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.
OedipusText: Los Angeles
August 15— September 23, 2003
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maureen Byrnes, Simon Burzynski, Tina Fallon, David E. Frank, Eric Jung, Jennifer Piehl, Jason Piazza, Thomas Ramirez, Paul M. Rubenstein
August 22, 2003
by David C. Nichols
Symbolist tactics and City of Angels targets mutate throughout “OedipusText: Los Angeles” in Santa Monica. This adroit City Garage deconstruction imbues Sophocles’ ageless saga of the incestuous king of Thebes with modern elements ranging from self-help to trip-hop. It transpires, as usual with this company, in a self-contained abstract ethos. Author-designer Charles A. Duncombe draws Jocasta’s lines from Helene Cixous’ opera “The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body,” but his esoteric text is otherwise original and impressive. Fredereque Michel’s staging of this melange of neoclassical restraint, shock-radio sass and Freudian polemic attains droll kinetic cohesion, moving a unified ensemble around Duncombe’s screen-dominated minimalist set with invisible ease. Duncombe’s concentrated lighting, Paul M. Rubenstein’s wry videography and Teckla de Bistrovlnovska’s color-coded costumes are invaluable in locating the reference points. Simon Burzynksi’s intense hero is a leather-jacketed Tom Cruise Jr., while Maureen Byrnes’ Jocasta is a riveting column of white who recalls the late Irene Worth. Rubenstein’s sidesplitting DJ is scandalously effective, and David E. Frank is brilliant, whether playing a Nehru-dressed, rocker-voiced Tiresias or a shrieking Dr. Laura-esque harpy. Three red-capped gangbangers (Eric Jung, Jason Piazza and Thomas Ramirez) share chorus duties, alternating as isolated urbanites whose interactions with Tina Fallon’s brittle chat-room fraud and Jennifer Piehl’s unfettered online exhibitionist punctuate Oedipus’ downward spiral. However, their visceral maneuvers just miss pathos: The compressed ideology is intellectually arresting but emotionally bloodless. Even so, the group aesthetic is imposing, analogous to (though opposite from) Sons of Beckett’s current sendup “Oedipus the King,” which recommends “OedipusText” as a Greek reconsideration to be reckoned with.
August 21, 2003
by Steven Leigh Morris
Freud’s Oedipus complex is borrowed from Sophocles’ mystery; adaptor Charles A. Duncombe lobs the ball back into Sophocles’ court with an absorbing 90-minute shot propelled by modern psychology’s Papa. The plague upon Thebes is here sexual dysfunction in an L.A. of tomorrow: Internet and telephone romances that skirt the terrors of flesh-to-flesh contact; porno and erotic power games all perverted from a primal, forbidden love of mama. Unlike in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus’ mom, Jocasta (the fine Maureen Byrnes), knows what’s going on, and merely waits for Oedipus (Simon Burzynski) to figure it out. Blind prophet Tiresias (the excellent David E. Frank) morphs into a drag queen who imposes glib S&M fetishes on Oedipus. (It’s a delicate line between myth and cliché, and this production wobbles between the two.) Duncombe takes a gamble by diffusing the murder-mystery and relegating the play to a semipolitical recitative. A shock jock (Paul Rubenstein) — a passé device — serves as chorus leader for an analysis that’s more or less narrated by the entire ensemble. (It can be argued that Oedipus’ bewildered soul is actually disseminated among a quartet of characters who are looking for love in all the wrong places.) Rubenstein’s video collages (the hull of a ‘50s convertible stranded in South-Central, a woman’s breast, an upper thigh) play in stark counterpoint to the argument on the boards that modern alienation — exacerbated by consumerism and high tech — has roots in antiquity. Frederíque Michel’s arch staging elegantly complements Duncombe’s rhetorical text (with segments by Helene Cixous). When the actors get it, the event soars, but then callow performances diminish its altitude. Still, the underlying idea, however blemished, is a provocative provocation, and attention seldom wanes.
The Sweet Madness
June 6 – July 20, 2003
by Simone de Beauvoir
Adapted for the stage and Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Cynthia Mance, Szilvi Naray-Davey, Jennifer Piehl, Liz Pocock, Cheryl Scaccio
BACKSTAGE WEST — CRITIC’S PICK!
July 02, 2003
Reviewed By Paul Birchall Director
Frederique Michel’s elegantly presented adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s novella meshes poetry, surreal onstage imagery, and dream-like movement to create a complicated but nuanced portrait of a borderline delusional soul. Inhabiting the complex and occasionally oblique play’s core is Murielle, a petulant and embittered woman who has isolated herself through her own irresponsibility and selfishness. Fortunately for her, though, Murielle happens to be played by four women, who, dressed like the backup singers from the old 1980s “Addicted to Love” music video, writhe about the stage, voicing her thoughts and feelings. One good thing about talking to yourself: At least you’re talking to someone who listens. Michel’s dynamic and visually enthralling staging opens with the arresting sight of the body of the woman’s dead daughter lying naked onstage, while around her the various fragments of Murielle’s mind shriek like harpies, slapping the ground with their shoes. This image sets a compelling mood of near-inchoate anger that simmers throughout the entire show. Before long, the reasons for Murielle’s wrath become evident: She has been dumped by her husband, who has taken their son away. To make matters worse, her daughter has recently committed suicide–the result of Murielle’s interference with her love for another woman. Yet even as Murielle wheedlingly justifies herself, we start to recognize the truth of her own self-deception. And, as we look between the lines of what the character says, we’re given the impression of what it’s like to be Medea–from the inside out. Splitting Murielle into four different figures (played by Cynthia Mance, Szlivi Naray-Davey, Elizabeth Pocock, and Cheryl Scaccio) is a fascinating conceit that cleverly and engrossingly suggests the fragmented and disconnected anger that roils within the character. And while none of the four performers is realized as an individual, they work together as one emotional unit, providing a haunting and strangely touching portrait of the woman they’re portraying. In the end, Michel’s taut, eerie production crafts the sense of a woman who is glimpsed through increasingly tragic facets.
LA TIMES — RECOMMENDED!
A BOLD DANCE OF RAGE AND MEMORY
June 13, 2003
by F. Kathleen Foley
“At City Garage, de Beauvoir’s feminist polemic is alloyed with bracing humor. And more.”
“The Sweet Madness” (La Folie Douce) at City Garage has been adapted from “The Monologue,” the middle novella in Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist triptych, “The Woman Destroyed.” The piece is essentially a harrowing rant delivered by Murielle, a deeply narcissistic woman wracked with righteous anger over the dissolution of her latest marriage, and lingering guilt over the suicide of her young daughter.
Murielle’s monologue lends itself nicely to dramatization and has been done before as a one-woman play. No such obvious measures for innovative director-adapter FrederÌque Michel, the longtime artistic director of City Garage. Here, Murielle is played by four actresses — Cynthia Mance, Szilvi Naray-Davey, Elizabeth Pocock and Cheryl Scaccio.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and these Murielles, wearing identical black cocktail dresses, are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Alone, desperate, filled with rage, they recount past wrongs, real and imagined. Through it all, the lurking shade of Murielle’s dead daughter (Jennifer Piehl) looks on in sad and silent recrimination.
It’s an audacious and carefully syncopated staging. Framed against the backdrop of Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s effectively stark set, the women move in precise unison — dancing in mincing steps, ticking their heads from side to side, hammering their high-heeled shoes in percussive rage. Acid memories overlap in staccato bursts. With few missteps, the actresses go through their rounds with the precision of clockwork Rockettes.
Granted, De Beauvoir’s work is partly a feminist polemic, but Michel brings a bracing humor to the fore, and Murielle — vain, self-deluded, unsympathetic yet pitiable — is so richly complex that she is seldom reduced to mere political exponent.
Katzelmacher (Cat Screwer)
March 21 — May 11, 2003
LA WEEKLY – PICK OF THE WEEK!
by Rainer Fassbinder
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Laurence Coven, Szilvi Naray-Davey, David E. Frank, Mathew Gifford, Katharina Lejona, Steve Najarro, Bo Roberts, Kathryn Sheer
LA WEEKLY — PICK OF THE WEEK
March 26, 2003
by Steven Leigh Morris
KATZELMACHER is the German slang for “cat screwer,” which actually refers to somebody with an unbridled sex drive. In the case of Jorgos (Steve Najarro, bearing an expression of sweet bewilderment), in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s very first (1968) play, the label is a misnomer, an ethnic slur applied to this Greek (“foreign”) laborer in a provincial German town. Katzelmacher (in Denis Calandra’s translation) is some thing of an etude in which Fassbinder shows the stock jealousy and xenophobia that ensues after the migrant worker, who barely speaks the language, beds his employer (Maureen Byrnes) and draws the romantic attentions of the local women (Kathryn Sheer, Katharina Lejona and Szilvi Naray-Davey). Mean while, the guys (Mathew Gifford, Bo Roberts, Laurence Coven and David E. Frank) are barely employed yet too proud to work for the low wages that Jorgos plans on sending home to his wife and kids. Fassbinder is really looking at the psychological effects of money, at how the town’s orgasmic violence stems from its economic malaise — which, though a truthful idea, does little to explain the sadism of the rich. Frederique Michel smartly evokes the play’s 1966 setting (with Brigitte Bardot flip ‘dos and costume designer Erin Vincent’s one-piece leather minis) with an ensemble bereft of Hollywood lip enhancements and repaired teeth. Rather, they look plucked from the regions — perfect for this play’s ambiance. Michel stages the episodic scenes in the style of a cabaret, propelled by sound designer Jason Piazza’s percussion. Occasionally, the actors’ simultaneous foot stomping and tapping of the rails get a bit arch, but the production is a mostly disciplined and cogent examination of “otherness” that’s, distressingly, more apt than ever.
LA TIMES
Fassbinder looks at youth culture
March 28, 2003
by David C. Nichols
The provocative genius of the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder dominates “Katzelmacher,” now at City Garage in Santa Monica. This 1968 debut by the icon of the Anti-Theatre receives a polished, pertinent realization. Set outside Munich in 1966, the plotless narrative traverses a group of lower- brow Bavarians. Embodying the restless youth culture then exploding across Europe, these miscreants are as promiscuous and casually deluded as their author is clear-eyed and acerbic in his objective delineation of their existence. Enter immigrant Jorgos (Steve Najarro, in the part originated by Fassbinder), the subject of the title epithet, an obscene allusion to foreign sexual behavior. This unwitting Greek unleashes a swirl of xenophobia, leading to sudden, primal violence.
Director Frédérique Michel and translator Denis Calandra honor Fassbinder’s ethos, linking the vignettes with hieratic interludes and rhythmic techniques. In tandem with Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s production design and Erin Vincent’s costumes, the ultra-stylized approach suggests Bob Fosse doing Günter Grass on absinthe. Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Laurence Coven, David E. Frank, Mathew Gifford, Katharina Lejona, Szilvi Naray-Davey and Bo Roberts offer avid counterpoint to Najarro’s sweet incomprehension. Kathryn Sheer is touching as his paramour, a role created by Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla.
Curiously, Fassbinder’s deliberate detachment feels less viscerally compulsive than in the 1969 film. The tactics command intellectual attention without consistently demanding emotional reaction. This may be an inevitable casualty of 21st century desensitization, and the arid topicality of “Katzelmacher” couldn’t be more obvious, or recommended, regardless.
BACKSTAGE WEST
March 26, 2003
Reviewed By Leigh Kennicott
“Katzelmacher” is Bavarian slang for a foreigner but translates to something like “someone who screws like a cat.” Therein lies this simple yet arbitrarily violent tale “at the intersection of prejudice and fear,” by the German phenomenon Rainer Fassbinder. Into the small-town doldrums of disaffected youth in the mid-1960s the first of a wave of “guest workers” arrives from Greece. Jorgos (Steve Najarro) is accorded much credit for mythological sexual prowess. When he takes up with Marie (Kathryn Sheer), the ire of the hometown boys cannot be contained. Under the tightly controlled direction of Frederique Michel, the 70-minute play records the rising tension that finally explodes into senseless violence.
Fassbinder is known for his gritty, uncompromising portraits of Germany during the social upheaval of the late ’60s and early ’70s. This, his first play, throbs with misplaced sexuality and ennui. But Michel has transcended his short, shocking, cinematic playwriting technique to create a uniquely stylized and ultimately compelling portrait of that period, and opened up the play by incorporating elements from Fassbinder’s subsequent film.
Her production opens on Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s eminently workable set: four spaces interspersed around the central courtyard of an apartment block where the out-of-work-youth congregate. The couples come together, part, and return to one another in a metaphoric, driving dance, thus setting a tone that will repeat at each of Fassbinder’s blackout transitions. Michel’s technique smoothes but does not camouflage his disjointed, brutal snippets of dialogue.
The actors are put through their paces with a uniform precision reminiscent of Edward Gordon Craig, who once advocated actors as marionettes. Yet they manage to imprint their characters with unique qualities. Lawrence Coven plays a pathetic clown, who has to pay to peep at Ingrid’s (Szilvi Naray-Davey) lovely breasts. Naray-Davey’s long body works well to convey the disgust and disdain she has for her steady source of income. Mathew Gifford is the jilted jittery town heartthrob, who must exact revenge. David E. Frank and Maia Brewton do the most with their sidekick roles. Katherine Lejona is the epitome of mod. As the powerful factory owner, Maureen Byrnes exudes disdain, especially for her live-in lover (Bo Roberts). All the production elements work well to convey a sense of this not-so-distant era. Along with the aforementioned set design, the costuming by Erin Vincent is eerily on target. The music, also designed by Duncombe, helps as well.
Cinema Stories
October 25 — December 15, 2002
by Charles A. Duncombe
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maia Brewton, Laurence Coven, Mathew Gifford, Cynthia Mance, Jason Piazza, Jed Rowen, Kathryn Sheer
LA Weekly
CINEMA STORIES: Ceremonies of Unendurable Bondage
by Lovell Estell III
City Garage’s latest offering shows director Frederique Michel as a skillful multimedia storyteller, blending narrative, film and performance art in seven pieces. All explore love, loss and alienation, with the text for all but one originating from a book of stories by Michel’s longtime collaborator, Charles A. Duncombe Jr. The results are mostly compelling. Milton and the Goddess is a tragicomical tale about one man’s (Laurence Coven) dreamy encounter on a tropical island with a nude female deity (Kathryn Sheer). In Sophia, Cynthia Mance gives a searing portrayal of a woman broken by a neglectful lover (Jason Piazza), spiritual malaise and physical illness. Michel effectively uses a video image projected on a screen (through most of the playlet, we see the nude Mance rocking to and fro in an upright fetal position), but the piece loses some of its impact from its excessive length. 1905 is a humorous and harrowing meditation on modern-day angst, beautifully performed by Mathew Gifford. The feckless Jenny Greenfield Gets Even With God finds Maia Brewton on a road trip with God. In addition to dull text, the voice-over segments are completely unintelligible. The Labors of Correspondence moodily tells of an eerie encounter between a man and woman (Gifford and Sheer). In Barracuda, Jed Rowen’s character remembers the day (and its aftermath) that his father nearly committed suicide. And Understanding, with Coven, Gifford, Piazza, Rowen and Mance, poignantly explores the communication barriers between men and women.
Titus Tartar
June 14 — July 21, 2002
United States Premiere
by Albert Ostermaier
Translated by Anthony Vivis
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe Cast: Maia Brewton, Katharina Lejona, Stephen Pocock, Bo Roberts, Paul M. Rubenstein
BACKSTAGE WEST
June 19, 2002
by Wenzel Jones
I love the whole notion of Frederique Michel directing these shows that manage to be both challenging and baffling. I won’t even pretend I can make head or tails of this production, but this is not a theatre that is making its reputation on accessibility. The physical structure, with its between-numbers address and its alley entrance, serves as an apt venue for the equally abstruse play within. The artistry involved cannot be denied. Not getting the piece makes us want to rise to the occasion next time–as opposed to running screaming into the night, the response to recondite theatre with nothing behind it.
This particular outing is a deconstruction of that bit of second- tier Shakespeare, the mayhem and revenge-fest Titus Andronicus. Playwright Albert Ostermaier–rather a Big Thing in Germany; if you don’t read Titus at least read the program notes–has reconfigured the piece so that Titus (played variously by Stephan Pocock, Bo Roberts, and a mannequin torso) is a writer whose art has been put at the service of a morally dubious state. Daughter Lavinia (played by Maia Brewton and a mannequin torso, but not the same one) functions more as a muse this time around, making her eventual appearance in hacked-up form all the more poignant. Leni Riefenstahl (Katharina Lejona) and Elia Kazan and Ezra Pound (Paul M. Rubenstein) also appear, musing on using their art in the service of something bigger. Only the Riefenstahl moment made the fog in my head clear; trenchant points were being made about the culture of the image and entertainment as control, but too soon the character was gone. The image thing carries through in Charles Duncombe Jr.’s set, a shrine to physical culturism. The work has been translated by Anthony Vivis, but I kept thinking that a production in German might be more effective, as the audience could then concentrate on the meta-theatrical and not get bogged down in the words.
Lejona and Rubenstein spend most of the evening functioning as the Angel of Death and the Dark Angel, respectively, and in these capacities they set the tone of the piece. They’re spooky and lascivious and just about everything but safe. Michele Gingembre has put the Tituses (Titi? Titae?) in boxy red suits, indeed sticking to an effective red-and-black palette throughout–even Lavinia’s white dress is spattered with blood. Michel doesn’t so much block her actors as choreograph them; at the same time they’re not so much speaking as singing without benefit of melody–if that makes any sense. Sometimes the challenge for the audience is in keeping a straight face, but it’s definitely theatre by and for the artistically ambitious.
Los Angeles Times
by F. Kathleen Foley
There are two ways to view “Titus Tartar” at City Garage. You can keep your brain on high alert, striving to catch every nuance of Albert Ostermaier’s fascinating take on Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” Or you can fall asleep. Passive observation is not an option.
Ostermaier’s text, translated by Anthony Vivis with additional text by Charles A. Duncombe Jr., is not so much a deconstruction as it is a demolition job. The complicated plot and characters of Shakespeare’s original are reduced to mere backdrop for Ostermaier’s flowing, fanciful verbiage.
Stark white mannequins are part of the backdrop in Duncombe’s eerie production design. In the play’s opening monologue, a man (Paul M. Rubenstein) laments: “Do you know what it’s like to have your art taken away from you?” The artist’s powerlessness in society, the yawning divide between pure creative expression and commercial success, the particular danger of politicized art are prevalent themes– powerful points, although belabored. A prominent poet and playwright in his native Germany, Ostermaier reiterates his plaint about the artist’s sad lot to a narcissistic degree.
To illustrate the perils of ideological compromise, Ostermaier trots out Leni Riefenstahl (Katharina Lejona) and Ezra Pound (Rubenstein) as cautionary examples of artists whose work was subsumed in the pathological mass culture of fascism.
The Hollywood Ten are invoked early on. “Yes, I named names,” a character defiantly admits. Faced with artistic suppression, he chooses betrayal.
The connection of all this with “Titus Andronicus” is intriguingly speculative. Perhaps Lavinia (Maia Brewton), Titus’ tongue-less daughter, is meant as an exponent of the voiceless artist. And maybe this doppelganger Titus, played here by Stephan Pocock and Bo Roberts, is intended to emphasize the duality of the artist–again, that painful gap between culture and creativity.
At least, those are possible interpretations. As for you, let your gray matter be your guide. The most certain elements in this tantalizing stew are the combined artistic efforts of director Frederique Michel and Duncombe–a proven team who continue to challenge area audiences with the purposely arcane.
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
March 8 – May 5, 2002
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe
Cast: Maia Brewton, Maureen Byrnes, Victoria Coulson, Lawrence Coven, Ilana Gustafson, Bo Roberts, Paul M. Rubenstein
City Girl in Heat
by Edmund Newton
21 March 2002
A play based on four Aimee Bender stories bursts with primordial passions.
Apocalypse has generally been the preoccupation of men. Let the ladies weave their stories about relationships and family histories, we’ll take care of the flaming lakes and exploding buildings, thank you. But contemporary women writers like Aimee Bender, four of whose stories have been turned into a play called The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which premiered last week at City Garage, seem less willing to relinquish the field. Bender’s female characters are racked with longing, knotted with angst; they all seem as if they’re about to burst into flames. Their pain apparently has less to do with chauvinist men than with just being alive, though they all stew in their own powerlessness. You get the feeling that, for all of their mundane problems, these harsh, edgy, self-absorbed women are somehow listening to the sound of continents grinding together, feeling the rush of lava beneath their feet and trying to make poetry out of their doomed lives.
The most successful of the stories in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, which was adapted and directed by Frédérique Michel, gives us Susie (Maia Brewton), a feisty city girl whose lust for life is haunting and primal. Susie yearns to burrow into things, to sink her teeth in, to dive headfirst into the mud of the city where she lives. For a small person, her appetites are big, rampant and uncontrolled. Sex for her is a threesome: “me the woman, me the man, and him, the red-haired guy with the great hands.” But her lover (Paul M. Rubenstein), a guy she picks up at a party, is still in the proverbial box, she discovers. “He thinks I’m just some girly girl, receptacle envelope girl,” she tells us, as the two actors play the scene fully nude. “He doesn’t know what I’m thinking. He doesn’t know I’m also a shadow on his back, pushing in.”
Brewton is short and bouncy on her feet, darting terrierlike in and out of situations, but she also conveys a deep, ineffable anguish. At one point, Susie searches out her lover in a manhole (for some reason she calls it a “pothole”), in the grid of pipes and conduits beneath the streets. Being in the hole is a turn-on for Susie, a metaphor for sexually penetrating the city. She finds her man there in his work clothes, his work gloves stained with oil. “I want him to grab me with those gloves,” she recounts, “and smear oil all over my body and my nice dress and throw me on the ground with all those cars above us, a ceiling of cars.” But, of course, he doesn’t, and Susie is propelled through the city on a lonely quest for — what? Love? Serenity? Susie ends up in a hotel room, with a 65-year-old man boffing her from behind. It’s a remarkable performance by Brewton, who makes Susie’s hurt as palpable as a knife edge.
The other stories, all of which blend into each other rather than being separated by blackouts, aren’t quite as successful. In a ham-handed attempt at satire, a spoiled rich woman (a naked, easy-on-the-eyes Victoria Coulson) goes on an “auditioning” excursion through the subways, trying to find a man to ravish her. She picks an unsmiling, uncommunicative man who cuts her dress off and ties her to a chair but won’t have sex with her. “You can’t just tie up a millionaire’s daughter and not fuck her,” she complains.
A middle-aged woman (Maureen Byrnes) watches her clod of a husband eat the meal she has prepared and fantasizes violently about “rescuing” the food from his crude mouth — reaching a hand in there “to bring it all out, until there is just a mush of alive potato between us” — and then shooting him in the knee. An anguished young woman (Ilana Gustafson) cares for her wheelchair-bound father, thinking of her task as a big rock that she carries around, wondering when youthful passion will be allowed to burst out in her, like flames consuming a chiffon skirt.
Michel directs with her customary adventurousness. There’s a bare stage with a jutting platform, which is transformed by a variety of slides and tapes projected across the back. When the seductive rich woman is in the subway, we see the steel sides and sliding doors of subway cars. When Susie is in the throes of sex with the old man, his passion-distorted face is in huge, grotesque enlargement behind him. The women tell their stories in declarative sentences that mostly begin with “I,” putting us off sometimes with their self-centeredness but haunting us with the intensity of their feeling. With all its heat and stabs of passion, the show seems closer to poetry or music than the “realistic” narratives that often pass for literature nowadays.
Back Stage West
13 March 2002
by Madeleine Shaner
There are certain givens as to how we are supposed to feel, how we are expected to behave. Politically correct, socially adherent, emotionally restrained–these are considered the most suitable behaviors for acceptably human beings; the social contract is too often an unsigned charter for liars to follow. Aimee Bender’s short, short stories, adapted to the stage and directed by Frederique Michel, look searingly into the heart of women’s darkness, sharing the deadly, secret truths of women waiting for their passion. Staying close to Bender’s earthily poetic, matter-of-fact presentation of bizarre fulfillments, the women eschew face value and dig down into their own screwed-up psyches for such complex personal reasons as spite, vanity, narcissism, and raw emotional hunger.
Victoria Coulson, in an unselfconscious performance as a spoiled little rich girl in “Call My Name,” presents herself on a platter to a Shy Man (Paul M. Rubenstein), whom she follows from the subway. Rebuffed by his lack of interest in her, she hangs around, naked and tied up, watching Jeopardy with him rather than be alone.
In “Fell This Girl,” Maia Brewton is boldy disarming as a woman obsessed with the body sexual–a tool she uses casually in her search for a deeper connection with herself, which consistently eludes her. She seduces, or lets herself be seduced by, Patrick (Rubenstein), a man she meets at a party, as well as an older man with a “wrinkled-up gray chest” (Bo Roberts), an escapee from a business convention, thus reducing passion to a tactile, sadly temporary gratification.
The title story reduces the father/ daughter relationship to a dirge about the burden of familial love. The delicious sharpness of Bender’s language loses some of its light in the hands of Laurence Coven and Ilana Gustafson, although the problem may be that the story becomes inaccessible by reaching too deep for its grasp, forgoing the wit of the writer’s skewed, vitally funny vision.
Opening and closing the mostly delicious event, in two short passages from “Fugue,” is the wry Narrator of two of the stories (an awesome Maureen Byrnes), who opens her own can of worm-eaten cynicism, brought on by a life that scarcely registers her presence.
Michel’s direction and Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s clean production design echo and enhance the clarity of the storyteller’s language and the erotic stimulation of its “body-centered aesthetic.”
The Gertrude Stein Project
November 9 – December 16, 2001
Based upon writings of Gertrude Stein
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design by Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Ford Austin, Maureen Byrnes, David E. Frank, Katarina Lejona, Jed Low, Irene Casarez, Kathryn Sheer
Los Angeles Times
November 16, 2001Review by Philip Brandes
Flamboyant though she may have been in life, 20th century arts icon Gertrude Stein is not the first author to whose writings one would typically turn for theatrical inspiration. Famous for her flowery tautology (“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”) and other circular, often ponderous conundrums, the fiercely anarchic Stein trod a different path even in her plays, relying on cerebral deconstructions of language rather than the traditional dramatists’ toolkit to render human experience on the stage.
The challenge of impenetrability hasn’t intimidated Aresis Ensemble’s Frederique Michel from tackling “The Gertrude Stein Project” at Santa Monica’s City Garage. Honoring what she calls Stein’s “Cubist” approach to theater, Michel has assembled passages from Stein’s writings into a fragmented, kaleidoscopic presentation.
The concept could easily succumb to heavy-handed treatment, but Michel opts for a light, whimsical approach to her staging that makes the piece more fun and lively than it sounds on paper. Deep philosophical musings alternate with puns and even recipes from the cookbook of Stein’s lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas. Part recitation, part performance, this esoteric pastiche is framed with the company’s usual stylistic flair, juxtaposing heady conceptual dialogue with erotic imagery.
“Plays are either read or seen or heard” goes one of the self-evident truths invoked for more detailed contemplation as a defiantly nude woman (Katharina Lejona) strolls across the stage. Later, she dons a mink coat as she and the other characters (who are really little more than presences) explore the psychosexual associations with the word “fur.” Think Helmut Newton meets Webster.
Lejona’s onstage companions include Kathryn Sheer as a comely ballerina with whom she suggestively mirrors Stein’s lesbian relationship with Toklas, Jed Low as a bald aristocrat, Maureen Byrnes as a chic cafe diner, and Ford Austin and David E. Frank as a pair of bowler-hatted gentlemen. Together, they grapple with the paradoxes inherent in statements such as “Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. The emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences.” (This and other puzzlements are repeated several times, so you’ll have ample opportunity to consider them.)
Augmented with Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s customary evocative production design, this “Project” represents solid work from the company applied to material that doesn’t easily lend itself to the stage. Trying to follow anything like a linear narrative or character continuity is a recipe for frustration–you’ll have better luck following Toklas’ brownie recipe instead.