Brett Aune, Alley Mills Bean and Jim Ortlieb (Photo by Jeff Lorch)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre
Through August 23
RECOMMENDED
The Los Angeles premiere of Reel to Reel at Rogue Machine may be one of the most unusual—and quietly moving— productions you are likely to see this season.
The play, by John Kolvenbach, has been co-produced by Rogue Machine and HorseChart Theatre, whose revamping of Charles Busch’s vintage camp classic, Psycho Beach Party, was such a hit at this venue last summer.
However, there’s nothing campy or cultish about this current production, a non-linear, non-chronological recapitulation of one couple’s marriage over the course of 55 years together.
Neither should you look for the standard progression of plot popularized by such apps as Save the Cat, which try to quantify story structure, beat by beat and crisis by crisis. The storyline of Reel is singularly uneventful, a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a somewhat unconventional but otherwise ordinary couple — no dramatic reversals, no high-stakes twists. The virtue of Kolvenbach’s play is in its very ordinariness, which elevates the everyday into the extraordinary.
Directed by Matthew McCray, four actors — Brett Aune and Samantha Klein as the younger couple and Jim Ortlieb and Alley Mills Bean as the older — play Walter and Maggie, the duo in question, at various stages in their relationship. Walter is a wannabe filmmaker who gave up his artistic ambitions when his sole movie was met with general opprobrium. Maggie is a sound technician, more specifically a sound documentarian, who has been taping the sounds and people around her all her life. She has become renowned for her solo performance pieces — aural mishmashes of everything from a chugging washing machine to the secret recordings she made in her parents’ bedroom when she was just a child.
The trick here — and it is in no way gimmicky — is that all the sounds in the production are made by these four actors, who function as on-stage foley artists (no relation to this reviewer). Upstage, behind the sliding glass doors of Evan A. Bartoletti’s ingenious set, they create the whooshing, percussive effects of Jeff Gardner’s magnificent sound and foley design, which employs simple objects to create the auditory ambience. To take just one example, a gallon water bottle, shaken back and forth, suffices for that chugging washing machine. The whole thing is almost comically reminiscent of the “coconut horse clops” of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Kolvenbach’s play is not without problems. Maggie and Walter first encounter one another at a party, after which Maggie seduces Walter in short order, then frustratingly disappears the next morning, leaving the smitten Walter to frantically search for her. Meant to establish Maggie as an eccentric free spirit, it’s a “meet cute” that smacks too much of the manic pixie dream girl, the type whose offbeat behavior strains credulity and only seems remotely believable when the woman in question is young and cute. Fortunately, that strained early dynamic deepens into a bracingly believable lifelong intimacy.
However, if the play isn’t faultless, the direction is. McCray’s understated staging never overemphasizes the characters’ interactions, whether they be comedic or shattering. Faultless, also, are the performers, who honor the delicate realism of their material with never a false moment. All are superb, but it is Mills Bean’s casual, comfortable, “old shoes” turn as the older Maggie that stands out. An artistic survivor of several decades, she richly embodies the creative passion that fuels her character — and this production.
Rogue Machine Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., L.A. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m., thru Aug. 23. (855) 585-5185. https://www.roguemachinetheatre.org/ Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.
