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.