripides is understandably absent from the credits). The approach risks overload, some things unnecessarily explained, and director Michel occasionally struggles to keep the tone consistent. Still, if the aim is to yank “Trojan Women” into our consciousness, this company benchmark, though overstuffed, is a triumph.
LA Weekly – GO!
Thursday, November 12, 2009
By Steven Leigh Morris
In his adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy (So freely swiped from the original that Euripides’ byline doesn’t appear on the program), Charles Duncombe takes a macroscopic, brutal and unrelenting look at the end of the world. Genocide in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, unsustainable population growth and climate change carry the day, and the play, with excursions into a theme that’s punctuated Duncombe’s earlier adaptations of texts by Sophocles and Heiner Müller: the relationship between gender and power.
Scenes depicting physical mutilation and rape in war zones – choreographed by director Frederique Michel – contain an excruciating authenticity, even in the abstract. Michel undercuts this harrowing tone by incorporating elements of farce in other scenes. One is a gem of understatement and humor: The reunion of fluttery Helen of Troy (Alisha Nichols, attired like a dancer in a strip club, and employing all those powers of manipulation) with the Greek king Menelaus (stoic, furious Michael Galvin) from whom she fled and started this bloody mess (the Trojan War, that is).
This is where the adaptation and direction congeal and captivate. This is still very much a work-in-progress, conceived for all the right reasons. As is, the directorial tones wobble like a top, and the adaptation contains far too much explication. The evening also reveals why theater matters, and how this kind of work wouldn’t stand a chance in any other medium. It’s too smart and too passionate to dismiss.
LA Weekly: Theater Feature
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Rotten Families: The Trojan Women and Tree, and what we mean to each other
By Steven Leigh Morris
Euripides’ The Trojan Women, the most famous in a trilogy of dramas written about the Trojan War, features the saga of the Trojan horse — the famous trick played out in Troy, when the Greeks gifted the Trojans a large, wooden horse during the Peloponnesian War. It’s hard to build trust after something like that, no matter how progressive one’s politics. The play is a post-traumatic wail by Troy’s surviving royal women, whose husbands and sons have been butchered, and who have now been sold into slavery to various Greek kings.
The Trojan Women is performed frequently around the world, which isn’t bad for a dour lament first produced in 415 B.C. Yet when Euripides dutifully entered his trilogy into the Dionysus Festival, it went nowhere. First prize was taken by a playwright named Xenocles, whom almost nobody has heard of since. That should tell you all you need to know about playwriting competitions and new-play festivals.
In his new adaptation of The Trojan Women, Charles Duncombe has spun it into a macroscopic view of human barbarity, depicting scenes of rape and genocide from Rwanda and Sierra Leone (which director Frederique Michel stages as a balletic dance of death), with running news commentary by an actor on the side (Cynthia Mance), who keeps asking the bludgeoned and dismembered how they feel. So even in the depiction of unbearable human brutality, Duncombe adds cutting shards of satire, aimed at the way we receive the news — something Euripides steered away from. (Then again, Euripides didn’t have to contend with FOX News or CNN.)
Early in the production, a Dummy and a Ventriloquist (David E. Frank and Michael Galvin) give a slapstick explanation of the Trojan War, and why nobody cares because it was so long ago, and is therefore irrelevant to our lives. This may be a preemptive rebuttal to those who question why such a dark play should be put on, but if the production is as good as this one often gets, the scene is largely beside the point.
When the story settles in on Hecuba, Queen of Troy (June Carryl), who portrays her fallen woman as an emblem of pained and stoic dignity, and her coterie of female Trojan royalty (Mariko Oka, Crystal Sershen, Cynthia Mance, Maria Christina Benthall, Reha Zemani and Amelia Rose) we slide into the literary-liturgical world of a theatrical prayer. Poor Andromache (Rose), the deranged wife of slain Hector, doesn’t comprehend the dire ramifications of her surrendering her infant boy, who provides her only purpose in life, to Archaean envoy Talthybius (Troy Dunn). This is a scene plucked from Euripides, and it’s as powerful now as it’s been through the ages, thanks in large part to Rose’s flittering, bewildered, widowed queen, inflated with self-importance. You’d want to slap her for her bloated and unearned sense of entitlement were she not clutching the handle of the insane asylum’s door.
It’s the kind of scene that needs no explanation, but Duncombe has added plenty of that as well — not about Andromoche in particular but about the state of the world in general. Frequently, such explications are pedantic and a disservice to Duncombe’s many wonderful scenes that play themselves out between the lines. His model may be Bertolt Brecht, who loves to explain and ruminate upon his parables. But this is no parable; it’s an epic. And what this is about is as clear as the black smoke of war.
The play’s strongest scene concerns Helen of Troy (Alisha Nichols, like a generic blond stripper, pouty lips, playing dumb but rat-smart), returning to her furious husband, Menelaus (Galvin at his best — a seething volcano of curses and spite), whom she abandoned for Paris, thereby provoking the brother of her cuckolded husband to launch 1,000 ships, and the decades-long war.
She’s now home, eyes-a-flutter, apologizing. Does Menelaus take the bait? He just said he wanted her torn apart by tanks in a slow and agonizing death. But sex toys like Helen have their power, too. This may be the point of Michel’s use of nudity throughout the production.
In A Mabou Mines’ Dollhouse, director Lee Breuer had Maude Phillips’ Nora strip off in his adaptation of Ibsen’s anthem to feminism, but she also removed a flowing wig, so that, in the flesh, she was bald. That image of a woman finding herself in a world of masquerade balls was nakedness rather than nudity.
For her Trojan Women, Michel has her women costumed in froufrou dresses and heels, and one hand gloved to the elbow. When lithe Mariko Oka strips down to everything but the glove and little white boots, it’s an image of both defiance and erotic seduction in the same gesture, of sexual vulnerability. Whether that’s an also an image of power is a question laced with ambiguity. There’s no question, however, that the flesh keeps everyone paying attention. Perhaps this dovetails into Duncombe’s parody of TV news, and of a voyeuristic culture imploding before our eyes.
With all its ambiguities and the sometimes wobbly tones, this admirable production demands respect. It’s a work-in-progress worth investigating.
Julie Hébert’s family dramaTree, set in Chicago’s South Side around 2000, tells the story of a now demented African-American woman named Jessalyn Price (Sloan Robinson), who lives mostly upstairs, and is cared for by her world-wearied son, Leo (Chuma Gault).
If Duncombe goes overboard with political explications of his macroscopic view, Hébert commits the inverse, having Jessalyn spout oblique lyrical fragments from her withering recollections, imposed upon what’s really a microscopic view of one family, and one long-ago love affair. Through the microscope, however, you can see the larger patterns of the society that shaped their lives, and ours. It too is a portrait of warring clans and their brittle attempts at reconciliation and acceptance.
Into the household wanders a Caucasian interloper from Louisiana, named Didi (Jacquelyn Wright), bereft over the recent death of her father and determined to learn the truth of a possible affair he had with the now-demented woman upstairs. Turns out Leo and Didi may even be siblings. Uh-oh.
And so begins not only a very testy relationship between the family in Chicago, including Leo’s sweet-smart daughter JJ (nicely played by Tessa Thompson), but also gender-ambiguous, smarty-pants Didi.
Another family drama about unearthing secrets? This could be an exercise in tedium, were it played out the way it usually is, with people suddenly confessing with melodramatic flourish to past sins, for no particular reason other than to expiate their own guilt, and the playwright’s tug on the puppet strings.
Not so here. Hébert structures her play as an anthopological dig. When old and difficult truths emerge, they do so from the exigencies of empirical evidence — correspondences that finally emerge, as well as the persistence of Didi, a truth-seeker whose curiosity borders on the belligerent. That’s probably what it takes to get to the heart of anything.
Hébert is a lovely writer, who avoids propelling her drama with glib Gothic parodies, a technique bountifully employed in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County. The friction here comes from personalities, not presumptions. The play finds its stride through people clashing, even gently, and their conflicting needs. When Jessalyn rambles on, especially near the play’s start, and despite Robinson’s meticulous and endearing performance, under Jessica Kubzansky’s direction, the forced poeticism has the texture of jam on top of honey.
The Chairs
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Cynthia Mance, Bo Roberts, Garth Whitten
Backstage
August 5, 2009
Reviewed by Danny Margolies
An old couple sleeps, snoring loudly. The husband awakens first and looks at his wife. He gazes at her with love, tenderness, fear, a lifetime of memories—and the audience is quickly engaged. In whatever way one interprets the enigmas of the script—and many scholars have tried—the couple in this production seems as real as any. Each adores the other, each is happily familiar with the other’s faults, and in the hands of actors Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts they are an odd delight.
Eugène Ionesco’s script, translated by Donald Allen—did we catch a fleeting reference to the Internet?—is a magnificent gift to actors and to the audience. As with the best of couples, Mance is the physical comedian—turning the wife into a lively, clowning companion—while Roberts makes the husband the true romantic, fully real in his quiet adoration of his wife and a former flame. Portraying the Orator, Garth Whitten silently greets the “guests,” bemusedly eyeing the extremely tall couple, then delivers Ionesco’s intentionally unintelligible oration. The set, designed by Charles Duncombe, has the melancholic feel of a Van Gogh room.
At first one wonders why Frederíque Michel put her couple in gray hair, when this play is so abstract that nothing else is spelled out. But by the play’s end, when the husband and wife are bounding across the stage in the great ballet of the chairs, the hair serves as a reminder to us that the characters are indeed old—and yet eternal.
The audience will work hard to stay with this piece. It’s only fair; the actors and director did so for weeks before putting Ionesco’s words into action. But we are also graced with the production’s surprising emotional impact—a rare treat in an increasingly absurd world.
KCRW-Theatre Talk
September 17, 2009
Reviewed by James Taylor
Lost Allusions
In years past, when dramatists wanted to make an allusion or use history to suggest a metaphor, chances are they would look to the bible — or some ancient Greek, Roman or even Norse mythology.
[…]
Across town in Santa Monica, another production makes reference to Tristan and Isolde: The City Garage’s revival of The Chairs the 1952 “Tragic Farce” by Eugene Ionesco. Here, allusion seems like a throwaway Ionesco’s Old Man says to one of his guests, “Will you be my Isolde and let me be your Tristan.” Like in LaBute’s play, this shout-out foreshadows the climax of the drama, but in Ionesco’s text, and in Frederique Michel’s staging, the allusion is subtle and folds in into the movement of the play. In Helter Skelter, the allusion rings out like a siren and instantly you know how the play is going to end.
Unlike many past City Garage stagings, this revival of The Chairs stays pretty close to the text. Besides doing away with a blackboard and updating a line about the radio (it’s changed now to say “the internet”) Michel delivers a vision of The Chairs that is clear and accessible. The director needs no gimmicks since the two lead actors, Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts, play Ionesco’s Husband and Wife (and their many guests, ranging five decades in age) with both focus and dedication. It’s not a revelatory production, but a sober presentation of an absurdist play that remains both daring and timeless.
Ionesco’s The Chairs runs through Sunday at the City Garage; The Elixir of Love continues at LA Opera through September 30.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
The School for Wives
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Bo Roberts, Jessica Madison, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Ken Rudnicki, David E. Frank, Jeff Atik, Troy Dunn, Michael Galvin, Trace Taylor
LA Weekly – GO!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
By Steven Leigh Morris
The central character in Molière’s comedy, here translated and adapted by Frédérique Michel & Charles Duncombe could be and often is a punching bag. But not here. Arnolphe is another in a stream of Molière’s aging, patronizing nitwits (like Orgon on Tartuffe) who presume that they can control the devotions and passions of young women in their care. In Tartuffe, when Orgon’s daughter protests his insistence that she break her wedding plans to her beloved suitor in order to marry the clergyman he prefers, Orgon figures her rebellion is just a impetuous, child-like phase.In The School for Wives, there’s a similar mind-set to Arnolphe (Bo Roberts), who has tried to sculpt his young ward, Agnes (Jessica Madison), into his future wife. He’s known her since she was 4, and he’s strategically kept her closeted, as though in a convent, hoping thereby to shape her obedience and gratitude. Just as he’s about to wed her, in stumbles young Horace (Dave Mack) from the street below her window, and the youthful pair are smitten with eachother, soon conniving against the old bachelor. Horace, not realizing that Arnolphe is the man keeping Agnes as his imprisoned ward, keeps confiding in the older man about his and Agnes’ schemes, fueling Arnolphe’s exasperation and fury.
Perhaps it’s the use of director Michel’s tender, Baroque sound-tracks, or the gentle understatement of Roberts’ performance as Arnolphe, but the play emerges less as a clown show, and more as a wistful almost elegiac rumination on aging and folly. Arnolphe tried to create a brainless wife as though from a petri dish, an object he can own, and the more she rejects him, the more enamored he becomes of her, until his heart breaks. The pathos is underscored by the obvious intelligence of Madison’s Agnes – an intelligence that Arnolphe is blind to.
The production’s reflective tone supersedes Michel’s very stylized, choreographic staging (this company’s trademark). The ennui is further supported by a similarly low-key portrayal by David E. Frank as Arnolphe’s blithe friend and confidante, Chrysalde. In In fact, when lisping, idiot servants (Cynthia Mance and Ken Rudnicki) keep running in circles and crashing into each other, Michel’s one attempt at Commedia physicality is at odds with the production rather than a complement to it. Company costumer Josephine Poinsot (surprising she doesn’t work more) provides luscious period vestments and gowns, and Duncombe’s delightful production design, includes a gurgling fountain, a tub of white roses, and abstract hints of some elegant, Parisian court.