I Decided I’m Fine: A Roach Play

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
The Attic Collective
Through March 1

I Decided I’m Fine: A Roach Play is the work of The Attic Collective, a group of theater makers mostly in their 20s (except for the veteran L.A. actor Bart Tangredi, representing humans over 40). The program states that the show was “devised” by The Attic and “written by” Rosie Glen-Lambert and Veronica Tijoe, directed by Rosie Glen-Lambert, with Veronica Tijoe in the lead. Glen-Lambert is the artistic director of The Attic, and Tijoe is the literary manager; they clearly set the tone for the collective. Yet the overall impression left by the show is that of several voices speaking at cross purposes and not coalescing.

The subject of the evening is hoarding, which they call a particularly American phenomenon. (Not sure about that, but okay.) First there’s a brief video presentation warning us that “there are hoarders among us,” as if they are inhuman monsters passing as everyday folk. Then we are spoken to by two “experts” — a Dr. Professor of Hoarding, B.S. (Brandon Blum) and a Very Trustworthy Therapist (Julia Finch). They place the play we are about to see in the context of a “casebook analysis” on hoarding. Blum and Finch are both very funny, though I don’t understand why their accents keep changing from English to German and back again. It just underscores the very shaky foundation of their personas.

Now we get to a play about a typical American family doing the most typically American thing: playing Monopoly. It’s a lively and funny sitcom scene that ends in a tragedy for Ellen (Tijoe), the daughter-in-law. This tragic event leaves Ellen with an injury that she is not able to recover from, and it becomes the trigger for her obsessive hoarding. In fact, it leads to the birth of a hoarding goblin, brilliantly played Kat DeVoe-Peterson, who genuinely seems to expand as the play goes on. I also enjoyed the performance of Meg Cashel as a well-meaning next-door neighbor who just can’t bring herself to confront Ellen about the alarming proportions (and smells) of her hoarding problem.

The same is true of Stephen (Tyler Bremer), Ellen’s husband. We are supposed to believe that 10 years go by, and that Stephen and Ellen raise a child in an apartment where the clutter makes it nearly impossible to take a step. While this gives rise to very funny commentary by our two experts, it also alienates the audience from Ellen’s plight and replaces our compassion for her with disgust. There’s an effective scene towards the end of the play where Stephen finally can’t take it anymore and gives Ellen an ultimatum. But this scene has been so long in coming that by the time it does, we’ve lost a lot of our respect for and belief in the characters.

I should mention that there is also a lengthy interlude in which the play shifts perspective to that of the cockroaches who now populate the apartment, “feeding off Ellen’s grief.” These human-sized roaches are portrayed very amusingly, as they play banjoes and guitars and sing and dance. In fact, Glen-Lambert does her best directing work here, creating a cockroach world that gets a thorough dousing with bug spray. But it feels like these scenes are from a different play. Or, perhaps more accurately, they don’t enlighten us any further about Ellen, or tell us anything we didn’t already know. In fact, they push us farther away from the emotional core of her dilemma.

And that’s really the problem here. If we don’t have any degree of empathy for Ellen, and any measure of insight into the bottomless well of her pain, then we simply start to tune out.

Nevertheless, I admired the ambition and inventiveness of The Attic Collective, especially costume/prop designer Rebecca Carr and scenic designer Lex Gernon. Young companies like The Attic are important to the eco-system of Los Angeles theater, and I look forward to seeing what projects they tackle next in the (hopefully) very near future.

studio/stage, 520 N. Western Ave., East Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 6 p.m.; through Mar. 1. www.theatticcollectivela.com/roachplay. Running time: two hours and 30 minutes with one intermission.

Killer’s Head/The Unseen Hand

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
Through March 8

As part of its 50th year celebration, Odyssey Theatre is presenting Killer’s Head and The Unseen Hand, two rarely seen plays by the great Sam Shepard, both directed by Darrell Larson, a terrific actor and longtime standout of the Los Angeles theater scene.

Several of Shepard’s well-known works are frequently performed in the Los Angeles area — Fool For Love, True West and Buried Child foremost among them. Along with Curse of the Starving Class and Lie of the Mind, they mark Shepard’s take on the “family play,” the staple of American dramaturgy. But before he went down this path in the late 1970s, Shepard had already written a score of others, most of them featuring a lost young man, much like the author himself. These were abstract, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness ramblings, taking place in some nowhere-everywhere zone in the playwright’s mind and featuring loners, drifters, seekers, poets, drunks, fools and other denizens of society’s fringe. They were adventurous, unpredictable screams into the void, and a middle finger to the classics of the greatest generation, with their tidy beginnings, middles and ends.

These plays of crazy yearning and uncorked rage were the envy of me and every other playwright I knew who came of age in the 1970s. We too hankered for their freedom to make a mess, to cut loose, to be bad, rude, disrespectful, uncensored and true to our contradictions — and somehow end up making beautiful poetry in the process. All of us wanted to break the code, learn this formula — but none of us could because it came from deep inside Shepard, from his unconscious, to which he seemed to have unlimited access. But times change, contexts shift, and I came to this production very eager to see if these early plays still kept their magic.

Killer’s Head is a 10-minute monologue, the last thoughts of a man strapped to an electric chair and about to be executed. These thoughts have nothing to do with any crime he may have committed, nor do they tell us anything about who he is or why he is here. What are we to make of his Western male chatter about pickup trucks and horses? Director Larson provides an interpretation in the program notes, but — like Shepard himself — I leave it to audience members to come to their own conclusions.

A series of actors take turns with the role of the condemned man, including LA theater veteran Jeff Kober and film veteran Dermot Mulroney. The opening night performer was Steve Howey, instantly recognizable to any viewer of Shameless on Showtime. I have enjoyed his work on that show, but I found him quite underwhelming here. He depends completely on the electric chair to provide a sense of danger. Very possibly the problem lies with the director, who plays into what I believe to be the Beckettian trap in the work.

The Unseen Hand is a wilder play, which finds Shepard on the familiar terrain of the Old West. In fact, it takes place just down the road in Azusa, which Shepard’s lead character never tires of telling us is “A to Z in the USA.” This character, Blue Morphan (Carl Weintraub), is a 120-year-old drifter who has been living for the last 20 years in the husk of a 1951 Chevy (which dominates the stage). He rambles on about his two long-gone brothers and his fear of violence from bullies in fast cars — until he is interrupted by a visit from a space alien named Willie (Matt Curtin) with the branding of a human hand on his forehead. Willie is here to bring back saviors who can help overthrow the oppressive masters on his home planet of Nogoland. Soon Willie has conjured Blue’s two brothers (Jordan Morgan and Chris Payne Gilbert) for that purpose. And then the last character appears, an Azusa high school cheerleader (Andrew Morrison) who has been-abused by jocks from another school and dumped out here.

The play proves to be surprisingly funny, with the opening night audience often whooping with laughter from Shepard’s zig-zagging inventiveness, the huge risks that he keeps taking. All the actors are good, with Morgan especially outstanding as a Wild West outlaw. Morrison is badly miscast as the cheerleader, whom Shepard wrote as an All-American guy — he’s literally called “The Kid” — but who comes off here as sensitive and highly stylized. (Morrison dances ballet with the Colburn Conservatory, which is evident in how elegantly he moves.)

With its improvisatory energy and unpredictable shifts, Shepard’s play depends on the performers being on the same wavelength, and this error in casting throws it off balance, bringing in questions of sexual identity that don’t arise from anything in the script. The play also depends on a sense of danger to be effective, and there isn’t much of that here. This makes it feel like Shepard-Lite — amusing, entertaining, but not as consequential as it could be. Certainly not as much as I remember it being many years ago in Downtown NYC.

Then again, maybe life has simply caught up with it, giving us so many other sources of danger. I was glad to see it again — any chance to catch Shepard’s dazzling early work done well is something to be grateful for.

Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd; Sawtelle; Wed., 8 p.m. (Feb. 5 & Mar. 4.); Thurs., 8 p.m. (Feb. 20 only); Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Mar. 8; (310) 477-2055, ext. 2 or www.odysseytheatre.com. Running time: one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.

Ledisi: The Legend of Little Girl Blue

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
A Fig Street Films Production
Through December 29

A few minutes into her autobiographical show, Ledisi tells a heartrending story about her mother, a member of the Black Panthers in Oakland. “She was my shero, my first and strongest shero, but every shero has her Kryptonite.” In this case, that meant her mom’s boyfriend — young Ledisi came home when he was in the middle of beating her mother, breaking her cheekbone. The 17-year-old Ledisi was so traumatized that she walked barefoot out into the night and kept walking for several miles. Ledisi caps this story by breaking into an inspired rendition of the blues standard “Trouble in Mind,” which Nina Simone also famously recorded.

The show’s full title is Ledisi: The Legend of Little Girl Blue: A Musical Journey into the Lives of Nina Simone and Ledisi. If that sounds awkward, then you’re right, it is. Ledisi is a deeply soulful jazz singer, attested to by her nine Grammy nominations and the many passionate fans who sit at the cocktail tables near the stage. But it’s no easy task to put together a show spanning a 25-year career, and this evening feels scattershot, lacking a strong through-line.

It begins with Ledisi coming onstage dressed regally as Nina Simone in a high headdress and African robe. The four-piece jazz band plays the lead-in to the blues song “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” Ledisi as Nina keeps tossing diffident comments at them, like “The band is playing too loud,” and “Well, don’t stop playing!” Then she does a rendition of the song as Nina Simone, with the searing pain filtering through that aristocratic and elegant voice.

I conclude at this point that the show is going to be a biographical play about Nina Simone through a playlist of her most famous hits interspersed with anecdotes from her life. But then Ledisi removes the headdress and changes her costume. “Nina Simone saved my life,” she says, describing a difficult time in her early adulthood when nothing was working out in her life, and she had contemplated suicide … but then Nina Simone’s voice came over the radio, luring her back into life’s fray. “Nina Simone was one of my greatest sheros, making it possible for singers like me to believe our dreams could come true. But my first shero was my mother….”

Then Ledisi launches into that traumatic story about witnessing her mother’s beating, and while Nina Simone remains an important presence, the rest of the evening has Ledisi herself centerstage.

First the pluses. Ledisi’s an accomplished singer, able to scat-sing a jazzy version of “Alright” as well as command our imaginations with the blues classic “I Put A Spell on You.” She has a mellifluous voice, a lovely tone, and it’s never less than pleasant to hear her in person. She is backed up by an excellent jazz combo (especially Brandon Waddles on piano), three terrific singers, and a sensitive lighting design by Eric Branson.

But, other than the story about her mother and a few other interesting anecdotes, the show lacks a gripping narrative. One song is accompanied by a photomontage of young black men, like Philandro Castile, who have been gunned down by the police. Another song is paired with photos of her cultural heros and sheros, who oddly include Marilyn Monroe and Julia Roberts (and, yes, Michael Jackson). But who is Ledisi besides a remarkable vocalist with a social conscience?

I can’t say I know.

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; Tues., 12/17 – Sat., 12/21 at 8 p.m.; Thurs., 12/26 – Sat., 12/28 at 8 p.m.; Fri., 12/27 & Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m.; Sun., 12/29, 7:30 p.m.; through Dec. 29. (310) 746-4000 or TheWallis.org. Running time: two hours and 10 minutes with one intermission.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Closed

When I told theater-savvy friends that I was attending a one-man version of A Christmas Carol at the Wallis Annenberg, the most frequent response was a sigh or a shrug. Yet another Christmas Carol? When I mentioned that the performer is David Mynne, whose one-man performance of Dickens’s novel Great Expectations was highly-praised at the Wallis last year — and who is also a co-founder of the famous English theatre company Kneehigh — there was a slight uptick of interest. But still — another Christmas Carol?

In fact, it’s hard to think of a non-biblical story that has been adapted and performed more often than this story by 19th century English novelist, Charles Dickens. His 1943 novella was a huge hit from the outset, selling out its first printing in a few days. Within months there were competing stage adaptations on the West End and in the provinces, and the subsequent years have brought a veritable tidal wave of plays, films and TV versions. (My personal favorite is the 1951 English black-and-white film starring Alistair Sim.) A new miniseries, co-produced by Ridley Scott and starring Guy Pearce (as Scrooge) and Tom Hardy, is about to drop on BBC One. So the bar on originality is very high on any new production, which must answer the question: What makes it different from all the versions that have gone before?

Though it’s been touring the world for the last three years, this five-performance run is a Los Angeles premiere, David Mynne co-adapted the script with director Simon Harvey, and they have stripped away all the bells and whistles and modern embellishments that have accumulated over the years in popular entertainments like Scrooged (the 1988 film starring Bill Murray as a brazenly ambitious TV executive). Mynne, a tall, bald Englishman, is a precise and nuanced performer. His transformations from Scrooge to Jacob Marley and others are skillful and persuasive, and usually hinge on a single detail to delineate the various characters.

Despite the uplifting ending, there is a sadness at the heart of this show, a persistent disappointment with the selfishness at the root of most human activities. This feels very relevant to our tumultuous and self-centered times, something that Mynne makes explicit by having Scrooge enumerate “Obamacare” among his complaints about the unreasonable neediness of the poor. I wish there had been a bit more of these links to our own avaricious era, but that may be unreasonable on my end.

I did not see the recent Jefferson Mays one-man Christmas Carol at the Geffen, though many friends have raved about his magical presence and his split-second character transformations. This production has neither of those qualities. It is more deliberate and reminds me of a traditional English panto — a re-telling of a familiar fairy tale or fable, with Mynne providing literary descriptions, sound effects, facial exaggerations and a few props to bring us into that world.

Whether that appeals to one’s imagination in this media-saturated world is very much an individual decision. I found the show moving and heartfelt, but I also didn’t think that the stage environment at the Wallis’s Lovelace Studio did it any favors — the high ceiling and the vast emptiness surrounding Mynne made it more difficult to focus on the quiet emotions and the incremental shifts in his performance. To my mind, Mynne would benefit from a warmer space that would enable a closer relationship to his audience. As is, it’s too easy here for the mind to wander, and when that happens it’s very difficult to be drawn back into this familiar but still-mesmerizing tale for all ages.

The Lovelace Studio at the Wallis Annenberg Center, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; Closed. https://tickets.thewallis.org/single/eventDetail.aspx?p=13548. Running time: one hour with no intermission.

Neil Simon’s Musical Fools

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Open Fist Theatre Company
Through January 26

RECOMMENDED

As I watched Ron West’s production of Neil Simon’s Musical Fools, the thought kept crossing my mind: Oh yes, the holidays are coming. Because this is a perfect holiday musical. In fact, the more I think about it, it may be the perfect holiday musical for our times.

For one, there’s no mention of the holidays (love that!). For another, it’s consistently funny, but in the silly (even ridiculous) way that the holiday season seems to bring out in people. From the moment that Leon Tolchinsky (James Byous) bursts onstage and sings about his excitement at being the new schoolteacher for the town of Kulyenchikov, hired to tutor the daughter of Dr. Zubritsky, we are in the realm of zaniness, reminiscent of the Marx Brothers and other vaudeville-influenced comedians.

We soon meet the townsfolk of Kulyenchikov, who seem in competition for “the stupidest” and would be right at home in the movie Dumb and Dumber (“Stupid and Stupider”?) My personal favorite is Parvesh Cheena as a sheepherder who has lost his sheep and can’t remember his first name. His foolish expressions are priceless.

The idiocy of the villagers traces back to a curse put on them in 1691 by Count Vladimir Yousekevitch (Hank Jacobs) after his son Casimir (Jack Sharpe) committed suicide. The reason — the father of his lady love, Sophia, had rejected his suit due to his (Casimir’s) illiteracy. To be honest, this origin story is as silly as the townsfolk after the curse. No matter, it serves its purpose. The only way for the town to regain its intelligence is for the current day Sophia (daughter of the Zubritskys) to marry Count Gregor, the last of the Yousekevitch line. But schoolteacher Leon could also break the curse if he can re-awaken Sophia’s brainpower — though he only has 24 hours to do so. Meanwhile, it will shock no one to discover that the schoolteacher falls in love with the lovely (but brainless) Sophia and takes on the challenge, even though failure means that he too will become as stupid as everyone else in the town.

Got that? Yes, this is not Shakespeare. It’s not even Brighton Beach Memoirs or other Neil Simon plays with aspirations beyond tickling the audience’s funny bone. It does allow Simon to dig deeply into his bag of tricks and come out with vaudevillian banter such as:

LEON: I was just thinking…

DR. ZUBRITSKY: Yes? What’s that like?

And so on.

The performance level rises significantly with the appearance of Jason Paige as Count Gregor in Act II. Paige has by far the most compelling singing voice in the cast, and he’s also a dynamic actor with something very funny to play. After so much celebration of stupidity, it’s a wonderful tonic to witness the matching of wits between Count Gregor and Leon the schoolteacher. So hang in there during the occasional moments when the show lags (which it does), because the many “switcheroos” between Gregor and Leon are worth waiting for, and Paige and Byous know how to mine the comedy gold.

Still, nothing in the show has any real weight, and it’s not supposed to. It’s a marzipan holiday loaf, so sweet that your teeth ache. And just like the holidays, there is too much of it — it goes on too long, and you pretty much know what’s coming. But somehow it serves a purpose too, raising our spirits and giving us a break from the very bad national news we deal with every day, not to mention the fires and all the other terrors that constantly threaten to overwhelm us.

Speaking of which — all this tomfoolery, this idiocy, kept reminding me of a certain president and the effect that his persistent lying and gaslighting has had on this country, making us truly into a confederacy of dunces. Then, near the end of the show, the schoolteacher himself refers to “a certain politician” who has been dumbing us down. And this is what makes the show a great musical for this particular holiday season, as it slyly confirms our worst suspicions about the negative influence of this White House, while still allowing us to laugh at the untenable situation that we find ourselves in. And to cry a little bit too.

Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village; Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.; Mon., 8 p.m. through Jan. 26. https://openfist.org/. Running time: two hours with one intermission.

The New One

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Center Theatre Group
Through November 24

RECOMMENDED 

On the opening night of the Los Angeles production of his one-man show, Mirk Birbiglia peered out from behind the stage curtain, then walked out onstage. “Is this supposed to be opening night?” he asked. Several heads in the audience nodded. “I have no idea why this is opening night, and not yesterday or tomorrow,” he confessed to everyone at the Ahmanson. “Just a warning: there may be a very close resemblance between this performance and every other one.”

This moment was vintage Birbiglia and encapsulates a lot of his appeal — spontaneous, genuine, anti-celebrity, very human. Also, smart but not snarky. Most comedians speak in terms of “killing” the audience as a measure of success. “I slayed,” “I crushed,” “I ruled” — such aggressive terms of comedian’s self-praise don’t seem applicable to the self-effacing Birbiglia. Similarly, he does not seem to have concocted a comic persona so much as found a public face to communicate his private self.

The New One — excellently directed by Seth Barrish — is Birbiglia’s true-life experience of fatherhood. Or, more specifically, of being certain that he did not want to have children. Ever. Unlike other such stories, Birbiglia did not have a change of heart, nor did his sense of priorities mellow with age. Rather, he was dragged reluctantly into it by his wife Jen, whom he was and is deeply in love with.

Not wanting children is a popular sentiment and a hot topic, but this seems to have little to do with Birbiglia’s impulse for telling it. Some of his reasons will certainly resonate with others, like not being able to relate to children, and how expensive and “relentless” the process of parenting is. Also, how repulsed he is by the behavior of parents, such as his own brother, whose child used the “Einstein for Children” program, but who (Birbiglia confides to us) is no Einstein. Then there are Birbiglia’s extensive and very unusual health concerns, which it would be wrong to give away except to affirm that his negative feelings about his own DNA are well-founded.

Suffice it to say that I found the experience of Birbiglia’s journey into fatherhood deeply pleasurable, both as a piece of writing (great visual metaphors!) and as a comic performance. He is unique among contemporary comedians, with Seinfeld’s sharp observational humor (but without the self-congratulatory smirk) and with the deeply personal confessional humor of lesser-known comics like Hannah Gadsby (but without her barbed anger). He reminds me of the monologist Spalding Gray in his self-effacing humor, but more down-to-earth and relatable.

This evening is for those who enjoy laughing about the human condition without the cynicism or bitterness brought to the forefront by the stand-up comedian in the White House. Birbiglia is the real deal and seeing him in person is essential to getting the full effect of his comic brilliance. He appeals to the audience’s imagination, intelligence and emotional core. All the critical superlatives he’s received turn out to be well-deserved.

Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown L.A.—Civic Center; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.; through Nov. 24. (855) 223-9532 or https://www.centertheatregroup.org/booking/best-available?prod_no=16636&perf_no=17039. Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.

Constantinople

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Vista Players
Through November 2

Aram Kouyoumdjian’s Constantinople, currently receiving its world premiere at the Secret Rose in a production directed by the playwright, is the kind of earnest, socially conscious play that might have been hailed by critics in the 1950s. Documenting the suffering of urban Armenians in the aftermath of their genocide at the hands of Turkish forces, this drama is so straightforward and bereft of irony that it’s as if the play itself is in denial of the last 65 or 70 years in the theater.

This in no way minimizes the importance of the subject matter. The killing of 1.5 million Armenians at the end of World War I is an atrocity of enormous proportions, pre-dating and foreshadowing the Nazi extermination of Jews a few decades later. Its emotional significance for many Armenians is still overwhelming, especially since the official party line from Turkish leaders is still to deny that these events ever happened. I’m not Armenian, and my only knowledge of what happened comes from books I’ve read and plays I’ve seen from writers like William Saroyan, Anthony Haden-Guest and especially Leslie Ayvazian. In such plays as Nine Armenians and 100 Aprils (produced last year at Rogue Machine Theatre), Ayvazian brings this history achingly alive in the way it haunts her flawed and very relatable characters several generations later.

In his three pages of “historical context” in the program, Mr. Kouyoumdjian states that Constantinople “is not a tale of victimhood… It’s a tale of resilience — and resistance.” He also claims that his play — which is set around 1919 — “mirrors many present-day concerns … [such as] displacement, migration, populism, demagoguery, and in #MeToo era, women’s rights. … Constantinople isn’t an historical play; it’s a contemporary play set within an historical context.”

Yet this is not how I experienced it. Making a play “contemporary” does not reside in reflecting “present-day concerns” as much as it does in presenting three-dimensional characters whose rhythms feel similar to our own. But the rhythms of this play are very much pre–World War II, with heroic people behaving heroically and selfish people behaving selfishly. There are no contradictions to our first impressions; instead, the characters display a consistency of behavior that comes to seem predictable and lessens the impact of the major offstage events that we hear about.

The main hero of Kouyoumdjian’s play is Vehanoush (Jade Hykush), in whose back room the play is set. She is a woman in her 50s who publishes a feminist journal while also spearheading missions to rescue the Armenians who have survived the attempted genocide — especially women like Anna (Eva Abramian) who was raped and held in a harem by her Turkish captor. Anna, now pregnant, wants to kill herself and the “monster” growing inside her so she can destroy the shame that overwhelms her. We witness Vehanoush not only help Anna overcome her self-destructive impulses but find her an Armenian husband who can love her and give her a reason to live as well.

Vehanoush is the best character in the play and Hykush does a great job of making her courage palpable and real. All the actors do excellent work, especially Travis Laughlin, Robert Walters and Abramian. The problem is that their characters seem more like types than individuals. We hear about the greatness of the poet Shenian (Walters), but we never listen to any of his poetry or observe how inspiring it is for the others. Similarly, we are informed about the terrible atrocities of the Turks, but we never see them depicted — which might allow us to feel the intense danger from the outside world and form our own judgments. As it is, this room in Vehanoush’s home is like a bubble, hermetically-sealed. Also, the dynamics of every scene are very similar; they all start out with an issue or problem which is then spoken about at great length until a conclusion is reached. This methodical dramaturgy becomes fairly tedious after a while and contrasts with the immediacy of the dilemma the characters are dealing with.

Kouyoumdjian tries to fix this at the end by cutting to a final scene set in the present day when the descendants of the 1919 characters are still dealing with many of the same issues. There are interesting possibilities here, but nothing is really explored, and the characters — while different in obvious ways — still seem too much like their forbearers for me to recognize them as people I might bump into on the street. Also, the writer/director has once again chosen not to bring in any sounds or images of modern life that might afford us a jolt of recognition. Perhaps another director could have made these scenes more vividly alive. As it is, I admired the characters without ever being drawn into their struggles.

Secret Rose Theatre, 11246 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through Nov. 2. www.itsmyseat.com/constantinople. Running time: 95 minutes with no intermission.

Red Thread

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Atlas Obscura
Through November 10

RECOMMENDED

The pleasure of seeing Red Thread, Siegfried Tieber’s theatrical exploration of chance and chaos, begins with its venue, the Paul Kaufmann Gallery in DTLA. There is mystery and something special from the get-go, as audience members enter through an alley and walk through the subterranean gallery rooms (full of Kaufmann’s one-of-a-kind shoe designs and erotic sketches) until they reach a large room ringed around with a white curtain, and with two rows of chairs facing an improvised stage.

The audience assembled when I arrive are mostly white and Asian urban professionals who have paid $74 per seat. It’s to the credit of Tieber’s show that situating this upscale audience just a few blocks from the homeless encampments on Los Angeles Street does not feel disturbing or anomalous. In fact, it fits well into Tieber’s themes, as anyone here could easily have ended up there given a slightly altered set of circumstances.

The mood in this audience is excited — folks are smiling with anticipation. I saw something similar at the Geffen Playhouse months ago when I was there to review Helder Guimaraes’s Invisible Tango — this almost giddy expectation of the interactive experience, and the element of unpredictability in how it will unfold.

When Siegfried Tieber appears, he proves to be tall and thin, with dark curly hair under a funny hat. There is something a bit fatuous about him, but not in a bad way — he seems both intelligent and clownish, and he reminds me of the comic relief characters in Shakespeare’s plays. I’m sure he would make a killer Peter Quince or even Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Right away he lays out his thesis: We live in a deterministic world, in which there are so many factors influencing every moment of our existence that it is absurd to talk about free will or simple causes and effects. At the same time, the human condition is intolerable without at least the illusion of free will. And this is what we will explore on our “journey” (his word). This journey involves interactive explorations with coins, Rubik’s cubes, books (he’s memorized entire novels, like Mr. Memory in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps) and especially decks of cards. I was blown away by all of it and have no idea how he did most of it. Then again, I’m not a would-be magician or even a magic aficionado, just someone who can appreciate great sleight-of-hand.

While the show does not have the multi-faceted resonance and meta-narrative strands of Invisible Tango, it is still a wonderful journey, both mind-expanding and highly amusing. The metaphor of Red Thread comes from the legend of Ariadne, the Cretan princess in Greek mythology who gave Theseus a thread that would allow him to find his way out of the minotaur’s labyrinth. Tieber, with his very original and engaging stage persona, makes a great guide through the cosmic labyrinth of our daily lives, sharing his insights into life’s big question while keeping us guessing and on the edge of our seats.

Paul Kaufmann Gallery, 113 E. 8^th St., Downtown L.A. — The Fashion District; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m. & 7 p.m., through Nov. 10. https://www.atlasobscura.com/experiences/red-thread#availability. Running time: 90 minutes with one intermission.

My Favorite Suicide

Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Saudade Theatre with Colectivo 84
Through November 3

When I see a play like My Favorite Suicide by Portuguese playwright Mickaël de Oliveira (translated by Maria Inês Marques), it makes me aware of how U.S.A.-centric I am, despite my attempts to expand my awareness of international work. It’s similar to how sensitive we are to the accents of others, without being able to hear our own. Where drama is concerned, our American bias is toward shows with spectacle (big musicals) and plays with emotional intimacy and rawness, especially those from “underserved populations” (black, gay, Latinx). A show like Angels in America combines both these strands while also incorporating aspects of the Theater of Ideas, more popular in Europe than here.

My Favorite Suicide is from this last category, as Oliveira plays around with ideas of fate, self-determination and many “big questions.” The play begins with four actors engaging in a game of chance with cards. The scene suddenly changes to “a cabin in the woods,” where a woman (Liliana de Castro) has asked three friends (Joy Brunson, Diogo Martins, Filipe Valle Costa) to join her. The woman then tells her friends that she intends to commit suicide. She makes it clear that she is healthy and not depressed; she simply has decided to end her life, and she would like her friends to help be “intermediaries” between her death and her relatives. This is followed by a lot of conversation, including a strange summing up of the woman’s arrival in this town and what her friends thought about her at first, as well as how their view of her has changed. This in turn is interrupted by a loud knock at the cabin door. I won’t disclose what happens next except to say that it’s not a food delivery service, and that the world outside the cabin is faring even worse than the people inside.

Both the play’s title and its arbitrary interruption of scenes reminds me of the work of surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel, especially his masterpieces The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Both of those also dealt with the way that civilized people deny the truths about their lives — especially the omnipresence of danger and death — in order to service their appetites and maintain the illusion of happiness.

Certainly there is a dreamlike feeling throughout My Favorite Suicide, suggested first by the eight or so potted trees onstage to represent the forest surrounding the cabin, and then by the original music from Drum and Lace, staccato bursts that are second cousins to Bernard Herrmann’s famous score from Psycho. This dreamlike sense of a fluid reality is provocative, and I kept waiting for a payoff that would bring home what the playwright was getting at and elevate this play from a curiosity into something substantial. But it never came.

What’s missing is the humor and the humanity that underscored all of Bunuel’s work, as well as the compassion that was the flipside of his scorn. As it stands, the dialogue here is flat and abstract, revealing little beyond the literal statements each character makes. While the ideas that Oliveira is contemplating show great potential for development, he forgot to create characters who could compel us to go on a journey with them. Or maybe I’m just too American to get his point.

Speaking of which: Oliveira subtitles his work “an American play,” and there are a few mentions of America in the dialogue, including the suicidal main character’s mention that she came to this town “from the South” (though without any accent). Later on, during descriptions of offstage events, we are told that the racist president and all his followers have been destroyed, along with pretty much everyone else — yet there has been no talk of politics up to then, nor do we hear any afterwards. For that matter, the title My Favorite Suicide suggests a very warped Bob Hope movie or screwball comedy, but the play itself has none of these traits. For those of us who had some personal experience with suicide or who lost friends in this manner, such incongruity can seem glib and offensive.

In any case, nothing in this play hit home for me on a gut level, which I know is a very American thing to say, but it’s why I go to the theater. I do, however, wish all the best to Saudade, the only Portuguese theatre company in this country. This is their second presentation, and they seem like lovely people with only the best of intentions. I hope they have a great future ahead of them.

Anthony Meindl’s Actors Workshop, 905 Cole Ave., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; no show Fri., Oct. 25; Sat., Oct. 26, 3 p.m.; through Nov. 3. www.saudadetheatre.org/my-favorite-suicide. Running time: 70 minutes with no intermission.