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.
The Bourgeois Gentilhomme
November 7, 2008—May 8, 2009
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik, Matt Cook, Ruthie Crossley, Troy Dunn, Michael Galvin, Deborah Knox, Edgar Landa, Jessica Madison, Cynthia Mance, Max Molina, Alisha Nichols, Mariko Oka, Ken Rudnicki, Trace Taylor, Garth Whitten, John Willard
LA Times – Critic’s Choice!
Friday, November 14, 2008 By David C. Nichols
A ‘Gentilhomme’ for our times
With a generous soupçon of witty anarchy, “The Bourgeois Gentilhomme” tumbles into Santa Monica. This sleek City Garage take on Molière’s deathless satire of nouveau riche pretensions and aristocratic machinations is nominally avant-garde, mainly an unguarded hoot.
First performed in 1670 before Louis XIV, “Gentilhomme” concerns Monsieur Jourdain (the riotous Jeff Atik), his father a wealthy merchant who retained middle-class contours. Hopelessly oafish Jourdain thus obsesses over not just the trappings of nobility, which elude him despite the fawning efforts of a slew of tutors, but over trapping the nobles.
That explains Dorante (aptly acerbic Troy Dunn), a sponging count who pretends to help Jourdain woo Dorimène (Deborah Knox, exquisitely poised), Dorante’s own paramour. While everyone mocks Jourdain behind his back, his acidulous wife (Ruthie Crossley) openly bemoans his aspirations, such as marrying off daughter Lucile (Alisha Nichols) to royalty, though she loves commoner Cléonte (Garth Whitten). Assisted by Cléonte’s valet (the avid Max Molina), a melee of duplicity ensues, leading to a demented faux-Turkish resolution.
Conceived by Molière as a comédie-ballet, “Gentilhomme” carries many wicked analogies to modern mores. Director Frédérique Michel and designer Charles Duncombe slyly tailor our times into their tart adaptation, complete with anachronisms, nonstop postures and purposely limp songs by Duncombe and John Gregory Willard. The design scheme seamlessly weds the red-black-and-gilt elegance of Duncombe’s set and lighting to Josephine Poinsot’s splendid costumes.
Goaded by Atik’s clueless climber, equal parts Bert Lahr, Don Rickles and a tea cozy, the nimble cast has a stylized field day. Ken Rudnicki’s tippling servant, Matt Cook’s dance master, Michael Galvin’s music master and Edgar Landa’s master chef are standouts, but everyone embraces the formalized mischief with élan.
Actually, their devotion to the detailed concept sometimes halts the antic fizz. Nonetheless, if full abandon is still finding its way, this hardly diminishes such a gracefully loopy soufflé.
LA Weekly – GO!
Thursday, November 13, 2008 By Steven Leigh Morris
You’d think, from reading the world press, that racism and, by extension, classism, had suddenly been vanquished from the nation — overnight, by a stunning national election. Such is the power of symbolism and hope. Sooner or later, we will settle into a more realistic view of who we are, and were, and how we have evolved in ways perhaps more subtle than the current “we are the world” emotional gush would lead one to believe. It’s in this more self-critical (rather than celebratory) frame of mind that Molière’s 1670 comedy – a satire of snobbery and social climbing – will find its relevance renewed. For now, however, Frederique Michel (who directed the play) and Charles Duncombe’s fresh and bawdy translation-adaptation serves up a bouquet of comedic delights that offers the caution that — though celebrating a milestone on the path of social opportunity is worthy of many tears of joy — perhaps we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves with self-congratulations.
The Bourgeois Gentleman was first presented the year after Tartuffe, and it contains many of the hallmarks of its more famous cousin: a deluded and pompous protagonist (Jeff Atik); a con man (Troy Dunn) aiming for social advancement by speculating on the blind arrogance of his patron; and the imposition by the insane master of the house of an arranged marriage for his crestfallen daughter (Alisha Nichols). The play was originally written as a ballet-farce, for which composer Jean-Baptiste Lully performed in the production before the court of Louis XIV. Michel’s visually opulent staging features scenery (designed by Duncombe) that includes a pair of chandeliers, and costumes (by Josephine Poinsot) in shades of red, maroon and black. Michel employs Lully’s music in a nod to the original. (The singing is far too thin even to support the jokes about its competence.) Michel also includes a lovely ballet by performers in mesmerizing “tears of a clown” masks, a choreographed prance of the fops, and she has characters bounding and spinning during otherwise realistic conversations, mocking style over substance. Comedy has a maximum refrigeration temperature of 75 degrees, and when that temperature was exceeded during Act 1 during the performance I attended, the humor ran off the tracks – despite the broad style being sustained with conviction by the performers. By Act 2, the heat problem had been remedied and the comedy began playing again as it should.
I haven’t seen a comic tour de force the likes of Atik’s Monseiur Jordain since Alan Bomenfeld’s King Ubu at A Noise Within. As Jourdain is trying to woo a countess (the striking Deborah Knox), Atik plays him attired in silks and bows of Ottoman extravagance, with a blissfully stupid expression – every dart of his eyes reveals Jordain’s smug self-satisfaction, which is embedded with delirious ignorance.
Backstage – Critic’s Pick!
Thursday, December 4, 2008 By by Neal Weaver
High style and low comedy merge in this new adaptation of Molière’s classic tale of nouveau riche Parisian shopkeeper Monsieur Jourdain (Jeff Atik), whose ambition to mingle with the aristocracy leads to his being swindled by shady Count Dorante (Troy Dunn), humiliated by his daughter’s suitor Cleonte (Garth Whitten), and deceived by all.
But fortunately for him, he’s too self-obsessed to notice he’s been hornswoggled. In their free adaptation, director Frederíque Michel and designer-managing director Charles Duncombe have added unexpected elements to the 17th century classic — including a martial arts instructor (Mariko Oka) for M. Jourdain, a transvestite cooch dancer (Matt Cooke), raunchy one-liners, and a handful of songs by Duncombe and John Gregory Willard.
Though Molière’s stock-in-trade was the combining of extravagant artifice with down-to-earth commonsense, director Michel’s penchant for stylization sometimes results in her treating artifice a bit too artificially, but the prevailing wit, buffoonery, and slapstick provide necessary grounding. And Michel has assembled a large and able crew of farceurs. Atik’s vain and dim M. Jourdain is painted in broad strokes, and Ruthie Crossley captures Madame Jourdain’s bourgeois practicality. Cynthia Mance and Max Molina provide sly feistiness as prototypical, scheming Molière servants. Dunn is a snootily supercilious Dorante, and Deborah Knox adds a note of elegance as the beautiful Countess Dorimène, vainly pursued by M. Jourdain. Alisha Nichols and Whitten offer blond good looks and charm as the young lovers, and the ensemble acquits itself nimbly as Jourdain’s various teachers, servants, and hangers-on. Duncombe has created the handsome set, and Josephine Poinsot deftly mingles lavish — and sometimes loony — period costumes with modern dress.
Santa Monica Mirror
Thursday, November 20, 2008 By Lynne Bronstein, Mirror Staff Writer
Comedy can be a lot of things, but sometimes it’s just plain silly. Moliere’s reputation as the classic playwright of France has modern Americans thinking that Moliere plays are really deep. Truth is, Moliere wrote comedies with roots in the broad farces of the ancient Romans and the Italian comedia dell’arte, usually revolving around a character who’s too foolish to see reality.
The Bourgeois Gentilhomme (gentleman) is one such play, an episodic farce about a man who aspires to being high-society. In City Garage’s production, it’s almost like a Marx Brothers movie – but then again, the Marx Brothers are but another link in the unbroken chain of comedies about stuffed-shirts who get their comeuppance.
Monsieur Jourdain (Jeff Atik) is the Bourgeois Gentleman. Rotund and bewigged, he indulges his desire, using his wealth (probably recently acquired) to be a real upper-class twit. He employs many instructors in music, dance, philosophy, even martial arts. He’s so dense that when his philosophy professor (Trace Taylor) explains to him that all speech is either verse or prose, he exclaims “Amazing! I’ve been speaking prose for 40 years and I never knew it!” Strutting around in outfits that look like Halloween in West Hollywood, he provokes ridicule from his down-to-earth wife (Ruthie Crossley), daughter Lucile (Alisha Nichols), and Nicole the maid (Cynthia Mance). But he ignores their warnings – after all, they’re just women.
Jourdain wants to move in higher circles, so he courts the friendship of a rather affected Count (Troy Dunn) and his lady friend, the Countess Dorimene (Deborah Knox). Jourdain lends the Count money and jewels, which the Count uses for his own purpose of wooing Dorimene. Talk about an enabler! The Count sees right through Jourdain’s silliness, but as long as he’s getting advantages from the foolish gentleman, he’s willing to go along with Jourdain’s pretensions.
In the meantime, a nice young man named Cleonte (Garth Whitten) wants to marry Lucile – but the Bourgeois Gentleman only wants to wed his daughter to a blueblood. Cleonte’s servant Covielle (Max Molina) hits upon a scheme straight out of the old fairy tale “Puss in Boots.” By the end of the play, there’s a happy ending and three couples prepare to tie the knot, thanks to the escalating nonsense of Covielle’s mega-put-on. And Monsieur Jourdain suspects nothing. He’s gained not one bit of insight. Larry David would probably approve.
City Garage is known for staging experimental and politically radical plays, more often than not featuring bare flesh. The Bourgeois Gentilhomme is tame material for this company, but director Frederique Michel has found opportunities to make the 17th century comedy feel more modern without glaring anachronisms. The translation and adaptation of the text, by Michel and Charles Duncombe, uses modern colloquialisms and a healthy dose of risque epithets. Many of the performances are appropriately broad and cartoon-like, especially Atik as the title character. Don’t be misled, though, by the ease with which Atik seems to play this foolish man – the role requires much energy and is undoubtedly physically exhausting.
Crossley is to be commended for playing Madame Jourdain with restraint, making her the practical ballast to her husband’s nonsense. Dunn is suitably epicene and sleazy as the Count.
The play also features songs, by Duncombe and John Gregory Willard, with a strong flavor of Monty Python, especially the “Food” song that closes the first act. As for bare flesh – it doesn’t get any more bare than a belly dancer (Lejla Hadzimuratovic). Moliere may not have envisioned a belly-dancer, but her dancing is there to enjoy. And The Bourgeois Gentilhomme is two hours of guilt-free enjoyable silliness.
Bad Penny
August 1—September 7, 2008
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Cynthia Mance, Alisha Nichols, Mariko Oka, Kenneth Rudnicki
LA Times: Happy this Penny Turns Up
Friday, August 8, 2008
By Philip Brandes
“A bad penny always turns up” is a platitude that packs an unexpected existential punch, at least in the sardonic world of New York playwright Mac Wellman. In Wellman’s Obie Award-winning short play, the titular “Bad Penny” opens a portal to the metaphysical abyss that yawns beneath the banality of a summer’s day in Central Park — and, by extension, beneath a society shaped by clichéd thought.
Staged with an austere pitch to the intellect by Frederíque Michel at Santa Monica’s City Garage, the play’s obsession with poetically fractured logic is sounded in the opening meditations of a recovering mental patient named Kat (Cynthia Mance), who wonders whether even the sky above is simply “a fake image of the true image of the sky.”
Having just found a penny by a nearby fountain, Kat is plagued with superstitious misgivings about bad luck coming to those who touch it: They could suffer the pharaoh’s curse, be eaten by trolls or be taken by the Boatman of Bow Bridge — a latter-day Charon ferrying lost souls across the Central Park pond, in one of Wellman’s sly juxtapositions of classical mythology.
Ducking fate, Kat gives the cursed penny to Ray (Troy Dunn), a toxic waste dump worker from Montana in search of a fix for the flat tire he’s hauling, Sisyphus-like, through the park. Skeptic to the end, Ray ignores Kat’s warning, oblivious to the ominous Boatman gliding up behind them.
Juggling illusions of normality, acquiescence to authority, paranoid conspiracy theories and toxic cheese, Wellman’s witty, abstract use of language is consistently challenging. The presence of other characters does little to bridge the sense of isolation that permeates this monologue-heavy piece. The ensemble delivery is clear and capable, though some of the outlandishly petty bickering cries out for the humorous inflections of New York accents. When the entire ensemble comes together to sing a few verses of “You’re Out of the Woods” from “The Wizard of Oz,” the effect is pure irony — no one gets off the hook here.
Though originally written for a site-specific staging at Central Park’s Bow Bridge, Charles Duncombe’s stylish production design effectively uses projected images and lighting to ease the translation to an enclosed space.
Backstage
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
By Neal Weaver
If you spot a penny lying tails up on the ground, don’t pick it up: It’s a bad penny and may put you in peril of being carted away by the Bad Boatman of Bow Bridge, a troll who lives in Central Park. That seems to be the message of Mac Wellman’s quirky one-act.
One day in Central Park, we encounter Woman One (Cynthia Mance), a daffy lady with a red umbrella and a bad penny, who claims to have been born in the Place of the Solitary Shoe. Also present is Woman Two (Alisha Nichols), who feeds the pigeons and wears red gloves. Man One (Troy Dunn) hails from Big Ugly, Mont., and seeks to change a tire on his possibly mythical Ford Fairlane. And he does not wear red. Man Two (David E. Frank) is a painter–with an easel, a painting of two dressmaker’s dummies, and a red scarf. Man Three (Kenneth Rudnicki) apparently lives in a cardboard box and wears one red sock. The Chorus of Six (Mariko Oka) appears in various guises–including what looks like a wedding gown, with a red heart-shaped cushion suspended around her neck. She rows past from time to time in an imaginary boat.
Woman One gives the bad penny to Man One, and the Bad Boatman carries him off. For what it’s worth, both Woman One and Man One claim to have had dogs named Meathead. All the characters sound off about the things that bug them in modern society and the human condition.
The piece seems both slight and enigmatic. And as to what it all means, it’s anyone’s guess. But director Frederíque Michel gives it an able cast and an elegantly impeccable production, and Charles Duncombe’s handsome set uses projections to suggest the changing seasons.
The Mission (Accomplished)
April 25—June 1, 2008
LA Weekly — GO!
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ishani Das, John Deschamps, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Dave Mack, Cynthia Mance, Amanda Mayen, Maximiliano Molina, Bo Roberts
LA WEEKLY – GO!
Scott Ritter and The Mission (Accomplished) Empire and its discontents
By STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS
Monday, April 28, 2008 – 7:01 pm Last month, the first installment in Moving Arts Theater’s monthly discussion program, “The War Plays Project,” consisted mostly of local writers who had written plays about the U.S. invasion(s) of Iraq, and who were trying to fathom the public’s disinterest in movies and plays about those wars.
Theories abounded: public fatigue from overexposure to either press coverage of the war or rhetoric by proponents and opponents alike, or perhaps a general desire for distraction from all the vitriol. I suspect something else is going on — something that involves the very language of the theater.
When I was in graduate school at UCLA, there existed a bias in that school’s theater department against allegorical plays in general, and absurdist plays in particular. Preferred were well-constructed dramas and docudramas about recognizable human emotions, and issues plucked from newspapers, magazines and talk radio. I remember one influential new faculty member dismissing Edward Albee as a living anachronism. “Theater of the Absurd is dead,” he proclaimed. Within the year, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Before you could name a leftist Latin American nation whose duly elected government we weren’t trying to topple, we were being sold the Star Wars defense shield for protection from those pesky Russians, along with the argument that Pacific Coast redwoods were a source of air pollution and that only the logging industry could save us from the scourge of toxic trees. Not even Eugene Ionesco could have come up with a script like that.
The absurd and Orwellian reports coming from the White House have since grown even more obviously duplicitous, and the lack of counterargument from mass-media journalists is almost Soviet. And that’s the source of my hunch: Smart people who attend theater have learned to distrust the indignant “newspaper speak” in which topical, political plays converse. David Hare’s docudrama about the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, Stuff Happens, and Tim Robbins’ chronicle of grunts and journalists in that same war, Embedded, pinned their bid for “importance” on overfamiliar arguments. But the larger cause of these plays’ being so dated, even on their opening nights, wasn’t that we’d already been bludgeoned by such arguments in the press, but that we’d been so transparently lied to by that press. Political discourse itself grows wearying in the theater, no matter whose side it espouses, because the truth it lays claim to has been so tortured and abused.
The political dramas that draw crowds these days speak through allegories — like political plays in any society whose politics have become too dogmatic for rational exchanges. These plays’ abstractions are decoded through ancient Greek tragedies, or through a misunderstood green witch railing against the hypocrisy of power and conformity in Wicked. These are fairy tales that those professors at UCLA in 1980 would have dismissed as frivolous, when actually they’re loaded politically and metaphysically, without any character uttering a single policy statement.
Enter Scott Ritter, chief weapons inspector for the U.N. Security Committee from 1991 to 1998. Ritter was speaking at the Hayworth Theatre last Wednesday night on issues ranging from relations with Iraq and Iran to the absence of a viable antiwar movement in the United States. Ritter’s comments (and a second-half interview by journalist Jason Leopold) were part of what he described as a performance piece in development, inspired by his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement.
Ritter is a big man, physically and morally. Were he just an actor on a local stage rather than a player on the world stage, his performance would be just another slightly overacted one-man show. But Ritter redefines “suspension of disbelief” through the verifiable authority of his actions in life. He resigned on principle as weapons inspector to protest Iraq’s expulsion of his inspection team, and the failure of both the United States and the United Nations to press for enforcement of the U.N. resolution demanding that Iraq allow his U.N. inspectors to do their job. He had a wife and twin 5-year-old daughters when Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned him that if he resigned his post, the FBI would come after him. Ritter resigned anyway, and he felt Berger’s wrath through an arrest on false and unfiled charges by the FBI that he solicited dates with minors in an Internet sting operation.
Things then grew even more surreal. The Iraqis had kicked out the inspectors, they said, because the CIA was using weapons inspectors as spies in order to obtain intelligence — not to dismantle an illegal weapons program but to plan an invasion of their country. Slowly, with a deepening sense of Washington’s betrayal, Ritter realized that the Iraqi argument was well-founded.
Now, Ritter insists, the decision in Washington to bomb Iran has already been made. It’s too late to stop it, and on this matter it’s irrelevant who is elected in November.
“Both Clinton and Obama spoke of Iran as a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the CIA report that there is no evidence of a weapons program today. Iran has a nuclear-enrichment program that is authorized by the United Nations and signed off by Iran and the United States. Iran poses no threat to the United States. This is not a war of necessity. We’ll regret this decision. But the American people have been imprinted, as they were last time.”
To make his larger points, however, Ritter speaks in allegories. Example: Because we love firefighters doesn’t mean we love fire. No, we arrest arsonists. Because we love our soldiers doesn’t mean we have to love war. But America does love war, at least the idea of winning one. There is no viable antiwar movement in this country, Ritter says, and there has to be in order for anything to change — that, and the replacement of all members of Congress who voted for the war in Iraq. Disapproval of the war reflected in the polls is not a reflection of our antipathy to war, Ritter argues, but of our antipathy to losing a war. Were we not stranded in a quagmire, few would be questioning the rationale or the legality of the 2003 invasion.
So now we’ll bomb Iran to punish it for the 30-year natural-gas contract it struck with China, Ritter says.
“Our aggression is to dictate the terms of development of China and India through the Middle East. Global empire is what we need to be frightened of. All empires end, most empires badly. I don’t want this for my country.”
At Santa Monica’s City Garage, Charles Duncombe’s adaptation of Heiner Müller’s text The Mission, which Duncombe retitled The Mission (Accomplished), takes Müller’s saga of three French insurgents (Troy Dunn, Bo Roberts and David Mack) in 1798 who tried to instigate a slave rebellion in British-ruled Jamaica, then juxtaposes that poem about regime change gone awry with images of a ruminative George W. Bush (John Deschamps), Donald Rumsfeld (David E. Frank), Dick Cheney (Roberts) and an American soldier in Iraq (Maximiliano Molina). Punching such a hole in the wall of history is a technique Duncombe endeavored in a 2001 adaptation of a different Müller text, Frederick of Prussia: George W.’s Dream of Sleep. The two productions are City Garage’s bookends to the Bush II presidency and could, taken together, be called Empire Lost.
Duncombe sails on stormy artistic waters, imposing a topical American context onto Müller’s historical allegory. Every rule in the book says this should fail, like those productions of Julius Caesar in which the title character emerges wearing a U.S. flag pin and throws the word nucular into the prose. Yet Duncombe pulls it off, largely because his own writing style matches Müller’s careful and tender poeticism. The other lifeboat comes from director Frédérique Michel, who guides the American portraits away from caricature.
Aside from that, Michel’s production is as visually elegant and erotic as the text is intellectually rigorous. Wonderful performances come from by Ishani Das, Cynthia Mance and Amanda Mayen. How a portrait of such brutality can emerge so sensually is a trick that defies description. There’s a subtle hint in this production that matches Ritter’s sentiments: that the end of empire need not mean the end of the world; life’s richness and beauty can persevere, if we allow it.
The Bald Soprano
November 9, 2007—March 2, 2008
Directed by Frédérique Michel Production
Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Jeff Atik David E. Frank Cynthia Mance Maximiliano Molina Alisha Nichols Bo Roberts Troy Dunn joined the cast for the second half of the run.
LA WEEKLY – GO!
GO! THE BALD SOPRANO by Eugene Ionesco
Monday, November 12, 2007
By Paul Birchall
Eugene Ionesco’s brilliant absurdist farce unfolds in a universe dislodged from logic and even common sense. Yet, even in this bizarre world, a good laugh is still a good laugh, thanks to director Frederique Michel’s assured staging that comes marbled in cool irony. A middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Jeff Atik and David E. Frank in drag), relaxes in a suburban living room not far from Paris, after having had a delicious dinner. Mrs. Smith rhapsodizes about the meal, while her genial hubby replies in incomprehensible grunts and gurgles.
Suddenly, the Smiths’ friends, Mrs. and Mr. Martin (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts), show up on the doorstep — and soon the characters are squawking, babbling and ejaculating random bits of nonsense. Are they a pair of typical suburban couples? Or barking animals at the zoo? It’s best to simply roll with Ionesco’s wonderfully random and playfully chaotic plot, which Michel sets with impeccable comic timing.
The performers rattle off the non sequiturs with glee and gusto — at times the piece resembles a long Monty Python sketch. Frank’s turn as Mrs. Smith is particularly droll — he plays the character as a frumpy suburban matron, but with buggy, lunatic eyes. Atik’s harrumphing hubby and Mance’s seriously deranged Mrs. Martin are vivid, multidimensional characters.
LA Times – Recommended
‘Bald Soprano’ Can Be So Surreal
Friday, November 16, 2007
By David Ng
Eugene Ionesco called his absurdist farce “The Bald Soprano” an “anti-play” — a succinct and accurate description for a comedy that breaks all the rules in the book and then gleefully incinerates the tome. Still provocative after more than 50 years, this theatrical Molotov receives a frequently hilarious if rather over-acted revival from City Garage in Santa Monica.
To summarize the anti-story: Mrs. Smith (David E. Frank) is prattling on about grocery shopping to her loutish husband, Mr. Smith (Jeff Atik), when a second couple, the Martins (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts), arrive at the door. It turns out Mr. and Mrs. Martin have never met before, even though they live together. Matters get weirder when a fireman (Maximiliano Molina) stops by to regale a few nonsensical stories. The play concludes with the main characters shouting gibberish at each other.
The actors display an infectious enthusiasm, but they tend to overstate the silliness of their lines as if they were unsure whether Ionesco’s humor is coming across. The performance that best channels the play’s surrealist vibe is Frank’s cross-dressing turn as Mrs. Smith. His robotic delivery and mildly deranged facial expressions seem a perfect match for Ionesco. The gender twist proves to be an inspired bit of non sequitur casting in a play filled with verbal non sequiturs.
Adapting Ionesco for the English-language stage usually requires taking numerous liberties with the play. This production uses a translation by Donald M. Allen that moves the action from England to France and sprinkles bits of français throughout. The direction by Frédérique Michel further annotates the text with a hilarious set of bodily paroxysms. Rather than compromise the play, these alterations only enhance its strange, anarchic power.
Quartet
August 17—September 23
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Sharon Gardner, Mariko Oka
BACKSTAGE – CRITIC’S PICK!
August 22, 2007
By Hoyt Hilsman
Frederíque Michel’s deft direction and outstanding performances by Troy Dunn and Sharon Gardner create a vivid, evocative production of German playwright Heiner Müller’s free adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The themes of lust, seduction, and intrigue are familiar from the various renditions of the novel since its publication in 1782. But Müller’s adaptation emphasizes the exquisite tension between the divine and the profane, as the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil act out their perverse passions in a choreographed dialogue about God and the flesh. Exquisitely written, the play is an extended tract, a debate about the nature of sexuality and spirituality, but enacted in the form of several role-playing seductions. Müller twists the intellectual screws again and again as Valmont and Merteuil exchange gender roles, further jumbling the perspectives of seducer and seduced. In the hands of a less gifted company, this material could easily become stiff and wordy. But Dunn and Gardner seem to have marinated themselves in not only the emotional subtext of each moment but also the darting, zinging intellectual combat that drives the play. Gardner is a stunningly convincing actor, playing the first section of the play in a wheelchair with absolute conviction, then rising miraculously to perform limber feats — physical and intellectual. She plays a perfect counterpoint to Valmont in her piercing yet fatally flawed honesty. Dunn is terrific, switching from the predatory seducer to the sympathetic seduced, all the while relentlessly exploring the spiritual rationale for his tragic existence. Müller’s words trip lightly from Dunn’s lips, but their philosophical weight sends lightning flashes out into the universe. In the end, Dunn and Gardner summon a transcendent emotional power that lingers long past the curtain. David E. Frank and Mariko Oka give solid performances in secondary roles. Michel is the beating theatrical heart of this piece, as she drenches the play with emotional subtext and intellectual power. Her work is strong, important, and critically vital in the contemporary world. And she delivers Müller’s disturbing, universal vision with beauty and grace.
LA WEEKLY – GO!
QUARTET by Heiner Müller
Monday, August 20, 2007
By Steven Leigh Morris
Like English playwright Christopher Hampton, the late German poet and überexperimenter in theatrical forms, Heiner Müller, also had a go at adapting Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th-century novel Les Liasons Dangereusesfor the stage. Whereas Hampton transformed the novel’s series of correspondences into a straightforward erotic melodrama about libertines and innocents, Müller’s Quartet (here in a translation by Marc Von Henning) turned the letters into a far more interesting, linguistically dense and poetical sequence of arias and dialogues spoken by two characters, a man and a woman named Valmont and Merteuil (Troy Dunn and Sharon Gardner). Quartet strongly suggests that the pair are acting out a jealousy duet that involves sexually ensnaring a virgin from a convent, while corrupting the president’s femme — leaving girl and femme ruined — just for the puppeteers’ fun, and boredom, and insecurity.
What’s to be insecure about? Why, aging and death of course, underscoring the frailty and presumptuousness of human power in general, and of sexual power in particular. What good is power if it lasts no longer than the blink of an eye? Valmont and Merteuil’s bitter game is a form of revenge against God for their own mortality, a petty swipe of nihilism motivated by reminders of their own physical decay. Director Frederique Michel has the pair switching roles, which further dramatizes the gamesmanship. She also adds two “Players” (David E. Frank and Mariko Oka); he makes droll remarks behind a golden mask while she enacts the role of the virgin.
Set against the sky-blue backdrop of Charles A. Duncombe’s elegant production design, which also includes a pair of suspended chandeliers and a centerpiece crucifix, the spectacle is as beautiful to watch as it is to hear, thanks in large part to the eloquent and intense performances that, even at fever pitch, sustain a quiet dignity. Also, Michel’s overlay of Kabuki formalization helps elevate the lusty melodrama from a poem about the meaning of sex to one about the meaning of life
LA Times – Reccomended
Gender-bending mind games
Friday, August 24, 2007
By F. Kathleen Foley
Director Frédérique Michel and production designer Charles A. Duncombe take on the obscurities of the late German playwright Heiner Müller in “Quartet,” Müller’s radically deconstructed adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” now at City Garage.
Michel and Duncombe have traversed Müller terrain before, most notably in their brilliant 2000 production of “MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore,” Müller’s cryptic take on the Medea legend.
Although Marc von Henning’s translation maintains plenty of epigrammatic zip, “Quartet” is far more austere and spare than “MedeaText.” The play opens with a startling visual — a naked woman crucified on a towering cross. This “Player” (Mariko Oka) features prominently in the fantasies of the carnally voracious Vicomte de Valmont (Troy Dunn) and his partner in lubricity, the Marquise de Merteuil (Sharon Gardner).
Attended by another Servant/Player (David E. Frank), Valmont and de Merteuil engage in gender-bending games of a progressively cruel ilk. There is nudity, yes, and even simulated sex, but don’t expect titillation from these concupiscent charades. Müller seldom mentions sex without a graphic reference to death. These pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats, so deftly portrayed by Dunn and Gardner, are keenly aware of the impending deluge that will soon land them in the tumbrels. Until that final deliquescence, they will continue to “rub their hides” together — soullessly and tragically.
Müller intended “Quartet” as a study on terrorism, but in Michel’s take, the emphasis is pointedly feminist, as it was in “MedeaText.” Under his sphinx-like inscrutability, Müller evinces a surprising empathy for his objectified female characters, as does Michel in her sympathetic enigmatic staging.
LA WEEKLY – Theatre Feature
AGING DISGRACFULLY
Trying and Quartet look at the costs and benefits of growing old
By Steven Leigh Morris
Wednesday, August 29, 2007 – 6:00 pm
[This article has been edited for length. Please click here for the full text.
Excuse me for remounting the old “L.A. is a theater town — really!” warhorse that observers who’ve been here for a decade or two, including me, drag out of the stable every year or two, but the local stage is firing on all cylinders this month — really! From the exquisite psychological realism in John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea (speaking of warhorses) at the tiny Elephant Theatre Company, and the sassy romantic comedy of Charles Mee’s Limonade Tous les Jours, just closed at 2100 Square Feet but reopening somewhere else shortly, to the skillful jocularity of Independent Shakespeare Company’s open-air offerings by the Bard in Barnsdall Park, to the finely tuned machinery of farce in Daniel Goldfarb’s Modern Orthodox at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, to the crowd-pleasing Orwellian spectacle laced into Wicked at the Pantages, this is all happening pre-season, which is very unusual. New York and Britain haven’t even rolled in their heavy artillery yet: The Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Scotland are packing their suitcases for visits to UCLA Live, and the Wooster Group’s Hamlet is slated for REDCAT early next year.
Add to the evidence another pair of glorious productions — one at Burbank’s midsize Colony Theatre and the other over at Santa Monica’s City Garage — that both grapple in contrary ways with the plight of aging.
… [snip] …
Christopher Hampton wasn’t the only one to adapt Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th-century novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses— written as a series of letters — into a play. The late German poet-playwright Heiner Müller composed a “text” named Quartet, which has been translated by Marc Von Henning in City Garage’s gorgeous production, directed by Frédérique Michel.
It’s very German. Where Trying is largely punctuated by repartee, Quartet consists of massive blocks of words, making it something of a literary cliff for audiences to scale. Aging former lovers Valmont and Merteuil (roles shared by Troy Dunn and Sharon Gardner) appear in whiteface and Josephine Poinsot’s lavish, baroque costumes. Through their torrents of language, they play-act multiple parts in a jealousy duet — challenges and counterchallenges for Valmont to de-virginize a Catholic novice (Mariko Oka) and corrupt the “femme de presidente” — all motivated by Merteuil’s desire to marry, and the couple’s mutually held fears of aging and insignificance. (The play is marbled with references to death and physical decay.)
With a large wooden crucifix planted center stage, against which Oka is suspended naked at the play’s opening, this is clearly a pitched battle between mortals and God, between impotence and immortality. Of course the mortals realize they’re on the losing end, cemetery-bound, and this is what motivates their nihilistic swipes at God and determination to push through the constraints of religious and social decorum through such games as sodomizing innocent little girls and gleefully destroying the reputations of lonely women succumbing to sexual temptation. This, and the masks they don while carrying out their brutalities, makes for a perfectly reasonable explanation for why pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry.
Michel stages all of this as a kind of dance with moments of faux-Kabuki formality, performed with strikingly lucid restraint and intelligence by Dunn and Gardner. Oka beautifully plays the added character of “Player,” along with David E. Frank, who, behind a golden mask, makes droll comments on the action.
The combination of taut choreography and freewheeling role playing, in conjunction with a pair of chandeliers suspended against the sky-blue backdrop of Charles A. Duncombe’s set and lighting design, makes for a very elegant and thoughtfully textured event.
Rhinoceros
June 1—July 17, 2007
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ruthie Crossley Justin Davanzo Troy Dunn David E. Frank Nita Mickley Maximiliano Molina Alisha Nichols Mariko Oka Rachel Oliva Bo Roberts
LA TIMES – RECOMMENDED!
Rhinoceros at City Garage: Staying human against all odds
Friday, June 8, 2007
F. Kathleen Foley
There’s this niggling problem with Ionesco. Over the decades, interpreters approach his texts with an increasingly misplaced reverence that can be stultifying.
Not so Frédérique Michel, whose staging of “Rhinoceros” at City Garage invests Ionesco’s absurdist classic with a heightened sense of whimsy. From the hilarious opening scene in which the actors frolic about to infectiously Gallic music, we realize we’re in for a romp. The dun-colored sets of Charles A. Duncombe’s sunlit production design provide an unobtrusive backdrop for the play’s human cartoons, who move about in a sort of group bustle. The exception to the general purposefulness is Berenger (Troy Dunn), the hapless everyman who recurs in several of Ionesco’s plays. A shambling boozer with “loser” written all over him, Berenger wanders through the crisply syncopated scenes with a telling lack of direction. But when his fellow townspeople transform into rampaging rhinoceroses, Berenger refuses to follow the herd and capitulate to conformity.
Of course, Berenger’s heroic inflexibility is the point of the play, a veiled parable of the Nazi scourge. When all about him are becoming beasts, Berenger remains defiantly human.
Dunn, who played Agamemnon and Pentheus in City Garage’s “Three by Mee” trilogy, gives a serviceable performance here but seems more comfortable cast in a heroic mold than as the comically perplexed Berenger. But plenty of requisite twinkle is provided by the engaging cast, especially David E. Frank as Berenger’s supposedly iconoclastic co-worker Botard, who succumbs to the prevalent plague in short order, and Justin Davanzo as the Logician, whose mind-bogglingly circuitous arguments get some of the production’s biggest laughs.
LA WEEKLY – GO!
The Rhino and the Whino
By Steven Leigh Morris
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
In Eugene Ionesco’s 1958 farce, Rhinoceros, a number of characters hear sweet music in the trumpeting of rhinos carousing on the streets of a provincial French town. Where we hear something resembling a seventh-grade kid learning to play a coronet, they hear Audra McDonald. Yet the trumpeting is only music to those in the throes of a mysterious transformation from human to pachyderm. One by one, the entire population grows horns and thick skins, and becomes destined to trample flowers, crush staircases and decimate the town square. The play — made more famous than it might otherwise have been by Eli Wallach and Zero Mostel on Broadway — is among the seminal works in the Theater of the Absurd, a movement fomented in the trenches of World War I and seasoned by the nuclear explosions over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Luigi Pirandello and Harold Pinter are the Theater of the Absurd’s original four horsemen of the apocalypse, pouncing on both logicians and the clergy like literary gang rapists, exposing the lethal brutality underlying human relations in general, and polite society in particular. Their plays are usually done as some kind of clown show with human puppets blathering non sequiturs. Ionesco lifted entire passages of dialogue from a foreign language primer. Like in Dada, it’s supposed to be as nuts as life and death itself.
As the Cold War was thawing, I was taught in university that the Theater of the Absurd was dead, an antique curiosity, as though our fruitful existence was now secured for the indefinite future. Thank goodness, they said, that in the theater, we could go back to comparatively comfortable dramas of family dysfunction, like those written by Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson. It’s not God who’s dead, they argued, it’s Chicken Little. Of course that was before global warming.
So here we are again, with the entire Middle East nuking up, with the icecaps melting and Chicken Little center stage. The prospect of our extinction as a species doesn’t even seem shocking anymore. Hamlet summed up that reckoning with mortality in his oft-quoted remark about “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”
It’s widely believed that Ionesco’s rhinos are stand-ins for the Nazis. Yet if, in Rhinoceros, we’re supposed to be watching the painful process of political and spiritual capitulation to the brutes, there’s no stage direction calling for a swastika on the set, nor does director Frederíque Michel, in this current staging of Rhinoceros at Santa Monica’s City Garage, play the fascist card in any overt way. We certainly don’t see any rhinos waiting in line at Starbucks as part of some critique of our corporate-consumer theology — the kind of critique this theater has woven into its adaptations of texts by Heiner Müller.
Rather, Michel serves up an ensemble of marionettes attired for the late ’50s (costumes by Josephine Poinsot), sitting and crossing their legs in unison, sometimes snorting involuntarily, and then stopping to gaze out for a moment beyond their insulated worlds of grocery shops and dime-store novels to see a beast thunder across their horizon, accompanied by a low rumble and snare drums (sound design by Paul M. Rubenstein). Instead of actually seeing the rhino, we observe the witnesses’ expressions of amazement before they return to their lives, bickering over whether the animal had one horn or two. A bow-tied Logician (Justin Davanzo) helps them make further sense of their tiny world by reasoning that since all cats die, and Socrates is dead, Socrates must have been a cat. In many ways it’s a pedantic little comedy, made more so by the actors’ supercilious emphasis on drones like Jean (Bo Roberts), who blusters out his moral superiority as though he has a target and the words “shoot me” painted onto his jacket. The play’s hero is the aimless, wine-toting Berenger (Troy Dunn), whose greatest virtues are his lack of punctuality and purpose. Dunn wanders through this dream in a completely different acting style. They’re doing a puppet show, while he’s playing cinéma vérité with matted hair and a three-day beard, looking like a cross between a young David Clennon and Mark Ruffalo. The contrast of style is strategic and effective, but would be more so were the town’s idiocy not painted in primary colors. Perhaps Michel respects the play too much, underscoring its patronizing, professorial qualities — which also may be exaggerated in Derek Prouse’s translation.
Yet Michel’s production captures something about the loss of what it means to be human. Whatever that is, we’re free to fill in. We see Roberts’ Jean suffering with a fever on a little bed. He strips off the sheets, and we see his skin now green, his voice growing hoarse. It was this transformation, as performed by Mostel, that electrified the Broadway stage. Roberts’ is more schematic than spontaneous, yet in that metamorphosis, you can feel the tug of our age: the mergers and market forces slowly diminishing the arts and other services that help people to be rather than just to buy. You can hear the howls of dissent growing softer, confined now to small pens, watched by police cameras and ignored by news cameras. You can feel cults of narcissism and celebrity rising as the cultural skin thickens, as publishing industries fall away, as any pretense to an intellectually open and diverse society lies on that bed, wheezing.
Designer Ralph Funicello provides a huge painted backdrop of Brueghel the Elder’s pre-Elizabethan painting Dulle Griet for Daniel Sullivan’s perfunctory staging of Hamlet at South Coast Repertory. Brueghel’s painted goblins of hell frame the action on an otherwise barren wooden platform stage, decorated with a throne or two. Hamlet, like Berenger, is out of joint with his time and with the world he occupies, only Hamlet has a purpose — vengeance — which comes to him in a vision as the ghost of his father. This is much like the trumpeting of the rhinos, the call of the dead, or of the Nazis, who were similarly fueled by revenge, and much of Europe signed on to their derangement. In Hamlet too we observe the steady metamorphosis of an entire population — the royalty of Elsinore — from humans into a herd of ghosts, propelled by lunacy to the grave and beyond it, if that looming Dulle Griet is supposed to mean anything. In Hamlet too they turn, one by one, Polonius (Dakin Matthews), Ophelia (Brooke Bloom), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Henri Lubatti and Jeff Marlow), Laertes (Graham Hamilton), Gertrude and Claudius (Linda Gehringer and Robert Foxworth), to our hero himself (Hamish Linklater), until whatever it means to be human, or simply to be, has been vanquished. This leaves Fortinbras (David DeSantos) and the Norwegians to take over. And that doesn’t look any more promising, given the grudge that motivated their arrival.
Dulle Griet — painted large over this production — offers the lure of a conceptually bold and potentially consequential Hamlet that the director resolutely ignores, in favor of the kind of generic, self-important, somewhat witty rendition that we see year in, year out. Foxworth and Gehringer make for a perfectly serviceable king and queen, Matthews’ windbag Polonius sparkles with clarity and humor, and as Hamlet, the slender, charismatic and, yes, often brooding Linklater moves with the understated grace of an actor. Given his au naturel method approach, it’s a deficit when understatement appears affected and overstatement overstated, sort of like a teen idol playing Hamlet. Some of Linklater’s speeches are gorgeously delivered, nonetheless. He’s allowed to express among the most eloquent ruminations and complaints ever written about what it means to be alive. Given the real prospect of human extinction, the play, like Rhinoceros, could and should resonate with a meaning that would make the Absurdists proud.
KCRW 89.9
Theatre Talk, Thursday, June 28, 2007
“The Absurd vs the Anecdotal”
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk. Forty–five years ago, Martin Esslin published the book, The Theatre of the Absurd, which was easily the most influential theatrical text of the 1960’s. Since that heady time, when playwrights like Albee, Beckett, Dürrenmatt, Pinter and others seemed to be innately connected to the zeitgeist, there have been lots of interesting plays—but no real movements.
A new revival of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros playing here in Santa Monica is sharp reminder of those forty-five years. This production (directed by Frederíque Michel) doesn’t reinvent Ionesco’s play, nor make us see it in any new light. Michel adds a Sarkozy reference and music by Charles Trenet, but on the whole, it’s a rather traditional take on the material.
Because of this straightforward staging, one can see Rhinoceros for what it is: A longish, imperfect play that is somehow still deeply profound. One also sees how incredibly difficult a play it is to bring to life on stage. So difficult that it may have even permanently driven Orson Welles from stage directing. (His 1960 production of Rhinoceros in London, starring Laurence Olivier as Berenger, was the last thing he ever directed for the theater.) The actors in Michel’s production are not Olivier’s and they struggle throughout the play with Ionesco’s bleak yet comic lines.
Michel’s stagecraft can’t elevate the production beyond the cast’s limitations or the play’s challenges, but simply getting it up on stage is a valuable reminder of how theatre was once the place for writers to be daring and stretch an audiences view of the world and themselves.
If, 45 years later, there a theatrical movement forming today, I would argue that’s its epicenter is here in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, this movement is far less daring and frankly, much more mundane. If the Post-World War II years brought us the Theatre of the Absurd; the early 21st century brings us the Theatre of the Anecdote.
Rhinoceros and plays of its era employed big ideas and bold gestures, often at the risk of alienating its audience; whereas the Theatre of the Anecdote seeks to tell small, personal stories, usually using direct address to make sure nothing is left misunderstood.
The World Premiere of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face at the Mark Taper Forum provides a perfect example of the Theatre of the Anecdote. Hwang’s play is a thinly fictionalized account of the playwright’s own artistic and political troubles. Because Hwang is more openly self-critical than most writers, the piece has some fun moments. But ultimately, besides the reliable truth vs. fiction conceit, Yellow Face is simply a first-person essay put on stage.
There is nothing wrong with this—as essays go, Yellow Face is amusing and well structured. But it isn’t really a play. And it’s not just David Hwang who’s not making plays. The Taper has over the years become ground zero for this type of theater—witness this season’s offerings Distracted or Nightingale. But this form is also spreading to Broadway with “plays” such as the Joan Didion adaptation: The Year of Magical Thinking. Like the citizens of the small French town in Ionesco slowly turning into Rhinceroses; theaters around the English-speaking world are seeing dramatic plays quietly being replaced by staged memoirs. Welcome to the Theater of the Anecdote.
Yellow Face continues through Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum; Ionesco’s Rhinoceros runs through July 18 at City Garage in Santa Monica. This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
LA WEEKLY – GO!
RHINOCEROS by Eugene Ionesco
By Steven Leigh Morris
Monday, June 4, 2007
The comedically regimented choreography in director Frederique Michel’s staging of Eugene Ionesco’s 1958 farce (translated by Derek Prouse) handily complements the Absurdist Romanian author’s portrayal of a town’s entire population transforming into the eponymous pachyderms. Even if Bo Roberts’ overly bombastic Jean — a living suit-and-tie blathering about rectitude and responsibility — overstates Ionesco’s dig at sanctimonious drones, at least the play is boldly interpreted. In manner and acting approach, Troy Dunn’s lead character, Berenger, is out on his own, a soft-spoken method actor in a world of stark puppets. He’s a stand-in for Ionesco — and us — as the townsfolk benignly capitulate to thick-skinned, dull-witted conformity. Ionesco wrote this after having observed the French embrace of the Nazis, and all of the lunatic rationalizations of that embrace passing for logic.
Michel shrewdly keeps Nazis and other rabid defenders of homeland security at arm’s length in a production that’s simply about the cost of being different. Though much of Ionesco’s satire is now pedantic and overwritten, the core idea, like this production, contains a horror that borders on tragedy, like the arts, or what used to be called free thinking, slowly shutting down in the body politic, organ by organ.
Iphigenia
December 1, 2006—February 4, 2007
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ed Baccari Crystal Clark Troy Dunn Alexandra Fulton Sam Littlefield Nita Mickley Maximiliano Molina Alisha Nichols Bo Roberts Kenneth Rudnick Marie-Françoise Theodore
Los Angeles Times — RECOMMENDED!
Clarity in revision of classic.
December 8, 2006
By F. Kathleen Foley
Charles L. Mee’s “Iphigenia,” the third and final offering in City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season, offers yet another reconsidered Greek classic by Mee that seems as timely as today’s headlines.
In the most straightforward staging of the three plays, Frédérique Michel brings a no-frills clarity to Mee’s occasionally overstated text, while Charles Duncombe’s striking production design richly evokes the Theban seaside where the action transpires.
“Agamemnon,” the first play in the trilogy, treated Agamemnon’s murder by his vengeful queen, Clytemnestra. The second play, “The Bacchae,” showed a prideful king at odds with the god Dionysos and his female revelers.
“Iphigenia” picks up Agamemnon’s fortunes just before the Trojan War, when Agamemnon, at the insistence of his troops, makes the fatal decision to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, as proof of his commitment to the conflict.
Troy Dunn once again plays Agamemnon, but this time, he is a gentler king before he has been brutalized by bloodshed and his own folly. Reprising the role of Clytemnestra, Marie-Françoise Theodore charts her character’s progression from loving wife to unyielding adversary. Crystal Clark’s Iphigenia shows the titanium backbone under the maidenly exterior.
“Iphigenia” is foremost an antiwar play, but it is more fascinatingly an incisive look at the tragic disconnect between the sexes. Surrounded by her vapid bridesmaids – a refreshingly cheeky element in Michel’s somber staging – Iphigenia fears suffocating in a domestic vacuum more than her own death. Hungry for the meaningful life that society denies her, she embraces her fate with the zeal of a suicide bomber. It’s a brilliantly revisionist denouement, and a fitting conclusion to City Garage’s ambitious, rewarding season.
LA WEEKLY — GO!
THREE BY MEE: IPHIGENIA
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
By Steven Leigh Morris
Completing a trilogy of Greek-classic adaptations by Charles L. Mee, director Fréderéque Michel demonstrates how she’s settled into view of theater that contains both the authority of stylistic precision mingled with a tenderness that carries the ache of her characters’ stresses and regrets.
This is the story of General Agamemnon’s (Troy Dunn) daughter, Iphigenia (Crystal Clark), whom her father sacrificed to the god Poseidon in exchange for fair seas to carry his fleet safely to Troy. Mee underscores the rumblings of Agamemnon’s army, transforming Poseidon’s demand into theirs – that the tortured officer make a flesh sacrifice to prove his credentials for authorizing the inevitable sacrifices of his troops. (This begs the questions of whether Congress would have so hastily authorized the Iraq war had we a draft that might have put legislators’ own sons and daughters in harm’s way.) For reasons that could be in performance, textual or a combination of both, a section bogs down where the soldiers explain their points of view.
Other than that, Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe’s production consists of a choreographed and elegantly costumed recitative – on and around a beached boat – that unfolds in a haunting crescendo of argument and emotion centering on the clash between Agamemnon’s duty to his country and to his family. Lovely, lucid performances by Dunn, Clark and by Marie-Françoise Theodore as Agamemnon’s agonized wife, Clytemnestra. Sam Littlefield is also grand as Iphigenia’s androgynous groom, Achilles.
KCRW: Greek is Chic
December 21, 2006
[Listen to the review] This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk. This past weekend, the Getty Villa presented Agamemnon by Aeschylus as part of their new series of informal, staged readings. If this Agamemnon (starring Tyne Daly as Clytemnestra) is any indication, these Villa Theater Lab events should make a valuable addition to L.A.’s classical drama landscape.
As a staged reading, the actors all dressed in black and simply sat around a table with scripts. Their Agamemnon (directed by Stephen Wadsworth) was well-rehearsed and featured elaborate lighting cues and sound effects–not to mention a riveting performance of Cassandra’s monologue, which actress Francesca Faridany got up on top of the table to recite.
The Getty Agamemnon was only one of a number of classic Greek myths on stage in L.A. this weekend. Just down PCH from the Villa, City Garage, the small Santa Monica theater tucked behind the 3rd Street Promenade, was showing Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0, a rethinking of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis.
Iphigenia is the third and final production of City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season, which started back in June with a production of Mee’s Agamemnon 2.0. Iphigenia, like City Garage’s other Mee productions, is directed by Frederique Michel and it features set pieces (a weathered, old fishing boat and a pan flute) as well as actors (namely Troy Dunn as Agamemnon) seen earlier in the trilogy.
Iphigenia is the most accessible of the “Three by Mee” series, both a production and as a play. Mee’s text is still assembled in a Dadaist, collage fashion, bringing together snippets of existing classic and contemporary writing; but in this piece, his curatorial hand feels more focused. In one scene, Mee has written an exchange between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon that has the feel of an old-fashioned drama–which throws the actors for a loop since for three plays straight they’ve been performing in completely post-modern style. Seeing them suddenly grapple with direct conflict and natural release of emotion is odd–it’s like watching soap opera actors whose teleprompters suddenly start scrolling Shakespeare.
The result is a play that’s less rambunctious than Mee’s other adaptations, but no less engaging for being relatively straightforward.
Michel, likewise, has streamlined Mee’s stage directions as well as her own directorial flare. The blocking is less busy and there are fewer moments that call attention to their own audacity. The final tableaux is far more restrained than the food-fight orgy that Mee calls for in his text, but the flash of chaos shown by the director is more haunting because of its brevity.
Equally haunting, but more whimsical (not to mention, less political) in tone is another Greek update playing across town at Inside the Ford. Sarah Ruhl’s update of the Eurydice myth has been slowly touring the country these last few years in a spectacular staging by Les Waters. It hasn’t played in Los Angeles, so the Circle X Theatre Company decided to mount a production of their own.
It’s not hard so see why; Ruhl’s Eurydice is filled with evocative imagery (like rain-filled elevators and a tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld) plus simple, honest, but poetic language. Director John Langs’ version is almost identical to the Waters’ production (which heads off-Broadway next year) minus a few canted angles and gallons of H20.
What Langs does achieve is a slightly more grounded reading of play. The lyric moments don’t soar as high, but as a dramatic experience, the play works better. After two viewings, Ruhl’s Eurydice is not quite the masterpiece some have hailed it to be, but it does seem to have just enough dazzle to inspire actors and directors to do excellent work.
Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice runs through January 6 at the John Anson Ford Theatre, Charles Mee’s version of Iphigenia resumes its run at City Garage January 12 through February 4.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
Los Angeles City Beat
Brilliant Twists: Two Westside productions cleverly rework classic tales
December 7, 2006
By Don Shirley
…Mee’s Iphigenia is no more realistic than Ibsen’s Dollhouse, but it’s on a much more intimate scale and takes about half the time (indeed, one more scene might be useful). It begins with ruminations by Agamemnon (Troy Dunn, who played the same king in City Garage’s Agamemnon earlier this year) that sound precisely tailored to the dilemma that W now faces in Iraq – except, of course, that W presumably never thinks about offering his daughters to the war effort, which is the sacrifice demanded of Agamemnon.
Yet the play eventually moves far beyond its discursive beginning and contemporary dress and references and evokes the original Greek emotions. The chorus of GIs and scatterbrained bridesmaids get some choice moments, as do Iphigenia (Crystal Clark) and her anguished mother (Marie-Françoise Theodore). Frédérique Michel’s direction is exquisitely nuanced.
Iphigenia ultimately accepts her wartime fate – at least she’ll be remembered as someone other than plain old Mrs. Achilles. Will the Bush twins now accept her challenge and sign up for service in Baghdad?
The Bacchae
September 8—October 22, 2006
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ed Baccari, Juni Buchér, Irene Casarez, Joan Chodorow, Justin Davanzo, Katherine Dollison, Duff Dugan, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Joel Nuñez, Nita Mickley, Mariko Oka, Julie Weidmann, Mark Woods
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THE BACCHAE
By Steven Mikulan
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Charles L. Mee’s take on Euripides’ Theban tragedy is an acquired taste. Written in the early 1990s, it’s a kind of postmodern celebration of Minoan matriarchy, with scoops of other people’s sexually charged writing thrown in, with authors ranging from Georges Bataille to Valerie Solanas. So it can be lyrically beautiful or sound like open-mike night at A Different Light. King Pentheus (Troy Dunn) is a staunch advocate of heterosexual rationalism and black suits. He loathes the carnal chaos represented by the god of wine, Dionysus (Justin Davanzo) and the Bacchae, his woman followers who live without men in the wilderness. Or does he? Halfway through this 75-minute production, we realize that Pentheus has quite a few secret sides to him, especially when he dresses in women’s garments to infiltrate the cliff-dwelling women’s camp. There’s not much in the way of linear “storytelling” here, and the show relies upon movement, music and declarative oration as much as dialogue. Director FrederÌque Michel displays a confident scenarist’s eye in her stage compositions, and her production shimmers with a languid beauty. She’s ably assisted by production designer Charles A. Duncombe, whose weathered shoreline set, complete with beached boat, gives a sense of shipwrecked ambition, and whose velvety lighting bathes the ensemble, many of whom appear nude or seminude. Josephine Poinsot’s witty costuming swings from modern to timelessly diaphanous.
Backstage West — PICK!
Three By Mee: Part 2, The Bacchae
September 14, 2006
By Hoyt Hilsman Charles
Mee’s reinvention of Euripides’ cosmic battle of nature and civilization, of gods and man, is enacted with a stinging contemporary edge in FrederÌque Michel’s production at City Garage. Mee’s Pentheus (Troy Dunn) is a modern-day neoliberal, an apologist for the fragile veneer of civilization that binds us into a moral and cultural society but also pits us against one another in violent conflict. When the Bacchae — women under the metaphorical spell of Dionysus (Justin Davanzo) — reject Pentheus’ bargain and abandon “civilization” to live in a state of bacchanalian nature on the cliffs above the sea, Pentheus sets out to conquer them. All this is against the advice of the elder statesmen, Tiresias (Ed Baccari) and Kadmos (Bo Roberts), who are inclined to be more forgiving of the women’s return to a natural state of existence. When Pentheus is forced into a Faustian pact to disguise himself as a woman and then is killed by his own mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), the tragedy of all human endeavors in the name of progress is writ large.
Euripides and Mee, as his successor playwright, do not shy from the largest, most gripping and disturbing of themes. Here is a fifth-century Greek playwright, in league with the modernist Mee, rejecting all human pretenses to decency and morality, casting us back into a state of nature that is animalistic, brutish, and tragic. The ultimate destination of civilization, say Euripides and Mee, is its destruction by the hand of coarse Nature, here represented by Dionysus — certainly a dark message for a segment of society that is currently dedicated to saving civilization from the threats of terror, global warming, and nuclear annihilation.
Michel’s direction is right on target for this piece, illuminating Mee’s evocative text with a beautiful stillness of imagery and performance. Dunn, in a strong portrayal, is alternately convincing and repulsive as the voice of civilization, arguing in a vacuum for a cause that already seems doomed. Davanzo is darkly seductive as Dionysus, luring us into the pleasures of the natural world, while toying with our frailties as mere mortals. The rest of the ensemble is solid, supporting the disturbing and provocative tone of the piece. The marvelous set by Charles Duncombe adds to the cosmic subtext.
Los Angeles Times — RECOMMENDED!
A Greek King at Odds With a God
September 15, 2006
By F. Kathleen Foley
As fascinating as it is flawed, Charles L. Mee’s adaptation of “The Bacchae,” the second offering in City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season, updates Euripides’ tragic tale about a Theban king whose stringent propriety puts him at odds with the god Dionysus. Thanks to FrederÌque Michel’s insightful staging, the play retains its requisite sense of mystery and menace. But the intellectual sweep of Mee’s hyper-poetical text is often interrupted by surreally puerile chatter that makes us feel as if we are trapped on a phone-sex line in limbo.
Michel’s languorous staging is a departure from her typically metronomic pacing but is fitting for these bare-breasted bacchantes, whose wild carousing has badly rattled Pentheus (impressively measured Troy Dunn), the kingdom’s repressed ruler. In Charles Duncombe’s superb production design, the action opens on a drifting vessel filled with drowsing women resting between their revels. Live music punctuates the proceedings, while shrieking gulls, creaking timbers and lowering light eerily presage the disaster.
Michel effectively plays up the homoerotic frisson between Pentheus and Dionysus (Justin Davanzo), a stranger whom Pentheus does not recognize as a wandering god. Pentheus is intent upon returning the errant females, including his mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), to hearth and home. Capricious Dionysus’ main interest is pulling the wings off these human flies and watching them wriggle.
Mee brilliantly illustrates the cataclysmic imbalance that results when a male-dominated society marginalizes its women and, conversely, the tragedy that can follow when women become warlike aggressors. But Mee’s leering concupiscence robs the tragedy of much of its sacramental magic. And the fact that Agave’s bloody deed is murder – even though she does not recognize the victim as her own son – is simply confusing, especially considering her subsequent protestations that she has killed a wild animal instead of a person.
KCRW
Greek to Mee & Classic Getty
September 21, 2006
[Listen to the show] This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk.
It’s always been a great irony that Santa Monica’s most avant-garde, European-style theater is next door to a Hooters restaurant. This juxtaposition reaches even more ridiculous heights this month as City Garage stages The Bacchae, Charles Mee’s radical reworking of the tragedy by Euripides which tells of lusty females who devote their lives to the god of sexuality.
Not knowing the prices at Hooters, I can’t say what $20 gets you there; but I suspect that unless guys are really there for the spicy wings, they’d be getting a much better deal next door, where a ticket to this Bacchae delivers much more bust for your buck.
Frederique Michel’s fleshy production is the type of show that would have been shut down by the authorities 40 years ago, which again adds to the irony since her theater is situated in an old police garage. This collision of tastes and sensibilities is a perfect backdrop for Charles Mee’s work. Mee’s Bacchae is almost Dadaist theater, as he assembles a rough outline of the story, using fragments of Euripides and roughly 12 other texts.
Given the play’s subject matter–women who leave the city to form their own society–many of these texts are feminist manifestos. But just as Mee is no slave to Euripides, Ms. Michel is no slave to Mee. The opening stage directions call for Tiresias and Kadmos to appear in Brooks Brothers suits, whereas as Michel has them attired in shorts, red polo shirts and loud argyle socks–this as a bevy of naked bacchanalians writhe around on the other side of the stage. In this way, Michel is a perfect match for the playwright’s work, because rather than simply amplify Mee’s remix of the Bacchae, she remixes it again in her own way. My one quibble with the production is that much of the music chosen was not as daring as the visuals–though I suppose the topless violinist might disagree.
Frederique Michel and Charles Mee’s postmodern take on Euripides stands in sharp contrast to the more traditional view of ancient Greece’s last, great tragedian showing at the Getty Villa. The Villa’s recent renovation includes a new outdoor performance space built in the style of a classic Athenian amphitheater.
The Getty’s inaugural production showcases Euripides’ earlier, less controversial play, Hippolytos. This tragedy about the Phaedra myth was performed in a new translation by Anne Carson, which is notable for its sprinkling of modern American vernacular–expressions like “cut the chitchat” and “work with me”–into the dialogue. The staging was entrusted to Stephen Sachs, an artistic director at the Fountain Theatre. As in his excellent productions of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances and Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, Sachs again contributes clean, clear direction that gets out of the way. There’s no Iraq war posturing, no Brechtian fussing about. True, some of the soldiers’ costumes look like Navajo kilts, but for the most part everyone is dressed in good old-fashioned togas.
The result is a tasteful evening, that elegantly showcases the new venue and its possibilities; but this Hippolytos feels a little too much like an artifact to be viewed behind glass. A 2,400 year-old play can’t simply be cleaned up and presented in attractive lighting. The director’s hands-off approach is noble, but if the spotlight is to be on acting in the future at the Getty, the museum will have to start a program that teaches authentic Greek performance technique, much like the Globe Theatre’s Mark Rylance did with Elizabethan-style productions. Without this, the Getty will have to turn to directors like Michel who will reinterpret classics by stressing the fashions of today. Interestingly, one aspect of Hippolytos did come alive in the Malibu night air–the music composed by David O. His score blended a cappella singing and vocal percussion. As performed by the small chorus, the music created an evocative mood that managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.
Hippolytos runs through this weekend at The Getty Villa’s Fleischman Theater, The Bacchae continues through October 22 at City Garage in Santa Monica.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
LA Weekly – Theatre Feature
Rage Against the Sex Machine: Why Greek tragedy is no toga party
By STEVEN MIKULAN
September 27, 2006
A flute and violin moan somberly as bodies slowly stir in the hull of a beached rowboat; strained light drizzles upon the naked flesh of women and their leader, Dionysus. So begins director Frédérique Michel’s 75-minute City Garage production of Charles L. Mee’s The Bacchae, an elegant interpretation that shimmers with languid beauty but whose telling sometimes sinks under the playwright’s dense blocks of speech. Mee’s 1993 reinterpretation of the Greek tragedy includes quotes, he says in the play’s introduction, from ‘Euripides, Georges Bataille… “insane” texts from the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, Joan Nestle’s Femme-Butch texts’ . . . So the evening can be lyrically haunting or sound like open-mike night at A Different Light.
The story is not really about the Bacchae, the wild women inflamed by retsina and lust. Nor is it about their idol, Dionysus (Justin Davanzo), god of wine and fertility, the happy-hour god who was the last of the Greek deities to take up residence on Mount Olympus. Instead, it concerns the king of Thebes, Pentheus (Troy Dunn), Dionysus’ implacable foe and a mortal who embodies our own personal conflicts between eros and civilization. Here, Pentheus appears to be a staunch advocate of heterosexual rationalism and black suits. He and his bodyguard-like aids (David E. Frank and Joel Nuñez) are scandalized to find his grandfather Kadmos (Bo Roberts) and the blind old seer Tiresias (Ed Baccari) lounging on the beach attired in the red colors associated with Dionysus’ followers.
The king prefers order and the grace of symmetry to the carnal chaos represented by Dionysus. Or does he? During some puritanical declarations, Pentheus admits to many forbidden desires and appears torn between an allegiance to art and beauty and the hankering for a goatier life of disheveled sensuality.
Toward play’s end, Dionysus persuades Pentheus, before he wages war on the Bacchae, to disguise himself as a woman and infiltrate the camp of these cliff-dwelling females. After being ceremonially crowned with a wig and swathed in black fabric (‘because it is the color of forbidden love between men,’ says Dionysus, helpfully quoting German sociologist Klaus Theweleit), the king hovers at the edge of the women’s base and gets an earful from the Bacchae.
‘There are times,’ says Tattooed Woman (Nita Mickley), ‘when you can put matchsticks or little wooden objects into your vaginal piercings, and then, after a while . . . just have anal intercourse if you want to use a dildo.’
Exactly, Pentheus must be thinking just before he is discovered and unmasked, whereupon his mother, Agave (Joan Chodorow), kills him with her bare hands – not because of his transvestism but because, under the spell of wine, the women mistook him for a wild animal.
The war between Apollonian ideals and Bacchantic debauchery runs in and out of vogue in art and literature. The 1960s were definitely Dionysus’ last heyday, a kind of Topanga Age (or was it Spahn Ranch Republic?) to which people fled from what they saw as the tyranny of logic and the sickness of ideas. Still, after watching the horror on Chodorow’s face when she realizes what she has done, one cannot imagine a worse hangover than that suffered by her and the Bacchae after the wine’s spell has worn off.
Director Michel’s two leads establish a suitably tense chemistry, with Dunn’s Pentheus being a one-man civil war of desires who’s ripe for the seductive suggestions of Davanzo’s deus sex machina. From her dolorous choreography of the Bacchae (whose other members include Juni Buchér, Irene Casarez, Katherine Dollison, Mariko Oka and Julie Weidmann) to the precision of her cast’s deliveries, Michel exercises a laudable restraint with Mee’s script. Production designer Charles A. Duncombe’s weathered-shoreline set and velvety lighting plot lend a subliminal unease to the proceedings, while Josephine Poinsot’s witty costumes swing from the modern to timelessly diaphanous.
Agamemnon
June 9—July 23, 2006
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Ed Baccari, Justin Davanzo, Troy Dunn, David E. Frank, Maximiliano Molina, Bo Roberts, Ben Shields, Marie-Françoise Theodore, Ilana Turner
LA WEEKLY — PICK OF THE WEEK
Wednesday, June 15-21, 2006
Charles L. Mee’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy (the first in this theater’s season, called ‘Three by Mee’) concentrates, like Homer’s The Odyssey, on the impulses behind cruelty and war. This is the story of the eponymous general (Troy Dunn) upon his return from a 10-year military campaign to his wife, Clytemnestra (Marie-Françoise Theodore), who seethes that her husband sacrificed their daughter to the gods for favorable sea winds.
Frédérique Michel stages the play as a choreographed recitation, with a Greek chorus of what appear to be decapitated heads, one of which is a figurehead bust, bolted to the stem of a boat. Michel juxtaposes the violence of the words with, for her, an uncharacteristically gentle staging – as sensuous as it is disciplined in movement and tone, so that the barbaric epic unfolds with a blend of eroticism, religiosity and moments of ironic humor.
This is one of the most rarefied and beautiful productions around, aided by shifting, projected images of ancient stone in Charles A. Duncombe’s production design, and recordings of Arvo Pärt’s haunting choral backdrops.
LA TIMES — RECOMMENDED
June 16, 2006
(capsule) Frédérique Michel’s keenly syncopated staging and Charles A. Duncombe’s striking production design highlight Charles L. Mee’s sanguinary reconsideration of the Agamemnon legend — the first in an ambitious season of three Greek tragedies by Mee. Vaultingly poetic in tone, Mee’s passionately antiwar drama is timely and resonant, despite an occasional lapse into gratuitous overstatement. (F. Kathleen Foley)
(full review) Agamemnon’s’ Antiwar Polemic
Charles L. Mee is a generous playwright. Mee urges readers of his plays, many of which are posted on his website, to freely borrow from his work, as he has freely borrowed from the ancient Greek dramas that have so richly inspired him.
“Agamemnon” – the first offering in City Garage’s ambitious season of three radically considered Greek classics by Mee – is a generous play, vaultingly poetic and rich, as was “Big Love,” Mee’s surprisingly humorous tale of forced marriage and mass murder based on Aeschylus’ “The Danaides.” Of course, “Agamemnon” treats the legend of Agamemnon’s homecoming after the Trojan War, and his subsequent murder by his vengeful wife, Clytemnestra. Far grimmer in tone, for obvious reasons, “Agamemnon” poses the salient question: Is it ever possible to overstate the horrors of war?
A bucket of bloody eyeballs later, we conclude that it is. Granted, Homer didn’t cut corners on sanguinary description in “The Iliad.” But Mee’s antiwar polemic, however timely and resonant, occasionally lapses into gratuitous overstatement.
That seems a quibble, in light of Mee’s passion and craft, but it does shatter our empathy at intervals. Not so Frédérique Michel’s razor-sharp staging, which is as effectively spare as a Zen sand garden, inspiring our contemplation, if not our serenity. A crack cast fulfills Michel’s vision without a motion to spare. Troy Dunn is a likely Agamemnon, the conquering hero who has angered the gods, while Clytemnestra (Marie-Françoise Theodore) is as scary as she is seductive.
Charles A. Duncombe’s inspired production design features a chorus of “disembodied” human heads – actually actors whose bodies are cunningly concealed by the set. It’s an uncanny effect echoing recent beheadings in the Middle East, a bitter reminder of how little mankind has changed over the course of the centuries. (F. Kathleen Foley)
KCRW’s THEATRE TALK
June 29, 2006
In Medias Res
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk.
It’s a gimmick as old as Homer: starting in the middle of a story. The City Garage in Santa Monica is staging two works from Charles Mee‘s quartet of plays titled “Imperial Dreams“–but they’re starting with Part III and then coming back to Part I later this year. FrÈdÈrique Michel‘s company is known for doing things differently, but mounting Mee’s metrology in medias res isn’t avant-garde posturing–it’s downright old-fashioned… and appropriate, as Homer himself is one of the characters in Mee’s Agamemnon.
The program notes read: “Mee tears apart and reconstructs the classic tragedy by Aeschylus.” Now, this is avant-garde posturing. Mee may reconstruct classic works, but he doesn’t tear them apart. His method isn’t violent, it’s celebratory and playful. His magnanimous style breathes life into plays from the past, using today’s language and music to retell these familiar stories.
As staged by Michel and her designer Charles A. Duncombe, Mee’s Agamemnon is a solemn affair. One that’s bathed in blue light, suggesting lonely nights spent staring out at the Mediterranean Sea. The play opens with a nude Clytemnestra reclining in an empty tub. Without clothes, it’s instantly clear that Michel’s vision of Clytemnestra is the opposite of Mee’s, whose stage directions describe her as “pale white, as the moon.”
Casting the dark, voluptuous Marie-Françoise Theodore is more than just a gimmick however, as the actress strongly conveys Clytemnestra’s grief and bitterness. Likewise, the Greek chorus of severed heads might seem like a cheap effect when described, but in the context of Michel’s staging it’s underplayed and sustains a quiet power throughout the 70-minute performance.
The director can’t help drawing parallels between the Trojan War and the current war in Iraq, but whatever one’s opinions about either campaign, Frédérique Michel’s realization of Charles Mee’s play is as poetic as it is political. Her Agamemnon is haunting, and often beautiful. It’s also a rare local example of serious, European-style director’s theater. The first installment of City Garage’s “Three by Mee” season suggests that Agamemnon is the start–or middle–or something big. Charles Mee’s Agamemnon runs through August 6 at City Garage in Santa Monica.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.