Beach People
Reviewed by Martίn Hernández
City Garage
Thru September 11
RECOMMENDED
Playwright Charles A. Duncombe’s farce on the absurdities of life, love, and oil spills, directed by Frédérique Michel, also serves as a wry skewering of celebrity culture, vapid consumerism, and the super-rich — ironically set in a locale that tends to hold those elements as virtues rather than vices.
In the play’s first half we meet 30-somethings Anna (Angela Beyer) and Paul (Henry Thompson), sunning themselves in beach loungers at a pricey Santa Monica Beach resort. They seem like a long-term and comfortable pair, yet the entrance of Diana (Naomi Helen Weissberg), a svelte young woman in a bikini, rapidly exposes the couple’s contradictions. “My eyes were closed,” Paul responds to Anna when she presses him on whether he ogled Diana. “Can’t you hear beauty when it walks by?” is Anna’s forlorn riposte.
Not to be outdone, Anna gets to feast her eyes on Rex (Kasey Esser), a buff and Speedo-clad waiter, with her leering resulting in some amusing slapstick. In hysterical rants, a pessimistic Anna, fueled by myriad insecurities and her wild imagination, recites a litany of tongue-twisting food analogies to describe how Paul could sexually devour Diana. Paul, harboring his own anxieties, delivers fevered musings to Diana on infinity and the futility he sees in it. Diana for her part, revels in her happiness, youth, and good looks, enticing Paul to comic effect yet unhinging Anna and triggering an existential crisis. But Diana is far from shallow, epitomizing the “I can be smart when it’s important” school in her erudite tete-a-tetes with both Paul and Anna.
Duncombe’s second half goes back in time, unveiling how Anna and Paul met at the same resort, though we are not told when that happened. Rex is no longer candy for Anna’s eye but a coach, proffering trite advice on how she can appeal to Paul’s male ego, which Anna reluctantly follows to the hilarious letter. Of course, it works and the two form a tenuous bond from which they abstract an equally tenuous long-term relationship.
Duncombe pokes fun at the wealthy, with references to William Randolph Hearst – after all, Santa Monica is where Hearst built a luxurious beach house and love nest for his paramour Marion Davies – and others of his more contemporary ilk. And while one may the think the women are vying for Paul, their struggle, at least to this reviewer, is a symbolic one between the feel-good philosophy of choosing a happy life, represented by Diana in her colorful two-piece, and an existentialist take that life, happy or not, is bereft of meaning, embodied by Anna in her dour black one piece.
Michel’s staging balances the humor and pathos with equal panache and her cast does not equivocate. Beyer and Thompson hold our sympathy as the angst-ridden couple, and they deliver Duncombe’s machine-gun dialogue with skill and flamboyance. Weissberg (alternating with Marissa Diaz in some performances) holds her own as the youthful but wise Diana while Esser brings a tenderness to Rex’s otherwise chauvinist assistance in Anna’s hesitant quest for love.
City Garage at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building T1, Santa Monca; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; thru Sept. 11. Running time: 80-minutes with no intermission. https://citygarage.org.
