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Timepiece
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
City Garage
Through March 1.
Betty (Renee Ulloa-McDonald), “a nice girl”, sits on a bench, reading a book. She is approached by a figure in mime-like whiteface wearing dinner dress (Jeffrey Gardner), who asks her if she “has” the time.
“I’m sorry, no,” she replies. He hands her an outsized mechanical clock, which affixes itself to her hand and can’t be removed. “Now you do,” he remarks before twitching his way offstage. Thus consciousness of mortality begins, and with it the futility of both action and stasis.
After many years of extraordinarily original adaptations at City Garage with his ongoing collaborator, director Frédérique Michel, playwright Charles A. Duncombe has delved more deeply in the machinations of metaphor in his recent works, Caged, and now the even less mysterious, more playful, Timepiece. Trafficking lightly in existential quandaries through contemporary rhetoric, Timepiece may essentially be intellectual frou-frou, yet it is still a fairly substantial exercise in which to indulge the allusive theater-making at which Duncombe and Michel excel.
Betty encounters a full spectrum of character-mouthpieces as she remains trapped onstage with her burdensome tick-tock. She is first accosted by Burt, an angry man (Bo Roberts), who assails her with pointed denunciations, punctuated by hoarded newspapers he spits in and hurls at her. Bob (Anthony M. Sannazaro), a nice boy, keeps running offstage to find help for her. (For some reason, while the men can leave, the women can’t. Or won’t.)
Bernice (Katrina Nelson), an anguished woman, soliloquizes on her discovery of life’s meaninglessness in the absence of causality, decrying that science only explains things by breaking them into smaller constituent parts. Bebe (Nili Rain Segal), a hot girl, lives only in the moment, reactively and for sensation, bereft of introspection yet nevertheless cursed with self-awareness. Billie (Megan Kim), a frightened girl, is discovered hiding in an unplugged refrigerator. Then there’s the guy in the Superman T-shirt (Johanny Paulino), who I never could figure out.
Duncombe provides all his archetypes with eloquent arguments, which the actors deliver with breakneck aplomb. It manages to be stimulating no matter how familiar the debating points may be. It helps that, like Duke Ellington, he is evidently writing specifically with certain players in mind, knowing their strengths and other characteristics to bring out the virtuoso in them, in service of the whole. CG mainstay Roberts has never before had a role suit him so snugly. Nelson sparkles with a comedic flair appropriate to a post-modern Carole Lombard. Segal endows a conscious cliché with genuine emotion even as she claims to feel little, while Ulloa-McDonald needs to carry the entire vehicle while playing someone temperamentally miscast in a role so central.
Duncombe also doubles as the production’s designer, which informs his literary vision with a full visual realization as well, while Michel pushes the pace to the practical limits of the performers, and never past. As frequently is the case at City Garage, the ghost of Ionesco does not linger far. And there is no little suspense generated as to how she will manage to interject the pubic exposure that certifies her signature as much as the walk-on was for Alfred Hitchcock.
If it can be a little sophomoric, the play betrays no discomfort with that whatever, capable of mocking its own preoccupations as much as those of the characters. Lively theater with real ideas and a sense of absurdity will always occupy a useful place in any artistic diet. If the accumulated variations on a theme perhaps exceed the capacity to surprise in their development, that’s an occupational hazard of the form. It’s a brisk 90 minutes, and any longeurs are fleeting.
Before the action begins, the sound system plays Marlene Dietrich singing Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me”, which occurred to me could become the theme song for City Garage: they “do do that voodoo, that you do so well.” Then again, we exit to the strains of Harry Warren’s “You’ll Never Know”. No answers, but only questions, that’s what makes life worthwhile, or has to.
City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, Building TI, Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.; through March 1. (310) 453-9939, https://www.citygarage.org/
