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
LA WEEKLY — GO!
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.
The Battle: ABC
Novemer 11, 2005—January 29, 2006
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Justin Davanzo, David E. Frank, Sharon Gardner, Bo Roberts, Paul M. Rubenstein
LA Weekly — Pick of the Week
by Steven Leigh Morris
November 17-23, 2005
What a pleasure to see a theater company — once defined by its presentations of somewhat cryptic material staged with the stomping heavy-handedness of some provincial German cabaret — evolve through the decades. This is perhaps the most tender production by City Garage to date, reflections by the late German scribe Heiner Müller subtitled Heiner Müller on Times of War (translation by Marc von Henning).
Four actors playing multiple roles, and sharing the narration, depict scenes from cities, German and Japanese, broken by war. A boy remembers his father taken away in the night, and later visits him in prison, and, decades later, in an old-age home. A gentle wave goodbye through a suspended window frame is about as devastating an image of loss and separation as one is likely to find. Though there is the pounding of feet — a trademark of director Frederique Michel — this time around, Michel seems as much influenced by the gentle formality of Japanese Noh theater.
Charles A. Duncombe’s production design is perfect in its simplicity — a stage floor of maple slabs, a bed to the side, and a screen containing judiciously employed documentary images from the war-torn cities being described. David E. Frank, Bo Roberts and Paul M. Rubenstein effortlessly carry the sometimes arch style, but Sharon Gardner is particularly fine, with her pained, pale face, her throaty voice and unrelenting poise.
Backstage West — CRITIC’S PICK
November 17-23, 2005
by Paul Birchall
Director Frederíque Michel’s powerful staging of this drama by the late German playwright Heiner Müller is of a thematic piece with some of the City Garage company’s most notable past productions of plays by Müller, who is considered by some to be the most important German playwright since Brecht. The plays deal with cruelty and the reduction of humanity to the level of pure bestiality. Yet what makes The Battle even more striking is its comparative accessibility.
That’s not to say this is an evening of easy theatre. It isn’t, and the show crackles with ambiguous images and often perplexing exchanges that are the standard leitmotif of Müller’s and Michel’s artistic styles. However, because so much of the drama consists of Müller’s autobiography, or at least what he presents as such, the piece has a personal quality that makes it unusually engaging. At the same time, this quality makes the acts of onstage cruelty all the more horrifying.
A narrator (Paul Rubenstein), whom we can only assume is intended to represent Müller, opens by recounting a horrifying memory of childhood in Nazi Germany, watching as his father (Bo Roberts) is hauled off as an enemy of the state. From here, the work fragments into a visual representation of the chaos of postwar Germany.
After Hitler’s suicide and the defeat of Germany, a miserable man (David E. Frank) shoots his screaming wife (Sharon Gardner) and daughter (Justin Davanzo) but is unable to kill himself. Later four soldiers, left alone in a wintry wilderness, draw straws to decide who of them will be killed and eaten by the others. Then another defeated man is stalked by a shadowy figure, whom he beats and ultimately kills, simply because the guy is always there.
Müller’s play is less about war than it is about the chaos and malice that follows it. And the work also tries to figure out what it was in the German psyche during the 20th century that gave rise to so much wickedness, despotism, and hatred. Michel’s staging offers sharply focused tension and intensity, which is cut with a droll irony—and the play seethes with an intellectual keenness that is rarely seen in LA. shows. The ensemble work is tight. Particularly notable turns are offered by Gardner, playing a haunted, debased German girl—turned-prostitute, and by Frank as the deadpan, deeply embittered narrator.
Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream
June 10—August 28, 2005
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Juni Buchér, Justin Davanzo, David E. Frank, Sophia Marzocchi, Stephen Pocock, Christie D’Amore
Los Angeles Times
Alternate visions of ‘Don Quixote’
June 17, 2005
by David C. Nichols
At City Garage, Kathy Acker’s scabrous post-feminist crib from Cervantes gets a searing realization.
“Being dead, Don Quixote could no longer speak. Being born into and part of a male world, she had no speech of her own. All she could do was read male texts, which weren’t hers.”
That epigraph cements the point of “Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream” at City Garage. It cannot convey the emblematic perversity with which director-adaptor Frederique Michel, production designer Charles A. Duncombe and an amazing cast realize the 1986 novel by Kathy Acker.
The late Acker’s scabrous post-feminist crib from Cervantes is a profanity-drenched phylum unto itself. Multiple influences, William S. Burroughs being only the most obvious, orbit about “Don Quxote’s” title abortion-seeker (Sophia Marzocchi). Acker pulls this bipolar surrogate into a picaresque, politically questioning head trip, analogous to the paintings of Sherrie Levine.
Under Michel’s assured direction, the players show seamless commitment. Marzocchi is a lithe, enigmatic discovery with the arcane beauty of a Roman deity. The riveting Justin Davanzo casually enters his Hobbesian debate with David E. Frank’s tickling Nixon wearing only periwig and boots. Stephen Pocock becomes an imposing Angel of Death by simply standing before the wings adorning one of the set’s trees. Juni Buchér and Christie D’Amore inhabit their pansexual archetypes with gusto, and Maureen Byrnes deftly passes off the polymorphous narrative viewpoint.
Duncombe’s evocative décor suggests Levine having at Joseph Cornell’s id, while Josephine Poinsot’s costumes trace Jean Paul Gaultier details onto Jean Cocteau doodles. True, Michel’s adaptation is faithful to a fault. Acker’s cascading polemic and graphic poetry risks static repetition in the flesh. Yet, though “Don Quixote” needs either further distillation or an intermission, audiences up for provocative theater of ideas will find its adults-only dreamscape hypnotic.
LA Weekly
June 17-23, 2005
by Steven Leigh Morris
Director Frederique Michel’s adaptation of Kathy Acker’s novel is largely faithful to the spirit of the late post-punk novelist’s writing — a sexually obsessed, fetishistic stroll, barefoot, along a road strewn with shattered glass. Because Michel’s cast is so fresh-scrubbed attractive, Acker’s grunge aesthetic gets a facelift. What Acker borrowed from the tones of Miles Davis and the images of William Burroughs, Michel distills into something more like an S&M tango, comparatively formal, snappy and manicured — all dressed up and then, literally, stripped bare.
The play is a meaning-of-life examination of female identity, literature, sexuality and the connivances of oppression (Thomas Hobbes [Justin Davanzo] and Richard Nixon [David E. Frank] both put in cameos) through the dream-journey of a female Don Quixote (Sophia Marzocchi, a strong presence who really needs more range) during her abortion. She partners with a self-flagellating saint (Davanzo), who turns into a dog, and she meets the Angel of Death (Stephen Pocock), who hangs around for the play’s final quarter. The characters spout Acker’s oblique riffs with a higher regard for sound and inference than for structure or reason.
Michel’s physically crisp staging matches Charles Duncombe’s production design that includes projected motifs from Raphael to Paul Klee, and a highly symbolic set. The production, like Acker’s novel, is searching, groping for an alternative language in a world defined by abuse and brutality.
The Lesson
October 22, 2004—January 20, 2005
LA Times — Recommended!
Cast: Justin Davanzo, David Frank, Liz Pocock
The Lesson (La Leçon) It’s hardly news that Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 classic one-act comedy about an insane professor tutoring a brick-brained student helped usher in the Theater of the Absurd. Though an obsequious maid warns the professor not to get too carried away by frustration, the professor’s growing exasperation leads to his increasingly loopy teachings. The student simply cannot grasp the most remedial aspects of mathematics or philology and suffers growing head pains in direct proportion to the rising lunacy of the professor’s lectures, until their mutual rage ascends to a lethally deranged pitch. So much for the virtues of reason.
Director Frederique Michel flips the genders of each character so that the Professor (Liz Pocock) is a lisping woman, dominating and erotically teasing an arrogant, lunk-headed male (Justin Davanzo). This puts to bed the mythologies of political correctness and male authority under a single blanket. When David E. Frank’s bow-tied Butler opens the play striding across the stage with one of Monty Python’s funny walks, we’re instantly in an arch cartoon, and director Michel never lets the rigidly choreographed Warner Bros. style slip for a moment. You fear, near the start, that the physical intensity of Pocock bursting-at-the-seams has nowhere to go, yet her animation keeps growing until, by play’s end, she’s a whiplashed, quivering ball of sweat, still hitting every mark and sibilant “S” on cue. Davanzo and Frank are also fine.
When the homicidal professor dons a Republican National Committee armband, you might think Michel’s joking about No Child Left Behind, or you might just be pissed off by the intrusive topicality within Ionesco’s allegory. Charles A. Duncombe’s elegant, simple production design places the focus on the actors, right where it belongs.
Los Angeles Times
An Unorthodox ‘Lesson’ Plan
By Philip Brandes
Special to The Times
Leave it to City Garage, Santa Monica’s bastion of European avant-garde theater, to put a refreshingly unorthodox spin on Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic “The Lesson.”
Written in 1951, this darkly comic one-act depicts a nonsensical and increasingly menacing tutorial between a deranged professor and an obtuse pupil — an encounter laced with unsparing critiques of learning, authority and sexual politics.
With undiminished savagery, director Frederique Michel’s revival slyly turns Ionesco’s subtext of patriarchal domination on its head by switching the genders of the Professor (Liz Pocock) and her student (Justin Davanzo).
This risky tampering pays off in spades. Pocock’s stodgy, bespectacled Professor is a hilarious, pitch-perfect portrait of Freudian repression, complete with nervous tics, sputtering lisp and a horror of physical proximity to her overeager pupil. Far from neutralizing sex roles, the gender reversal highlights them in unexpected ways, as the initially timid, deferential Professor becomes aggressively dominant in the face of the pupil’s failure to live up to her impossible standards.
Her deteriorating grip on propriety and reality is the play’s centerpiece, which Pocock sustains with subtle mannerisms and equally accomplished broad physical slapstick in Michel’s demanding, highly choreographed movements. Charles A. Duncombe’s sparse, elegant production design contributes atmosphere without undue intrusion.
In pursuing his doctorate in “total knowledge,” Davanzo’s student gamely submits to the escalating abuse, his naive exuberance giving way to bewildered victimization in the face of feminist impulses run grotesquely amok.
Changing the Professor’s servant (David Frank) from maid to butler gives additional heft to his smarmy commentary, particularly in a finale seething with psychosexual overtones.
Backstage West – Critic’s Choice!
“La Leçon/The Lesson”
Reviewed By Paul Birchall
In Frederique Michel’s delightful production of Eugene Ionesco’s darkly absurdist comedy, a young Student (Justin Davanzo) arrives at a Paris home, excited for his first lesson with his new tutor: a tightly wound Professor (Liz Pocock). At first the Professor is diffident and unsure of himself, and the Student seems confident and optimistic. However, as the lesson continues, the balance of power shifts. The Student discovers he doesn’t know any of the answers, and an escalating toothache prevents him from concentrating on the Professor’s lecture. The Professor becomes increasingly unhinged, and he concludes his class by presenting his student with a long, hard, brutal gift that is anything but a diploma.
In most productions of Ionesco’s play, the Student is portrayed by a cheerful young female, while the role of the increasingly oppressive Professor is played by a man.
However, in her subtle staging, Michel flips the genders, adding an intriguing and indefinably disturbing sexual charge to the piece. The interactions have the feel of a creepy role-playing game, the characters playing out their parts in costumes that give them their personalities.
Michel’s direction, with blocking that’s choreographed to the slightest gesture and nuanced glance, boasts unusually focused comic timing. That said, a jarring, clumsy note is sounded the show’s final coda, in which the Professor dons an armband showing the emblem of the Republican Party. In most other productions, the armband is a Nazi swastika–the change is a thematic conceit that represents an awkward parallel with the modern day. In any case, Davanzo and Pocock play off each other hilariously in this otherwise cracklingly smart and intellectually bracing production. If you’ve never seen any Ionesco, this serves as a great introduction.
Patriot Act
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Tom Killam, Bo Roberts, Paul M. Rubenstein, Kathryn Sheer
LA Weekly — RECOMMENDED
July 15, 2004
by Steven Mikulan
When Dominic Behan wrote his bitter Irish anthem, “The Patriot Game,” he didn’t envision an actual competition to see which players are the most patriotic. That kind of contest would be foreign to anyone who lives in a country where the national flag usually flies only above post offices and at football games — most countries in the world, that is. Such a game, however, might not seem out of place here, in America, where the Stars and Stripes fly, row upon row, at gas stations, used-car lots and swap meets. Playwright Charles A. Duncombe knows this; he mixes reality-TV shows with exhibitionist patriotism and adds a helping of post-9/11 paranoia to create a harrowing night of theater.
Patriot Act: A Reality Show begins in darkness with jingoistic country & western songs pumped into Santa Monica’s City Garage theater, followed by the late Ray Charles’ soulful rendition of “America the Beautiful” and the “Bush” version of “The United States of Whatever,” while a game-show contestant (Bo Roberts) takes a seat within the wooden frame of some kind of isolation booth. He’s here as part of a winnowing process for American Patriot — a Fox TV spinoff of American Idol in which TV viewers choose who will win a million dollars for being the show’s most patriotic person. Elsewhere on Duncombe’s spare set, three interviewers (Kathryn Sheer, Paul M. Rubenstein and Tom Killam), whom the man cannot see but only hears through speakers, put him at ease before they begin a screening session.
At first our player, sporting a flag T-shirt, is confident he has what it takes to make the show’s final cut. After all, he supports the president, the troops, the war, the camps, the laws — everything that has grown out of the ashes of the World Trade Center. Especially, though, the Patriot Act and its proscriptions on civil rights, although he does pause now and then when asked about the government’s right to pry into reading and Web-surfing habits. Those pauses, however, draw his inquisitors to take a closer look at their would-be millionaire, who, it turns out, is about to lose his job as a restaurant-supply salesman because of a corporate takeover of his company.
By degrees, as the man’s interviewers begin circling his booth like vultures, their conversational drift moves from affable softball questions to Socratic inquiry to a brutal interrogation in which the man continually trips up over the logic of his own answers. After 90 minutes, the sound booth has come to resemble a holding cell, and, sure enough, that’s where the man voluntarily remains, waiting to be taken into custody.
Patriot Act is a very simple piece of political theater but not a simplistic one. Like the would-be contestant, we don’t realize until it’s too late that each of the man’s answers to his interviewers’ questions has clicked a lock on his freedom. The frightening thing is that no matter what replies the man (or we) supplies, the judges are likely to interpret them as unreliable and persuade their prisoner that even if he were innocent of any suspected wrongdoing, it is in the country’s best interests that he go along with whatever the government declares as truth.
There are clearly echoes of the Room 101 chapter from George Orwell’s 1984, and just as Winston Smith’s avuncular interrogator assures him that they will meet in a place where there is no darkness, so do Duncombe’s interviewers claim that in our burgeoning surveillance state, there will come “a time when everything will be recorded.” Patriot Act is not at all a disposable piece of agitprop likely to fade with the legislation for which it is named. It is a peculiar examination of gullible America’s trust in authority that finds us fatally incurious about the matter. Ably directed by Frédérique Michel, the show has problems that stem from the stage architecture imposed by the story. Bo Roberts is confined to his booth, while the other actors must stand outside and talk to him, separated by invisible walls. Michel gives them some Pinteresque choreography (the bouncing of balls, clapping of hands, crossing of legs) that initially hints at menace but before long merely looks like an attempt to compensate for a static stage. Perhaps Duncombe’s characters can’t break the fourth wall dividing them from the audience, but they might do well at least to intrude into Roberts’ space or momentarily draw him into their dark corners — not unlike the government.
LA Weekly
July 8, 2004
by Steven Mikulan
Charles A. Duncombe’s satire begins as an audition for a game show in which contestants will compete to be voted the program’s “most patriotic,” and ends as a Grand Inquisitor scene for post-9/11 America. Although the nature of Duncombe’s setting locks his characters into fairly static poses, this is a smart show that moves beyond taking potshots at easy political targets, and director Frederique Michel always keeps the wordplay in focus.
The Empire Builders
March 19—April 25, 2004
LA Weekly — Pick of the Week!
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Jake Eberle, Katharina Lejona, Bo Roberts, Cristian YoungMiller
LA WEEKLY — Pick of the Week!
Political Toys in the Attic: The Empire Builders takes City Garage up a step
by Steven Leigh Morris
April 15, 2004
Santa Monica’s City Garage is the most politically charged theater in a city that traditionally believes that e-mail, not theater, is for messages. Sacred Fools and the Actors Gang in Hollywood tie for second. Though Sacred Fools is currently running Theresa Rebeck’s lame Clinton-era comedy, View of the Dome, a far braver choice was its pre-2000-election play, Ric Keller’s Dubya 2000 – a grotesque commedia parody of the Bush family that ended with a narrator begging the audience to vote and to keep George W. out of the White House. Dubya 2000 was largely dismissed by critics for being overt and rude, which of course was its driving purpose. It was also horrifyingly prophetic in its suggestion of catastrophes to come, arising from the Texas clan’s cloistered, Orwellian lunacy. The play ran for about a month and died. It was brilliant.
The following year, City Garage crashed the gates of propriety with a rage of similar intensity, staging Charles A. Duncombe’s original adaptation of a text by Heiner Müller, Frederick of Prussia: George W.’s Dream of Sleep. As the 18th-century Prussian ruler (having had inclinations to poetry knocked out of him by his sadistic father) disemboweled great swaths of Europe, our own president sat perched center stage, dozing through the history lesson. Shortly into the run, a trio of passenger airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and City Garage found itself with a patriotism problem. The producers shuttered the production within a week or two. Occasionally, theater changes the world. Unfortunately, in this case, it was the other way around.
In the intervening years, defiant critiques of American culture and foreign policy have emanated from the City Garage stage. But this time, a changing world – or at least accruing evidence of falsehoods, duplicities and cloistered, Orwellian lunacy on the political stage – has contributed to rising public disillusionment and anger that well serve City Garage’s greater purpose. Sometimes, when people are sufficiently furious, they really crave more than mere entertainment in their downtime. With its sardonic, belligerent satire, City Garage has become the Air America Radio of local theater. Furthermore, this year the troupe reconfigured its ensemble, which, in its latest production (Boris Vian’s 1958 farce, The Empire Builders), now executes resident director Frederique Michel’s rigorous cabaret stylizations almost without a hitch or a wobble – lapses that cursed former CG productions with an earnest quality. (If your play is trying to connect industrial pollution, pornography and violent intervention in foreign countries, the quality you most want to avoid is earnestness.) Here, the actors portray elastic cartoons so perfectly calibrated, their slapstick wrenches the gut.
A stairwell forms the centerpiece of Duncombe’s production design. A Father (Jake Eberle), Mother (Katharina Lejona), their daughter, Zenobia (Maia Brewton), and Maid (Maureen Byrnes) flee up that stairwell to a series of ever smaller apartments whenever they hear a horrifying noise that sounds like a heartbeat from some unknown source. Up and up they go, costumed in black and red, cheerfully celebrating their capacity for survival while blithely pummeling a bandaged scapegoat (Cristian YoungMiller), whom they label ‘danger’ and who appears in each abode, perennially wounded and groaning in misery.
Zenobia is the one character who acknowledges the nightmare – at least, she expresses it in exasperated shrieks while clutching her temples when a Neighbor (Bo Roberts) meets her for the fourth time as though they’ve never met. Waiting for Godot, anyone? One by one, the family members fall away from Father who, like Eugene Ionesco’s Berenger in Rhinoceros, wrestles with capitulation. Vian and Ionesco both wrote about feelings evoked from childhood memories of the Nazis.
They both also expanded that terror into a broader philosophy on the nature of existence, where death at the end of a firing squad is not so different from death at the end of old age, where the pointlessness of death suggests the pointlessness of life, where meaning is an arbitrary construct. And though the French were colonizing Algeria at the time, Ionesco’s and Vian’s were peacetime reflections.
We, however, are at war. That Michel douses the action with speeches on Homeland Security (sound design by Paul M. Rubenstein) funnels the interpretation to Bush’s war of terror, whereby perpetual fear engulfs the nation so that we’re goaded to clamber up the stairs. Perhaps in an election year and with our democracy at stake, Michel’s narrower take is more urgent than just narrower. After all, it’s not oblivion that lies at the top of Duncombe’s stairwell, it’s a Diebold voting machine.
BACKSTAGE WEST
March 31, 2004
Reviewed By Laura Weinert
It is irresistible and possibly worthwhile to take a politically inspired allegory about the ever-present fear of a mysterious, invisible enemy and weld connections to current issues: the purportedly ubiquitous terrorist threat, the dangerous state of panic and helplessness that results. Boris Vian’s 1959 play tells the story of a middle-class family pursued by an inexplicable noise that forces the family members to flee upward through their own home to progressively smaller quarters, leaving behind all the comforts they once enjoyed while maintaining a semblance of calm and denial. Their only release seems to come when they beat on a mysterious, dark-skinned, bandaged man who appears in the corner everywhere they go.
The program notes inform us that they play was based on Vian’s childhood experience of the Nazi occupation, and that it was also written at a time when French colonialism in African and Asian territories was coming to an end, a time when France was experiencing an increased influx of “dark-skinned immigrants.” Vian died before this play would be produced, debated, scrutinized for relevance and meaning. It seems important, however, to note that Vian’s friend and translator, Simon Watson-Taylor, has related this anecdote: When a friend of Vian suggested this play was a satire on French colonial policy, Vian replied, “Ha! A splendid idea! But I hope you’ll agree that doesn’t prevent an absolutely mythical myth from assuming any number of other meanings.”
Frederique Michel’s direction seems determined to contextualize the play as a kind of potential indictment of current American policy, with program notes that discuss the administration’s aggression, arrogance, and implicit use of fear to prevent scrutiny. We hear recorded voiceover speeches on “homeland security” between scenes. Yet not only do these elements encourage a more limited interpretation of the play than Vian might be comfortable with, they also seem to intrude upon what is most compelling about the production: the tight, terrifying, absurdist, French world that Michel and her cast so skillfully create.
Michel’s staging is often dance-like, each character possessing an odd assortment of physical ticks. A few moments of physical theatre are a pure delight to watch, particularly between Jake Eberle, as our desperately “prudent” father, and his sophisticated, aquiline wife, played by Katharina Lejona. Maia Brewton is well cast as their defiant daughter Zenobia, the only one in the play who admits and addresses the madness their lives have become. Maureen Byrnes is their quirky, amusingly repetitive maid Mug.
Charles A. Duncombe’s functional, mobile set evokes the oppressive, shrinking world of this play. And of course the production could not work without Paul M. Rubenstein’s carefully crafted sound design that creates a noise so haunting and horrific, yet so eerily unidentifiable.
LA WEEKLY – Pick of the Week!
March 25, 2004
by Steven Leigh Morris
French scribe Boris Vian’s brutal postwar comedy instantly brings Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to mind – the same style of absurdist, domestic farce later used by Christopher Durang, but here saturated in political allegory. Perpetually fleeing the roar of an enigmatic heartbeat, a couple and their daughter keep finding refuge upstairs in a series of ever-smaller apartments attached to the same stairwell. Like Ionesco’s villagers, they try to make the best of the growing menace, while blithely pulverizing a bandaged scapegoat figure (‘danger’) who’s present in each abode. Vian was alluding to the Nazi threat; 50 years later, his politics of terror have an entirely new resonance. Under Frederique Michel’s direction, the ensemble crackles with delirious wit so that the underlying horror is felt in the marrow.