Stage Rows

BY BILL RADEN

We at Stage Rows would like to formally thank Stage Raw for inviting us to share the hottest if not-very-well substantiated L.A. stage rumors and bald-faced show plugs in this, the inaugural of what we hope will be a regular weekly column of scandalmongering and sludge-raking among the personalities that make the Los Angeles stage scene the fractious, fecund and incestuous community that it is.

Spring has Sprung, Early

Following a rather bleak and inauspicious January and early-February, the L.A. stage erupted in recent weeks with an explosion of unusually muscular must-sees, including Echo Theater Company’s world premiere of Tommy Smith’s deliriously transgressive pedophile black comedy, Firemen, (starring the sizzling Rebecca Gray), and, next door at EST-LA, director Gates McFadden’s gut-splitting L.A. premiere of the dark Marius von Mayenburg plastic-surgery farce The Ugly One.

Those detonations were echoed across town at The Odyssey, where Murray Mednick again demonstrated why he is this city’s literary-stage éminence grise with Villon (featuring the always-mind-blowing Peggy Blow), his layered, philosophic and funny meditation on the theater as refracted through France’s medieval lumpen poet laureate.

Bart Catches his Breath, Briefly

The Breathless Bart DeLorenzo (Photo: Pauline Adamek)

Also in-house at Odyssey was Bart DeLorenzo’s fabled Evidence Room and its production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (that closed on Sunday), in which the inimitable Shannon Holt displayed a versatility at nationalistic megalomania even we never previously dared suspect, playing Queen Elizabeth, Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan, albeit not at the same time.

Stage Rows managed to corner the hardest working man in stage biz at LADCC’s recent nominee reception party — yes, the habitually awarding LAD Sissies are finally acknowledging Bart’s directing genius with something called “The Milton Katselas Award,” which we presume has nothing at all to do with Dianetics.

Bart says that after workshopping the new Steven Drukman play Death of the Author over the next two weeks, he’s shooting comet-like to NYC to remount his 2013 Odyssey hit Annapurna Off-Broadway with The New Group and, following the opening-night cast party, is red-eying it back to Westwood to get up Death in time for its May 20 world premiere at the Geffen. Whew! We’re out of breath even typing that.–Reported by Pauline Adamek

SoHo on the Pacific, Sort-of

Wooster Trojan Greg Mehrten panders to SOSE’s Melina Bielefelt at Kate Valk’s Standard birthday fete (Photo: Bill Raden)

Some of the loudest concussions rattling the city’s cultural fenestration came via a flurry of frenzied stage experimentation that fleetingly gave our staunchly middlebrow burg the avant frisson of downtown NYC, circa 1981.

Making the biggest noise was Wooster Group’s polarizing and provocative world premiere of Cry, Trojans! (Troilus and Cressida) at REDCAT, director Elizabeth LeCompte’s razor-smart and dizzyingly radical attack on Shakespeare’s rarely produced antiwar play, and which featured LeCompte’s ironized “re-appropriation” of Hollywood-appropriated Native American history and gestures.

Typically, the town’s cadre of well-made-play panderers (aka the mainstream bloggers/critics) sorely missed the point, which left the show without a defender and vulnerable to polemical brickbat attacks and screams of “racist!” carried out by narrow identity-politics absolutists on REDCAT’s Facebook pages. Out of all of L.A.’s theater artists, only the valiant (and embarrassingly talented) stage designer Matt Richter seemed to have the cojones to rush in where other Angel(eno)s feared to tread, as Matt made repeated pleas for the show in comment threads on Bitter Lemons.

SOSE’s Melina Bielefelt toasts the one-year-more-beautiful Kate Valk at downtown’s Standard Hotel (Photo: Bill Raden)

The Woosters themselves seemed unperturbed by the fracas at a post-show birthday party on the rooftop of downtown’s Standard Hotel for its incandescent leading lady, the magnificent Kate Valk. Amid pounding dance music and what looked like lots of bored, 20-something metrosexual Russian mobster types (and the odd fashionista club kid) lounging around the Standard’s over-upholstered pool-side bar, the likes of REDCAT’s Mark Murphy, Poor Dog Group’s Jesse Bonnell and Son of Semele’s Melina Bielefelt attempted to carry on conversations with the birthday girl and Woosterites LeCompte, Cynthia Hedstrom, Scott Shepherd and Greg Mehrten.

Mehrten, the show’s decidedly oily Pandarus, said he’d been passing his off-time locked in his REDCAT-provided hotel room and taking advantage of the Standard’s bountiful room service. (Nice work if you can get it.) He did, however, admit to attending an exclusive Oscar party at the lavish hillside home of L.A. performance-art legend John Fleck — an affair that was conspicuous by the presence of bicoastal stage director David Schweizer and the absence of uninvited Stage Rows. (Note to self: Never mention fair-weather Fleck’s name in digital print again!)

Rob Zombie star Jeff Phillips and Villon’s Gray Palmer imbibe at Pharmacy (Photo: Bill Raden)

One guest list on which Stage Rows did find itself was impresario-playwright Kevin O’Sullivan’s triumphant revival of his free evenings of one-off experimental theater called Pharmacy. After being booted from its Chinatown home two years ago during an ownership change, Pharmacy finally landed at the downtown-adjacent Monty bar, which was filled by a well-oiled capacity crowd for a stellar evening opened by an outrageously funny Mark Boone, Jr. (Sons of Anarchy) and Justin Tanner star Chloe Taylor, with appearances by poete maudit John Tottenham and the likes of Darrett Sanders, Corryn Cummins, Mike Wiles and Suzanne Fletcher in works by O’Sullivan, Wes Walker and Sharon Yablon.

A post-show Mark Boone, Jr. chills outside Pharmacy (Photo: Bill Raden)

The final show in what totaled up as an L.A. avant-garde trifecta is the premiere of experimental-stage collective Poor Dog Group’s long-anticipated opus, Five Small Fires, which features a riveting ensemble (Brad Culver is especially on fire) in a smart and tightly mounted, 75-minute riff off the House of Atreus that is cut into a wittily self-referential and knife-edged exploration of the cult dynamic at play in any avant theater group. Go see it!

The newly legalized Cat Ventura and Jonney Ahmanson enjoying experimental bliss in Five Small Fires (Photo: Jesse Bonnell)

And when you do, be certain to give your felicitations to Fires stars Jonney Ahmanson and Cat Ventura, who revealed to Stage Rows that they are newly hitched! The avant — and now state-sanctioned — couple assured us that the announcement was a Stage Rows exclusive, and it would have been had not PDG’s Facebook page scooped us by a good three months.

Avant-art power couple Lewis Klahr and Janie Geiser pose at Covell Wine Bar

Stage Rows got its revenge, however, by crashing PDG’s victory celebration at Hollywood’s Covell Wine Bar and getting belligerently tipsy on some excellent Argentinian sparkling wine in the company of experimental collagist-animator Lewis Klahr and his wife, filmmaker, avant-garde puppeteer and Automata gallery founder Janie Geiser.

PDG’s free-bassing Brad Culver at Covel Wine Bar (Photo: Poor Dog Group)

Also at the party was director and CalArts theater honcho Travis Preston, who said he had come straight from LAX and that, earlier that morning, had been in Hong Kong as part of a Pacific-rimming logistics trip in advance of the international tour of his Getty Villa stage hit Prometheus Bound. The highlight of the trip? Seoul, South Korea, enthused Preston, a city that he said now boasts one of the most vibrant and edge-cutting performance scenes on the planet. (Calling Mark Murphy.) Their cars aren’t so shabby either.

And This Late-Breaking Blind Item From the Stage Rows Archive (circa 1956)

What renowned Broadway playwright and author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof openly admitted in a Key West bar that he was not only a friend of Dorothy‘s but of a known Key West practitioner of outlaw “perversion?” Or, as our exclusive source puts it, “How do you think it would sound all over the world if folks began thinking America’s leading playwright wrote with a limp wrist. How do you think it would look in the history books?” Hmm. We at Stage Rows couldn’t say, though we suppose it isn’t entirely improbable that an appreciator of Broadway musicals should find a home in the theater.

As always, any reader tips, gossipy tidbits and — most importantly — party invitations (host-bar only, please) will be gratefully accepted at rows@stageraw.com.