Mad kings breed dismay, in DC and LA
Trump dumps on theaters. 'Lear Redux' in West LA. Pasadena's 'Doll's House Part 2.' Glendale's 'Glass Menagerie'. 'A Man of No Importance.' 'Life of Pi.' And more...
Forget “the merry month of May. ”
On May 2, two days after I posted the April edition of Angeles Stage, many non-profit arts companies began receiving notifications from the National Endowment for the Arts that some of their previously awarded NEA grants were peremptorily revoked, apparently on the orders of King Donald’s flunkies.
The justification? These particular grants don’t “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president.” Among the affected theater companies in Greater LA that flunked the president’s egocentric standards: South Coast Repertory, Geffen Playhouse, East West Players, Cornerstone Theater, Deaf West Theatre, Hero Theatre, Chance Theater and About Productions.
Greater cuts are surely waiting in the wings. Trump has eliminated the National Endowments of the Arts and the Humanities from his latest proposed budget. The NEA is the largest arts funder in the US, yet it’s one of the smallest federal agencies.
I probably should have anticipated this. The president’s primary action in the arts sphere, since his second inauguration, was to seize unprecedented personal control of the Kennedy Center in Washington. In May, he was still ranting about the center’s previous leaders’ so-called “fraud” (denied by those leaders) and its “woke” events, including, he said, “dance parties” for “queer and trans youth that wasn’t working out too well. They had a Marxist anti-police performance, and they had, uh, a lesbian-only Shakespeare.”
I’ve read speculation suggesting that Trump’s bizarre “lesbian-only Shakespeare” comment probably referred to the jukebox musical “& Juliet,” a Broadway hit with a tour that played the Kennedy Center and which is scheduled to play LA’s Ahmanson Theatre in mid-August and Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa in September. I haven’t seen it. But its creators’ first names are Max and David — not very “lesbian-only”-sounding. From descriptions of the plot, it appears that the title character — Shakespeare’s revived Juliet— becomes attracted to a man other than Romeo. One of her friends is non-binary.
If indeed Trump reacted like this to a Broadway show, I doubt that he has the slightest understanding, let alone appreciation, of non-profit theater — which is bad news for LA, where probably 95% of the professional theater companies are non-profits, in need of grants as well as other donations. Most of these use relatively small venues in which even sellout performances can’t necessarily balance the books — even as audiences and actors cherish the venues’ intimacy.
By the way, if you have access to it, here is an amusing and enlightening Washington Post article about Trump’s own previous participation in the for-profit theater world. This article also led me to this YouTube video of Trump playing a farmer — in perhaps his only appearance in a role on a LA stage? In it, Trump and Megan Mullally sing the theme song from the 1965-1971 TV series “Green Acres” at Shrine Auditorium, near USC, during the 2005 Emmy Awards ceremony. Mullally later referred to the photo of their appearance as her “suicide note.”
Speaking of small venues and books-balancing (two paragraphs back), mid-May also brought word that California Governor Newsom proposes eliminating California’s recently-established Performing Arts Equitable Payroll Fund — an $11.5 million allocation of COVID-era funds that would help small professional arts companies comply with state legislation that makes it harder for those companies to classify workers as independent contractors.
The governor sees his potential cancellation of the program as part of an effort to eliminate an $11.95 billion shortfall in the state budget, which he blames on the effects of Trump’s tariffs and the resulting economic chaos. But removing this particular less-than-1/1000th of that amount from that budget would probably harm small arts companies much more than it would help the state’s budget. Actors’ Equity, now led by president Brooke Shields, strongly opposes the proposed slash.
King Lear strides up Sepulveda
Let’s move on to a mad king who’s currently on a stage in LA — in “Lear Redux,” at the Odyssey Theatre in West LA. It’s a co-production by the Odyssey, New American Theatre and Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble.
This is not the same British-set “King Lear” saga of Shakespeare and even earlier bards. “Lear Redux” occurs in what appears to be contemporary West LA. At one point we see an image of the “king” walking on the sidewalk just north of the Odyssey, with the real-life Sepulveda West Car Wash in the background. But that’s only because he temporarily escaped his usual habitat in his posh bedroom, where he is under the care of nurses 24 hours a day.
This “Lear” (portrayed by Jack Stehlin as full of piss and vinegar, even as his body and mind are deteriorating) is a stage and screen actor, who was once famous enough to be featured as the subject of a “60 Minutes” segment. He apparently played in “King Lear” so many times that he still remembers his lines — and repeats them frequently in real-life situations — even as his brain slips into senility. He often wears a cheap crown, usually thinking of himself as Lear to the extent that we don’t even learn his name, even in that faux-”60 Minutes” segment.
He doesn’t simply recite those lines by himself. He has trained his family members and his nurses to join him in Shakespeare’s exchanges. His adult daughters — usually begrudgingly — play the roles of Lear’s daughters Goneril (Jade Sealey) and Regan (Eve Danzeisen). His younger brother (Dennis Gersten) plays Kent, and his male nurses play Edgar (Ahkei Togun) and Edmund (Andres Velez).
Meanwhile, he thinks of his beautiful, friendly dog (a remarkable puppet, designed by Eli Presser and manipulated and voiced by Emily Yetter) as his youngest daughter Cordelia, who is already dead.
You don’t have to sift through the complicated “King Lear” plot to appreciate “Lear Redux.” Much of the original narrative is no longer in this considerably shorter adaptation, written and directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca. But several choreographed music segments, set to modern pop recordings, have been added. I interpreted these as figments of the old man’s imagination, providing temporary stimulation for his brain, but also providing visual and aural variety for this production. Perhaps this actor also had appeared in musicals?
He ends up outside his castle, so to speak, as does Shakespeare’s Lear. But the location here is an urban 7-Eleven (perhaps scenic designer Mark Guirguis was inspired by the 7-Eleven down the block, at Sepulveda and Olympic?), not a windy moor. He’s joined there by two homeless men — played by the same actors who play the nurses — and apparently by the blind Gloucester, who is played by Gersten.
I’m not sure how Farmanesh-Bocca pulled it off, but the ending — mostly Gloucester’s spoken meditation on time, life and death, accompanied by changes in lighting (by Bosco Flanagan) and sounds (designed by Farmanesh-Bocca himself) carries the audience along with this urban Lear into another dimension. I was more moved by this “Lear Redux” than I am by most “King Lear”s.
The Odyssey is also currently the home of “Love’s End,” by the French writer Pascal Rambert. It consists of two long tirades of invective — first from a man, then a woman, aimed at each other. It’s almost entirely lacking in any narrative context that might make these polemics less tiresome. In a press release about the production, the director Maurice Attias says the play is “a highly theatrical battle of words, a tragic-comic Beatrice and Benedick. What happens when the chemistry is gone?”
Huh? As I recall, the “chemistry” between Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” gradually strengthens, via repartee instead of speechifying. We can refresh our memory about that soon, as the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga is about to open another “Much Ado,” re-set in the US at the end of the Civil War.
Nora returns, yet again
If you want to watch a former couple “when the chemistry is gone,” a much better (and much funnier) bet is Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House Part 2,” at Pasadena Playhouse, directed by Jennifer Chang.
As you might recall, Ibsen’s classic part 1 (originally produced in 1879) ends with the Norwegian Nora walking out on her husband and family. Hnath’s sequel, which first opened at South Coast Repertory in 2017, is rapidly becoming a modern classic. It became the most produced play in America in the 2018-2019 survey conducted by American Theatre magazine — and tied for the same title a year later.
Besides that South Coast premiere of Hnath’s sequel, I’ve now seen three other productions of it in Greater LA. Beverly Hills Playhouse presented both the original part 1 and part 2 in repertory last fall. International City Theatre in Long Beach did Part 2 in 2022. I don’t want to discuss the plot here, in case you have yet to see it, but let’s just say that Nora has a legal reason to re-visit the house she left, and the discussions become intense.
Chang’s staging in Pasadena is my favorite (so far). Some of the credit goes to the decision to provide limited seating for some audience members on the stage, behind the main view of the action. I don’t know how that worked out for them, but from my seat in the main auditorium, this variation in the seating and staging carried a suggestion of a public town hall, like so many we’ve seen on TV news recently, instead of keeping the tension within the confining boundaries of most domestic dramas.
Because the playhouse is larger than any of the other venues in which I’ve seen the play, it also required more physically assertive performances by Elizabeth Reaser as Nora and Kimberly Scott as the housekeeper who has raised Nora’s children — and the actors expertly complied, perhaps in part because the town-hall format encouraged them to do so. This is not to suggest that the actors playing the less assertive roles — Jason Robert Harner as Nora’s ex and Kahyun Kim as her daughter — should have followed suit. The subtleties of their performances gracefully balance the more emphatic portrayals by Reaser and Scott.
The 70,000-square-feet campus of the century-old playhouse is now once again owned by the theater company that operates it, after decades of renting, thanks to a $15 million fund-raising campaign which had reached 75% of its goal by April 6.
His ambitions weren’t in the warehouse
In “A Doll’s House,” the wife/mother walks out on the family. In “The Glass Menagerie,” now playing through Monday at Antaeus Theatre in Glendale, it’s the exasperated adult son who will walk out on his mother and sister and his job in a warehouse — only to experience more later regret for that decision than Nora expresses about her choice in Hnath’s play.
Tennessee Williams’ first big hit, from 1944, probably needs no more description of its plot than does “A Doll’s House.” I’ve seen it many times, but I was again struck by how spellbinding it can be, at Carolyn Ratteray’s Antaeus staging. The spellbinders include Josh Odsess-Rubin in the “Tom” Wingfield/Williams role, Gigi Bermingham as his mother figure, Emily Goss as his sister who is as fragile as her “glass menagerie”, and Alex Barlas as the “gentleman caller” who might be this family’s last best hope. The design team — especially Karyn Lawrence on lighting — works wonders.
Walking on the Wilde side
This is the final weekend of A Noise Within’s production of the 2002 Terrence McNally/Stephen Flaherty/Lynn Ahrens musical “A Man of No Importance,” based on a 1994 film starring Albert Finney. The musical had one previous LA production, but it’s hardly a classic. I’d guess that ANW, a classics company, staged it because a vision of Oscar Wilde (David Nevell) looms over the story of closeted Irish bus conductor Alfie (Kasey Mahaffey), who is trying to create a production of Wilde’s “Salome” at his local parish’s amateur theater group — in Dublin in 1964. Meanwhile Alfie’s sister and roommate (Juliana Sloan) is trying to match him up with, natch, a woman. Mahaffey’s performance is engaging, but the musical itself somehow feels somewhat remote yet slightly routine, maybe because we’ve seen so many coming-out dramas since 1964, or maybe because the script and score don’t come close to the same creative team’s “Ragtime.”
By the way, if you want to understand how truly deluded Alfie is in his ambition to present “Salome” at a church, read Charles McNulty’s 2006 LA Times review of what was probably LA’s last big-name (Al Pacino as Herod) production of “Salome,” at the Wadsworth Theatre in LA.
Speaking of Wilde, he also appears as a character in Tom Jacobson’s “Tasty Little Rabbit,” at Moving Arts in Atwater. Wilde was one of several gay artists who vacationed in Taormina, Sicily in the 1890s. But the scenes set in that environment are flashbacks from the 1930s, when Italian fascists were cracking down on pornography. Rob Nagle plays Wilde in the flashback and an investigator from the fascists in the 1930s. The parts of the play don’t cohere smoothly. If you want a much more detailed opinion that mostly rings true for me, too, read Deborah Klugman’s review in Stage Raw.
‘Pi’ under the sky
“The Life of Pi” closes this weekend at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown LA, but the production will move to Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa for a June 3-15 run. Based on Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, preceded by an Ang Lee movie version, and adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti (after two previous stage adaptations), it’s an adventure saga about a young man whose ship is wrecked as it’s moving a zoo from India across the Pacific to North America. Pi (Taha Mandviwala) is the only human who survives — in close proximity to a tiger and other animals on a small lifeboat. The story mostly kept me interested, but the main attraction of Max Webster’s staging (with Ashley Brooke Monroe as the tour director) is the extensive puppet corps designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell. It’s quite a theatrical spectacle, but some might prefer to either see it in the more realistic movie or to imagine it in their own minds by reading the book.
‘Califas’ dreamin’…and the pre-tariff ‘Chinese Lady’
Roger Q. Mason wrote two plays that opened this month — both are part of a planned “Califas” trilogy. “California Story” (closing this weekend) is produced by the new Outside In Theatre at LACC — while the company awaits completion of its own theater in Highland Park. The titular “Story” is supposedly that of the last Mexican governor of California, Pio Pico (1801-1894), but Mason seemingly tries to divert us from it with such devices as a sparkly contemporary chorus line on roller skates. As in “Tasty Little Rabbit,” the parts don’t cohere well, and it all lasts too long — 2 hours, 45 minutes including intermission on opening night.
Meanwhile, Mason’s shorter “Hide & Hide” (playing through June 29) is at the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz. If “California Story” is too much, “Hide & Hide” is not quite big enough — two actors play a Filipina immigrant and a Texas rent-boy who meet in 1980 LA, but they also play too many other characters. It might have clicked if the production had more than two actors. As is, it almost seems like a showcase for those two actors.
A much earlier female Asian immigrant to America is the subject of Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady,” staged by Shinshin Yuder Tsai at Chance Theater in Anaheim. In 1834, Afong Moy was 14, in China, when her parents sold her to a promoter who brought her to New York and made her the star of a traveling museum exhibit — as the first Chinese female to arrive in the country. We feel Afong’s bewilderment, then her pain as she matures — and even after she disappears from the historical record. Afong finally (and apparently posthumously) erupts with a list of anti-Chinese incidents in US history. The only other character in the play is her bilingual male Chinese interpreter, whose conflicted soul is more subtle. However, as in “Hide & Hide” (above), Suh’s play would be somewhat livelier if other characters were on the stage — for example, the man who brought Afong to America, or perhaps at least one of her parents.
A pre-Musk Tesla tale
Of course some immigrants to America made much smoother transitions than those in “Hide & Hide” and “The Chinese Lady.” Nikola Tesla, born in the current Croatia, immigrated in 1884, and within four years he was using his alternating-current ideas to become wealthy. His multilingualism, developed when he was more or less a child prodigy, probably helped him adjust so quickly.
Tesla’s early years in America are the primary focus of “Flashes of Light,” a new musical by Billy Larkin and Ron Boustead, staged by Jon Lawrence Rivera at Sierra Madre Playhouse. But attention is diverted away from the actual story of a scientific genius by adding a quartet of four ancient Greek gods who follow his activities from above. In fact, one of them — Electra, of course — is so taken with him that she violates Greek-god protocol and makes her presence tangible, assisting him with divine electrical charges (as if his scientific know-how weren’t sufficient). This is probably the only way to inject a little romance into the show — the real Tesla remained single and without any domestic partners throughout his life (although in this narrative, a real-life married woman also has a crush on him). The somewhat generic score has too many (26) numbers, too many of which sound like 21st-century pop, usually with a backbeat, instead of anything from Tesla’s period.
Let’s end with some comedy
I enjoyed Steven Dietz’s “Becky’s New Car” — the tale of a middle-aged married woman who works at a car dealership and becomes entangled with a rather clueless but wealthy customer — at Pacific Resident Theatre in 2010. Now I’ve renewed my appreciation of it with the current revival at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, with a layered performance by Jean Robbins as Becky. Cate Caplin’s staging smoothly brings a wide-ranging story together, and Theatre 40’s stage offers more room for the play to spread out to different locales, in contrast to PRT’s narrower stage.
Unfortunately I wasn’t as amused by PRT’s current comedy, Chaya Doswell’s “Fostered,” in which aging marrieds, on the verge of retiring in Hawaii, are suddenly overwhelmed by the problems of their four adult children. At the performance I attended, the laughter seldom surpassed “mild” on the meter. The last scene, which ought to leave us laughing, seemed strangely bewildering. And the main supporting character from outside the central family — yes, an immigrant — struck me as an implausible contrivance.