Chas Harvey, Megan Stogner, Ayindé Howell (Photo by Ashley Randall)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
The Actors’ Gang Theater
Through November 16
Topsy Turvy, written and directed by the Actors’ Gang’s longtime artistic director Tim Robbins, who also contributes several original songs, has traveled widely to theater festivals in the EuropeanEastern bloc since it initially opened at the company’s Culver City home last June. Now, this “musical Greek vaudeville” has returned to Culver city for an extended run.
The action commences with a musical number performed by a “Chorus” to live music. When a black-clad Harbinger (Luis Quintana) prognosticates plague and impending doom, the tight-knit group unravels, going into isolation rather than risk infection.
As the death toll mounts, seclusion takes a psychic toll on the immured, who call upon gods from diverse cultural traditions for help. In sharp contrast to the somber, sequestered Chorus, whimsically attired deities (Rynn Vogel did the costumes), along with other antic characters, barge in and out of the action like circus clowns on meth.
There’s comically debauched Bacchus (Scott Harris) and his wacky sidekick Cupid (Quintana), who jokingly point out the welcome distraction of boozing it up when hooking up is no longer an option. In a belabored segue, the Aztec goddess Coatlique (Stephanie G. Galindo) stridently rebukes the predominant Christian culture for the conversion of her divinity into the Virgin of Guadalupe (a cultural appropriation if there ever was one). Raucous Bacchus’s somber opposite Dionysus (Harris, again) rails against the closing of the theaters, essential “sacred spaces” sidelined during the plague. Near play’s end, the goddess Aphrodite (Guebri Van Over) castigates the Chorus for their fearfulness but restores love in their hearts when they display proper repentance.
Robbins interlaces the vaudevillian segments with lengthy philosophizing, much of which, we suspect, derives from his own views as an activist on the decidedly Left side of the political spectrum. But although he is on record that his play is intended as a “catalyst for conversation,” this pandemic parable comes off thematically unbalanced, at least as this reviewer perceived it.
I may be misconstruing, but apparently indignant allusions to the closing of “sacred spaces,” in particular theaters, seem simplistically reductive (one wonders how many people would have attended this production during the height of the pandemic), as are repeated exhortations for the Chorus to come out of isolation so they can rebuild their communities and “breathe” — ironic, considering that hundreds of thousands of Covid victims gasped out their last breaths in hospitals overburdened by the unvaccinated. And the parody of a white-clad doctor, which I took as a “comically” obtuse stand-in for Dr. Fauci, was particularly problematic.
The Actors’ Gang has been an established force on the Los Angeles theatrical scene since the 1980s and Robbins’s association with the group stretches back to its inception. Perhaps Robbins wrote Topsy Turvy in the same spirit of anarchic experimentalism that has defined the Gang over the decades. Yet despite an able cast, commanding staging and strong production elements, the play’s atmosphere contains a whiff of anti-science bias — a troubling undercurrent, even if Robbins didn’t intend it that way.
The Actors’ Gang Theater, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., Oct. 20 and Nov. 3, 2 p.m. thru Nov. 16. (310) 838-4264. www.theactorsgang.com 1 hour 40 minutes with no intermission.
