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Around Town
Shiv and her Hindu dad, Colin Mitchell’s playlets, appreciating Marivaux’s Servant, and more
By Myron Meisel
Shiv captivates
SHIV at The Theatre @ Boston Court (photo by Ed Krieger)
The recurrent dramatic question of our own lives plausibly could be what it means to embrace the consciousness of another day (i.e., getting out of bed). For Shiv (the emotionally pellucid Monika Jolly), eponymous protagonist of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s captivating play in its west coast premiere at The Theatre @ Boston Court, arguably her imaginative life is so fecund that she needn’t escape the confines of her irremediably creased childhood mattress — as if she could.
The immigrant child of a doting Hindu father, Bapu (Dileep Rao), himself an irretrievably embittered Punjabi poet (and ostensibly the first true modernist bard in the language), Shiv is stuck between reconciling herself to the common paradox of love for and disillusion with a parent, and venturing into the New World to which she would be far better equipped to adapt than he. Shiv has inherited a literary soul, ingeniously captured in a conceptually simple but complexly subtle production.
Similarly, Kapil’s writing skims along familiar thematic lines, deceptively so, since gradually a most intricately embroidered tapestry of imagery and allusion coalesces into an original vision of what might be otherwise sloughed off as another exotic immigrant coming-of-age narrative.
Nicknamed for Shiva, who can take many forms but most familiarly as a goddess of destruction (in our culture, best known through Dr. Oppenheimer’s reaction to the first nuclear blast), Kapil’s Shiv is so infectiously creative in her memories and eloquent in her reticence that it is often too easy to forget that her existential depression is so profound.
Though Shiv as storyteller so filters her narrative with fancy that it cannot be certain her experiences had been real, she does venture from sulking in Skokie to serving as a caretaker at an idyllic lakeside retreat owned by an American family whose fortune derives from colonial exploitation of India. There, she meets an effacing, solicitous dreamboat-scion, Gerard (James Wagner), an accountant by trade who prefers the natural peace of removing himself from life’s engagement (by choice rather than necessity).
Gerard’s uncle, the Professor (Leonard Kelly-Young), may be a pompous and defensively contemptuous relic of imperialism, but he is also a perceptive scholar with a keen memory and lofty standards. His recollections of her haplessly clueless and compromised Bapu devastate her, yet paradoxically enable her to free herself (perhaps) of her disabling resentments so inextricable from her heritage’s subjugated history.
A deeply political play that prefers to suggest that its ideas are more subliminal than analytical, Shiv totes its heavy baggage with a doggedly gossamer touch, incarnated not merely by Jolly’s gamine pluck and her own distinctively transparent command of empathy that bespeaks star quality, but also the resourceful invention of Emilie Beck’s direction.
Beck lends the piece a determined sense of play that shrewdly synthesizes the profuse patterns of images and metaphors into a delightful series of highly concrete props that drop from above the stage on wires: This defines the claustrophobia of Shiv’s condition while opening it up to the possibility of endless invention, realizing internally her own kinship with her father’s failed dream of creating new forms for a new post-colonial culture.
Complementing the effective work of properties designer Erin Walley and scenic designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, sound designer Jack Arky positively luxuriates in the supple potential of Boston Court’s nonpareil sound system.
What appears in outline to be a most conventional play turns out to be an ambitious one that gets under the skin with its charms. Its gracious surfaces disguise a common unease expressed in highly specific cultural terms. This may be a rationalizing projection on my part, but for all the play’s rather modest pleasures, I unconsciously identified sufficiently deeply with Bapu’s creative block and Shiv’s inability to leave the house. Though this review was written well after the viewing, I felt I couldn’t go anywhere until it was done — even though, like them, I knew just what I felt needed to be said.
Colin Mitchell’s notes from Zombie Joe’s Underground
Zombie Joe’s Underground soldiers on towards a third decade, a proud outlier even within the independent ethos of the Los Angeles intimate theater scene, devoted to plumbing the depths of gore and horror with some excursions to tortured psyches and aberrant desires.
Notwithstanding his public persona of unfettered self-promotion on his website, Bitter Lemons, Colin Mitchell remains a committed playwright and capable performer. His Breaking and Entering fit snugly within the ZJU house style in 2013, and his solo show, Linden Arden Stole the Highlights, earned hit status for 2014’s Hollywood Fringe.
Mitchell’s trio of vivid campfire tales at ZJU (Madness! Murder! Mayhem!) brings just a slight modernizing touch of lo-fi grunge to classic forms of scary storytelling. Lasting altogether less than an hour, in spirit they fit the template of a half-hour radio or television anthology series, although the material would certainly have been too scabrous for network during the form’s heyday. They are vivid, proudly old-fashioned and revel in just enough trangressiveness to keep their chestnut situations theatrically fresh for their modest duration.
Ostensibly occurring in different places on the single date of April 19, 1905, each vignette presents personalities in extremis. In “At the Break of Day,” an older prisoner awaits the imminent execution of a newly arrived condemned man by baiting him with terrors and tortures both imagined and real.
In “Natasha,” a manipulative psychiatrist importunes a judge after a murder acquittal to allow the hypnosis of the defendant to reveal appalling truths of irredeemable injustice. Mitchell himself relishes the pretensions and domineering theatricality of the arcane shrink, while Jonica Patella as the pathetic governess of the murdered children executes a bravura display of split personality.
The final, “Orgy in the Lighthouse,” fits most snugly into the ZJU aesthetic with its yarn of serial killing and mass death, although even here, the Grand Guignol quotient falls considerably below that of the space’s usually graphic guts.
There is nothing essential about these playlets, which are meant to entertain with mild shock and a modicum of DIY style. They succeed at what they set out to do. They neither overstay their welcome nor burden themselves with pretensions other than the preening sadism of their characters. Unlike most horn-tooters, Mitchell actually possesses the lapidary skill required to make these genre exercises accomplish exactly what they ought to, under Jana Wimer’s staging.
The latest from an increasingly compelling playwright
Gina Young’s sSISTERSs, August 6-8 at the Lyric-Hyperion Theatre and Cafe
Gina Young’s fascinating musical with its sustained and eruditely goofy queer vision, sSISTERSs, which premiered earlier this year at Highways, is now resurfacing on the east side in Silver Lake at the Lyric-Hyperion, August 6 to 8, for three performances. Young, who years back issued some superb rock albums, has been maturing into an increasingly compelling playwright with her Femmes: A Tragedy and Tales of a 4th Grade Lesbo. sSISTERs is her most challenging, if sometimes obscure, work to date, but don’t be put off: It’s a playful piece with passages of delicious wit and an almost scholarly appreciation for pertinent nuggets of historical rhetoric (both sexist and enlightened). It also contains obsessive invocations of sister trios (Chekhov, Catholicism, the waves of feminism, etc.) and the vicissitudes of sisterly solidarity.
Scabrous Semites in The Homecoming and Bad Jews
Pacific Resident Theatre’s THE HOMECOMING plays through July 26 (photo by Erika Boxler)
One of the inadvertent pleasures of frequent theater-going is the odd juxtapositions that yield surprising insights. The current Pacific Resident Theatre revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, particularly in its boutique space, irrefutably announces its place in the continuum of drawing room comedy, making evident the relish with which Noel Coward appreciated how it decimated the form while forthrightly reveling in it. In a lobby conversation with artistic director Marilyn Fox, she recalled how John Lahr had originally written of the “Jewishness” of The Homecoing, in comparison to all of Pinter’s previous work. This insight called up inevitable free associations to an utterly different scabrous dissection of mores, Bad Jews, a hit closing July 26 at the Geffen. The two comedies share ineffably weird affinities. See them both and be surprised.
BAD JEWS at the Geffen through July 26 (Photo by Michael Lamont)
The many delights of Marivaux’s The False Servant via Brit scribe Martin Crimp, and Evidence Room
Evidence Room’s THE FALSE SERVANT at The Odyssey Theatre (photo by Diego Barajas)
The return of director Bart deLorenzo and his Evidence Room to the Odyssey Theatre with a new version by Martin Crimp of Pierre Marivaux’s The False Servant did not much impress Stage Raw’s Terry Morgan in his review, but to permit a dissenting view, this rather rough-hewn and intrinsically Brit recasting of class conflict in 18th century France provides a most novel take on classical era comedy. This is largely thanks to DeLorenzo providing a safe environment and cohesive context for rather daringly contrasting performances, equal parts antique and contemporary, perhaps a mite more intriguing than persuasive.
Nevertheless, the actors are encouraged to make endlessly daring choices that I found quite exciting and amusing in recogizable ways, and while point by point, I suppose the recently closed reimagining of Regnard’s The Heir Apparent by David Ives was more conventionally accomplished, I found this odd duck consistently provocative in concept and stimulating in effect, and it has stayed me with far longer. This isn’t an immortal literary masterpiece on a par with his The Game of Love and Chance or The Triumph of Love. However, with dialogue in several scenes that virtually verbatim replicated arguments of my own as recently as the week past, Marivaux’s insights into behavior can be eye-openingly modern.
SHIV | By Aditi Brennan Kapil | The Theatre @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Avenue, Pasadena | Through August 9 | www.bostoncourt.com
MADNESS! MURDER! MAYHEM | By Colin Mitchell | Zombie Joe’s Underground | Through July 31 | www.zombiejoes.com
sSISTERs | By Gina Young | Lyric-Hyperion Theatre, 2106 Hyperion Avenue, Silver Lake | August 6-8 | www.ssisterss.brownpapertickets.com
THE HOMECOMING | By Harold Pinter | Pacific Resident Theatre, 707 Venice Boulevard, Venice | Through July 26 | www.pacificresidenttheatre.com
BAD JEWS | By Joshua Harmon | Geffen Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave, Westwood | Through July 26 | www.geffenplayhouse.com
THE FALSE SERVANT | By Martin Crimp, adapted from the play by Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux | Odyssey Theatre/Evidence Room, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles | Through Sept. 6 | www.odysseytheatre.com
