Broken Fences

Reviewed by Myron Meisel
The Road Theatre Company on Magnolia
Extended through April 17

RECOMMENDED 

Matters of real estate tend to so dominate any sense of home or neighborhood in Los Angeles that it’s easy to neglect how central hearth and neighbors can be to the life experiences of most Americans. The Chicago homestead play springs from deep roots in A Raisin in the Sun, and the recent riffs and reversals on it in Clybourne Park only cements the primacy of community identity, and how wrenching its changes can be on individual lives. Recent movies like 99 Homes elucidate on the most fundamental level how the exploitation of the housing bubble wreaked such violent emotional havoc on that most fundamental foundation of the American dream: home ownership.

Broken Fences, Steven Simoncic’s smart, entertaining and illuminating addition to the subgenre, receives a deft and sensitive production at the Road on Magnolia: it’s an exemplary social issue play that, while neither difficult nor complex, clearly evidences a deep appreciation for the difficulties of complex situations.

On John Iacovelli’s resourcefully evocative set, we see adjacent backyard properties in the west side nabe of East Garfield Park: one weathered and old-school urban, hard alongside a newly developed upscaled renovation. Moving in as the play begins, white couple April (Mia Fraboni) and Czar (Coronado Romero), expecting a first baby, can be acutely conscious of their economic (and diversity-accepting) choice to avoid the suburbs, yet blithely clueless about the inexorable impact their gentrifying has upon the residents, most especially their third-generation next-door neighbors Hoody (Bruce A. Lemon Jr.) and fiancée D (Donna Simone Johnson), whose triply escalating property tax reassessments swamp their ability to hold onto what had been home to multitudinous relations, notwithstanding the mortgage is nearly paid off.

Simoncic generally works within the Ibsenite tradition of an Arthur Miller social problem play, thankfully without the moralizing and with a better ear for lively dialogue, a glib facility that makes everyone sound rather more clever and eloquent than they would likely be, though never saying anything that the characters would not mean to express, only more accurately (and often delightfully so). He skillfully evolves the tone from a comedy of tense misunderstanding buffered by essential goodwill to a drama of immutable consequences, astutely recognized by all involved as tragic, yet beyond the capacities of any action — violent or charitable — to ameliorate.

It’s the particular satisfaction of the conventionally well-made play that it can explore issues with a wide-ranging appreciation for emotional conflicts that are both civic and personal, although perhaps Simoncic’s most piquant ploy breaks the boundaries of the otherwise manicured naturalism: the four main characters each deliver parallel monologues about their secret sense of existential invisibility, and how it shapes their strategies for hiding their intractable insecurities. Even more than elucidating common humanity, the technique enriches the already intricate economic and class distinctions with a psychological dimension that, rather than detracting from the already finely observed behavioral details of the performances, lends them a self-conscious, yet dynamic, range of perception.

As has been apparent in many recent black-themed films, white characters, particularly those of historic import or motivated by good intentions, are ripely overdue for the sort of travesty long perpetrated by racial and ethnic stereotypes through history, the sort of payback that deserves to be tolerated with good humor, however unfair. Simoncic, though of a Caucasian persuasion, can play this game, too, though his caricatures remain light and mostly directed at the roles that corporate capitalism enforce on the privileged to maintain that status. (Both Czar and his best friend Spence (Kris Frost), who lives with wife Barb and kids in mockable suburban Schaumberg, work devising advertising for dubious products of unquestionable unworth.)

Broken Fences doesn’t aspire to be a daring, or even particularly challenging, experience, but it doesn’t compromise the integrity of its subjects, its characters or the audience, and it makes important, rather gnarly, concerns coherent whilst engaging minds and sympathies. I rushed to the show on two hours’ sleep, dodging L.A. Marathon traffic closings, and to my delight found it to be the most satisfying theater I’ve seen locally in months (with a nod to the Echo’s Sheila Callaghan play Bed, which Stage Raw’s Deborah Klugman well considers in her own review).

Not entirely coincidentally, my mother grew up between the wars in a West Side Chicago neighborhood only slightly south of East Garfield Park, when it was mostly Jewish immigrant. During the brief time she was in college, frantic white flight turned its population black. Broken Fences empathetically examines the fallout as, more than a half-century later, demographics and economics shift it tumultuously back.

I’d be remiss to fail to single out acutely persuasive performances Lemon and Johnson, as well as an indelible portrait in unapologetic pragmatism by James Holloway, as Hoody’s enterprising brother Marz, though the entire ensemble handles the paradoxes and double-edge sincerities with an aplomb that belies the multiple facets of the roles.

The Road Theatre Company on Magnolia, The NoHo Senior Arts Colony, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; Extended through April 17. (818) 761-8838, roadtheatre.org. Running time: two hours with intermission.