by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

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

Photo by David Esquivel 

Skylight Theatre

When Swiss dramatist Max Frisch wrote his 1953 radio play Biedermann und die Brandstifter in the wake of the Second World War, the frayed nerves of global disaster were still settling over the world. The play was born from his need to make sense of how ordinary, educated, seemingly sensible citizens could watch catastrophic forces approach in plain sight and still construct countless small excuses to accommodate them—eventually handing over their house keys and the very matches used to burn down their own homes.

Its first of several English translations for the stage was presented in America at San Francisco’s Actors’ Workshop in 1964 as The Firebugs, later reappearing again in 2007 at London’s Royal Court as The Arsonists translated by acclaimed Scottish playwright Alistair Beaton and starring a young unknown Benedict Cumberbatch. Three-quarters of a century since its inception, Frisch’s subtle/not-so subtle warning of the dangers of complacency has only grown more severe.

In the director’s notes for the current revival of Beaton’s version of The Arsonists now still playing with fire at the Skylight Theatre, Luke Harlan highlights Frisch’s famous description of the piece as a “morality play without a moral.” The narrative avoids heavy-handed lecturing or simplistic sermonizing, instead forcing theatergoers to sit watching the agonizing absurdity of passive human compliance. Yet even without a neat lesson wrapped up at the end, the core point becomes unmistakably clear to anyone in attendance: looking away while damage is being done is its own form of active participation.

This dynamic was given a fresh energy through this vibrant translation by Beaton, who made a career revitalizing classic satirical works by writers such as Frisch, Gogol, and Brecht. It delivers an adaptation that feels completely accessible and punchy for modern audiences without losing any of the script's original bite.

That central conflict demands an unvarnished comparison to our current political climate. As our increasingly more unhinged Apprenticadent Donald Trump and his political movement push forward with extreme claims, unprecedented structural and environmental renamings, plans for monumental golden statues of our monster-in-charge, and beyond it all the dismantling of long-standing democratic norms, those within his administration and the broader Republican Party consistently look the other way. They normalize his bizarre and dangerous behavior, negotiating away their own presumably once lofty principles, and treat obvious alarm bells and flashing red lights as if they were just standard political operating procedures.

In Frisch’s allegory, when a pair of random homeless traveling pyromaniacs unceremoniously move themselves into the home of Gottlieb Biedermann, they basically make no effort to hide their true identities. Instead, they state exactly what they are doing, yet Biedermann and his household rationalize every single warning sign, convincing themselves that if they show enough courtesy and hospitality, they will personally remain safe. In an absurd display of self-delusion, Biedermann proudly declares he is a modern man who does not care about class distinctions—a statement meant to project open-mindedness even as it seals his own fate.

Harlan’s direction is slick and sharply focused, driving the escalating nonsense at a brisk clip so that the comedic beats land right before the chilling reality settles in, while a massive portion of that dramatic impact comes from Stephen Gifford’s remarkable scenic environment.

The Skylight’s intimate space is transformed in ways rarely seen before, expanding out to the raw, exposed brick walls along the sides and back wall of the playing space. Gifford constructs a full two-story layout rising all the way up into the rafters, where the upper loft incorporates one of the venue's four actual physical skylights, an architectural detail of which even long-time patrons are unaware according to the theatre company’s newly minted Artistic Director Cameron Watson. Complimented by Jared Sayeg’s lighting effects and Drew Sensue-Weinstein’s ominous seat-rattling atmospheric soundscape, the physical staging is top-tier.

The cast breathes vivid life into this production. Tessa Auberjonois delivers a finely tuned performance as Biedermann’s perpetually anxious wife, perfectly capturing the nervous dread of a woman watching her household collapse from within, while as the fire marshal serving as a narrator to guide the play’s Greek chorus of firefighters, Seamus Mulcahy commands a charming authority that slyly introduces the show's theatrical framework.

The centerpiece of the production is Brian Wallace as Gottlieb Biedermann, who blends an infectious satirical wit with almost silent-era physicality. From the frantic adjustments he makes to his ratty toupee (another topical nod to current times?) to the way he holds his posture, his choices would make Harold Lloyd proud. The rapid shift in his body language as he alternates between mercilessly scolding his wife and desperately trying to flatter the intruders who have commandeered his attic is a joy to watch.

Praise also for Trevor Jonathan Lown and Liam Rhodes, who double as associate producers for this mounting as well as delivering magnificent teamwork onstage as the invaders, playing the arsonists with brash confidence and a constant, almost sinister amusement. Meanwhile, Jazelle Villanueva turns in a standout performance as Anna, the Biedermanns' long-suffering and increasingly frantic servant who sees the madness for what it is long before her employers do.

This staging of The Arsonists holds up a satirical mirror to our own tenuous national nightmare, offering a more than worthy revival of a mid-century classic: it is a timely, hilarious, and deeply unsettling wake-up call about what happens when people choose to hand over the matches.

 THROUGH SEPT. 20: Skylight Theatre, 1816½ N. Vermont Av., LA. 213.761.7061 or Skylighttix.com

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 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