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.”
Atrocities: Meetings with Monstrous Men
November 3 — November 19, 2000
Written for City Garage by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Jonathan Cobb, David Frank, Lejla Hadzimuratovic, Jonathan Liebhold, Freddy Nager, Stephen Pocock, Bo Roberts, Paul Rubenstein, Eric Talon
LA Weekly
November 17, 2000
Review by Lovell Estell III
Towards the close of Charles Duncombe’s harrowing ensemble piece about human-rights abuses by Russian soldiers in Chechnya, a young man asks incredulously, “It’s not really possible for people to act like that, is it?” The answer is self-evident but far from simple, and rooted in paradox. One by one, director Frederique Michel’s cast of steely-eyed, parlous young men – some bare-chested and sporting tattoos – recounts nightmarish acts of murder, rape and torture committed against men, women and children. Some speak as if seeking absolution or to assuage tormented consciences, while others glibly justify these acts by war’s brutal logic or as necessary acts of vengeance for atrocities perpetrated by the enemy. Interwoven throughout is a poignant story about a young woman (Lejla Hadzimuratovic) seeking news of her brother fighting in Chechnya. That we never fully or satisfactorily fathom what makes these men (and others like them) tick is understandable; that we find judging them difficult is what makes the play thought-provoking. Duncombe’s incorporation of factual material into his script helps render the production all the more jarring.
The Presidents
September 13 — October 18, 2000
By Werner Schwab
Translated by Ivo Schneider & Sarah Morrissette
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design and Dramaturgy by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Cast: Maureen Byrnes, Katharina Lejona, Cynthia Mance, Eileen O’Connell, Veronica Valentine, Erin Vincent
Backstage West
by Michael Green
In the grimly hilarious vision of Austrian playwright Werner Schwab, mankind starts rotten and has no chance of redemption because life offers nothing but barren mass delusions and pathetic ego-centric fantasies, condemning humanity to wallow in a world filled by sex, violence, and shit, vulnerable to the false promises of Nazism whistling invitingly from the wings. This first (1990) major play hadn’t yet perfected Schwab’s trademark mangling of language that reduces communication to incoherence or lacerating assault, but already vivid is his degraded, hideously cruel and stupid humanity, whose exchanges produce only pain and rage.
In the grimly hilarious vision of Austrian playwright Werner Schwab, mankind starts rotten and has no chance of redemption because life offers nothing but barren mass delusions and pathetic ego-centric fantasies, condemning humanity to wallow in a world filled by sex, violence, and shit, vulnerable to the false promises of Nazism whistling invitingly from the wings. This first (1990) major play hadn’t yet perfected Schwab’s trademark mangling of language that reduces communication to incoherence or lacerating assault, but already vivid is his degraded, hideously cruel and stupid humanity, whose exchanges produce only pain and rage.
Top Dogs
September 9 — October 14, 2000
LA Weekly — Pick of the Week!
By Urs Widmer
Translated by Patricia Benecke
Directed by Frédérique Michel
Production Design and Dramaturgy by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Cast: Tatiana Alvarez, Joel Drazner, Richard Grove, Dyan Kane, Dennis Ottobre, Mark Rebernik, Bo Roberts, Gene Williams
LA Weekly — Pick of the Week!review by Constance Monaghan
Swiss playwright Urs Widmer’s brutally funny look at life after downsizing may be billed as surreal, but to anyone familiar with the corporate milieu, it can only seem painfully real. It opens with an endless series of huge, projected mouths announcing name, impressive corporate title and obscene salary. When next we find ourselves in a roomful of these same “top dogs,” now jobless clients of the New Challenge Corporation employment agency, our pity can’t help but be tinged with smug satisfaction. That duality of response continues as we empathize with this “white-collar trash” newly shorn of identity (literally clinging to their wingtips and pumps) and simultaneously scorn them for weaknesses we also identify with. Director Frederique Michel brilliantly balances the explosively comic and movingly melancholic in a precise, stylish staging that segues from drill-team choreography, to dead-on spotlit monologues (one man fantasizes becoming a zookeeper while a woman imagines impressing her hard-nosed mother with a top-floor office), to re-enactments of the characters firings. The ensemble is impressive: Tatiana Alvarez, Joel Drazner, Richard Grove, Dyan Kane, Dennis Ottobre, Mark Rebernik, Bo Roberts and Gene Williams. Charles Duncombe Jr. created the set, lighting, sound and video (along with Cristian YoungMiller and Arosh Ayrom).
MedeaText
June 2—October 18, 2000
L. A. Weekly — Pick of the Week!
L.A. Times — Critic’s Pick!
Based on the Medea texts by Heiner Müller
adapted for City Garage by Charles A. Duncombe Jr.
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Jeff Boyer, Jennifer Dion, David Frank, Ilana Gustafson, Liz Hight, Andrea Isco, Katarina Lejona, Cynthia Mance, Jody Moschetti, Stephen Pocock, Christian YoungMiller
L. A. Weekly — Pick of the Week!
MEDEATEXT: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore
by Tom Provenzano
For a director or an audience to tackle a work by Heiner Müller is almost, by definition, a great adventure. The German dramatists plays consist of brief, fragmented scenes — in part linear storytelling but mostly surreal musings on characters and events. His plays are meant to be entirely reconfigured by adaptors, directors and actors to create unique stagings. In this difficult and rewarding production, Müller’s convoluted MedeaTexts are a great match for one of L.A.’s most determined advocates for European theater, director Frederique Michel. Her work here with adaptor Charles A. Duncombe Jr., based on Carl Weber’s translation of the original manuscript, delivers the mythical story of Medea and Jason into a contemporary Los Angeles filled with rampant greed and enshrouded with the cult of celebrity. The classic tale follows Medea’s murderous revenge upon her unfaithful husband Jason, for whom she had helped secure the legendary Golden Fleece. A number of actors play Medea simultaneously, creating characterizations ranging from a highly sexualized woman to an unfettered intellectual. Several Jasons likewise move in and out of the scenes, exposing horrible aspects of maleness. The mise en scene, all designed by Duncombe, is beautifully gruesome, beginning with the opening image of a naked. bloody Medea kneeling in sand. Duncombe’s transformation of the story to a grotesque vision of locally induced egoism is often a simple, elegant retelling. But the production becomes most exciting when the performers fracture the story (almost beyond recognition) into a series of events – from clownish pantomimes to poetry to live video documentary interviews.
LA Times — Critic’s Pick!
Challenging ‘MedeaText’ Plugs Into Modern Culture Theater
Review By F. KATHLEEN FOLEY
June 9th, 2000
Director Frédérique Michel and her longtime associate Charles A. Duncombe, Jr scale exhilarating heights in “MedeaText:Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore,” a radical retelling of the Medea legend based on Heiner Müller’s original play, as translated by Carl Weber. The production has its rough edges, including a couple of amateurish performances and the occasional slip into tonal excess — a not-uncommon City Garage failing. Despite these shortcomings, an atmosphere of rigorous professionalism prevails, from Michel’s stringent staging to Duncombe’s wonderfully evocative production design to Lee C. Smith’s inventive costumes, which feature such bizarre innovations as a see-through cellophane hoop skirt — a melding of Old World decorum and New Age license that is very much to the philosophical point.
Set in a bleak, postindustrial Los Angeles dreamscape, the play opens with Medea (at least, one of them — the role is played by three actresses) sitting in a sandbox, nude. Medea’s hands are red with the gore of her recent slaughter, yet she stares expressionlessly out at the audience, devoid of affect or emotion. White masks are evenly interspersed among the trash-strewn sandboxes that border the stage — a double-edged symbol of Los Angeles as terminus, both geographical and spiritual, where the land drops abruptly into the sea but the sewage of Hollywood mass culture seeps ever outward. The female anatomy is prominently on display throughout, although not in any exploitative sense. The play evolves into a piercing examination of male entitlement and female rage, with a particular emphasis on the constant objectification of the female form, from network television to Internet porn.
Challenging and abrasive stuff, this is far from a feminist diatribe. The dialectic is evenly balanced and surprisingly funny. In one amusing video segment, projected live on an screen, “scholars” face off in front of cameras to discuss Medea’s motivations, each passionately promoting his or her own skewed agenda. Various Jasons in Armani chat glibly on cell phones while a fetish-clad chorus cavorts hilariously. Medea’s alter egos, pale women in black leather jackets, sweep about like birds of prey. And all the while, Medea sits, staring. In Michel’s clockwork staging, the actors move with the eerie inexorability of automata, dehumanized and pitiless. But it is Duncombe’s adaptation of Müller’s meager text that is the true triumph of the evening. A theatrical exegesis that expounds brilliantly upon the original, Duncombe’s reworking plugs into the malaise of modern culture — that dreary, fleshly round — and sharply illuminates the spiritual emptiness that results when human beings are relentlessly reduced to objects.
LA Weekly
Grave New Worlds
by Steven Leigh Morris
City Garage is situated in an alley adjoining Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade — that mecca of consumerism around which the other legit stages in the immediate area devote themselves to sketch comedy and other comparatively feel-good entertainments. But where such troupes as Second City, at the Mayfair Theater, swiftly folded, City Garage, in its little cabin behind Fourth Street, has for the last decade been slogging away at cryptic, newish European writing. This is a theater that, over the past three seasons alone, has devotedly put on plays by Ginka Steinwachs, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Michel Tournier and now Heiner Müller — heady, abstract works by playwrights from France, Poland and Germany whose writings, if not for City Garage, would remain unknown to most Angelenos, plays that nobody else in the region has had the savvy, or the gall, to touch.
I suspect that one of the reasons City Garage has endured over the years — despite chorus lines that clump rather than snap, mangled dialogue and a general sense that the company is floundering in material that’s stylistically beyond its reach and training — is that so many of the actors have paraded onstage in the buff, or in fetishist attire, in ways only dubiously justified by the material. It’s a shrewd strategy: When the novelty of all that flesh wears off, you can tune in to Fassbinder — and vice versa.
Pinch me if I’m dreaming, but if its current production of MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore is any indication, City Garage appears, at last, to be growing up. Never before has this company looked so much like an ensemble, moved with such synchrony and poise. Never have director Frederique Michel’s stage pictures seemed so rarefied, so cleansed of the kind of redundancy and excess that’s characterized many of her productions in the past. Never before has the nudity made such sense or been executed with such acute sensitivity to gesture and body language. This intoxicating production may not be perfect, but it’s certainly the best work by this theater to date.
Charles A. Duncombe Jr. has adapted Müller’s rather dense Medea texts — the sum of which is only a few pages — into a full-length play set in and around Los Angeles. The result, powerfully enhanced by Michel’s staging, is a kind of semijocular SoCal dystopia, a garbage-strewn beachscape collage in which masked demons spout poetry, movie execs snort coke, and the faces of various academics, commenting on the action from the wings, are beamed live via an upstage video screen. This chorus of sorts deconstructs the deconstruction, wrapping themselves in ontological knots — in the middle of which sits bloodied, naked Medea (Andrea Isco, one of three actors who share the title role), whose beautiful, tormented visage embodies this production’s soul.
In Euripides’ legend about betrayal and revenge, Medea is a young woman so devoted to her husband, Jason, she helps him steal the coveted golden fleece from her father, King Ae’tes, then sacrifices her own brother, sending him in the lethal path of Jason’s pursuers, in order to protect her husband. For her trouble, many years later, Jason dumps his aging wife for a princess (Jody Moschetti). Medea responds by murdering her own children by Jason — an understandable, if excessive, gesture.
The story has received countless cinema, opera and stage adaptations over the years. In his late-’60s play The Golden Fleece, A.R. Gurney Jr. used the legend to serve up a fairly linear commentary on contemporary American marriage. Here, however, Müller’s primary interest is neither family nor storytelling; he chooses instead to shatter the story, as though throwing a vase against a wall. In the shards one can find glimmers of insight, images whose very disarrangement speaks to the fragmentation of society. Duncombe Jr., in his adaptation, expands upon Müller’s concerns, filtering the myth through a prism of mid-’80s feminism. When Medea gets dumped for a nubile younger woman, the adapter connects this to the lure of pornography and its disembodied images. In an amusing monument to male selfishness and egocentrism, Cristian YoungMiller, one of three briefcase-toting Jasons, explains how really, truly difficult it is for a fellow down at the studio. (“I’m sorry, this is about me.”) Near play’s end, a chorus of women preen as they mock lurid phone-sex come-ons, exemplifying through words the pictures of disassociated body parts that pass for sexuality in our disassociated culture.
The drawback is that these are exactly the images one would expect from a play subtitled Los Angeles/ Despoiled Shore — generic images already too much in circulation to describe with much nuance our city and the pop/porno culture of greed it has come to represent. The work is so bereft of references to L.A.’s subterranean and minority cultures, you’d think it had been created by artists from Munich, London or Seattle, rather than by people who’ve been digging artistic trenches in our own back yard for more than a decade. There’s a reason L.A. sets fire to itself every 30 years or so, and it seems odd to exclude that from a locally situated play about rage.
Marriage Blanc (White Wedding)
November 12th — December 19th, 1999
Written by: Tadeusz Rozewizc
Translated by: Adam Czerniawski
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Annette Culp, Jennifer Dion, Richard Grove, Justine Klineman, Katerina Lejona, Jonathan Liebhold, Cynthia Mance, Laura McCann, Eileen O’Connell, Bo Roberts, Cheryl Scaccio, Erin Vincent, Gene Williams
Los Angeles Times
review by Philip Brandes
“A surreal erotic fable chock full of Freudian themes and imagery, “Marriage Blanc” (White Wedding) is a good fit for the libido-drenched avant antics of Santa Monica’s City Garage. Nudity, emotional confrontation, socio-political satire and absurdism abound in this tale of a girl’s frightened resistance to an arranged marriage and her own emerging womanhood. But Tadeusz Rozewizc’s wry allegory also lets the ensemble demonstrate its facility with more traditional performance and stagecraft, thanks to linear narrative, continuity of character, and turn-of-the-century setting.
In a striking departure from the company’s frequent forays into stark, existential modernism, production designer Charles A. Duncombe Jr’s ornate period scenery and warm-hued lighting prove well-suited to the 1968 play’s deliberate construction as a distant fairy tale — necessary to avoid censorship in the playwright’s native Poland.
Cynthia Mance gives a sympathetic, multilayered central performance as Bianca, a tom-boy whose terror of sexuality manifests itself in fanciful visions almost as strange as her peculiar family. Particularly effective are her philandering father (Richard Grove), who furtively chases the domestic help; her uptight mother (Katherina Lejona), who derives her only sexual gratification reciting mail-order catalogs for china and undergarments; and her lecherous grandfather (Gene Williams), who has no qualms about preying on his own descendants.
Initial naturalistic presentation gives way to increasingly menacing hallucinations that torment Bianca with the approach of her marriage to a pompous, inexperienced poet (Jonathan Liebhold), who appears to be sporting a phallic mushroom with angry red cap; the other males follow suit and ultimately mutate via animal masks into grunting beasts at the wedding feast.
Metaphorically extending paternalistic sexual dominance into the political sphere with a thinly veiled assault on government, Rozewizc’s point doesn’t require quite this extended a treatment. Despite director Frédérique Michel’s often inventive flourishes, the final third bogs down in restatement but redeems itself with a haunting finale.”
Beverly Hills Outlook Online Magazine
review by Charles Lonberger
“On November 14th, in the rarified ambience of Santa Monica’s City Garage, amidst the smell of sawdust and the taste of wine, the City Garage Theater troop presented a good-humored version of Tadeusz Rosewicz’s whimsical “White Wedding” (Marriage Blanc), a play of quirky, imaginative and coherent greatness.
The production itself, which was dedicated to Jan Kott, was notable for the open and wide breath of Charles Duncombe’s sets and costuming of Michele Gingembre and Eric Vincent that convincing]y recalled the epoch in which the action was placed, and for the brilliant, eccentric and eclectic direction of company director Frédérique Michel, whose work has, in the past, not always been untouched by the polemic, but who was here consistently on the mark, calling on the songs of birds and crickets, chants and the sounds of a summer rain amid a riot of phallic mushrooms and virile masked beasts, in bemusedly bringing this tale of the Ribald Power of Life to life.
The cast, which included many company debuts among them, was uniformly outstanding, and set a new level of ensemble achievement at this venue. In particular, Cynthia Mance’s Bianca was a creation of brilliant, believable hysterics, a powerful glue that held the entire production together, and was well-played off against the healthy, robust earthiness of Erin Vincent’s Pauline, who gave us a glorious St. Verbona sequence. As their father, Richard Grove was invigoratingly lecherous, while Katharina Lejona brought a pinched frigidity to the role of their other. The part of the Aunt was fleshed out to its fullest capacity by Cheryl Scaccio. Gene Williams’ grandfather was a work of great acting depth, resonant and of deep substance. Also exceptional was Jennifer Dion as the cook, who imbued her potential throwaway part with the Force of Life itself. Laura McCann’s Ghost of the Grandmother was read with a melodious cadence, while Jonathan Liebhold lend a dazed David Manners touch to his work as Benjamin. The whole of this production perfectly meshed in delivering a particularly riveting confessional scene, an inspired marriage of text, cast, and direction that well served the exceptional translation of Adam Czerniawski.
A visual motif running throughout the drama like an invisible commentary were Annette Culp, Eileen O’Connell, and Justine Kleinman as Maids who at times cavorted in and out of the shadows like figures from Matisse, while, at other times, silently stalking the stage.
Readers of this publication are strongly advised to keep a close eye on this venue near the beach. Their productions, while not uniformly successful, are always thought provoking and well mounted, giving local audiences an early view of European trends in contemporary theater.”
Pre-Paradise Sorry Now
Fall 1999
Written by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Directed by: Frédérique Michel
Production Design by: Charles A. Duncombe, Jr.
Cast: Tatiana Alvarez, Ruth Crossley, Greg Hecht, Andrea Isco, Jonathan Liebhold, Christian Youngmiller, Jody Moschetti, Freddy Nager, Mark Rebernik, Bo Roberts, Paradorn Thiel, Doria Valenzuela, Gustav Vintas
Backstage West
review by Paul Birchall
Director Frédérique Michel’s production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s elementally disturbing black comedy is depraved, loathsome, and vile. And, in this unique case, those are all meant to be compliments. Exploring Fassbinder’s bleakly ironic and ghoulishly jaundiced world view through exotic visual spectacle and often surreal imagery, Michel’s staging is unusually well matched with bizarre and over-the-top psychotic text.
Fassbinder’s play is equal parts self-indulgent sleaze fest, penetrating social satire, and Natural Born Killers (The German Version). It’s unfortunate that the show is also entirely hard to stomach: the mix of monsterous acts of cruelty and wince-inducing jags of debased sexuality — presented with a melancholy, jaded insouciance — create a show that is both compelling and disgusting. The production is frequently quite effective at chilling the blood. But it’s certainly not for everyone.
As a video monitor plays a quick-paced montage of clips from appalling slasher movies (all available on video, I believe), we’re treated to a staged biography of serial killer lovers Ian Brady (Jonathan Liebhold) and his girlfriend Myra Hindley (Andrea Isco), who were responsible for a series of torture killings in the 1960s. Brady and Hindley are indeed sick cookies: He happily masturbates to DeSade’s Justine, while she lets herself be whipped senseless for spending her weekly pocket money too quickly. Both sincerely believe themselves to be more highly evolved than the rest of humanity, which by their lights gives them the right to torture their hapless captives to death.
As the pair accomplish their dreadful deeds, the play also focuses on a number of other revolting characters — a transvestite prostitute who gets beat up by her john, two doctors who mercilessly ignore the human test subject they’ve punished into catatonia, and a soldier who is forced to perform push-ups on top of a knife. These blackout sequences are subsequently all repeated, but this time with the tortured person playing the oppressor, and vice versa.
Michel stages the play’s cruelty with an eye for detail that’s simultaneously horrifying and humorous. The performances crackle with intensity and venom, particularly Liebhold’s cooly restrained Brady and Isco’s creepily devoted Myra. Also amusingly grotesque in supporting roles are Greg Hecht, as an extremely lurid male stripper, and Gustav Vintas, doing his dead-on Maurice Chevalier impersonation as the consummately creepy narrator.
Calling Pre-Paradise Sorry Now unwholesome is like saying the Son of Sam was mildly irritated. This is a deeply distasteful and provocative show.”