One Critic’s Journal: LA Theater in 2023

Land of Idiots

By Steven Leigh Morris

There’s almost nobody I’ve spoken with who doesn’t anticipate 2024 with dread. The most optimistic assessment is that we’ll be lucky if we can make it through next year without a violent socio-political explosion.

Politico Magazine recently ran a feature by David Siders on well-intentioned plans in the state of New Hampshire to restructure how it sends delegates to the U.S. Congress, in an attempt to render congressional representation less partisan and closer to the actual people being represented. The idea was to derail the clown-car that is the U.S. House of Representatives, which hasn’t done much except obstruct everything in its path and attack its own members, like some toxic homeowners’ association. Meanwhile, consider the U.S. Supreme Court . . . No, let’s not.

But what Siders discovered on his road trip to the Northeast was the prevailing sense that the problem doesn’t lie with the political system, but with the people, the locals, who were ostensibly supposed to be the salvation of a country on fire. If the people could get closer to Washington D.C., or be better represented, the system might work better, the devisers of this New Hampshire plan opined.

Not so, Siders concluded. The problem is the people: people with a propensity for bigotry and violence, gullible people believing whatever, people in pain lashing out. Siders’s article is called “We Live in a Land of Idiots.”

How did we get to be so stupid?

Perhaps we’ve always been stupid: Bigotry and violence are veins in our history reaching back long before social media, long before the Internet, long before the invention of even desktop computers or cellphones.

I arrived on U.S. shores in August 1963. Three months later, the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas. Some of the 9-year-olds in the tiny, rural Northern California town where I lived cheered the assassination, likely reflecting the attitudes of their parents.  In that era, the Supreme Court was actively enforcing Civil Rights legislation — the racial integration of public schools and the right to vote, all stubbornly resisted by a bloc of former Confederate states. The pushback in the South against these Supreme Court decisions was seismic, leading to confrontations with the National Guard. For a fleeting moment, it appeared that Arizona’s arch-conservative Senator Barry Goldwater might win the 1964 presidential election for the Republican party, over the Democratic incumbent from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Goldwater, a libertarian, worked to unravel FDR’s New Deal, which consisted of multiple assistance programs, including Social Security. Sound familiar?

This was an era when Republicans reviled everything Russian, while those on the Left kind of liked the place (China, too), even making excuses for Stalin’s genocidal actions. Something must have happened because Russia is pretty much run (by a czar) the way it’s always been run. Its genocidal actions continue, actively, as before, while our loyalties, and even our principles, have been turned inside out, as though we’re not particularly smitten with democracy anymore, or the right of all citizens to participate in it. Oh yes, in 1964, LBJ won that election in a landslide.

It should also be noted that after Goldwater left the U.S. Senate, he openly supported gays in the military, the right to abortion, adoption rights for same-sex couples, environmental protections, and the legalization of medical marijuana. You just never know what lies in people’s hearts.

What Lies in People’s Hearts Is What Theater Was Invented to Address

From what I saw on local stages in 2023, our theater continues to do a pretty good job at that, at least in some quarters. The challenge for local producers is to break through the progressive bubble of conformity that has made some audiences so weary, they’ve given up attending theater. It isn’t because they disagree with the values of identity/gender politics; it’s because they agree with it, and it’s boring to be validated rather than challenged. Conversely, but equally true, it’s also tedious to be continually shamed for the behavior of one’s ancestors, particularly after paying $60 to $100 for the privilege. At least that’s what Stage Raw’s 2023 audience surveys told us. There was considerable discontent with the content on our stages, and the high cost of tickets. They’d rather stay home and wait for Maestro to show up on Netflix, or watch Taylor Swift cheering Travis Kelce in the Kansas City bleachers.

Donald Trump: Onstage and Off

I’ll start with my personal favorite of the year, which could have the title Land of Idiots, but is  actually called Bob’s Holiday Office Party. This is Rob Elk’s and Joe Keyes’s annual-holiday-season pageant, an extended sketch comedy that just completed it’s 26^th year. In 2023, it was at the 99-seat Beverly Hills Playhouse. If we’re very lucky, it will return in 2024. And if we’re super lucky in 2024, we’ll elect a president rather than a czar, perhaps without a conflagration?

The characters in this play are the kinds of people who would tilt the next election towards Trump. Bob’s Holiday Office Party is set in Neuterburg, Iowa, and it’s populated by characters who are strikingly similar to the characters in New Hampshire described in David Siders’s article in Politico. It’s a tribe, though they’d rather be called a “family.”

Bob Finhead (played by Elk, sort of like Bob Newhart) is an insurance agent, representing Neuterburg’s denizens (all cousins of Archie Bunker in Norman Lear’s All in the Family), and he’s throwing a holiday party for them. These denizens are portrayed by some of L.A.’s thoroughbred comedians, including Elk, Keyes, Mark Fite, Pat Towne, Sirena Irwin, Andrea Hutchman,  J.P. Manoux, Judy Heheghan and Johanna McKay.

The “plot” is simply a descent into comedic anarchy, fueled by booze and drugs, repressed sexuality, scatological humor, cheeseballs, and a dash of anti-Semitism. You won’t find a Democrat with a Geiger Counter. Finhead comes closest, though he identifies as an Independent, wading his way through Trump country. The Mayor (Towne) finally declares that he’s gay, but everyone at the party is too drunk at this point to hear, or to care. A pair of twin sisters (Heheghan and McKay, identically attired in lunatic Christmas attire) attend Q-Anon meetings, recite the sins of the “Biden crime-family” like gospel, all with a giggle and cavalier wave of the hand, in unison; the production is rife with superlative physical comedy, directed by Matt Roth. Every character has an opinion, every opinion is unhinged, and almost nobody seems able to leave this asylum. Sherriff Joe (Keyes) pontificates on the state of the town while sitting on a toilet. We see all this because the pothead handyman (Fite) hasn’t gotten around to returning the bathroom door to its hinges. Joe pauses mid-sentence to grunt and let things fall where they may. In the land of lowbrow humor, brows don’t come any lower than this.

I saw a version of this show in 2007, when it was just a wacky parody of small-town America. In 2023, the times lend a weird brilliance to the ribald humor. Perhaps in two or three years, it will return to being just a wacky parody of small-town America. We should be so lucky. At present, the show’s impact is like that of a deadly anchor held aloft in the sky by a hot air balloon. Anyone who sees it prays it won’t come crashing down. An image from the show that lingers is the lipstick-smeared town tart, Brandi, sublimely played by Sirena Irwin, totally out of her mind, crossing the stage, lithe with the dexterity of a cat while spewing cheeseballs from her mouth onto the other characters. That pretty much sums up our present cultural moment.

At this same venue, slightly earlier in the year, was a production of Allen Barton’s Outrage (co-produced by Crimson Square Theatre Company), a social drama set in LA and couched in psychological realism, but toying with cancel culture like a kitten with a ball of string to such an extent that I wondered if Barton was just having fun baiting his audiences.

The play has a couple of roots anchoring it: one is Trump, and the decision of a theater school’s director named Ethan (Peter O’Connor), and his wife (Cameron Meyer) to vote for him in 2016. This is not something either of them brags about. It slips out, and causes, well, outrage among the theater students. The second root is the killing of an unarmed Black teen by the LAPD, and the refusal of the school’s director to join a wave of Internet posts condemning the killing. For the director, such a post is not pertinent to the purpose of his school (it’s not a social or political organization), and there’s also what he considers conformist virtue-signaling, and his right to keep his opinions to himself, or at least out of social media. For this position, his students wage a campaign against him. He loses his job, and his theater gets torched.

This synopsis makes the play sound like some reactive response to the excesses of the extreme Left, but it’s more nuanced than that. Still, the central characters’ support for Trump is a bridge I personally was unable to cross. Ethan is no denizen of Neuterburg, Iowa, whose every utterance is based on a conspiracy theories, disinformation, or substance-induced derangement. Rather, he is smart, articulate, thoughtful — yet he offers no actual reason for why he voted the way he did. How could he have such recklessly poor judgment? Nobody deserves to see their theater torched, but honestly. . .

That’s precisely the view held by one of Ethan’s former colleagues (Kirk Fogg), who did not participate in the cabal against Ethan, but neither did he stand by him — solely because of his continued support for Trump.

In this way, playwright Barton is smart enough to anticipate the various reactions to his central character, and to put them on the stage, while sliding in his condemnation of Stalinist conformity to knee-jerk social-group judgements that destroy careers.

Barton throws in a powerful scene involving one of Ethan’s former students (Evan Michael Ewing), who signed the petition against Ethan. The student grudgingly admits that he was hoodwinked, and that he hadn’t actually read what he was signing. He runs into Ethan and his wife by accident, and tenders a sublimely awkward apology, which Ethan has the grace to accept (though his wife does not, accusing the student of moral cowardice for not standing up sooner).

This week there’s reportage from France about a petition, signed by over 50 French luminaries (actors, producers, French presidents and their spouses), defending actor Gérard Depardieu, who has been accused of sexual assault by several women and, in a documentary made about him, said some misogynistic things. The petition, however, points out that he has been accused, not convicted  — in other words, he’s being “lynched” without due process; moreover, his history and value as an actor is too great to be cavalierly burned on some pyre of momentary self-righteousness.  French progressives are “disappointed” by this petition (“We always believe the victims.”), subtly threatening the people who signed it. This stuff is international.

I must note Peter Zizzo’s spectacular performance as Murray, Ethan’s would-be new employer, and owner of a local warehouse. The man is also a Trump-supporter, a blustering, rage-fueled tyrant, screaming at his employees and proffering an unhinged rant against the scientists who recommended that people wear Covid masks in enclosed spaces. He finds a soft spot for the now taciturn Ethan when he learns that his theater got torched, though he’s unclear what a theater is, or what it’s for. He’s the closest this play comes to the people of Neuterburg, Iowa, and he might fit in well there, except for Neuterburg’s anti-Semitism.

Playwright Phinneas Kiyomura in general, and actor Kirsten Vansgness in particular, have a soft-spot for the current, presumed Republican nominee, treating him as a creature of pathos — i.e. a loser. If only. This comes from Kiyomura’s clever verse-play called Nimrod, at Theatre of NOTE, which showed up in the spring. Nimrod frames our current political moment inside an 18^th century canvas (where the verse feels right at home). The title character, Nimrod, is Trump — but it’s Trump as the king he imagines himself to be, surrounded by stand-ins for Melania (Hiwa Chow Elms); their son Barron, here renamed Dukie (Asha Noel Iyer); a bodyguard (Edward Moravesik) with whom “Lani” is  having an affair; Giuliani as Ghoulani (Sierra Marcks) and so on. The comedy contains more Shakespearean tropes than anybody can count.

Vangsness portrayed Nimrod as a mad-sad King George III, running for re-election and feeling increasingly betrayed and boxed-in. She didn’t impersonate the leading Republican candidate; rather, she distilled the essences of his mannerisms, per the play’s stage directions. The result was a revelation.

This was before the indictments and lawsuits rolled in, so one could argue that the play is prophetic. But the point here is not that a play produced in the spring anticipated what would unfold in the winter. The point is that for critics (I mean that in the general sense) such as myself, who hold such strong predispositions about this character, Vansgness aimed for something larger, to supplement and temper those predispositions. Her portrayal, under Alina Phelan’s ever-so-smart direction, was so humane in capturing the character’s isolation and suffering (Nimrod’s best friend becomes a pig that he fucked, whom he genuinely cares for above all humans), that the character emerged more tragic than demonic. Imagine Nixon but without the grace to stand down.

Still, the question remains: How do we endure such Shakespearean malevolence that continues unabated? How do we get out of it alive, and sane?

The Deputy

2023 featured at least four different productions of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in Southern California: Foolish Productions at Hollywood’s Broadwater, City Garage in Santa Monica, Ophelia’s Jump in Upland, and Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena. In late October, I took a trip to Kosovo, and there it was again!

What is it about this play, in these times, that seems to have made it so appealing all around the world? My guess is that it’s in the presentation of its central character, Angelo (Deputy to the Duke, who leaves for a while, or pretends to) — an embodiment of sanctimonious, zealous hypocrisy — the enforcer of sexual abstinence who can’t contain his lust and consequently indulges in an abuse of his power. He’s like a closeted gay who bashes other gays. Angelo paved the way for Tartuffe, whose conman-like qualities, obviously, are universal.

One of the three versions I saw in 2023 was writer-director Jessica Kubzansky’s Measure Still For Measure at Boston Court Theatre, an immersive treatment about an acting company putting on a production of the play, and homing in on the abuse of power by the production’s director (Rob Beitzel) (he kisses an actress without her consent) thus mirroring the malfeasance of Angelo (Leo Marks).

The production’s first half was dedicated to the audience meeting the company — in the parking lot, in the lobby, in a rehearsal studio, and being privy to their domestic lives  (i.e. phone calls to friends, to insurance companies, etc). These are fine actors, but I didn’t buy it. Nor did I care much about the backstage dramas. Don’t quite know why. Perhaps because it was supposed to be hyper-realistic yet it came off as staged? I’m wondering if immersive theater is like a squeaky toy for a puppy: immeasurably appealing when first presented (well over a decade ago), but after time, the novelty wears off, and the demands of authenticity become more rigorous?

Ghost Road Theater pulled it off with more aplomb in its production of Super Duper at LA Theatre Center, a living gallery installation dedicated to the career and character of an off-stage artist. The audience was invited to wander through a series of installations and meet a single character in each setting who proffered views and experience on the artist, while interacting with the onlookers like a talk-show host.

Still, when Measure Still for Measure finally made it into the actual theater in Act 2, and the production focused on the rehearsals of Shakespeare’s play, the stage artifice fell into place, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, perhaps because they were rehearsing a play, or pretending to. Maybe actors are better at pretending than being? These are called plays, after all. Maybe being is the purview of the audience.

Director Aaron Henne and his Theatre Dybbuk took a similar approach to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Annotated), a potent, experimental treatment that ran for two-weeks in the Shatto Chapel of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles before touring across the Pacific Northwest. Stained glass windows and Christian saints peered down on the machinations of Jewish Shylock, aggrieved by Venetian anti-Semitism, and making good on his demand for a pound of flesh should his Christian client default on his loan. But this wasn’t so much a presentation of the play as snippets of the play, explained and interspersed with contemporary cultural references. In a show heavily narrated (by the actors, with mics), Ron DeSantis and many prior U.S. presidents put in appearances in a production largely about bigotry — the kind of bigotry that burns eternal in a circle of hell, traversing continents and epochs. The costumes featured overalls, pantaloons, while the set relied on music stands and trash bins. The ensemble included Joe Jordan, Adam Lebowitz-Lockard, Julie A. Lockhart, Diana Tanaka and Inger Tudor, among others, while including consulting scholars such as Jennifer Wells, Erith Jaffe-Berg, and Daniel Pollack-Pelzner.

Worlds So Far Away, Yet so Close

Candide may have traveled the world and concluded that everything worth knowing can be found in one’s own garden, but he only figured that out after considerable traveling. Without those travels, he’d have just been another rube. If one can’t travel to places where they may not speak English, City Garage in Santa Monica will bring those other places to its stage. While it isn’t the only theater in the region that frequently produces play by non-Anglo-American scribes, it’s among the very few, underscoring this theater’s long-standing defiance of provincialism, not only in local theater, but in the culture.

This year the company presented two plays associated with the Ukrainian Worldwide Readings Project (dozens of plays curated and translated or co-translated by John Freedman). One, Ghost Land, was by Ukrainian playwright Andriy Bondarenko; the other was Belarussian author Andrei Kureichik’s Insulted. Belarus. Frederique Michel handily directed both, with strong tech support (video design, in particular) by Charles A. Duncombe.

In Ghost Land, (translated by Freedman with Vladyslav Hetmanenko), Bondarenko interweaves three tales: a Ukrainian soldier (David E. Frank) witnesses the slaughter of his fellow troops, Russian soldiers (Isaac Strackonis and Anthony Sannazzarro) torment a married Urkainian couple (Andy Kallok and Juliet Morrison) and their pregnant daughter (Léa DeCarmo), and a reporter (Angela Beyer) endures torture from a psychopathic FSB agent (Gifford Irvine).

This is definitely from the Eat-Your-Spinach, It’s-Good-For-You school of theater, aiming to arouse if not incite an affinity for the victims of a neighboring bully. It is unapologetically partisan, and is probably more powerful in retrospect than when it was presented — now that the West is waffling on its military support for Ukraine, even though that country is fighting and dying for (what used to be) our principles and our interests. Just wait until after Ukraine is subjugated and Russian tanks roll into Poland, a nation we’re obligated by our treaty with NATO to defend militarily, i.e., with our own troops. Does anyone seriously imagine that Putin is truer to his word than Hitler was? And our isolationist detractors thought that supporting Ukraine was expensive.

Insulted. Belarus (translated by Freedman) is a docudrama concerning the electoral defeat of Belarussian strongman, Alexander Lukashenko (a striking lookalike, Randall Wulff), in 2020, by housewife Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (Beyer). Predictably, Lukashenko refused to acknowledge the results, claiming the election was rigged and subsequently engaging in violent crackdowns against the massive protests that resulted from his quest to remain in power. That’s the story unfolding on the stage.

It’s more than a cautionary tale. We were warned of such behavior on our shores after our own election in 2020. And now we’re cavalierly inviting the aggrieved wolf back into the henhouse after having once shooed him away.

We’d be idiots to imagine that we can merely shoo him away twice. This is the dread that will accompany all those champagne bottles popping, as we lurch into 2024.

Worthy, Unfinished Plays

I’d like close this year-end review with the sense of hope that comes from theaters that present new plays that may not be perfect, but nonetheless are invested in looking at what makes us human, and doing so in exotic and unorthodox ways.

In a different time, even a different century, this is what our local theater did best, serving as a laboratory for the percolation of new ideas. It was easier then. Theater was far less expensive to produce. And this is why it’s worth the time to salute the gumption, the bravery of the mostly intimate theaters that continue to take these risks. Because a play that doesn’t entirely add up is not necessarily a failure, but a roadmap to a better play. (One could argue that Measure for Measure, with its opening classical structure that devolves into absurdist comedy, is a play that doesn’t add up. Yet it’s performed frequently across the globe, because it still matters.)

So here are a few offerings from 2023 of new plays that matter, despite some dramaturgical clutter that could be easily streamlined should the playwrights even care about such things.

Ghost Road Theater presented John Guerra’s play, directed by Christine Breihan, The Dry Years at the Broadwater. It’s set in a drought-stricken rural California outpost, and concerns the arrival of stranger-rainmaker (Ronnie Clark) — all very American Gothic. The chemistry involved in inducing rainclouds threatens the health of people close to the process. But this isn’t a play about chemistry. It’s about storytelling, truth, and conscience. The play’s central character is a young woman (Melissa Paladino) who engages the rainmaker in defiance of her now absent father’s (Richard Azurdia) expressed wishes, and, in so doing jeopardizes the health of her kid brother (Kelvin Morales) who works closely with the rainmaker. Can she tell the truth of her recklessness to her own young daughter, to whom she’s narrating the saga? How will she be remembered if she tells the truth? What is history, if it’s tampered with to spare feelings? Though this play is set in California, these are the questions coming out of Florida, as the State, and local school boards, take a more authoritarian hand in determining what histories are allowed to get told, and why.

 

Jean Collingsworth’s scintillating play, Sealed Orders — part biodrama and part fantasia — is about Herman Melville (Kelly Franett) and his family, and received a solid production at Ophelia’s Jump in Upland, where it was directed by Beatrice Casagrán. Its central idea is very much in line with the theme in this section of this essay: That for a literary work, critics and even readers are not the final arbiters of quality. Melville’s Moby Dick was never recognized during the author’s lifetime. It quickly went out of print in the U.S., until the Brits saw something brilliant in both the book and Herman Melville that few people stateside could comprehend. Much like Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, it became a cult classic after the author’s death. Bulgakov’s novel was actually banned by the Soviets, whom it made fun of, so it had a double impediment. Moby Dick was condemned by the forces of domestic ignorance and apathy, which is not so different from a book-banning, in retrospect. Melville died imagining he was a failure because he couldn’t make a living from his writing. There’s a somewhat hopeful lesson here for authors in despair — perhaps not comforting, but at least hopeful.

Over at the Road Theatre, Allessandro Camon’s Scintilla probably has too much on its plate. It suggests a house on fire — that’s not just a metaphor, there really is a fire encroaching — where a woman (Taylor Gilbert) with early onset Alzheimer’s refuses to leave. Her imperious son (Kris Fost) and his wife (Krishna Smitha) roll in to whisk her away. She ain’t interested. And she has her reasons. Among other characters, there’s also a Latino workman (Carlos Lacámara), who’s been beaten up after being falsely accused of starting the fire. The end-of-the-world and the loss-of-memory is a beautiful, poetical Beckett-like juxtaposition that gives this play its value. How bigotry, social injustice and family recriminations all play into this left me scratching my head. But on another level, I didn’t really mind. Ann Hearn Tobolowsky directed this attractive production.

The juxtaposition of the end of the world with identity politics blended into each other sweetly, under Amanda McRaven’s direction, in Frozen Fluid, Fly Jameson’s fantastical play, co-presented by Coeurage Ensemble and the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Three scientists Yvonne Cone, Jalana Phillips and Steph LaHane on the performance I attended), find themselves in Antartica, which is melting. Whales are beached. Like Bob’s Holiday Office Party, it’s a bit of clown show, though there’s nothing vulgar here. Rather, on occasion, the actors waddle across the frozen landscape like penguins and discuss the injustice of name-giving without consent, which is odd coming from scientists like these, who spend their careers naming things. At the same time, they question whether how or what one is named even matters, which makes them particularly endearing.

Names may very well matter. Names form the underpinning of the bigotry that Camon’s Scintilla was driving at. Playwright Jameson doesn’t press the point, leaving us instead an open question to ponder. While I know I’m writing here about plays that might suffer from dramaturgical clutter, there’s no clutter in Frozen Fluid. It was just a lovely production, the kind of show that tempers the dread of 2024.

That may not be comforting, but at least it’s hopeful. If there’s theater as smart and kind as this, I’ll cling to hope.