The Dog Ate Our Gossip

 

 

For those of you who have been dedicated and loyal readers of this column, Stage Rows owes you an apology: We blew our deadline this week, and we are sorry. We wish we had a justifiable reason for being several days late. Sadly, county health officials did not close the theaters because of bubonic plague. Nor did Parliament order that “public stage-plays shall cease and be forborne” to “purge our stages from all obscene and scurrilous jests such as might either be guilty of corrupting the manners, or defaming the persons of any men of note in the City or Kingdom.” Not that thought isn’t without its appeal.

 

 

No, our only defense is what we in the gossip business call an unusually dismal week for raking the muck. Despite desperate pleas to our usual suspect sources, it seems that neither idle talk nor malicious rumor could be had for love or money. Mostly, it turns out, because of love.

 

 

Such as when a tantalizing whisper reached our ears that a major company development was breaking at NoHo’s ZJU Theater, and Stage Rows set out to get a confirmation only to find itself in the maddeningly ethical position of being love-bombed into silence by its artistic director Zombie Joe. Rather than scoring a leading scoop, we sheepishly agreed to Zombie’s press embargo so that the startlingly good news didn’t sour for the company due to a premature release.

 

 

 

Remember the Serpent’s Tooth, Tobias

 

Love struck again on Sunday afternoon, but this time at an Odyssey matinee, where we fell head over heels for the theatrical fireworks of director Robin Larsen’s exceptional new revival of A Delicate Balance. We are unashamed to admit that our attraction to the show’s opening weekend was less the opportunity of seeing Edward Albee’s ferociously funny, 1966 excoriation of mid-century WASP complacency than it was our lifelong fan worship of the production’s star David Selby, who first enchanted us when we were mere sprites with his brooding, mutton-chopped romanticism as the lycanthropic Quentin Collins on the ‘60s gothic soap Dark Shadows.

 

 

And we are thrilled to report that in the role of Albee’s suburban patrician Tobias (opposite his former Falcon Crest costar Susan Sullivan), David has lost none of his breathtaking capacity for making goose flesh. His show-stealing rendition of Tobias’s chillingly self-revelatory lines about a pet alley cat sets the evening’s bloodcurdling emotional pitch and that is paid off in Act 3, when David brings down the house in Tobias’s lacerating howl of terror over the paralyzing emptiness of his existence.

 

 

 

A Delicate Balance is not a one-man-show, of course, and Susan Sullivan (David’s former Falcon Crest costar), O-Lan Jones, Deborah Puette, Mark Costello and Lily Knight all deliver superbly memorable performances. But they were not the reason we lingered in the Odyssey lobby after the show with our pen and program at the ready … and lingered … and lingered … until eventually somebody from the theater tactfully pointed out that the Odyssey also has a back door and that David — pro that he is — knows how to use it.

 

 

Which, come to think of it, may help explain why our favorite member of the accursed Collins family was more accurately the late, great Jonathan Frid.

 

 

The Wright Stuff

 

 

To be honest, at least part of this week’s gossip drought can be attributed to the mental fog in which we’ve been toiling since picking up a stubborn cold on our return flight from New York that has made the simple act of stringing sentences together not unlike wading waist-deep through heavy molasses.

 

 

 

What we believed to be our uncanny ability to contract whatever seasonal virus is floating through a passenger jet turns out to be no isolated talent. Or so confirmed our personal health consultant and daughter-of-a-former-flight-attendant Jacqueline Wright when we phoned her the other day while in the midst of our white-knuckle deadline panic.

 

 

Jacqueline also happens to be one of our town’s busiest and most versatile acting talents as well as an accomplished playwright renowned for her mordantly witty and poetically incising stage explorations of romantic love in works such as 2011’s Have You Seen Alice?, her 2008 collection Spider Bites and 2004’s Eat Me. For the past six months, however, she has been testing the East Coast’s work opportunities while on a six-month professional sabbatical, mostly in Lisa Peterson’s staging of playwright Marlane Mayer’s The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters that closed in December at Playwrights Horizons.

 

 

Despite thriving on the low winter temperatures and high artistic voltage of Manhattan’s winter stage scene — and, she reports, the excitement of reading for both Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information at Minetta Lane Theater and SoHo Rep’s An Octoroon (playwright Branden Jacobs–Jenkins’ hit adaptation of 19th century slave melodrama by Dion Boucicault) — Jacqueline is now officially returned to L.A.’s bosom and is already back in harness.

 

 

What eventually lured her home, she admits, wasn’t simply missing her main romantic squeeze, the stage director and screenwriter Adrian Cruz, who has been hard at work since February with the launch of a new SyFy Channel series scheduled to premiere in November. Rather, it was the opportunity to do the new Mickey Birnbaum play Backyard with director Larry Biederman that is set to open at Echo Theater in Atwater on May 30.

 

 

Jacqueline describes the play, that she says she’s been with since its first reading in Kansas 8 years ago, as an outrageously fun and exhilarating look at the suburban backyard wrestling phenomenon.

 

 

“I love his writing!” she enthuses about Birnbaum. And what’s not to like about any show with a dream cast that also includes Hugo Armstrong, Richard Azurdia, Ian Bamberg, Adam Martin Rocha and Esmer Kazvinova? And in wrestling tights! Jacqueline confirms that the entire ensemble will be in the ring performing all our favorite leapfrog body guillotines, neck-breakers, wheelbarrow face-busters and head-scissors take-downs on an actual wrestling canvas.

 

 

Making sure the bouts play out both safely and spectacularly is martial multi-talent Ahmed Best, who is an original STOMP cast member, was the voice of Jar Jar Binks and seems to hold a black belt in everything. “He is the best fight choreographer I have ever worked with,” Jacqueline declares flatly. And we’re not about to argue the point.