Amye Partain and Jonathan R. Freeman (Photo by Ashley Randall Photography)
Reviewed by Martίn Hernández
Theatre 68 Arts Complex
Through Oct. 13
RECOMMENDED
Scoot (Jonathan R. Freeman) is a veteran TV writer and Brooklyn (Amye Partain) a much younger writer’s assistant in playwright Sam Henry Kass’s erudite metanarrative on memory, truth, love, loss, and the mess they can all entail when entwined.
But — are the two merely characters in Kass’s play? Are they also characters in Scoot’s in-progress play about his and Brooklyn’s romance from 20 years ago? Are they really characters at all? Despite a truncated feel and a pat ending, Kass weaves a playful yet painful tale as Scoot and Brooklyn, flashing back and forth in time, try to come to grips with their relationship’s failure.
They first meet in a TV studio parking lot in Los Angeles when the apathetic Scoot shows up on his second day of work, after going AWOL on the first. With flippancy and some flowery prose, Scoot convinces Brooklyn to leave work early for a date. Though Scoot is married (claiming he no longer loves his wife), he enchants Brooklyn with the lyricism of his spoken and written words, as well as a squalid charm. Scoot is smitten with Brooklyn, seeing her as a long-sought-after muse, as yet unscathed by “Industry” intrigue.
While he scoffs at his studio bosses, underneath his bravado and contempt for hack head writers (whom he thinks sabotage his work), Scoot feels like a sellout. In Brooklyn he sees someone possessing the same potential that his insecurity has squandered in himself — which puts a strain on their bond and triggers his flight mode. As Scoot slips away from her, Brooklyn desperately tries to haul him back.
Designer Matt Richter’s wall projections — type-written script pages, indoor and outdoor locales — set the play’s time and place, while his novel animation offers insights into the characters’ personalities. Kass has Freeman and Partain intermittently break the fourth wall, sniping at each other’s characters over some perceived mis-telling of their stories or as actors out of character hilariously advising on how any future producers could stage or cast the play.
Director Ronnie Marmo has a flair for tableau, strategically staging his actors to emphasize their characters’ shifting power dynamics. Freeman nails the iconoclastic Scoot as a wounded warrior in the nefarious trenches of Tinseltown. Partain also excels, as credible at exuding the younger Brooklyn’s enthusiasm for her work as she is expressing cynicism at her compromises as an older woman. As a prominent TV writer himself, Kass also delivers a swipe at Hollywood’s pecking order, where mostly boorish producers valuing profit over art, hold writers, whose artistry fuel those profits, in such low esteem.
Theatre 68 Arts Complex, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 7 pm; thru Oct. 13. www.theatre68.com Running time 70 minutes with no intermission.
