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Cleo, Theo and Wu
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Theatre of NOTE
Through December 6
Commendable for its support of female empowerment and its flashes of wit, Cleo, Theo and Wu can be a frustrating experience if you’re a theatergoer who prefers a coherent story to a chaotic one.
Framed as a fantastical dream and workshopped by company members at Theatre of NOTE, this latest play by Kirsten Vangsness is an impressionistic hodgepodge of ideas and events. It consists of encounters between cartoonish characters who, except for the dreamer and her boyfriend, are either incarnations of historical figures or visiting specters from the future, extraterrestrial and otherwise.
The title references three empresses from history: Cleopatra, Theodora, and Wu Zetian, an extraordinary 7thcentury achiever who started out as a concubine and ended up, for the last 15 years of her life, as the sole ruler of China. (Theodora was also a mover and a shaker; an actress of humble birth, she married Emperor Justinian and became his powerful coregent over the Byzantine Empire).
When the play opens, a prone and unconscious Lucy (Vangsness) is being maneuvered about the stage by a quarrelsome quartet of spirits. They include two reincarnations of Cleopatra, Cleo 1 (Tamara Perry), a salty down-to-earth presence, and Cleo 17 (Jennifer Flack), who is self-admiring and vain, plus Theo (Cat Chengery) and Wu (Hiwa Chow Elms).
The fractious four (and an additional pair of female figures who show up) bicker among themselves about where to place Lucy in the space. They argue about her resilience in coping with what life tosses her way, speaking in baffling sentence fragments. After a bit, one discerns the main idea of their interchange — that Lucy, and other individual women by implication, are part of a universal womanhood that is strong and nurturing, not weak and deferential. These larger-than-life female figures are there to help her realize that.
OK, so no problem with the theme.
Scene two, probably the play’s funniest, introduces a trio of other-planetary male beings — Gloob (Tony Decarlo), Gluck (Phil Ward) and Glock (Joel Scher). From a future civilization, they comment on some of the puzzling traits and self-destructive practices of the human race (“humes”), while expressing particular delight at the existence of “wo-humes.” One of these fellows, Glock (Joel Scher), declares a special affinity for the “wo-humes,” and in a future sequence shows up in Lucy’s bedroom to encourage her to help save the planet, while counseling her to ignore her boyfriend (“We cannot save the worlds if you wake to angry man noise.”).
As with Vangsness’s prior plays, Cleo, Theo and Wu is an intensely personal work that charts the efforts of a single woman to attain self-realization and respect. In the program notes, Vangsness explains the play’s genesis and development: She’d been listening to an audio course on ancient history, which was mostly about men, and began writing this scenario in response. Afterward, lines came to her “in the night.” The outcome of the 2016 election was a factor too. Finally, artistic colleagues, within and outside the ensemble, made a contribution.
Directed by Lisa Dring,the production features plenty of on-stage comedic talent decked out in Stephanie Petagno’s fun, colorful costumes. Ever a champion of her gender, Vangsness plays Lucy with her unique combination of ingenuous vulnerability and in-your-face manic energy. Joel Scher flits and flutters in his inimitable way — a persona he revives from production to production that somehow never gets old. He and DeCarlo and Ward skillfully underscore the smart silliness of their space alien triad. Justin Okin fills the bill as Lucy’s obsessive domineering boyfriend, and the scenes between the two characters work well to make Vangsness’s point about the dangerous toxicity of out-of-control males.
But overall there’s no getting past the production’s not-ready-for-prime-time script, with its fractured narrative, its surplus of fragmented dialogue, and its hour and 40 minutes intermission-less length. The scenes among the fictional women can be especially wearing on one’s attentiveness. You can excuse these shortcomings by saying they manifest as part of a dream play, but the truth of the matter is that the material could use more cogency.
Theatre of NOTE, 1517 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through Dec. 8. 323-856-8611 or www.theatreofnote.com. Running time: one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.
