PASSING PROPER/PASSION AND PRECISION

A would-be screenwriter attempts to navigate the shark-ridden Hollywood waters in Passion And Precision, the second of a matched set of one-acts by Joe Davis Massingill. That the first of the two, Passing Proper, just happens to be a staged version of the very screenplay the writer is hoping to sell is just one of several reasons to check out the two plays running on a single bill at Theatre 68.

Passing Proper stars Massingill and Forrest Lancaster as Bud and Will, a pair of Arizona outlaws who’ve hopped a California-bound freight train with five thousand dollars in stolen bills and no idea of what their next move will be. Before long, a Spanish-accented stranger named Carl (Ray Cosico) has popped into their car and explained the reason for the stacks of long-untouched boxes surrounding them. “Folks call this the ‘Ghost Train,’” Carl reveals. “This baby rolls back and forth across the Southwest, with twenty five cars that carry tons of nothing. Lost, roaming the desert, lost without a purpose.” Sort of like our ragtag pair of antiheroes.

Carl doesn’t stick around for long, and his place is soon taken by Lily (Alex Oliver), a pretty, guitar-strumming drifter who’s fallen in love with the ghost train and made it her home.

It takes only a short while for Lily to provide Bud with yet another reminder of what it’s like to be sidekick to a hottie like Will. (“Women choose to sleep with you, just for the joy of sleeping with you,” Bud has commented earlier on. “To sleep with me, she's either gettin' something else out of it, she loves me, or she's making a mistake that she won't realize till she sees me naked in the morning.”) With Bud still bleeding from a gunshot wound and sexual sparks a-smoldering’ between Will and Lily, anyone who expects the trio to ride off into the sunset together might want to rethink that notion.

Passion And Precision begins Film Noir style with screenwriter Trick (Massingill) flashing us back to his first meeting with up-and-coming literary agent Jake (Lancaster). “I had been in Los Angeles for six months, spinning my wheels,” he recalls. “I saw an ad on-line for a screenplay contest. The only thing I'd written was a play, about a ‘Ghost Train,’ so I adapted it, best I could. Never heard from the contest, but a couple weeks later, I get a call from a guy…”

The scene then shifts to Jake’s mostly unfurnished office as he interviews (and simultaneously hits on) Michelle (Oliver), a smart, sassy, sexy redhead who’s come about a job opening as his assistant. Since Michelle is not only a looker but can give as good she gets, it’s no wonder the job is soon hers.

Enter Trick, whose excitement about Jake’s interest in his work soon turns to disappointment when he learns what The Edge Network really has in mind—an hour-long dramatic series based on his screenplay. Unwilling to sacrifice his principles even if it means giving up big bucks and waiting another five years for his big break, Trick resists Jake’s every effort to wear him down, unaware that the agent’s motivations may well be even shadier than they seem.

Massingill’s dialog crackles, particularly in the Mametian second act, and he has written Lancaster, Oliver, and himself two terrific pairs of roles. Each play could stand some pruning, however, particularly the rather too talky Passion And Precision, whose length dilutes the impact of its nifty payoff. (A two-hour running time including intermission would be ideal for the two-play package.) This reviewer also found it hard to imagine how “Ghost Train” could be expanded into an episodic series, but then again, I’m not a network exec.

No quibbles can be made, however, about the cast’s crackerjack performances, honed razor sharp under Jamison Jones’ assured direction. Lancaster, like Alec Baldwin in his 20something days, possesses leading man good looks, a sexy edginess, and acting chops to match. Particularly in Act Two, the handsome 6-footer manages Massingill’s rapid-fire dialog with spontaneity, fire, and not a moment of uncertainty. Oliver’s folksy, sultry Lily and her smart, sassy Michelle reveal a promising, highly watchable young actress who can more than hold her own opposite any scene partner. She’s also quite a singer-guitarist (and co-wrote “Over The Border” with Massingill). Massingill is, like Jack Black, a character actor with leading man appeal who just happens to have written himself a bang-up acting showcase. Cosico is so dynamic and appealing as street-smart Carl that one wishes the playwright had figured out a way to use him in Act Two. (Poor guy doesn’t even get a curtain call.)

Danny Darst’s original background music enhances Massingill’s storytelling. Design elements are uncredited. Lighting, sound, and costume designs are all first-rate; however, intimate theater aficionados may be disappointed in the two plays’ merely workmanlike scenic designs. Angelica Santos is producer, Kourtney Sonntag stage manager, and Tanya Wilkins and Dan Hutchinson techs.

Though no writer enjoys deleting pages of dialog he’s worked hard to create (and no actor enjoys losing them), Passing Proper and Passion And Precision represent a case when less might add up to considerably more. Even at a longer than optimum running time, however, they introduce a talented new playwright to Los Angeles audiences and some exciting new L.A.-based performers as well.

Note: Sunday evening performances feature an alternate cast of seven actors, each playing a single role.

Theatre 68, 5419 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles. Through August 21. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 3:00 and 8:00. Reservations: 323 960-5068
www.theatre68.com
www.passingproper.com
--Steven Stanley
August 7, 2011

BLACKBIRD

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BLACKBIRD

A 30ish woman confronts the 60ish man who had sex with her when she was only 12 in David Harrower’s harrowing Blackbird, now shocking, disturbing, and dare I say entertaining audiences in equal measure in its Los Angeles premiere by Rogue Machine Theatre.

Before I’m accused of giving too much away in my first sentence, let me assure you that this startling bit of information comes out a mere ten minutes into the play, and any attempt to discuss Blackbird without revealing its central conceit would be frustrating at best. In any case, whatever preconceived notions you might have of Blackbird as a staged version of a cable TV revenge melodrama will quickly be dispelled by the playwright’s unclichéd (and even poetic) dialog and unpredictable plot twists, especially as directed to razor-sharp perfection by Robin Larsen and performed by a pair of utterly brilliant actors.

Our first glimpse of Peter (Sam Anderson) and Una (Corryn Cummins) finds them mid-conversation in the trash-strewn break room of an unnamed company, and though we’re at first unaware of the reason for their confrontation, one thing is crystal clear. Peter wants out and Una is not about to let him get away. Peter’s coworkers, whose shadowy figures are glimpsed through the room’s translucent windows, seem as curious as we are about what’s going on between this disparate pair, but we have the advantage of being inside the room with them. Indeed, because Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s scenic design in Theatre/Theatre’s smaller space is so utterly realistic, it seems almost as if chairs and risers had been added to a preexisting factory room, and not the other way around.

Were Blackbird a novel, a writer like Jodi Picoult (whose 400+ page tomes deal with precisely this type of dark, twisted subject matter) would fill us in with every detail of Peter and Una’s past relationship from both points of view, and from the points of view of the people who surrounded them, and quite a compelling novel it would make.

The challenge—and the excitement—of Blackbird as an eighty-minute, two-character play is that whatever we know about the older man and younger woman comes from what they tell each other during their real-time encounter. We hear her story as she remembers it, and his as he does, or at least in the way that each one wants the other to think that he or she remembers it. As for the details of Peter’s current life or Una’s, we have to take their word on it, and do so with a grain of salt, since the potential for prevarication is very real indeed. Thus, playwright Harrower keeps us particularly on our toes, filling in the blanks as best we can, and his play is all the stronger for making its audiences think.

Blackbird is far too complex for clichés, and anyone expecting a black-and-white predator-victim tale will have to search elsewhere. Is Peter the serial molester that child abuse advocates would like him painted as, or was Una (as he insists) only a one-time thing? Is he being honest about the man he claims to have become, or merely describing a life he wants her to see him in? Is Una a grown-up abuse survivor looking simply for closure, or does her visit hide far different urges? Be prepared to hash over these questions with your fellow playgoers as you exit the theater following Blackbird’s disquieting blackout.

One more thing about Harrower’s script as published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. and staged by Rogue Machine. Whoever tweaked it for American audiences deserves major props, as there’s not a moment you’d think that it was written by a Scottish playwright, save the unlikelihood of Una's surname.

Lead performers Anderson and Cummins can now be added to the list of the year’s stunning dramatic duos, which have included Johnny Clark and Michelle Clunie, Mike Farrell and Jim Parrack, and Morlan Higgins and Adolphus Ward.

Anderson, StageSceneLA Award winner for his unforgettable work in The Bird And Mr. Banks, is equally unforgettable here as a man whose seeming harmlessness (he looks to be the last person any parent would worry about leaving their child with) makes his past transgressions all the more shocking, and whose air of sincerity makes his claims of redemption all the more credible should we choose to believe him. It is as tough a role as Anderson has ever undertaken, emotionally and physically draining (credit fight choreographer Edgar Landa for the latter), and he is as on top of it as you’d expect an actor half his age to be.

The remarkable Cummins is equally well cast. There’s a toughness to her that makes you wonder how she could ever have been a victim, yet the lone tear that falls unexpectedly down her cheek reveals the wounded child within. The talented young actress brings a feline fierceness to the role, matching Anderson in power and depth every step of the way, so that when …

I’ll stop myself before giving anything more away. Suffice it to say that Anderson’s and Cummins’ work must surely match the best of any actors who may have tackled these roles in previous productions.

Casey Burke makes a highly effective eleventh hour appearance. Dana Lyn Baron and Alec Tomkiw are seen mostly only as distorted images through frosted glass, but their presence adds significantly to the realism of Larsen’s staging.

Leigh Allen’s lighting design is remarkably varied considering the one-set, real-time nature of Harrower’s script. Christopher Moscatiello’s sound design adds subtly to the suspense. Jocelyn Hublau Parker’s costumes suit each character to a T. Property designer Ilona Piotrowska gets a round of applause for filling Schwartz’s set with fast food detritus like you may never have seen on the legitimate stage. Sasha Sobolevsky is stage manager, David Mauer technical director, Amanda Mauer production manager, and Darryl Johnson assistant director. Blackbird is produced by John Perrin Flynn, Matthew Elkins, and Edward Tournier.

I had avoided Blackbird when it first opened, the darkness of its subject matter suggesting a play that might prove overly disturbing to this somewhat faint-hearted reviewer. Disturbing it is indeed, but (as mentioned in the first paragraph) highly entertaining as well, and well worth seeing for that reason alone. Even amidst the darkness and despair, it is a theatergoing treat to savor the superb work being done by Anderson and Cummins—literally within touching distance. Blackbird gives playgoers one more reason to sample the many treasures of Los Angeles theater.

(Note: Blackbird’s current schedule—Saturdays and Sundays at 5:00 and Mondays at 8:00—makes it particularly easy to program into even the busiest theatergoing schedule.)

Rogue Machine, Theatre/Theater, 5041 W. Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles. Through August 15. Saturdays and Sundays at 5:00, Mondays at 8:00. Reservations: 855 585-5185
www.roguemachinetheatre.com
--Steven Stanley
July 25, 2011
Photos: John Flynn

AFTER THE AUTUMN

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AFTER THE AUTUMN

If horse-blinder Alan Strang was a tough nut for psychiatrist Martin Dysart to crack in Peter Shaffer’s Equus, then the nameless Army Captain in Matthew Kellen Burgos’ engrossing new dramatic one-act After The Autumn proves an even greater challenge to the doctor assigned to his case.

Now getting its World Premiere production by Vanguard Rep under the La Canada Flintridge stars, After The Autumn takes us on a non-linear journey, introducing us in flashback to the Doctor (Sam R. Ross), his patient (Clay Wilcox), two nurses (Alice McFarland and Adam Burch) charged with the Captain's daily care, and the officer’s former subordinate (David Ross Paterson), as the actors recite from a redacted (i.e. heavily censored) report from the Doctor’s malpractice hearing. (We hear only beeps whenever a name is mentioned.)

The Captain’s day nurse fills us in on the facts. The officer has recently been transferred to the Ascension Military Recovery Clinic, “where they send the ‘ghosts,’” his symptoms including, “but not limited to insomnia, lasting depression, disturbing nightmares, difficulty in social settings, and anger management issues.” And if that weren’t already enough, the Captain appears virtually mute, that is except for outbursts of anger during which words emerge from his mouth that seem to make little or no sense.

We learn that the Doctor has been given the Captain’s case by the Medical Licensing Board as a probationary assignment to be fulfilled while attempting to recover from an addiction to sleeping pills and pain relievers. Should he not be able to kick the habit, the Doctor’s medical license will be permanently revoked.

In words eerily reminiscent of Dr. Dysart’s in Equus, the Doctor recalls his initial reaction to his troubled patient: “I have to get closer. Just a little closer. Just as I’m close enough to hear what he’s saying, suddenly his mouth opens wide. Impossibly wide. He screams with many voices all at once. God, the noise. Loud. So loud.”

As the Doctor begins his attempts at therapy, he discovers that the Captain has been so heavily sedated as to make communication virtually impossible. Vowing to wean his patient from his overprescribed meds, the Doctor is surprised one day when the Captain speaks words that seem far too formal for an Army officer. “Better be with the dead whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,” begins the officer, “than on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.” Though the words mean nothing to the man of medicine, the Captain’s night nurse recognizes them. “Crazy bastard’s rehearsing a one-man Macbeth.”

Somehow, the Doctor now realizes, the Captain is using the words and themes of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play to express some secret inner torment, and feeling inspired for the first time in a good long while, the Doctor vows to root out the cause of the Captain’s trauma before his patient is committed to spending the rest of his life as a sedated vegetable. What he does not initially realize is that this may mean uncovering secrets the military would do anything not to see made public.

Playwright Burgos takes considerable risks in having his Army Captain speak only in the words of Shakespeare, courting protests that something like this would never happen in real life. Still, as a theatrical conceit we go with it, particularly since Burgos has come up with that rarity, a World Premiere play which proves absolutely apt for a Shakespearean season. As for the performances director Burgos has elicited from his stellar cast, they simply could not be better.

Ross, StageSceneLA Award winner for his Dramatic Performance Of The Year in Breaking The Code is utterly compelling as a man charged with healing a wounded soul, all the while dealing with inner demons virtually as relentless as those of his patient. Wilcox matches Ross every step of the way as the Captain, his eyes at once hollow and filled with pain, a shell of a man still possessed of the strength to do violence, though perhaps not enough strength to face life once again among the living.

The elegant Paterson disappears inside the Sergeant’s considerably coarser skin in a performance that transcends stereotype. McFarland gives the day nurse an Upper Midwest accent you could slice with a knife and layers of caring and warmth. Burch is terrific too as the night nurse with a junior college minor in theater and little tolerance for the Doctor’s efforts to save a patient he thinks would be best left to vegetate.

Ric Zimmerman’s lighting is as striking as Jason Knox’s sound design, with its censorship beeps and tape rewind whirs. Bethany Richards gets high marks for well chosen costumes. Elisa K. Blandford is stage manager.

Opening the evening is a brief performance piece, Tragic Women, adapted from Shakespeare by Ross, who directs it as well. The short one-act has the spirits of Ophelia (Eliza Kiss) and Desdemona (Kirstin A. Snyder) mentoring suicidal neophyte Juliet (Chelsea Taylor) entirely in words from Hamlet, Othello, and R+J. It features graceful choreography by Elizabeth Ross set to Nino Rota’s theme from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo And Juliet. A worthy experiment, Tragic Women offers its three actresses the chance to do first rate work, with Kiss exhibiting a fine singing voice as well. Vocal arrangements are by Kathryn Gallagher and piano arrangement by Ben Coria. Richards costumes Tragic Women as well.

Still, the evening belongs to After The Autumn, a play that stands on its own and deserves future stagings. You will likely admire the imagination that went into Tragic Women, but it is the powerful After The Autumn that will stay with you long after the lights have dimmed.

Byrnes Amphitheater, Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, 440 St. Katherine Dr., La Cañada Flintridge.
www.vanguardrep.com
--Steven Stanley
July 17, 2011

A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS

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A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS

“Attention must be paid to such a person,” declares Linda Loman at the end of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece Death Of A Salesman, eulogizing a husband who woke up one morning to find that the thirty-four years he’d spent as a traveling salesman had been for naught.

Six years later, Miller paid attention to similar lives of fruitless drudgery in A Memory Of Two Mondays, now being given a rare revival at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Group Theatre. Just as their intimate staging of Miller’s All My Sons last year demonstrated the Ruskin’s expertise at bringing the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright to 21st Century life, so does the sure hand of director Amelia Mulkey make this return to Miller territory an unforgettable one.

A Memory Of Two Mondays’ protagonist is a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old Miller stand-in named Bert (Lane Compton), a young man who, just as the playwright himself did in the early 1930s, has taken a job to set aside money for college. A young man with big dreams, Bert toils in the shipping room of a large auto-parts warehouse at the height of the Great Depression, a period during which he and his coworkers were among the 75% of Americans lucky enough to have a job, no matter how exhausting, boring, and unpleasant it might be.

As its title suggests, A Memory Of Two Mondays takes place on a pair of Mondays, the first the stiflingly hot summer day Adolph Hitler took power in Germany (though only Bert is world-aware enough to know this), the second the bleak winter morning that Bert, about to start his college studies, bids adieu to the friends he has made there. Never without a copy of the day’s New York Times or Tolstoy’s War And Peace, Burt subsists on four dollars a week of his fifteen dollar weekly salary (still only $250 in today’s currency), saving the rest for the higher education he knows is his way up in the world.

There is no way up or out for other men and women working beside him day-in day-out for little or no reward, not for Larry (Jason Paul Field) or for Tom (Conor Walshe) or for Raymond (Gregory G. Giles) or for Gus (Richard Leighton). Newcomer Kenneth (Nick Cimiluca) may still have an Irishman’s stars in his eyes, singing folk songs and quoting from Walt Whitman, but not for long, his spirit too about to be crushed by daily drudgery and a newfound love of “the drinkin’.”

Over the course of the titular Mondays (and a seventy-five minute running time), Miller offers us a slice of these workers’ lives, and though not much “happens” plot-wise to the majority of them, the effect of spending time as flies on a warehouse wall leaves the audience impacted and moved by the experience.

Larry has bought a car he can’t afford because he’s “approaching forty” and “What am I going to be careful for?”, though this means that should one of his kids gets sick, “I’ll be strapped.” Tom arrives at work so drunk he is literally catatonic, and although a scene in which his coworkers conspire to make it look like he’s busy at his desk could fit right into a 1950s sitcom, it is no less heartbreaking for making us laugh. Raymond may have the title “foreman,” but that doesn’t mean his life is any more fulfilling than the others’. As for Gus, the Eastern European immigrant’s good-humored wisecracks may well camouflage the burnout of a man who has slaved for twenty-two years, and for what?

A Memory Of Two Mondays’ large cast of characters is completed by spinster receptionist Agnes (Lynn Wanlass), pretty secretary Patricia (Julia McIlvaine), 70something Jim (Paul Denk), shipping clerk Frank (Jeison Azali), drinking buddies Jerry (Timothy George Connolly) and Willy (Val Masouris), a mechanic (Hamilton Matthews), and warehouse owner Mr. Eagle (Billy Ensley).

Though Arthur Miller is working on a smaller scale than usual this time around, the impact of this mere hour and fifteen minutes of Miller is a powerful one. However brief our glimpses into these lives of quiet desperation might be, each character leaves his or her impression. Our hearts ache for those who remain trapped, and particularly for those whose decline we observe over the space of only a few months, and yet we rejoice in knowing that Miller’s surrogate, like the playwright, may well be making his escape to greatness.

An abrupt midstream shift into memory play territory, one which has Bert suddenly breaking the fourth wall, is about the only awkwardness in an otherwise impeccably written and constructed script, and at the Ruskin there is truly not a weak link in the cast of fourteen, making it one of the finest dramatic ensembles you’re likely to see all year, Field, Giles, recent USC grad McIlvaine, and Wanlass making particularly strong impressions.

Still, a quartet of performances stand out highest among the crowd.

Compton is absolute perfection as Bert, investing the character with such All-American goodness, heart, and charm as to win over even the hardest-hearted audience member. Cimiluca, one of L.A.’s most dynamic young actors, continues a string of terrific performances with a rich and heartbreaking turn as a man whose optimistic flame burns out right before our eyes. Walshe, whose Irish brogue is the one he grew up with, takes a character whose boozy stupor might end up cartoonish in lesser hands, and makes it painfully real, as is his later transformation into honest-to-goodness functioning human being. Finally, there is the towering work of Leighton, a seasoned actor who so disappears into Gus’s worn-out, worn-down (yet still feisty skin) that it seems less a performance than a simple yet highly complex act of being.

Mike Reilly’s lighting design does more than just illuminate Cliff Wagner’s impressively detailed set, it ups the dramatic impact scene after scene. (That the Ruskin Theatre was once a Santa Monica Airport hangar makes Wagner’s set even more believable.) Kudos go too to Lola Kelly’s period costumes, Christopher Richard’s original score and Karen Landry’s scenic painting. An anachronistic coiled phone cord and Patricia’s too short skirts are minor design flaws. Nicole Millar is stage manager and McIlvaine assistant director. A Memory Of Two Mondays is produced by Mikey Myers and Reilly.

No production of A Memory Of Two Mondays, no matter how great, will ever earn it a spot on a list of Arthur Miller’s Greatest Hits. Those will will remain Death Of A Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible, and A View From The Bridge. Still, this largely forgotten gem is no less a treat for being minor Miller. Like other fans of the greatest American playwright of the 20th Century, I’ll take minor Arthur Miller over major Anyone Else any day.

Ruskin Group Theatre, 3000 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica. Through August 14. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00, Sundays at 2:00. Reservations: 310 397-3244
www.ruskingrouptheatre.com
--Steven Stanley
June 12, 2011
Photos: Agnes Magyari

A DEATH IN COLOMBIA

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A DEATH IN COLOMBIA

It takes particular skill to write a thriller for the stage. Playwrights can’t rely on chase sequences or camera angles or other cinematic tricks as screenwriters can. Their task becomes all the more difficult if the stage thriller they’re writing is to unfold in real time on a single set with only a handful of characters. Add to the above a political theme, and you’ve got a doozy of a writing assignment.

All the more reason to cheer Shem Bitterman’s edge-of-your-seat political thriller A Death In Colombia, now being given its World Premiere engagement by the Katselas Theatre Company.

An opening scene introduces us to our soon-to-be lady in distress, though at first the only distress felt by expatriate Lisa (Roxanne Hart) is in having to entertain her husband John’s idealistic young colleague Natalie (Sarah Foret) in the couple’s elegantly furnished Bogota apartment. The rather more jaded older woman doesn’t particularly take to the effusive praise heaped by Natalie on the Colombian natives, whose poverty is so different from her own upper middle class upbringing. Where the younger woman can’t help gushing about a recent uprising on Cartagena Boulevard, “a Marxist expression of the people’s will,” Lisa is a good deal more cynical about the future of these 2002 Colombian revolutionaries. If they get what they want, might they not choose precisely what Natalie is against?

It soon comes out that John has been incommunicado in the jungle for the past three weeks, causing Lisa to wonder whether the rebels he’s been working with might have put a bullet in his head and dropped him in a ditch. Despite Lisa’s concern, it’s Natalie who seems the more worried of the two, and when she remarks that “he should have called one of us by now,” her casual use of the plural cues Lisa in on the affair her husband has been carrying on with the much younger woman, who has the nerve to defend herself with a sympathetic “You can’t call what you’re in a real marriage.”

Natalie soon departs, leaving Lisa to light up a joint, put on some music, and settle in for another evening alone—or so she thinks until a knock sounds at the door.

It takes a while for Lisa to become convinced that the man outside is really an old friend of John’s from Harvard, and though she grabs a knife just in case this Roger isn’t who he claims to be, the fellow who comes through the door couldn’t seem more harmless. (He is, after all, being played by Joe Regalbuto, the oh-so-likeable Frank Fontana all ten seasons of Murphy Brown.) Though Lisa has no recollection of having met Roger, she offers him some scotch and the use of the sofa for the night. After all, everyone crashes at John and Lisa’s when they’re in Bogota.

In the course of conversation, we learn a bit more about John’s work with the rebels. As Lisa explains to Roger, her husband is convinced that the best way to preserve the rain forests is to fight against the so-called “War On Drugs,” believing that American industrialists and oil companies have their own ulterior motives for waging it.

Still, despite talk of potential kidnappings (and worse), Roger’s visit seems harmless, with perhaps even the promise of a bit of sexual hanky-panky in the offing. Glasses of Johnny Walker keep getting refilled, the twosome share some pot (hers) and some coke (his), music gets turned on, and they dance a bit.

At the same time, there is something about Roger that just doesn’t sit right with Lisa, and not just the that he works for one of those oil companies John is fighting against. When she comes right out and accuses Roger of lying to her (“I don’t believe that John would have a friend like you”), her visitor drops any pretense of affability, and A Death In Colombia: The Thriller begins in earnest.

There’s a good deal more I could reveal in this review, having taken copious notes just in case they might be needed, but to do so would spoil the many surprise plot twists Bitterman has in store for Lisa, and for us (including just whose death it is in the title).

Besides the playwright’s crackerjack dialog and plotting, A Death In Colombia’s World Premiere benefits from an absolutely terrific trio of some of L.A.’s busiest and best actors.

Casting Regalbuto as villain proves a stroke of genius on the part of producer Gary Grossman and director Steve Zuckerman. Without the Murphy Brown vet’s natural likeability, we might find it hard to accept that Lisa would invite this total stranger into her apartment at night. Like Alan Alda, Regalbuto as bad guy makes for a far more interesting ride than we’d get from say a Willem Defoe type, and when he starts getting rough, watch out.

Opposite Regalbuto, a sensational, supremely watchable Hart brings to her role the same intensity and depth she would if she were playing Shakespeare or Williams or Miller. In a performance with as much happening inside as out, the stage, screen, and television vet makes us believe—absolutely—in Lisa’s distress, her ingenuity, and her pluck.

Foret’s role of “sweet young thing” seems at first a throwaway part, onstage for an expository scene and then sent away to dressing room purgatory, but a) the bubbly actress’s talent at hiding her natural effervescence under Natalie’s passionately idealistic skin makes the part far more than a mere supporting turn, and b) playwright Bitterman has a surprise up his sleeve, one which gives Foret the chance to show off real dramatic chops.

Working with composer Roger Bellon’s suspenseful background score (its Andean flutes are a particularly nice touch), director Zuckerman keeps the tension high from start to finish. Scenic designer Jeff McLaughlin’s Death In Colombia set is every bit as elegant as his Bakersfield Mist set is deliberately tacky, and this time it’s McLaughlin himself who lights it in gorgeously burnished hues. Kudos to Christopher Moscatiello for his top-drawer sound design, and to fight director Steve Ranking for a particularly believable (and scary) tussle or two. Adam Rotenberg is associate producer and Christopher Hoffman production stage manager.

There aren’t all that many stage thrillers that really work. Dial M For Murder, Death Trap, and Wait Until Dark come to mind. Fans of the genre will want to check out A Death In Colombia, a high tension cat-and-mouse game that bears comparison with the abovementioned suspense classics, with bonus points for its fascinating political backdrop.

Kastelas Theatre Company, The Skylight Theatre, 1816 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles. www.ktctickets.com
--Steven Stanley
July 3, 2011
Photos: Ed Krieger

BROADSWORD: A HEAVY METAL PLAY

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BROADSWORD: A HEAVY METAL PLAY

Sixteen years ago, four young New Jerseyans dreamed of a heavy metal stardom that would transport them far away from the Podunk town of Rahway. Then, as these things happen, their lead singer got a too-good-to-resist offer of a solo career and the remaining three were left to pick up the pieces. Now, a decade and a half later one of the the foursome is dead (or at the very least presumed dead), and his surviving bandmates have reunited for his memorial.

No, this isn’t yet another rehashing of The Big Chill or Return Of The Secaucus 7, but rather Marco Ramirez’s highly original Broadsword: A Heavy Metal Play, one which the young playwright could just as easily have subtitled A Supernatural Faustian Thriller.

However you choose to describe it, Broadsword is one humdinger of a play, now being given one humdinger of a West Coast Premiere at the Black Dahlia.

A bravura monolog delivered by a character known only as The Man In White (Armin Shimerman), a sinister fellow who has more than a bit in common with Damn Yankees’ Mr. Applegate, serves as the play’s prologue, after which we meet its protagonists. There’s auto mechanic and Broadsword bass player Vic (Blake Robbins); bartender and former drummer Nicky (Kenneth Allan Williams); rock star wannabe Tony (Tim Venable), the band’s singer who flew the coop; and Becca (Heather Sher), Broadsword’s “biggest fan” and the single mother of a boy who may have more than a passing connection with a member of the band.

The foursome find themselves together again for the first time in sixteen years in the very basement where Broadsword used to practice. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long for old dreams, regrets, and resentments to resurface.

Playwright Ramirez then introduces a fifth character to the underground mix, a mysterious musicologist who introduces himself as Dr. Thorne (Morlan Higgins) and cues the foursome into just what missing-presumed-dead Richie was up to during the years following Tony’s abrupt departure from New Jersey and from Broadsword. As Dr. Thorne explains it, Richie spent the last sixteen years on a black magic search for “certain intervals between the tones. New keys. Undiscovered sounds. Tones between tones,” the very same musical hooks which Richie’s brother Tony has returned to Rahway in search of, tones and keys and sounds which the singer hopes will help him finally achieve rock stardom.

And in the words of the very un-heavy metal Carpenters, Broadsword has “only just begun.”

Though playwright Ramirez hasn’t written a perfect play (it can get a tad too mystical for this reviewer’s tastes and the ending is a bit abrupt), it is nonetheless an exciting one, a work that heralds great things from the 20something Miami-born, Julliard-trained playwright.

If Ramirez hasn’t already seen or made plans to see Broadsword’s West Coast Premiere, he is hereby advised to take train, bus, or plane (or even hitchhike if need be) to L.A.’s teensy-weensy but highly illustrious Black Dahlia Theatre, where director Mark St. Amant has staged a couldn’t-be-better production, one which impresses even before the action has begun.

Kurt Boetcher’s extraordinarily detailed basement set seems to extend back forever in the tunnel that is the Black Dahlia, all the way back from a rock paraphernalia-cluttered “rehearsal space” to a devil-red furnace situated way upstage. It’s a wow of a set that portends terrific things to come.

Performances are all-around electric, beginning with Shimerman’s dazzlingly Mephistophelian Man In White. Williams’ nihilistic Nicky, Robbins’ sweet-natured Vic, Venable’s intense Tony, and Sher’s tough-but-tender Becca are each and every one superb, as is the chameleon-like acting virtuoso that is Higgins, once again vanishing into another man’s skin.

Scenic design prodigy Boetcher, lighting design marvel Leigh Allen, and sound design whiz David B. Marling (here billed simply as Dave) must have had their most fun in ages creating Broadword’s vivid, ever-morphing look and sound. Raquel Barreto’s costumes fit each character to a T. Together, the quartet have put together as exciting an intimate-stage design package as you’ll see this or any year.

Broadsword is produced by Gaalan Michaelson. Steven Barr is technical director, Joel Goldes dialect coach, Thomas Hadju music composer, and Emily Lehrer production stage manager.

Anyone who’s ever badmouthed or belittled Los Angeles theater owes it to him or herself to see Broadsword: A Heavy Metal Play, as does the L.A. Time’s ever-globetrotting Theater Critic. Think New York, Chicago, or any of those other reputed theater towns can do better than this? Think again!

Black Dahlia Theatre, 5453 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles.
www.thedahlia.com
--Steven Stanley
June 30, 2011
Photos: Gaalan Michaelson & Lauren Pasternack