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.
Frederick of Prussia/George W’s Dream of Sleep
August 10 – September 23, 2001
By Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Directed by Frédérique Michel
based on the text Frederick of Prussia by Heiner Müller, translated by Carl Weber
Cast: Rachel Boyle, Maureen Byrnes, Chris Codol, Ruthie Crossley, Damien DePaolis, David E. Frank, Richard Grove, Jed Low, Paul M. Rubenstein, Tara Tobin, Christian YoungMiller
New Times LA
By Edmund Newton
13 Sept 2001
Dissident Marxist, protégé of Bertolt Brecht, director of the prestigious Berliner Ensemble, the late East German playwright Heiner Müller always got a lot more attention from European intellectuals than from even the hippest American theater junkies. If a Müller play ever came to Los Angeles before now, it must have been during some well-meaning extracurricular affair sponsored by a university German department. Most meat-and-potatoes theatergoers in this country have never even heard of him. Now comes Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s adaptation of Müller’s play about Frederick the Great, which Duncombe has titled Frederick of Prussia/George W’s Dream of Sleep, at the City Garage.
“Adaptation” doesn’t quite describe what Duncombe has done here. Müller’s text is fragmentary, a few hallucinatory scenes from Prussian history, which Müller (who died in 1995) has invited would-be collaborators to use as a platform for fuller exposition of his notion of the historic role of German political repression and authoritarianism. Duncombe, a longtime member of City Garage’s creative team, preserves Müller’s dark humor and his idea of the sinister continuum of political repression stretching from Frederick to the contemporary White House. But he has gone far beyond adaptation, rewrite or even reworking of Müller’s skeletal script. The result is a lengthy, sometimes witty, often brilliant but ultimately turgid American satire on the modern corporate state.
Frederick, Prussia’s iron ruler for almost 50 years in the latter part of the 18th century, is usually remembered as an enlightened king who tried to eliminate corruption in his government, instituted legal reforms and promoted freedom of religion. But he was also a ruthlessly aggressive militarist who didn’t hesitate to lead his army across Prussia’s borders to take big bites out of neighboring Austria and Poland. And he was a cruel, absolute ruler at home. Raised by a sadistic father — Frederick Wilhelm — who once made Frederick watch as his best friend was executed in front of a firing squad, Frederick had acquired, by the time he inherited the throne in 1740, all of the characteristics of a bloodthirsty, fun-loving Caligula. That’s Müller’s take, anyway. Hitler role model, anyone?
The first act, which sticks largely to Müller’s script, shows the poetry-loving Frederick being brutalized by his father, then turning into a murderous king, who forces himself sexually on a woman as her husband is being executed in a courtyard below. Just so we don’t forget what Duncombe and Müller are up to here, the stage brims with sadistic dominatrixes with whips, actors posing as snarling attack dogs, an actor portraying the American president asleep on a throne, and slide images of Ronald Reagan, whom Frederick’s martinet father lovingly refers to as “Grandfather.” Frederick ends that part of the show with an eerily familiar finger-waving, fist-squeezing diatribe against those who coddle weakness. Then, with top hat and cane, he leads a chorus in a paean to fascism to the tune of “Fascinatin’ Rhythm.”
Compared to the second act, though, this is the height of refined subtlety. Frederick, played with gleeful derangement by David E. Frank, is now the host of a children’s television puppet show, with more sideshow images of sadism and bedlam (a man in a truss designed to keep him from masturbating, for example), then a smooth-talking witness before a congressional committee. Duncombe uses the garish scenes to analyze the current state of American politics. But those who come expecting satire of the Saturday Night Live variety will be disappointed. The Bush on the stage isn’t the familiar SNL dufus with the slow grin, but a faceless king who wakes up at the end to deliver a long, senseless monologue about power.
The idea here is that, through clever market strategy, the repressiveness and brutality of Frederick and Hitler have been rendered unnecessary, as the oppressed have been coopted by global consumerism. Duncombe explains the notion intelligently and effectively — but endlessly. It’s as if a theater company had decided to put on a production of a George Bernard Shaw play, say Major Barbara or Saint Joan, by reading aloud the playwright’s lengthy, brilliantly expository preface rather than performing the play. The cast of 11 performs smoothly; particularly impressive are Richard Grove as the snarling Frederick Wilhelm and Ruthie Grove as a dithering psychiatrist. In the end, let’s be grateful that the 14-year-old City Garage, under its restless director Frederique Michel, persists, flirting with danger to bring us experimental and avant garde plays that no one else will touch.
Backstage West
by Brad Schreiber
22 Aug 2001
Frederick II of Prussia, who ruled Germany for 46 years, whose military genius was revered by Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler, is a fine starting point for this incendiary patchwork quilt of ideas, information, and dramatic outrageousness. While playwright Charles Duncombe Jr. takes some side trips through history and theme that leave some holes in the tapestry, and some unraveling of performances among the 11 players, this is an adventuresome, at times confrontational work not to be ignored.
In the weakest way, Duncombe connects our current president with the material, with George W’s dozing presence awakening at the end for a poetic rant. However, Duncombe and director Frederique Michel are most fortunate to have David Frank as the titular character, who embodies not only the hysteria of Frederick but also his countenance, as when his ruler father Frederick Wilhelm (Richard Grove) executes his best friend as punishment, having declared as his credo, “Never forget the frailty upon which order is built.” Getting a bit lost with suggestions of Frederick’s unresolved sexuality, the play finds its legs in his assumption of power, wherein his cruel logic expressed to a widow-to-be upon the upcoming execution of her husband shows both his self-reflection and masochistic genes inherited from his dead dad. “Fascinatin’ Fascists,” a song parody, has some smart lyrics and gives us a taste of the stranger sojourn to come.
Act Two takes us into a truly bizarre dimension. A takeoff on the Howdy Doody children’s TV show introduces an inappropriate discourse from Doctor Dee (a joyfully up-tempo Ruthie Crossley) on sexuality and social control, with lurid sex jokes from a marionette. From there, we have Frederick in a McCarthy-esque hearing, which cleverly debates how his militarism, belied by societal reforms, can dovetail with American capitalism. On “Celebrity Soup,” a TV talk show, Frederick, despite being 280 years old, whips the audience into frenzy, until he explains how consumer society, for the betterment of all, has subverted and overtaken political expression and, for the most part, individuality.
The work, based on a text by Heiner Müller, is far too long and would do better to minimize the stodgy 18th century melodrama, tighten all segments, and think hard about a stronger connective tissue. That said, Frank is remarkably energetic and holds it all together, always seeming on the edge of a breakdown, despite the rich verbiage of Duncombe, who combines an impressive authority of poetry, political discourse, and outlandish stage frenzy. Inevitably, though, one must choose only so many targets.
LA Weekly
31 Aug 2001
by Steven Leigh Morris
“I am beginning to forget my own text,” laments an Actor (Chris Codol), echoing Mednick’s equation of words with life’s meaning, as he impersonates German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s Frederick of Prussia/George W.’s Dream of Sleep, adapted from Heiner Müller’s prose. “I am a sieve. More and more words fall through,” the Actor continues, describing Lessing’s descent toward a deathlike sleep.
“Soon I shall hear no voice but my own, which asks for forgotten words.”
This Beckett-like lyricism comes on the heels of a brutal portrait of the 18th-century tyrant and militarist Frederick the Great (David E. Frank, a reed in wolf’s clothing), whose soft spot for high culture, including Lessing’s plays, was beaten out of him by his savage father, Frederick-Wilhelm (Richard Grove). (Those childhood tortures included having his son witness the execution of his best friend – just to toughen him up. It worked.)
Müller, in 1976, toyed primarily with the duality of the artist and the soldier — the empathically connected and the disconnected – against a backdrop of historical atrocities. Duncombe takes it a step further (as he did with Müller’s Medea texts last year, at this same venue), serving up our global corporate economy, with its astonishingly efficient technologies for mass marketing and consumption, as the logical extension of Frederick’s military planning. To do this, Duncombe brings Frederick before a U.S. congressional subcommittee, where he wows the senators with utopian free-trade dogma. As the play mixes rants with poetry and bouncy choreographed ditties (e.g., “Fascinating Fascists” set to the tune of “Fascinating Rhythm”), a crowned George W. (Paul M. Rubenstein) sits dozing on a throne-on-high, set against a projected cloudscape backdrop.
The result — under Frederique Michel’s direction, and fueled by devotion to the material — is at once appealing and belabored. Flashes of visual beauty and linguistic playfulness mitigate exasperation with scenes that make their point twice, then thrice, and with dialogue that could have been lifted from the editorial pages of The Nation. Turning doctrine into poetry has been the challenge of playwrights from Odets to Brecht to Edward Bond and, of course, Müller. Duncombe Jr. doesn’t yet meet that challenge, though he’s well on the way.
The Queens
May 11 – June 17 , 2001
By Normand Chaurette
Translated by: Linda Gaboriau
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Victoria Coulson, Damien DePaolis, Andrea Isco, Katherina Lejona, Cynthia Mance, Kathryn Sheer, Veronica Valentine.
From the Program Notes
About the Play:
Normand Chaurette’s The Queens, inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard III, is a fantasy drama that depicts a classic struggle for power and status. Set during the time of the War of the Roses, the play unfolds over a few crucial hours on one afternoon. The king, Edward, lies dying off-stage and the women of the court are jockeying for position. Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, traverses the castle incessantly, searching desperately for her two young sons, the rightful heirs to the throne. Isabel, wife of Edward’s brother, George, and member of the noble house of Warwick, is confident that her own reign as queen is imminent. Anne Warwick, sister and rival to Isabel, weighs a potentially advantageous, but also somewhat Faustian, proposal from Richard, Duke of Gloucester, known as Richard Crookback because of both his physical deformity and his dark reputation. The aged Duchess of York, mother-in-law to both Elizabeth and the sisters of Warwick, yearns for the weight of the crown she was never able to gain by marriage or ascension, despite years spent in proximity to the throne. And the seemingly mute Anne Dexter, a daughter long since disavowed by the Duchess, longs for the most basic of validations: the acknowledgment that she exists. Meanwhile, Margaret, the deposed French-born queen, bitterly wishes the worst on all contenders, current and former, and pines for a glorious exile far from the land of her disgrace.
Just as Shakespeare interpreted history and bent it to his own dramatic needs in writing Richard III, so too does Normand Chaurette reconfigure his source material and reinterpret the actual history. Shakespeare lived just a century after the events he depicted and had a Queen of his own to worry about: Queen Elizabeth I, descended from Henry Tudor, the man who deposed Richard III in 1485. Chaurette, some 500 years removed, is less concerned with dynastic politics than with how the stories of these women, at most supporting players in Shakespeare’s drama, might have played out on the traditionally male stage of royal succession. In order to heighten conflicts and throw relationships into sharper relief, he compresses history and resurrects ghosts. In reality, Margaret, Isabel, and Anne Dexter all died before 1483, while the Duchess of York outlived every woman on stage. And George was killed in 1478 for being a threat to Edward, not Richard, though he was indeed drowned in a cask of wine.
These queens are neither leading armies nor rallying troops around their causes, though Margaret was once one of her own best generals. Instead, they harness the only tools available to them: words. Lies, innuendo, and rumor are their weapons, not swords or daggers. Isabel and Anne, despite being sisters, lie to each other throughout the play, and both of them torment Queen Elizabeth with claims regarding the whereabouts of her children, claims calculated to have the most chilling effect. The Duchess and her daughter are caught up in a web of lies regarding identity and the power of speech. Margaret lies to everyone, including herself. Unlike Richard’s victims, who die by drowning, or worse, the casualties of these conflict remain to bear witness to their own pitiful declines. It is not difficult to imagine the deposed Queen Elizabeth, after the loss of her position and her children, becoming even more deranged than “olde Queen Margaret” (to use Shakespeare’s description) already is.
The limitations imposed on these women by history and by custom are not the subject of the play, but they do form a powerful backdrop. Society demanded that even the strongest woman be connected with a man of position, and thus is Margaret, by this time bereft of royal husband and son, rendered bitter and impotent, a mere observer of the current conflicts. But Chaurette is more concerned with what drives these women as individuals than as archetypes. Their grievances are personal, their aims selfish. For these noblewomen, raised on the expectation of becoming royalty, anything short of the crown is failure, and the loss of the crown is the ultimate ignominy. But must pride always trump morality? How much will they sacrifice to achieve their aims? And, once installed, how far will they go to maintain their always precarious positions?
About the Playwright:
Working as a playwright, translator, novelist, and academician, Normand Chaurette has established himself as one of Quebec’s leading literary figures. He has translated works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Schiller for performance in French. He has also written numerous plays that have been produced all over the world. The Queens, Chaurette’s most successful work to date, was an award winning play in Canada in both French and English. It has also been translated into Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Dutch. In 1997, The Queens was performed at the prestigious Comédie Français in Paris, where it was a popular and a critical success, winning the Prix CIC as best production of the year.
The Skriker
March 9 – April 15, 2001
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Jonathan Cobb, Chris Codol, Michael Connelly, Jennifer Dion, David Frank, Ilana Gustafson, Dyan Kane, Katharina Lejona, Cynthia Mance, Jodi Moschetti, Cheryl Scaccio, Eric Talon, Veronica Valentine, Charlene Yang
LA Times
March 14, 2001
‘The Skriker,’ Not a Kinder, Gentler Spirit
Compelling and sad, the otherworldly presence in Caryl Churchill’s play preys on earthbound humans with a vengeance.
Review by Michael Phillips, Times Theater Critic
Those unseen Irish hobgoblins of Conor McPherson’s “The Weir” would be tornapart, mercilessly, by the creatures inhabiting Caryl Churchill’s infinitely meaner play “The Skriker,” now at Santa Monica’s City Garage.
For her title character, a shape-changing spirit preying on vulnerable humans, Churchill (best known in America for “Cloud Nine” and “Top Girls,” two high points of late 20th century drama) invents a Joycean stream-of-consciousness language. The Skriker’s rantings feature such dillies as: “Oh dear what can the matterhorn piping down the valley wild horses wouldn’t drag me.” And: “Revengeance is gold mine, sweet. Fe fi fo fumbledown cottage pie crust my heart and hope to die.”
It’s not all like that, but in general it’s not “Blithe Spirit.” Even so, no play by Churchill should take seven years to show up in Los Angeles. “Blue Heart,” two short (and newer) linked pieces by Churchill, are far too interesting to justify a similar delay.
In “The Skriker,” Josie (Jody Moschetti) apparently has killed her baby. Lily (Cynthia Mance) is pregnant. The Skriker (Ilana Gustafson) has seduction in mind: She wants Lily’s unborn baby for herself.
The Skriker can recall a time when the real world and the spirit world acknowledged each other more openly. Those days are gone. Dogged, spiteful, the Skriker can make coins pour out of one victim’s mouth, as easily as she can bring live toads out of another’s.
The play is full of fantastical events, yet the key exchanges between Lily and Josie qualify as straight-up mordant realism. Churchill’s intermingling of the spirit and earthbound worlds is rather sad. And, if you’re inclined, compelling.
Frederique Michel’s City Garage staging is at once grave and eccentric–sometimes in sync with Churchill, sometimes out of it. There’s a hurtling craziness to the writing not fully revealed here. Director Michel’s rhythms tend toward the glacial. (Some productions of “The Skriker” clock in at 90 minutes; this one’s closer to two hours in length.)
But with a savvy performance from Gustafson in the lead, Churchill’s discombobulations have a clear, sturdy base. Essentially a three-hander, Churchill’s script calls for up to 16 actors–14 are used here–with the supporting players inhabiting the roles of various folkloric spooks. Michel’s vision incorporates some persuasively creepy mask designs (by Michele Gingembre and David Frank) and an especially evocative sound scape by Charles A. Duncombe Jr., who also did the set and lighting.
Through it all, Gustafson relishes each new assignment. The Skriker plays many roles, all of them well, but she’s destined for an eternity of disappointment in Churchill’s eyes–even if she comes out on top, which is to say, even if Earth gives up the ghost. A lot of people will no doubt stare at this play. One London critic called it “as baffling an experience as you are likely to encounter in a theatre.” Others admired it. It stuck with me. A little below Churchill’s best, it’s still Churchill.
As the Skriker says in the play, speaking of herself: “Not a major spirit, but a spirit.”