Little Theatre
Reviewed by Martίn Hernández
Rogue Machine
Through January 8
RECOMMENDED
In the 1990s, playwright Justin Tanner was the wunderkind of small venue L.A. theatre. Tanner churned out hit after hit, like Pot Mom, Zombie Attack, and Teen Girl, for the now defunct Cast Theatre, where he was resident playwright. The Cast was also where artistic director Diana Gibson reigned supreme, raking in the bucks from Tanner’s prolific output while raking him over the coals over, in her esteemed opinion, his paltry writing skills.
Tales about their love/hate bond are the stuff of local legend, and Tanner was quoted in her 2014 L.A. Times obituary as saying, “I’ve never been as brutal, and never been treated as brutally.” Now, Tanner depicts their joint brutality in this combination self-confession and begrudging swan song to his mentor, delivered with his trademark wit and pathos. While it is mostly played for laughs – and there are plenty – it serves as a disturbing behind-the-scenes tale of how narcissistic manipulation and the resulting psychological warfare can destroy an otherwise fruitful artistic relationship.
As our evening’s narrator James (Zachary Grant) explains, in the late 1980s he was assigned to El Centro Theatre to work off community service hours for vehicular misdeeds. There he meets Monica (Jenny O’Hara) who runs the theatre with an iron fist and has an anxious James quivering in his boots within minutes. Along with El Centro’s associate director/jack of all trades Danny (Ryan Brophy), James endures her slings and arrows, even after he fulfills his judicial obligation and Monica hires him as a glorified gofer, also manning the phones. While his phone etiquette is atrocious, James has a secret weapon: he writes plays.
Not good plays at first, but as Monica takes James under her wing, with her corrosive insults to his writing talent flustering him to no end, his work improves, and patrons start filling the house with each new play. But while the money rolls in, James sees little of it as Monica uses the withholding of remuneration to keep James cranking out product at an excruciating pace.
Soon, Hollywood comes calling and the shrewish Monica, aware that her meal ticket might fly the coop, sinks her talons deeper into James. While he knows their dysfunctional interaction drives his success, their “Stockholm Syndrome” pairing is devastating to his psyche and somehow, James must find a way to break loose.
While the names – Tanner’s, Gibson’s, and mutual colleague Andy Daly’s – have been changed to protect the guilty in this autobiographical portrait, the innocent, familiar to many veterans of L.A.’s theatre scene, don’t get off as easily. Despite some opening night jitters, there’s a perverse joy witnessing the vivid O’Hara’s turn as the caustic Monica, who gleefully skewers theater folk from the era, rants about James’s and Danny’s freeloading actor friends, and bemoans her dearth of sexual partners. Monica’s diatribe closing Act One is classic Tanner, simultaneously hilarious and pitiful.
Brophy’s snide smirk and dry readings as “rich kid” Danny offer additional comic relief, especially on a hysterical trip with Monica and James up the California coast to celebrate James’s first TV deal check. Grant also offers up a convincing performance, starting off as naïve innocent – though Tanner has admitted in press material that his character is “much nicer than I was in real life,” – who transforms into a cynical professional. While James’s and Monica’s confrontations sometimes pull some punches, there is enough pugilistic spark to fire up the tension.
Director Lisa James’s keen staging on John Iacovelli’s realistic sets – Monica’s tawdry living room and the grubby office and theater backstage – give her the opportunity to place her performers in absorbing tableaux. A staircase accentuates the hierarchy the characters possess – or want to possess – as they sit or walk up it, and the face-to-face clashes put James and Monica on an equal footing, even if temporarily.
After a long period of estrangement and shortly before her death, Tanner and Gibson came to a peace of sorts, an acknowledgement that while time may not heal all wounds, some wounds must fester before healing to create lasting and luminous art.
Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles; Wed.-Sat., 8 pm.; Mon., Dec. 19, 8 pm.; Sun., 3 pm.; No perfs Christmas Eve and Day or New Year’s Eve and Day; through Jan. 8. https://www.roguemachinetheatre.net/little-theatre. (Running time two hours including a fifteen-minute intermission.)
