The ensemble of Change the Game (Photo by Timothy Bennett and courtesy of Jon Bruschke)
Reviewed by Joel Beers
A Hollywood Fringe show at the McCadden Theatre
Closed
Hard to choose what’s more impressive: the references to Antonio Gramsci and Pablo Friere that pepper the songs in the rock musical Change the Game, or the show’s (approximately) 20-member cast and crew that made the 8:30 p.m. curtain on a Friday night in Hollywood. Because for me the drive north from Orange County on the 5 and 101 freeways was surely as enervating as actually reading Gramsci or Friere.
OK, that was a cheap shot — if only we all read more Gramsci and Friere — better yet, if only we dared to implement our understanding of them in the wholly unapologetic, irony-free conviction that co-writers Jon Bruschke and Andrew Howat do. With this they get help from lyricists Tyrone Stokes and Laura Heider, along with the aforementioned cast and crew, most of whom are either current or recent high school or college students.
Bruschke, who moonlights as the Chair of Human Communications Studies at Cal State Fullerton, wrote the program notes for Change the Game, an offering this year at the Hollywood Fringe Festival’s first weekend. In them, he tells us that the show was inspired by the 13 years he served as debate coach for the CSUF speech and debate team, an outfit that went routinely toe-to-toe with universities like Harvard, USC and Dartmouth. As befitting a campus with a radius that encompasses central and north Orange County — one of the most ethnically diverse regions of the state (seriously, lop off that elongated boot stretching north to south along the coast from Seal Beach to San Clemente — and you’ll see for yourself that his students hailed from every conceivable ethnic background and brought their life experiences and perspectives with them. (Don’t forget to include Huntington Beach on that chopping block!)
They also brought their ideas and even some of the books that inspired those ideas — including one that changed the way a card-carrying PhD like Bruschke could look at the world: Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” I won’t pretend to know one fricking thing about that book, but I’ve read that it reshuffles the traditional top-down educational model into one where members of the oppressed classes are encouraged to defy the reigning hegemony by taking the radical step of empowering themselves to actively participate in its dismantling.
That’s the message that reverberates through Change the Game and — so far as plays with a reverberating message go, it’s not a bad one at all. One wishes, however, that along with Freire’s book, someone had brought a directing 101 textbook to the table. And maybe a dramaturge. The play starts out seeming to present a counterargument to the diversity and inclusion movement sweeping American colleges. Students in Economic Sociology 330 vent about all the diversity initiatives promoted by the university that don’t seem to include any of their backgrounds. Instead of championing diversity, the students seem to agree, they are just creating boxes for everyone to be packed into. But then the play mostly dispenses with that concern and becomes a rather boilerplate look at local politics as an impassioned, and highly tenured, university professor reluctantly accepts his student’s pleas to run for congressional office in a district whose poorest inhabitants live in substandard housing.
So far, so OK. But the arrival of the wholly corrupt California governor and his Snidely Whiplash handler, while supplying some of the funniest moments, injects a broader-than-broad style of comedy so melodramatic that one can’t help but expect Rube Waddell to burst forth from the wings, shoot a pistol with the word BANG! propelled from its barrel, and rescue the fair damsel from being impaled by the local locomotive running up Beach Boulevard.
The cast is all uniformly game and uniformly all over the place, but they hit the harmonies quite well, and there are some ringers, including Faith Romo as our leading human being, and Rio Gomez’s expert soft shoe tap routine.
The play has been workshopped at two of Orange County’s senior storefront theaters, Chance Theater and the Maverick, and seems to still be in development, with a capital D. It’s too long by about a half-hour; the songs are mostly anthems that don’t drive the plot forward; a well-meaning subplot between the character who becomes the main character once the play decides to have a main character and her abuela detracts more than adds; and it‘s best musical number, a hip hop duet powerfully delivered by Victoria Jackson and Ethan Rokos, seems badly misplaced — if ever a 10 ‘o’clock number punches in too early. it’s this one. And the play’s conclusion, i.e., who will be the standard bearer for those who most need it, is telegraphed by a country mile.
But it’s difficult to not like it because even though what it says could be said with more polish and panache, what it is saying is too important to ignore. Here’s hoping that Bruschke and crew keep working on this piece — and maybe hire a director. Even better, here’s hoping that all concerned never lose the idealism that their characters espouse. This world has a nasty prediection of crushing the most well-intentioned of hopes and dreams — and snarky reviewers don’t exactly help.
