by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

"Critics watch a battle from a high place then come down to shoot the survivors."  ~ Ernest Hemingway  

Photo by Kari Van Meeteren 

Zombie Joe’s Underground

There was something undeniably magnetic, as well as for me personally deeply nostalgic, about stepping into the miniscule cult-darling Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre to deeply and wholeheartedly drink in the world premiere of Michael Sargent’s latest tumble down the theatrical shlockmaster’s private and sometimes thorny rabbit hole.

Sargent’s brand new Devils in America once again rips the veil off American infamy from the headlines of the tabloid news—and what a glorious ride it is. Looking around the crowded North Hollywood performing space before the lights went down, it hit me that this wasn't just a typical opening night. It was an outright reunion of Los Angeles underground theatre royalty, a gathering of artistic survivors, renegades, and long-time collaborators.

As the sadly long defunct Evidence Room’s former artistic director Bart DeLorenzo dryly remarked after the final bow, "I don’t think I’ve ever been in an audience before where I virtually knew everyone there." He wasn't exaggerating. The place was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the very people who were majorly instrumental in building the fringe and avant-garde theatre movement in this city, including John Fleck, Patricia Scanlon, Ann Closs-Farley, Tina Preston, Sandra Tsing Loh, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, Constance Forslund, Denise Blasor, Jeff Daniel Philips, Echo Theater’s Chris Fields, Theatre of the Ridiculous composer Peter Golub, and so many, many others who have spent decades pushing boundaries and never giving up. That kind of turnout speaks volumes about the enduring love and fierce reverence LA’s scrappiest creative community holds for Michael Sargent.

For those of us who have tread those proverbial boards for him and alongside him over the years, Sargent remains one of the truely unyielding forerunners of the LA underground theatre scene. I couldn't help but look around the space and remember my own deeply cherished history with this crowd, most notably back in the early 2000s when we staged the long-running cult classic The Strip at the Evidence Room, dubbed a “living comic book,” where a trio of outrageous continuing serialized episodic stories created weekly in the mad minds of Sargent, Scanlon, and Justin Tanner were written, rehearsed once, and performed live every Saturday night at midnight for a constantly packed crowd of dedicated devotees and celebrities, including regulars Lily Tomlin and Toni Basil slumming after their own shows to see what the hoopla was all about, as well as being joined along the way onstage by guest performers such as Laurie Metcalfe,  Mink Stole, Jack Black, Dennis Christopher, and Elizabeth Berridge.

One of those weekly installments was Sargent’s delightfully unhinged The American Nympho, in which I had the sheer joy of performing alongside Fleck, Keythe Farley, Liz Davies, the lategreat Kirk Wilson, and my dear friend Chris Carmack long before his star turns in Grey's Anatomy, Nashville, and earlier that same year when he and I starred as Tennessee Williams and his lover Frank Merlo in Lament for the Moths in LA and at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans.

That same spirit of fearless midnight-fueled theatrical bravado is alive and burns white-hot in Devils in America. Simply put, this is Michael Sargent in the rarest of his top form. It is without reservation one of the absolute best and most razor-sharp pieces he has ever presented to Los Angeles audiences—and considering the staggeringly prolific body of his work, that’s saying a lot.

A hilarious triptych of outrageously irreverent one-acts, Devils in America drags an infamous trio of modern history’s most terrible tabloid monsters into the harsh, satirical, and mostly fictional spotlight: disgraced West Hollywood Democratic donor Ed Buck, Oscar-winning You Light Up My Life composer turned serial predator Joe Brooks, and Donald Trump’s pal and jet-setting Epstein enabler Ghislaine Maxwell. Sargent doesn't just mock these figures; he dissects their pathologies with a biting, dark-comedic rhythm that leaves the audience gasping as much as howling with laugher.  

The performances across the board are extraordinarily brave, anchored by some deliciously game Sargent-devoted regulars who know exactly how to walk his over-the-top tightrope of camp and sheer theatricality.

Famed counter-culture icon, actor, composer, and playwright Philip Littell is happily without filter as Ed Buck in D.O.A., bringing an eerie, unvarnished magnetism to the notorious WeHo hustler-killing john, while Suzanne Fletcher and Shannon Holt turn Madam/Madame into a masterclass of dark farce, playing Ghislaine Maxwell and the DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who here share the same jail cell and are trapped together in their own bizarre self-made lingering hell.

And then there’s my aforementioned Strip castmate Keythe Farley, author of Bat Boy: The Musical and the spaghetti western spoof Stranger, the latter in which I also had the pleasure of appearing at the Bootleg Theatre in 2009. Farley simply steals the entire evening in If I Ever See U Again with an insanely Ernie Kovacs-esque mannered and monstrously magnetic performance as Joe Brooks. Watching him tear through the toxic sliminess of the disgraced Hollywood songwriter/producer/director is worth the price of admission alone.  

Along the way there are also delightful supporting performances from a quartet of eager newbies assigned to somehow try to keep up with these veteran scenery-chewing zanies by playing their hapless victims: Bradley Bazile, Margaret Julian, Carter Calahan, and Ruby Farley, amazingly now a voluptuous grown woman I remember as a tiny tyke who, along with her sibling Vice, would entertain us during Stranger after shows and at cast parties with their own Yo Gabba Gabba-inspired self-styled song and dance routines.  

In an era where so much theatre has grown safe, polite, and overly cautious, Devils in America arrives like a brick through a stained-glass window—and Zombie Joe’s provides the quintessential intimate crucible for Michael Sargent’s brand of dangerous comedy. It is loud, unapologetic, shockingly topical, endlessly funny, and a vibrant reminder of why Sargent remains an essential irreplaceable voice in the Los Angeles stage landscape.

THROUGH SEPT. 10: Zombie Joe’s Underground, 4850 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo.  www.ZombieJoes.TIX.com 

[Liz Davis, Chris Carmack, and Yours Truly in The Strip, 2009] 

Photo by Paul Rubinstein 

City Garage

Few theatres in Southern California engage with global socio-political urgencies as relentlessly or uncompromisingly as City Garage. With their West Coast premiere of Natalka Vorozhbyt’s Green Corridors, artistic director Frédérique Michel brings a devastating and timely piece of Ukrainian drama to Santa Monica. Translated with razor-sharp precision and vibrant, darkly humorous immediacy by John Freedman with Nataliia Bratus, the script preserves the full and harrowing trauma of displacement during wartime without losing its biting absurdity. It offers an urgently vital text and is an inspired programming choice for City Garage.

Michel’s staging is characteristically dynamic, highly kinetic and visually stylized, drawing heavily from a hyper-present commedia-infused performance tradition—recalling the raw, intense "Style" pioneered right down the street by Tim Robbins and the Actors’ Gang. Characters often address the audience directly, projecting hyper-amplified emotional states across the proverbial footlights.

It’s a concept that fits Vorozhbyt’s writing beautifully, yet it poses an extraordinary technical trap. In the claustrophobic intimacy of City Garage, where the audience sits in immediate proximity to the performers, the dreaded middle ground simply doesn’t work. A script this wordy and powerful requires a strict choice: either the playing must strip back to a starkly grounded simplicity, trusting the inherent weight of the language, or it must throw itself headlong into radically extreme exaggeration.

Too often, much of the cast here hovers between those two poles, most looking slightly uncomfortable in a technique that demands absolute unyielding discipline. When actors work too hard to perform intensity rather than inhabiting the extreme, the artifice can undercut the tragedy.

Yet when the technique finds its footing, the production soars, most notably in the central performance of the Irene Pappas-voiced Angela Beyer. Playing the central role of a well-known displaced film actress from Kyiv, Beyer is commanding and powerful, possessing a rare fluid command of the playing style and seamlessly navigating its extreme demands while maintaining an undeniable core of emotional truth.

Beyer’s work reaches its zenith in a scene titled "Waiting for Water" opposite Cruz St. James, who plays a TV producer who has cast her in his new series. St. James, making a welcome return after his City Garage debut in Charles Mee’s Limonade Tous les Jours only a few months ago, turns in another exceptionally strong performance.

While his portrayal of two female roles in the production occasionally verge on the self-conscious, leaning a bit too heavily into physical signifiers like constant hair-twiddling and delivering his lines in the nosebleed ranges of his vocal instrument, St. James is far more simple in his choices playing the less stylized male role of the producer. The encounter between him and Beyer’s actress begins as a polished exchange of mutual professional niceties before fracturing along political and ideological faultlines. As their wildly divergent realities collide, the room detonates and this scene easily provides the most thrilling high-stakes moments in the play.

Adding to the otherwise somewhat uneven ensemble is return of former City Garage company member Ricky Lee Grove, who came out of acting retirement for this production. Stepping into multiple roles, including a customs officer, a film director, and a horny doctor visiting a vulnerable refugee, Grove’s grounded authority provides the exact benchmark of stylistic comfort the production needs.

Green Corridors remains a vital, essential piece of theatre even as its ambitious physical choices occasionally strain against the cast’s technical expertise and comfort. The sheer force of Vorozhbyt’s voice, amplified by Freedman and Bratus’ highly contemporary translation, as well as Beyer and St. James’ stand-out performances, makes this an exceptionally important story to tell and a production that demands to be seen.

THROUGH SEPT. 27: City Garage, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Av., Santa Monica. 310.453.9939 or www.citygarage.org

Photo by Grettel Cortes 

Independent Shakespeare Company in Griffith Park

On the green purple yellow red grass

Let us pass through our perfect park

Pausing on a…

Sunday in the Park with Will!

After living a life in the theatre for well over 70 years and reviewing it for the last four decades, I’ll admit I have a tendency to shy away from Shakespeare—not because it isn’t the backbone of world drama, but because when you’ve seen the canon performed a few dozen times, I can practically mouth the actors’ lines right along with them. Then comes the Independent Shakespeare Company’s rip-roaring production of The Comedy of Errors at the Old Zoo Dell in Griffith Park and I can say without hesitation it’s one of the most enjoyable evenings I’ve had at the theatre in a long, long time.

Adapted and directed with irrepressible energy by Indie Shakes’ artistic director Melissa Chalsma (who also appears onstage as the Abbess opposite another uber-talented company stalwart, Lorenzo Gonzalez as Aegeon), this staging takes The Bard’s brisk farce of mistaken identities and transports it to a vibrant technicolor Grecian port city on the verge in the mid-20^th century. 

“With Comedy of Errors,” Chalsma comments, “Shakespeare has depicted an incredibly detailed depiction of an inter-connected community full of vibrant characters whose mistaken identity plot has delighted audiences for centuries. Our version has live music played by the actors. It’s perfect for our multi-talented company of performers and for the lively, informal atmosphere of the park. 

“We’ll be transforming our stage and environs into the busy town square of an imagined Mediterranean island village in 1949. We’re setting the play on the day of the Festival of Saint Phanourios, a patron saint of lost things. The events of the play in and around the preparations for the festival and the audience will have a chance to celebrate with the characters. The production is a tribute to community and the history that ties us together.”

And truly, this fresh new take on ol' Will’s most raucous, pun-centric comedy accomplishes that task bigtime. Chalsma and her creative cohorts, especially costumer Danica Martini and lighting designer Bosco Flanagan, join together with a remarkably enthusiastic cast to make the familiar text feel completely original, delightfully fresh, and relentlessly hilarious.

Indie Shakes’ annual summer residency in our beloved Griffith Park remains one of the finest gifts to Los Angeles arts culture, completely free to local residents yet performed by a gifted and hard-working cast of full Actors’ Equity union members being paid a proper salary—and what a refreshingly novel idea that is!

ISC co-founder and managing Director David Melville, who also pulls triple duty onstage as Dr. Pinch as well as wailing away quite significantly on the guitar on COE’s musical side stage, has infused the production with his own original Tom Lehrer-esque score featuring wonderfully silly, topical, tongue-in-cheek lyrics. Fronting Melville’s live onstage band led by musical director Dave Beukers on keyboards is the extraordinary Kalean Ung, who acts as the show’s narrator and nightclub singer, reimagining Shakespeare’s Courtesan as a sultry chanteuse at the Porpentine Club. Ung’s stunning vocal range effortlessly bridges opera, pop, and jazz, steering the show's musical high points perfectly.

Still, the core engine of the production rests on the sensational demanding farcical antics of the two lead actors, Brent Charles and Patrick Batiste, who together rocked a far different though equally impressive acting challenge in the title role and as his nemesis Tullus Aufidius, respectfully, in Coriolanus, ISC’s first summer show this season. And as their second-banana sidekicks playing the twins’ bumbling (also twin) manservants, Brian Tran and Trinidad James Sandoval add pure comic gold to the proceedings. Together, channeling the virtuosic high-octane slapstick of Cirque du Soleil clowns, these four performers infuse the stage with a tremendous surge of energy, excitement, and sheer corporeal buffoonery that keeps the burlesque of Chalsma’s vision operating at peak velocity.

Bright, inventive, and wonderfully physical, the production plays like a seamless blend of classic slapstick, 1950s musical comedy, and lively cabaret. It takes a truly inspired team to make a 400-year-old warhorse feel like a brand-new party, so if you think you’ve seen The Comedy of Errors too many times to be surprised, head to the gloriously versatile Griffith Park one of these cool summer evenings and let this brilliant company prove you delightfully wrong.

THROUGH SEPT. 6: Indie Shakes, outdoors in the Old Zoo area of Griffith Park, Los Angeles. www.indieshakes.org

Photo by Jeff  Lorch 

Ruskin Group Theatre

MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Samuel D. Hunter is quickly becoming this generation’s master cartographer of the marginalized, mapping the quiet, often devastating landscapes of rural isolation and emotional stagnation. His latest work, Grangeville, which is receiving a suitably fine Los Angeles debut from the Ruskin Group, strips away the clutter of most playwright wannabes to deliver what is indisputably the best play of the year in our often rather dry cultural oasis—and it's simply a towering achievement in pure ensemble performance.

The narrative spine of the play follows Jerry and Arnie (Jeff LeBeau and Tim Cummings), two half-brothers who haven’t spoken in years currently living continents apart suddenly forced to confront the toxic legacy of their upbringing. With the abusive mother who raised them now on her deathbed, the impending loss forces a painful reckoning with the ghosts of their past, albeit mostly by telephone and zoom across the miles from Jerry’s rural lifelong home in Grangeville, Idaho, and Amsterdam, where Arnie fled many decades before from persecution from his brother and his hometown’s rampant homophobia.

The two exceptional actors are each tasked with tackling dual roles to flesh out this delicate familial orbit and, in lesser hands, such a casting conceit could feel like a technical exercise or a showcase for virtuosity at the expense of substance. Here, however, LeBeau and Cummings become the ultimate posterchildren for what ensemble acting is truly about. The chemistry between them is so tightly knit, their rhythms so instinctively locked, that they evoke a sprawling world of shared history and unspoken resentment with nothing more than a shift in posture or a heavy silence. The result is two of the finest performances witnessed on a local stage this season.

I have personally grown deeply exhausted by the wave of modern “kitchen sink” drama that mistakes lecturing for playwriting. Too often theatre has evolved in the woke era to become a relentless exercise in being preached to, forcing audiences to sit through hours of characters aggressively whining about the unfair injustices of their lot in life as if we are personally responsible. Hunter addresses these identical heavy themes of personal and societal trauma without hitting us over the head with a thematic hammer. Instead of weaponizing grievance to make his audience feel inherently guilty or to take on the blame for the many unequal transgressions for which our society has certainly been responsible, Grangeville beautifully allows its characters to emerge as real flawed human beings who by the end of the play are actively on their way to healing themselves.

At its core, the play serves as a profound interrogation of the victim card and the quiet tragedy of wasted potential—and Hunter captures how easily human beings can let their lives slip away while marinating in past traumas and using those old still-festering wounds as an armor against moving forward.

This ideological current crests magnificently in a breathtaking monologue delivered by Cummings as Jerry’s estranged wife Stacy. In an unforgettable moment of clarity, the character cuts through the emotional stagnation to lay bare the fallacy of competitive suffering. She speaks of the insidious trap of spending our lives waiting for a reward for our pain, a cosmic acknowledgment or a validation from those who hurt us, clearly meant to remind us all that there is absolutely no guarantee that compensation will ever arrive. To spend a lifetime waiting for such reparation, she argues, is the ultimate waste of the precious time we’re given. It is a stunning, paradigm-shifting piece of writing, delivered with such a raw intensity by Cummings that stops the heart.

John Perrin Flynn’s direction throughout is strikingly austere and entirely flawless, allowing the actors and Hunter’s bruising dialogue to remain front and center. That minimalism makes the play’s incredible eleventh-hour shock attack of a set change all the more jarring.

It is on this specific design choice that I must step out from behind the traditional critic’s notebook. When the stage suddenly transforms into a section of the guys’ decrepit trailer where they grew up to clean out their mother's meager belongings, my immediate visceral reaction was that the new environment felt cartoonlike and exaggerated, too overly theatrical for such an intimate character piece.

But then, great theatre often doesn't end when the house lights come up and the true measure of a production's success is how it echoes when the memory and impact of it is absorbed back into the real world. On the drive home, my partner, who was born in similar disadvantage in a New Mexico Navajo reservation before his unstoppably ambitious father successfully pulled them out of it, began talking about his traumatic early upbringing, detailing similar realities of growing up in his own basically impoverished rural community.

I had heard these haunted stories from Hugh before, of course, but it wasn't until Hunter's uncompromising visual was burned into my mind's eye that the true weight of those memories finally clicked. The stark and uncompromisingly difficult reality of designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s stage environment expertly bridged the gap between abstract storytelling and lived truth. It forced a wave of personal humility in me, having been raised in such contrasting comfort and safety and privilege, making me instantly realize how easily we can misunderstand the depth of others' hardships from a distance and how painfully claustrophobic some realities can be.

What is better than art that truly opens eyes and heals, especially without being excruciatingly obvious? Grangeville is theatre at its most vital: intimate, perfectly executed by Flynn and his creative team, and emotionally devastating. It doesn't just ask for your attention; it demands your empathy.

EXTENDED THROUGH SEPT. 21: Ruskin Group Theatre, 2800 Airport Av., Santa Monica. 310.397.3244 or www.ruskingrouptheatre.com

El Portal Theatre

Longtime Los Angeles weatherman Fritz Coleman retired in 2020 after four decades delivering his signature uncannily cheery forecasts on a daily basis but at age 76, his solo show Unassisted Residency, which plays once monthly at the El Portal’s intimate Monroe Forum, proves he’s still got the chops to deliver a jocular and lighthearted tsunami to his eager and most loyal fans.

Coleman began his career coming to LA to pursue his passion for standup comedy in the early 80s after first achieving success as a well-loved deejay radio personality in Buffalo, New York.

As the story goes, a producer at NBC caught his act one night at a local club and began to woo him to become a weatherman at KNBC-TV since our weather here was so consistent that he felt it needed a little on-air boost of humor to make it more interesting.

Delivering the daily forecast with a twinkle in his eye beginning in 1984 didn’t stop Coleman from continuing to chase his original dream by performing on local stages in several successful live shows, including his hilarious award-winning turn in The Reception: It’s Me, Dad! which played around town for several years to sold out houses.

Now, after leaving NBC four years ago, Coleman is back but the demographics have changed—or I might politely say… matured.

In my own case, as someone a year older than Coleman, his focus on finding the humor in aging is most welcome. In Unassisted Residency, the comedian talks about the challenges life has to offer in these, our so-called golden years, from physical deterioration to losing contemporaries on a regular basis to navigating the brave new world of technology and social media.

As his opening warmup act, the very funny and professionally self-deprecating Wendy Liebman notes, while looking out at the sea of gray hair and Hawaiian camp shirts in their audience, that Coleman chose to present his show as Sunday matinees so his target audience can shuffle our drooping derrières on home before dark.

Along the way, he also tackles subjects such as retirement communities, nonstop doctors’ appointments, incontinence, and Viagra, not to mention having grown up sucking in our parents’ omnipresent clouds of secondhand tobacco smoke and that generation’s lackadaisical attitude toward our safety and our health, all before moving on discuss to his all-new admiration for those heroic modern educators who during the pandemic had the patience to deal with zoom-teaching his grandkids.

The one thing he doesn’t talk much about is the weather—that is beyond mentioning how grateful he is that our current heat wave didn’t deter those gathered from venturing out of our caves and offering as a throwaway that one of the reasons he retired four years ago was climate change. Although he never says it, he doesn’t really have to; we get that even for someone as funny as Coleman, everyone has their limits when it comes to the potentially catastrophic future for our poor misused and abused planet.

Then when he launches into reminiscing about the amazingly incessant search for sexual gratification in our younger years (that time Stephen King once wrote when the males of the species all look at life through a spermy haze) and how that has changed since then. As a now single guy still looking for love—with some choice remarks about online dating sites—he tells a rather steamy tale about one date that proves it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, something of which I can definitely relate.

I first met Coleman in 1988 or 1989 when I did a feature interview with him as a cover story for The Tolucan (the more industry-oriented and less Evening Women’s Club-ish-pandering predecessor of the Tolucan Times).

He was gracious and charming and kept me laughing so hard back then that I couldn’t take notes fast enough, a knack he not only hasn’t lost but has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the audience members at the Forum have been following him since then and for whom the topic of not-so gently aging hits home as dead-center as it did me.

This doesn’t mean you have to be 70-something to appreciate Fritz Coleman’s hilarious gift for creating homespun storytelling in his ever-extending monthly outing called Unassisted Residency.

My partner Hugh, who is a mere 42 years my junior and was quite literally at least three decades younger than anyone else in the audience last Sunday, laughed longer and louder than anyone else in the audience—perhaps a reaction to hearing me bitch continuously about getting old for the last 12 years?

NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR! Plays one Sunday each month at the El Portal Theatre’s Monroe Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo.  For schedule: www.elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html