Productions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bristling with youthful experimentation, “The Shepard Project: The Early Works of Sam Shepard” at City Garage gives a fascinating glimpse into Shepard’s artistic progression. For anyone not a die-hard Shepard fan, however, the works are limited in scope and execution, punk playlets by an unformed writer who had not yet found his voice, performed by actors not always sure of theirs.

It’s seldom that I run across something as difficult to describe as Journeys Among the Dead, Eugene Ionesco’s autobiographical last play. The City Garage’s production, directed by Frederique Michel, is compelling, beautifully paced, nicely performed for the most part, and yet… How do you wrap words around what is essentially an old man’s dream journey to find his mother and confront the guilt and anger that has plagued him since childhood? Simple enough to say, but it doesn’t quite convey what seeing this play is like.

French Novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, a.k.a. George Sand, was at the center of the 1848 European revolutionary movement that gave rise to communism; she was a femme fatale “who changed lovers more often than her shoes” and whose beaux included Karl Marx, Chopin, Schubert, Balzac and Flaubert; she dabbled in lesbianism, left her marriage to a country baron and supported herself through her writings, employing a male pseudonym.

90-odd minutes of watching petty, nasty people with too much money on their hands (and snorting the coke to prove it) getting progressively more drunk and more spiteful. Not exactly my cup of tea, and yet, under Frederique Michel’s beautifully paced direction, it works, and it works well.