The Echo One Acts

Reviewed by Bill Raden
Atwater Village Theatre
Through August 24

“General Sherman’s Hollow Body” (Photo by Andrew Putschoegle)

Now comfortably settled into their first permanent home in Atwater, the no-longer-itinerant Echo Theater Company reinstitutes its program of commissioned short works with a new edition of The Echo One Acts.

Six playwrights writing to one bedroom set (by scenic designer Shalome Pilon) — not a theme, explains Echo artistic director Chris Fields in his curtain speech, but a simple matter of expeditious stage logistics — suggests that a bed can be many things, if least of all a piece of furniture for mere resting. When occupied by more than one person, it tends to become a dramatic topology of the unconscious in which the sexual rifts and psychological fractures that inform the waking, rational world get revealed in the surreal logic of the dream and the nightmare.

Shawna Casey presents the oil-and-water gender dynamics of a couple as a clash between the canine (Garrett Hanson’s Rex) and the feline (Sarah Jane Morris’ Sugar Puss) in “What Are You Doing on the Bed?” — a whimsical allegory about a pair of complementary neurotics that director Jennifer Chambers stages a tad too literally as a kind of saccharine-sweet, live-action cartoon.

In “General Sherman’s Hollow Body,” writer-director Wes Walker playfully seizes upon the figure of retired Civil War general and total-warfare architect William Tecumseh Sherman (a resplendent Darrett Sanders) as an ideological battleground. As a pair of insurgent, Irish-immigrant-servant sisters (Alana Dietze and Jeanette McMahon in precision performances) look after the general’s bodily needs, Walker poetically collapses the socially disruptive violence and sublimated sexual desire of a postwar, 19^th century patriarchy with the emergent power of the era’s female underclass, as the Irish servants lead a fanciful feminist invasion of Sherman’s body.

With “As We Sleep,” John Lavachielli turns a bedroom conversation between a long-married couple into a harrowing excavation of the anxieties and darkest impulses at the root of the couple’s middle-aged malaise. When Anne (Jennifer Chambers) confesses her fear of finding herself alone in her 50s to husband Ben (a chilling Michael McColl), she quickly discovers that, emotionally at least, she has been alone for most of her married life, sharing her bed with a violent and psychopathic stranger.

“The Optimist” is Brian Tanen’s sketch-like transposition of J.M. Barrie’s tale of perennial childhood innocence onto the decidedly cold-blooded and adult realm of the police procedural. When jaded chief inspector Pye (Tara Karsian) and neophyte constable Birdy (Parker Phillips) are called to the Darling household to investigate the mysterious disappearance from a locked bedroom of young Michael, John and Wendy, conflicting crime-scene theories (and worldviews of experience versus imagination) are eventually resolved in the harsh reality of a grisly discovery in a locked trunk.

In ‘”Say You, Say Me” by Lionel Richie,’ playwright Miki Johnson wickedly demystifies the syrupy sentimentality of the adult-contemporary songwriter’s titular mega-hit single from the 1980s. Fields’s crisply realized staging features Erin Washington as Lala, a sort of mystically inclined confessor-prostitute of the soul, who panders to both the perverse, fetishistic fantasies and self-destructive tendencies of a trio of johns that include the suicidal Justin Huen, the deeply disturbed Karl Herlinger and the chronically alcoholic and guilt-ridden self-amputee Gareth Williams.

Jen Silverman’s “Laileen on the Way Down” puts an exclamation point on the evening via a queasily uncomfortable oedipal comedy in which a son (Jesse Fair) reluctantly accompanies his elderly mother (Carol Locatell) to retrieve the dentures that she left behind in the bedroom of her trailer-trash boyfriend (a soulful Daniel Hagen). Dietze’s inventive direction of a talented ensemble manages to transcend the arch satire of Silverman’s text to deliver something strangely tender and moving.

Echo Theater Company, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through August 24. (310) 307-3753, echotheatercompany.com