Lee Wilkof, Liz Larsen, Geoffrey Wade and Jake Horowitz in The Reservoir at Geffen Playhouse (Photo by Jeff Lorch).

The Fine Art of Losing One’s Mind

The Reservoir at the Geffen, and Lear Redux at the Odyssey

“Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. For I am mainly ignorant of what place this is; and all the skill I have remembers not these garments; nor I know where I did lodge last night.” — King Lear

In Jake Brasch’s newish play, The Reservoir (Geffen Playhouse), an NYU theater school dropout named Josh (Jake Horowitz) finds himself on a Colorado riverbank with a wound to his arm, the cause of which he doesn’t recall. Not unlike King Lear, he’s only vaguely cognizant of where he is and how he got there, nor does he remember with any specificity where he was the day prior, or have a clear idea of where he’s going.

His problem, identified by a park ranger (Adrián González, playing a variety of roles) is that Josh is wasted. The ranger feels a modicum of sympathy since they’re both of “the tribe.” (Josh tells the ranger “shabbat shalom” and the ranger lets him go. This is an echo of a joke in a famous scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David is caught on a video camera sticking his finger down his throat during his friends’ renewal of their wedding vows; he then has to plead with the reluctant cameraman to erase the image by appealing to their tribal connection.) “Wasted” is also the perfect word to describe what Josh is doing with his life.

Lear is in his 80s; Josh, in his 20s. One a king, the other a pauper, they both find themselves lost in the world — Lear, from some combination of inflated self-entitlement (that’s what being king does to a person, I suppose) and his misguided trust in the loyalty of his daughters, all conflated into a kind of grief-stricken dementia; and Josh, from his irrepressible binge/blackout drinking, which has led him, too, to wander aimlessly through the storms of his life.

The Reservoir aims to interconnect the Lear-like memory-loss of Alzheimer’s to the memory-loss of blackout drinking. Josh’s beloved grandmother, Irene (the endearing Carolyn Mignini), slips into the oblivion of the former disease, which Josh realizes too late because he’s been dwelling in his own oblivion from the latter disease. Add that guilt to Josh’s many causes for self-loathing.

And so, Josh, as spirited as he is wounded, seeks out remedies for his grandmother, even in the midst of trying to cure himself (or perhaps as a form of therapy for himself), and we get a kind of analysis of Alzheimer’s and what it does to brain cells. Yet the connection between these two diseases is more lyrical than scientific, and the playwright is perfectly aware of that, since one of the characters points it out: One can be cured, the other can’t, his other grandmother, Beverly (a spitfire performance by Liz Larsen), extolls. (Even this isn’t entirely accurate, since both diseases can be prompted into remission or part-remission, but not cured.)

Josh heavily narrates his own story of attempted recovery, and that story is the play’s spine. The script specifies that this is Josh’s fever-dream, in which Josh’s mother (Marin Hinkle), his bookstore boss, Hugo (González), his two grandmothers and his two grandfathers (the excellent Geoffrey Wade and Lee Wilkov), also drop in.  Which is fine, except that there isn’t a moment in this play when any character doesn’t say what they mean, and mean what they say. This unflinching earnestness not only feels at a remove from our times — or any times — it dissipates opportunities for subtext, and the characterizations and complexities of people dwelling within their own contradictions. Rather, we’re served up a series of essentially comedic and/or empathetic foils for the author’s predetermined opinion of them. Which is a long way of saying that they are sitcom characters in a play that presents the promise and premise of something far greater.

The causes of Lear’s despair are many, and palpable in that play, whereas the causes of Josh’s despair are vagaries: feelings of neglect, perhaps the stigma of being gay in Red-state Colorado (that’s speculation, since the play deals so fleetingly with Josh’s sexuality). He’s an addict, and the play asks us to go with that. We meet Josh’s mother, Patricia, who has tossed in the towel of caring for a son who has so frequently betrayed his promises to stay on an addiction-recovery program. Having once taken him at his word and then having her cash stolen by him for the purchase of more booze, she now won’t even let him in her door until he provides evidence of keeping his promises. There’s no sight, or mention, of a father. Why would such an amiable young man with at least a couple of loving relatives crash and burn? Is this a self-esteem issue, or has it to do with what we’ve become as a culture? From this play, that remains an open question.

With the actor Horowitz capably at the helm of the narrative, there’s a jocular tone under Shelley Butler’s direction — so jocular, it’s as though the production fears the darkness at the heart of the story. There are, for example, jazzercize sequences with actors costumed in peppy, blazing-colored leggings, tops and hairbands; It feels as though we’ve entered a grown-up gym room in Sesame Street, having drifted from the midst of a story about a young man’s torment. Brasch’s play already has a keen and welcome sense of humor, but this very well-performed yet unfocused production underscores rather than mitigates the play’s wobbling dramaturgy.

Takeshi Kata’s set presents a series of five proscenium frames that vaguely resemble strategically off-kilter frames of mid-20th century television screens. Per the author’s request, Josh’s four grandparents are parked within the most upstage of these prosceniums, on four chairs facing forward. The characters enter the other frames when needed. All of the set pieces are portable. Josh’s maternal grandparents are from Nebraska, so when Irene ruminates on her youth in a dream sequence, cornfields roll in from all sides. In one scene, there’s a bench on one side, a chair on the other, and two car-seats with a steering wheel closer to center-stage. The slightly awkward aesthetics of this cinematic stage picture make one speculate on whether this stage play has ambitions beyond the theater.

The production has three regional theater partners: Alliance Theatre (Atlanta), Denver Center Theatre for the Performing Arts, and the Geffen Playhouse.

 

Clowning Around With Lear

Sometimes it seems that the only way to get a play on these days is to have multiple producers; such is also the case with Lear Redux, written, directed, and choreographed by John Farmanesh-Bocca, and presented by Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in association with The New American Theatre and Not Man Apart – Physical Theatre Ensemble.

As in The Reservoir, Lear Redux jokes around with one man’s despair. Mark Guirguis’ sets feature a large bed stage center, a bed so large it’s not in a hospital, despite the IV drip stand on one side and two male nurses (Andres Velez and Ahkei Togun) who stand by the patient (Jack Stehlin). This must be some home-care arrangement.

In Farmanesh-Bocca’s own sound design, we hear the campy mid-20th century recordings of “The Sandman,” followed by “Misty,” during which the king enacts multiple attempts at suicide — with a knife, with poison, flailing around the bed in agony, arriving at the very moment of his expiration, eyes-bugging out, before winking at the audience and returning to life for yet another attempt. This is actually straight out of the Pyramus and Thisbe routine in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, itself a parody of the deaths of Romeo and Juliet.

Stehlin’s technique is spot-on, and his unfettered joy at being such a ham is infectious.

Whereas in The Reservoir, the issue of a jazzercise class in a play about a youth who’s lost his way presents an issue of clashing sensibilities, not so the re-framing of King Lear (a tragedy) as a farce. In Lear Redux, the rules of the road are clear from the first green light. The first 10 to 15 minutes of Lear Redux are entirely physical theater. The seven-actor ensemble performs a showbiz-y dance in unison, reminiscent of the performance style of another local physical theater troupe, Theatre Movement Bazaar, and their riffs on Gogol, Chekhov and Tennessee Williams.

Call it deconstruction, reconstruction, or whatever you like — the source material is a piñata, waiting to have the candy knocked out of it by children with clubs.

The premise here is that Lear is also listed in the program as “Actor,” once famous (we see a projection of a 60 Minutes sequence of this Actor, who won Oscar and Tony awards, and more) but now consigned to whatever oblivion awaits once-famous actors who have been largely forgotten. Which is every actor who was ever famous, and every actor who wasn’t.

In this redux, devoted daughter Cordelia (Emily Yetter, a fine performer and puppeteer) conveys a puppet-dog, as a stand-in for Cordelia’s loyalty. When she finally releases the puppet, in the scene after she’s been hanged, the image of the dog lying inert on the stage floor is quite moving.

In the sliver of a new play that accompanies a compressed re-enactment of King Lear, we learn that the Actor was a neglectful father, as famous dads can be, and that his two daughter (Jade Sealey and Eve Danzeisen) who benefitted from his largess, harbor deep resentments. They also portray Goneril and Regan. Meanwhile, Actor’s comparatively temperate Brother (Dennis Gersten, doubling as Kent) struggles to bring reason to insanity.

It could be argued that in the source material, his horrible daughters Goneril and Regan have cause to betray him, since Lear is so arbitrarily cruel: among other things, his needs — his demand, for example, that his entourage be retained (at their expense) in his retirement, drives them nuts. Furthermore, because of his sadistic, rash banishment of honest Cordelia and his loyal servant, Kent, he can’t be trusted. In this play-within-the-play, the two pernicious daughters make a similar case, yet the Actor is more self-involved clown than sadist, a child on a power-trip. This renders the daughters pettier than Goneril and Regan, and their cause more petulant.

One question for Farmanesh-Bocca is: Why re-enact and riff on a towering work if you’re going to shrink-wrap it in pop psychology? I can see plucking out an aspect of a multi-tiered play such as King Lear, and focusing on that. But here, they’re doing pretty much the whole thing. A redux version of a classic is one thing, but to make a great work seem smaller is quite another.

That said, Lear Redux really is nicely done — enacted by an impressive ensemble, physically and emotionally. It possesses a snarky joy that’s of a piece. As Lear, Stehlin stands as a central pillar of vanity and self-absorption, which he relishes. And so did I.

I question how this is in service of the play, or of its bearing on our times, but damn, I had a good time.

THE RESERVOIR by Jake Brasch. Geffen Playhouse, 10886 LeConte Ave., Westwood. Wed.-Sat., 8 pm, Sat., 3 pm, Sun., 2 pm and 7 pm. www.geffenplayhouse.org Running time: One hour and 45-minutes with intermission.

LEAR REDUX Odyssey Theater, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West LA; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 7 pm, dark July 4; thru July 13. OdysseyTheatre.com