Stories outside the stream
'Storyteller of East LA,' Fugard, 'Flower Drum Song,' 'For Want of a Horse,' 'Hell Mouth' and more
“What was the last streaming show that you watched?” That was the final and most inexplicable question asked in the first debate among the top contenders for California governor, on April 22.
Only four of the six candidates answered with specific titles — none of which I knew about. After doing a little research, I concluded that none of the mentioned shows focused mostly on Californians.
If debate moderators want to probe the candidates about their entertainment choices, this request might draw more revealing comments:
“Name a play that’s set in our state and that you saw here, alongside fellow Californians.”
For example, Latino Theater Company is presenting “The Storyteller of East LA,” by Evelina Fernández, in the downstairs venue at Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC) in downtown LA. Gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra represented parts of East LA in the Assembly and the House when he was younger. On April 3, he even attended an immigrant-rights forum at LATC itself (in a larger upstairs venue). But I’m told that he has yet to see “The Storyteller of East LA.”
To be fair to Becerra, he was one of the two candidates who told the debate moderator that he hadn’t seen any recent streaming shows either. He probably believes that he should spend virtually all of his time campaigning, especially in swing districts.
However, “Storyteller of East LA” is a play that should interest not only Angelenos but also any theatergoer. It’s a gripping drama that touches on two contemporary phenomena: increasing life expectancy corresponds with more cases of dementia, and ICE raids could deplete the ranks of those who are paid to care for demented patients in their own homes.
The play isn’t a docudrama. As you can see in the photo, above, the dementia patient Mercy (Lucy Rodriguez) senses and communicates with a hovering angel (Sal Lopez).
One of Mercy’s middle-aged daughters (Zilah Mendoza) is with her daily while the other (Brenda Banda) drops in only occasionally. Lulu (Blanca Isabella Pallini) is the young-adult granddaughter who remembers the stories that Mercy used to tell her, and she also serves as the storyteller (AKA narrator) of this play.
Josefa (Ruth Livier) is a paid caretaker who helps out during the day, but her nighttime equivalent just quit. And Josefa herself is distraught because ICE has apparently snatched her husband.
Longtime observers of the Fernández oeuvre probably recall that she wrote a play titled “Dementia” that opened at LATC in 2002. They might even recall that it also featured an angel. But its dementia was rooted in AIDS, a disease that was likely to affect younger people (the younger Lopez played the patient) more than their elders.
Today, almost everyone who is reaching old age has a degree of concern about dementia, regardless of any history with AIDS. And the recent ICE raids also make the play’s secondary concern strikingly up-to-date.
Especially considering the subject matter, director José Luis Valenzuela’s production is surprisingly…yes, gorgeous. You’ll enjoy the view of Prairie T. Trivuth’s set, Josh Epstein’s lighting, Yee Eun Nam’s projections, Naila Aladdin Sanders’ costumes. Elegant supertitles above the stage translate the mixture of spoken English and Spanish with extremely precise timing, reflecting the bilingualism within this family’s generations — and almost certainly within its captivated audience.
Also currently playing in the same LATC building, in the upstairs smallest space, is “Colored People’s Time,” the late Leslie Lee’s collection of 13 short scenes from the lives of everyday American Blacks from 1859 through 1954, staged by Ben Guillory for his Robey Theatre Company. The more potent vignettes tend to start too late and/or end too soon, while a few less interesting scenes could simply be eliminated with no great loss. But performances by the actors playing different roles across time add up to a sum that’s greater than the parts.
Fugard…and ‘Flower Drum Song’
Speaking of exploring the effects of anti-Black racism, the South African playwright Athol Fugard — who died in March 2025 — chose a structure that couldn’t be more different from Lee’s in his 1982 opus “ ‘Master Harold’…and the Boys,” which Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse has masterfully revived.
It has only three characters. It runs about 100 minutes in one setting — a South African tea room in 1950. The cast includes the veteran South African star John Kani as the older of the two servants in the room, with Nyasha Hatendi as his younger colleague and Ben Beatty as the young white man whose family runs the shop. Co-directing are Fugard vet Emily Mann and the Geffen’s artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney. It’s the best production so far in the Geffen’s 2025-2026 season.
In more recent South African developments, you might have heard that in his second term Donald Trump made an exception to his mostly anti-asylum-seeker stance in order to accommodate white Afrikaners from South Africa.
Then again, if Trump were to see East West Players’ “Flower Drum Song” (with David Henry Hwang’s second rewrite of the book) — might he make an additional exception for young women fleeing the still ostensibly Communist China?
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical is set in the late ‘50s, when China was much more Communist than it is now. After young Mei-Li’s father is arrested and killed by the authorities, she escapes to San Francisco, along with his “flower drum.”
For this revival in downtown LA’s Little Tokyo, East West Players has forsaken the former church where it usually performs (irony alert — that building’s official name is the David Henry Hwang Theater). Instead, this version of “Flower Drum Song” is at the larger Aratani Theatre, which is part of the co-producing Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, about two blocks south of the Hwang.
In 2018, when Snehal Desai led EWP before he was hired as artistic director of Center Theatre Group, he also used the Aratani for the new musical “Allegiance.” I like the Aratani, especially for musicals. It’s more comfortable than the cramped EWP headquarters to the north, and the sightlines are generally better.
EWP’s “Song” is directed by Desai’s successor as the company’s artistic director, Lily Tung Crystal. Grace Yoo’s performance as Mei-Li and Marc Oka’s as her uncle Wang, who initially runs a failing “Chinese opera” group but then morphs into an All-American showman, are exceptional. The matinee that I saw was only slightly marred by the use of an understudy who carried the script through much of it.
During the curtain call, I appreciated hearing a roll call of where every actor was born. So many were born in the Los Angeles area, since the musical’s origin, that this figuratively helped expand the show’s impact beyond the Bay area of seven decades ago. However, it was followed by an unnecessary reprise of “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” sung by Kenton Chen — who plays the show’s one gay character. The song has such cringe-inducing lyrics — FYI, Hammerstein was in his 60s when he wrote them — that it really shouldn’t be sung more than once in any revival.
By the way, as I publish this, the Los Angeles Times has yet to review either “The Storyteller of East LA” or “Flower Drum Song” — even though the New York Times published a feature article about the latter LA revival. Today LAT theater critic Charles McNulty posted comments on three productions — in New York.
‘Mean Girls’… and the opposite
Recent musicals that focus on “girls” these days aren’t always as upbeat as Hammerstein’s lyrics, as displayed in director/choreographer Dana Solimando’s revival of the Tina Fey/Jeff Richmond/Neil Benjamin musical “Mean Girls,” soon to enter its final weekend at La Mirada Theatre. This is the teen-clique comedy’s home-grown SoCal premiere — as opposed to the Broadway tour that passed through the area in 2023. Its design achievements are as distinctive and as dazzling — or maybe more so — as the tour’s equivalents. The stage pops, virtually non-stop — the results of a top-notch design team.
Perhaps the most famous musical-theater “girl” is Dorothy, who traveled to Oz. For the last two weekends, the Mark Taper Forum was the site of Muse/ique’s “Back to Oz,” which was more of an audio/visual presentation than a conventional theatrical production. The group’s artistic and music director Rachel Worby led us — and a large group of musical pros — through ruminations on “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked,” “The Wiz” and other manifestations of L. Frank Baum’s now-classic tale. Actually, the musical highlight was LaVance Colley’s performance of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” A similarly formatted presentation focusing on Joni Mitchell will occur at the Taper for two weekends in July.
‘A Horse’ and a ‘Hell Mouth’
Let’s discuss the two most enterprising creations that opened recently in LA’s small-theater universe. Both of them are scheduled for four more weekends.
The more surprising of these is Olivia Dufault’s “For Want of a Horse,” which explores the zoophilic feelings of a man (Joey Stromberg) toward a horse named Q-Tip, staged by Elana Luo for Echo Theater Company in the Atwater Village Theater complex. In fact, it’s surprising to the extent that spectators are beseeched to not give away the ending to those who haven’t seen it. So I’ll just say that Griffin Kelly expresses Q-Tip’s supposed inner thoughts and feelings convincingly — up to a point. Jenny Soo plays the man’s initially supportive wife, and Steve Culp plays a friend with a similar passion. You already saw Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?,” perhaps in 2005 at the Taper? Wait, there’s more…
Tom Jacobson’s “Hell Mouth,” at the Road Theatre in North Hollywood, is a play about a gay LA museum official, Tim Josephson, and his elderly Oklahoma parents. The plot hinges on the twin possibilities that Tim’s father is about to die in Oklahoma and that an aged Mr. Blackwell-type figure in LA might donate what could be an unknown Caravaggio painting to the museum (both of the older men are played by Tony Abatemarco).
Playwright Jacobson has worked at LA museums and grew up in Oklahoma.
I have no idea how much of the script is autobiographical, but most of it has a ring of authenticity in both of these environments. Danny Lee Gomez plays the central character and Road artistic director Taylor Gilbert enacts the two women. Jacobson and director Ann Hearn Tobolowsky have figured out masterful transitions between the two locales. But the script becomes a bit overextended in the second act.
A brief note on one more production — Talene Monahon’s “Eat Me” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. I felt like a picky eater while trying to digest this play about a gourmand and several friends and relatives. Perhaps I was expecting something more satirical? At any rate, it found it somewhat mystifying and elusive.