2022 LA Theater in Review

What Happened? Part 2

By Steven Leigh Morris

Monazia Smith as Puck, in Open Fist Theatre Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Photo by Frank Ishman)

Part 1 of this essay, posted last week, surveyed some of the factors that led to the present, challenging circumstances of people and companies trying to put on a play with professional standards.

This is the second half: one person’s commemoration of work that stood out in a difficult year.

THE BIG BOYS

Hennessy Winkler and Sis in “Oklahoma” at the Ahmanson Theatre (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)

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In its first full season returning from the pandemic-generated closure of almost two years, CTG continued its tradition of favoring New York imports over locally weaned plays (and local actors).

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With one exception, I didn’t speak with anybody, within Stage Raw’s tent or beyond it, who didn’t believe that the London (Young Vic) /New York (Broadway) import of Matthew Lopez’s two-part epic portrait of New York’s gay community, The Inheritance — based on E.M. Forster’s 1910 Howard’s End, (and arriving here at the Geffen Playhouse) — wasn’t the cat’s whiskers. So I’ll defer on that one to my colleagues for their praises.

Daniel Fish’s minimalist staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! was another import (St. Anne’s Warehouse and Broadway) to arrive at one of LA’s largest stages, The Ahmanson Theatre. Center Theatre Group administrates a trio of LA County stages — The Ahmanson and the Mark Taper Forum, across the plaza from each other in downtown’s Music Center plaza, and Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theatre. In its first full season returning from the pandemic-generated closure of almost two years, CTG continued its tradition of favoring New York imports over locally weaned plays (and local actors). This would seem to be a product of fiscal anxiety and artistic timidity, both understandable impulses in times such as these, except that there’s been scant variation on this theme for the better part of two decades. How is it that St. Anne’s Warehouse in New York and the Young Vic in London can generate globe-hopping product, and we can’t? Well, we can, but we rarely try. LA theater may lack the confidence or even the vision, but not the talent.

That said, Oklahoma! was joyous, thanks to Fish’s ribald interracial/transgender staging, John Heginbotham’s surging choreography and music director Andy Collopy’s conversion of the music into earthy R&B arrangements, featuring a hefty dose of acoustic and electric guitar. Fish’s Oklahoma! shattered the comparative optimism of the American era (1943) in which it was born, focusing instead on the musical’s darker impulses (and raising the question of why they simply didn’t do Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd). But such academic quibbles can’t counter the quality of energy coming from the stage.

FOUR OF THE GRITTIEST COMPANIES IN THE REGION

Candida Celaya and Jennifer Bobiwash in “The Hall of Final Ruin” at Ophelia’s Jump in Upland. (Photo by Randy Lopez)

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Open Fist Theatre and Porters of Hellsgate are two more local theater companies that operate from principles of, well, principle.

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Stephen Sondheim emerged here from Upland to Long Beach, the latter in a scrappy, delightful production of Company at Long Beach Playhouse, and the former in James Lapine’s revue of the composer-lyricist’s work, Sondheim on Sondheim, at Ophelia’s Jump in Upland.

Sasha Bada and Cris Cortez in Long Beach Playhouse’s “Company” (Photo courtesy of Long Beach Playhouse)

Among the reasons for hope, when it comes to local theater, is the determination of a company such as Ophelia’s Jump, on the western edge of San Bernardino County, to stage Kelly McBurnette-Andronicos’s fascinating new historical drama, The Hall of Final Ruin, about the terminal illness of a female gambling hall proprietor in 19^th century New Mexico. Under Beatrice Casagran’s absorbing staging, the play was rife and rich with Mexican mythology at the moment when the Yankees were first arriving in the Southwest – that would be the pioneers, not the baseball team.

Azeem Vecchio, Syanne Green, Malik Bailey in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Open Fist Theatre Company (Photo by Frank Ishman)

Open Fist Theatre and Porters of Hellgate are two more local theater companies that operate from principles of, well, principle. The former staged an epic A Midsummer Night’s Dream (adapted by director James Fowler) set in the Antebellum South, with the mechanicals and fairies cast with Black actors; and the Athenians, White. While the production carried with it the risk of unwitting racism and conflation, Fowler’s choices ultimately made cosmic sense. The Whites were grounded, even when dreaming; the Blacks, led by Monazia Smith’s impish and slightly pissed-off Puck, ethereal, mercurial. There was nothing pedantic in the concept, just a look at one period of America’s brutal history across the gulfs of incomprehension that still so resolutely reside in our country today, as they also reside within Shakespeare’s play. It’s as though the Bard were warning us.

Sean Faye and Dawn Alden in Shakespeare/Webster’s “All is True, or King Henry VIII” presented by The Porters of Hellsgate (Photo by Lucia Towers)

The Bard received equally distinguished treatment by The Porters of Hellsgate in Shakespeare’s final history play (co-written by John Webster) All Is True, or King Henry VIII. Who stages this? Almost nobody. Structurally, it’s a mess. Well, thank goodness then for The Porters, a feisty company that handles the Bard’s language and his style with skill and confidence. With this production, they also made the case that a play’s structural problems are no reason to ignore it. The play centers on Henry VIII’s (the child-like Jesse James Thomas) efforts to divorce his wife, Katherine (Dawn Alden, possessing a fiery aggrievement), a latter-day Medea. Her crime is her inability to bear the king sons. Cardinal Wolsey (Thomas Bigley, with stoic gravitas) forms the third pillar in this play’s core triangle in the large cast ensemble, so capably directed by Will Block. As in so many of the Bard’s history plays, the plot is propelled by fear, duplicity and betrayal. Those who rise to the occasion by speaking with conscience get struck down, if not beheaded. As in Fowler’s Midsummer, it’s as though the Bard were warning us.     

Marissa Ruiz, Lindsay Plake, Emily Asher Kellis, Lea De Carmo, Courtney Brechemin and cast of “The Penelopiad” at City Garage (Photo by Paul M. Rubinstein)

Finally, Santa Monica’s City Garage, run by director Frederique Michel and playwright-designer Charles A. Duncombe, Jr., has been defying the odds for decades, staging works that, frankly, most of the region’s theater-goers have little interest in: American, British and European scribes — from Duncombe, Neil Labute and Eugene O’Neill to Pinter and Sarah Kane to Moliere and Jeton Neziraj —whose aesthetic is often, (but not always) pedantic, grappling bluntly with political and existential stupidities and injustices. Sometimes their shows are playful (Charles Mee), toying with the absurdities of domestic relationships. Almost without exception, the works at this theater are floridly language-based, and invariably peppered by Michel with arch, expressionistic choreography that might be seen as intrusive if these were, say, movies trafficking in psychological realism. Their years-long conundrum has been putting together an ensemble with the technique to execute Michel’s exacting style. This occurred with striking success in their recent production of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, which featured an all-female cast and concerned Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, reflecting on her unwitting contribution to the execution of a dozen maidservants upon her husband’s return. What with Duncombe’s cinematic, oceanic backdrops and the lucid interpretations by all the performers of this potent chronicle, it’s little surprise this production played to full houses.    

These works in 2022 by Ophelia’s Jump, Porters of Hellsgate, Open Fist Theatre Company and City Garage were products of artistic conviction and courage. Do they have any to spare?   

CLASSICAL GAS

“Uncle Vanya” at Pasadena Playhouse: Brandon Mendez Homer’s Dr. Astrov, and Hugo Armstrong as Uncle Vanya (Photo by Jeff Lorch)

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Michetti simply airlifted the 19^th century Russian author into our nuthouse epoch.

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I almost never enjoy productions of plays by Anton Chekhov because the playwright requires a balance of pathos and humor at a pitch so precise, it’s almost unattainable. Well, scrap these reservations for Michael Michetti’s glorious Uncle Vanya at Pasadena Playhouse, featuring Hugo Armstrong in the title role: peevish, pathetic, impish and utterly insane. Michetti simply airlifted the 19^th century Russian author into our nuthouse epoch.

Jennifer Shelton and Scott Roberts in Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2″ at Long Beach’s International City Theatre (Photo by Kayte Deioma)

Chekhov’s Norwegian contemporary, Heinrik Ibsen, was given a dance spin by playwright Lucas Hnath, over at Long Beach’s International City Theatre. Hnath’s play, A Doll’s House, Part 2 picks up a decade or so after the close of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In case you’re unfamiliar with Ibsen’s feminist classic, housewife Nora, emotionally battered by the judgmental condescension of her spouse, Torvald, and the society that props him up, takes matters into her own hands, or feet, by walking out on him and their children, to an undetermined fate. Her decision is like an anthem for what used to be called “women’s liberation.” Hnath has Nora, now a successful author of books about marriage (of course), returning to hubbie and kids. She seeks the divorce that Torvald promised but never delivered, because her “married” legal status is now impinging on her career, thanks to turn-of-the-20^th-century Norway’s patriarchal laws. What ensues is a power play between the estranged couple that challenges both the nobility of Nora’s decision and the hypocrisy of Torvald’s society. It’s really a drama about clashing entitlements, containing weirdly contemporary resonances. Trevor Biship-Gillespie’s staging met our cultural moment head on. Credit a superb cast (Jennifer Shelton, Scott Roberts, Eileen T’Kaye and Nicolette Ellis), supplemented by Yuri Okahana-Benson’s set that refused to box the production into Ibsen’s kitchen-sink realism. For the record, Hnath’s 2017 play was commissioned by and premiered at Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, before transferring to Broadway.

PLAYS ABOUT THE END OF THINGS

The ensemble of Murray Mednick’s “Three Tables” (Photo by Jenny Graham)

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Mednick’s uncompromising devotion to revealing our collective follies, in all their horrific, mythic, and comedic authenticity, renders him a clarion voice of our times.

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From 1978 to 1995, playwright Murray Mednick, now an octogenarian, ran the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in the hills above Claremont, offering fellow scribes (from Sharon Yablon to Hank Bunker to Guy Zimmerman to Sam Shepard to Jon Robin Baitz) annual opportunities to workshop plays in development. Decades later, under Zimmerman’s leadership since 2001, an offshoot company, Padua Playwrights, has hosted productions of Mednick’s poetical works that come laced with Borscht Belt rhythms. Three Tables, was performed in 2022 at the Zephyr Theatre under the Padua Playwrights banner; it was a monument to the playful yet despondent view that Mednick has been espousing for decades. Call it a comedy about the end of the world.

Mednick directed his own play which consists of three groups sitting at an eatery where actors gather. Three groups, three tables. The motion lay in the language itself, through which people talked over and around each other, repeating phrases and cliches that weaved and interlocked. That’s a far cry from language being understood, or even heard. At one table, two old waiters grumbled about their customers (with good reason), threatening to spit into their food. One of them referenced Samuel Beckett, who is a clear influence in this — and all — of Mednick’s plays. One of them recalled the Holocaust and the struggle to move on from it, because the past lives within us, weighing on us.  (“History is floating in and above the ground, like an ocean.”)

The second group consists of actors developing a play by enacting an ancient myth (giving Three Tables a meta-theater layer), while the third group contains yet more actors, these with a haughty disregard of the eatery, as though they’re rolling through life about to crash into their inflated self-regard.

I found it funny yet was unable to laugh out loud, for the very reason that Mednick was driving at: We’re all thespians hurtling towards oblivion, reciting lines that few hear or comprehend, though most of the lines are platitudes anyway. At the same time, the cadences themselves, the way the words flew in and around the space, were amusing, despite their ultimate disengagement from barely listening characters. The event was a combo church service/comedy routine. Imagine a recitation of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” as invoked by Neil Simon. Mednick’s uncompromising devotion to revealing our collective follies, in all their horrific, mythic, and comedic authenticity, renders him a clarion voice of our times.

Leo Marks, Sami Klein and Valerie Perri in “If I Forge” at the Fountain Theatre. (Photo by Jenny Graham)

The sentiment that “history is floating in and above the ground, like an ocean,” got called into question on the stage at the Fountain Theatre by a character in Steven Levenson’s thoughtful and provocative family drama, If I Forget (performing into January). Affectingly played by Leo Marks, he’s a progressive Jewish scholar who is critical of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians and is about to publish a book arguing that Jewish obsession with the Holocaust is being exploited and monetized by self-serving intellectuals. Can we acknowledge the trauma and move on? he argues. His dad has read the book but refuses to comment, until he finally does, and domestic bombs go off. The production was solidly performed and staged (by Jason Alexander).

John Perrin Flynn and Jeffrey Delfin in “A Great Wilderness” at Rogue Machine

Remembering was likewise at the core of Samuel A. Hunter’s A Great Wilderness. Produced at Rogue Machine,  it headlined the company’s artistic director John Perrin Flynn, who empathetically portrayed a man living in a rural Idaho cabin who is arguably in the first stages of dementia. Still mostly cognizant of our world, he is straining to justify his life-long, theological devotion to conversion therapy, i.e. using prayer and conversation to set young men on a “righteous” path after they admit to homosexual yearnings. Though the play wisely steers clear of polemics, the counselor’s final effort, before his family transfers him into an elder-care facility, goes horribly wrong — the disastrous capstone of a dubious career. Though Elina de Santos’ staging on Bruce Goodrich’s hyper-realistic set included some performances that struck me as more broadcast than heart-felt, this was a production sufficiently effective to linger in memory months later.

Colin Campbell in his “Grief: A One-Man Shitshow” at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. (Photo by Rebecca Asher)

Recalling trauma also formed the crux of Colin Campbell’s autobiographical solo performance, Grief: A One Man Shitshow, performed at the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Campbell’s two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver, who T-boned the car Campbell drove, with his kids and wife as passengers. (His wife survived, his children did not.) Campbell reframed all expectations for the tone of such a confessional, which was remarkably jocular and amiable. With anecdotes and memories, the show was a how-to recitation on how not to treat a victim of such unbearable grief: all the things people normally, obliviously, say and do. “I feel your pain,” No, you don’t. “I have no words,” You probably do. “They’re in a better place.” No, they’re not. And so forth. The buoyant platitude-defying tone was perfectly established by director Michael Schlitt.

Marshall McCabe and Laura Coover in “A Terminal Event” at The Victory Theatre Center (Photo by Tim Sullens)

Set in and around an oncology clinic, Richard Willet’s new play at the Victory Theatre Center similarly dealt with a desperate soul grappling with demise. Maria Gobetti directed a first-rate ensemble featuring a youthful, high-strung former ad exec (Marshall McCabe) determined to self-heal his colon cancer. Mind over cancer? Faith versus science? There was obviously more to this play than met the eye, particularly now with the mayhem of doctors trying to impart reliable information on how to prevent and treat Covid, and the lethal consequences of social media’s conspiracy mill. Lovely performances also by Laura McCabe, Laura Coover and John Idakitis.

DON’T FORGET THE CHILDREN

Lennon Koiter and Janice Crowe-Christensen in “The Sandman” at THE MAIN in Santa Clarita

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The larger point is that this theater in Santa Clarita was filled with children, who will inherit our wobbling planet.

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Phil Lantis’s The Sandman, performed by adults and children, was spun from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name. The project was presented as a joint venture by Eclipse Productions and the Santa Clarita Shakespeare Festival at the northern end of LA County, in the heart of Santa Clarita. The fable, a morality play, tells of how the title character (adult actor Jackson Caruso) sprinkles fairy dust on children  — in this case one boy named Henry (child actor Lennon Koiter) — in order to deliver them dreams. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, anyone?) This happens night after night. In one dream, Henry is met with a Candide-like offer to travel the world, and he wants to.  A seagull counsels him against this through a kind of comedic repartee: What do you wanna do that for? I’ve been everywhere, I’ve been to Africa, I’ve been to Rome. It ain’t worth the trouble.

In the story, and in this adaptation, the Sandman holds umbrellas over the children in order to provide them dreams. If the umbrella is blank, no dream will come.

A bevy of umbrellas decorated the stage in Nancy Lantis’s fanciful staging that was equal parts narrative and performance art. Henry’s biggest concern was getting married — he didn’t want to. And his grandma (Janice Crowe-Christensen) imparted a sentimental lesson on the nature of love and generosity.

What’s notably, perhaps mercifully absent from the story is any reference to horrors of today or of Andersen’s time. There are death references in the saga, but they’re largely abstract, which the kids may absorb nonetheless. 

The larger point is that this theater in Santa Clarita was filled with children, who will inherit our wobbling planet. With productions such as this, perhaps they’ll also inherit our wobbling theaters.