EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

From TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER  

"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."   ~ Ernest Hemingway  

Photo by Ashley Randall

THROUGH JUNE 8: The Actors’ Gang, 9070 Venice Blvd., Venice. 310.838.4264 or theactorsgang.com

[REVIEW TO COME]

Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Pantages Theatre

People are either going to passionately love this one or absolutely hate it. For me, Girl from the North Country is the best new American musical in years—or should I say best new musical about America in years.

I guess it’s no secret for anyone who knows my theatrical likes and dislikes that most musical comedy falls into the latter category in my world. I’ll take stories about barbers slitting throats, housewives descending into bipolar disorder, lesbian cartoonists dealing with their father's suicides, or people paying to pee any day over corn as high as an elephant’s eye or someone growing accustomed to her face. Musical theatre as the antithesis of classic musical comedy is where I get a little giddy.

That said, Conor McPherson’s morality play with music, utilizing the classic songs of Bob Dylan to tell the story of a ragtag group of miserable middle-American people doomed by the Great Depression, should have won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an honor given to a distinguished new play by an American playwright, preferably original in its source and dealing with some aspect of American life. If McPherson wasn’t born and raised in Dublin, this would have—or at least should have been—a shoe-in.

Simply, Girl from the North Country is a stunning achievement. The Olivier-winning and five-time Tony nominee playwright (The Weir, Shining City, The Seafarer) has created a dizzying number of characters, all presented as residents of a ramshackle and soon-to-be foreclosed upon boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota in 1934 swept away in the aftermath of the Depression, each one of them vivid and desperate people grabbing to regain hold of their shattered lives.

Nope, not the Von Trapps by any means.

McPherson directs his own masterwork, fortuitously delivering an evocatively gossamer, almost Carson McCullers-esque quality to the musical that somehow also manages to be extraordinarily theatrical. With 22 sensationally passionate musical theatre performers crowding onto the Pantages’ stage, under less skilled leadership from anyone but the playwright himself, identities could indeed become confusing. Instead, each actor has been gifted with a remarkably clear throughline that makes shaping their simple yet complex characters comprehensible.

Many actors are given their own showcased solo number, unostentatious Dylan ballads brilliantly transformed into anthems for broken people to earnestly tell their stories, most sung centerstage behind an old 30s radio show standup microphone—yet no character is deemed too important to not move set pieces or play onstage instruments accompanying their fellow players’ psalms of hope and redemption.

Somehow, we learn to care about each and every one of these desperate stand-in everymen for those countless forgotten people stuck in dustbowls and breadlines during one of our country’s most challenging periods of time, appearing here as though living embodiments of a Dorothea Lange photograph.

This evocation of the lost souls of America in the wake of the Depression is made real by the contributions of an amazing, truly world-class ensemble of performers, all obviously intensely committed to their characters and the rich source material.

Jennifer Blood, as the mentally lost wife of the boardinghouse’s owner Nick Laine (John Sciappa), is the heart of the production, offering a performance reminiscent of a young Amanda Plummer crossed with the down-home rustic scrappiness of Frances McDormand. And when she ends Act One with a showstopping rendition of Dylan’s 1965 classic “Like a Rolling Stone,” the idea of how to dropkick a finale before intermission reaches a whole new level.

Everyone in the cast is a knockout, palpable in their sincerity and gifted with vocal chops that could guarantee each of them a career well beyond the limitations of musical theatre.

Ben Biggers and Sharae Moultrie are notable as the Laines’ shiftless alcoholic son and quasi-adopted daughter, both of whom have memorable duets with their respective loves, Biggers sharing a haunting “I Want You” with his departing former girlfriend played by Chiara Trentalange and Moultrie in an inventive melody of “Hurricane,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Idiot Wind” with her nomadic ex-prizefighter beau played by the extraordinary Matt Manuel.

David Benoit, Jill Van Velzer, and Aiden Wharton are standouts as the once-successful Burke family and their mentally challenged son Elias. Van Velzer, who also doubles quite impressively on the drums, takes over the stage every time she steps up to sing and Wharton knocks it out onto Hollywood Boulevard in a postmortem eleventh-hour gospel-inspired production number version of “Duquesne Whistle” that brings the house down.

Although North Country could easily hold up as a play, the incorporation of Dylan’s songbook is a stroke of genius, his unconventional stylings grounding the piece in a kind of hypnotic pragmatism rather than how other famous songwriters’ music has been employed over the past few years in the conventional jukebox musical genre, adding glitz to sell the show rather than any substance to the story.

That said, perhaps the greatest contribution here aside from the unearthly gifts of Conor McPherson is the cutting-edge sagacity of arranger Simon Hale, whose uncanny and innovative interpretations of Dylan’s tunes—some familiar, some obscure—won him a well-deserved Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.

There is indeed a grimness in the reality presented here, but McPherson also delivers a haunting exploration into the depth of despair into which the human psyche can be thrust and how much that experience can fuck with our species’ ability to choose right over wrong.

Through the bleakness and hardship, there’s an omnipresent glimmer of hope that threads throughout Girl from North Country as this stepped-upon group of tyrannized survivors fight to discover what it is they want in their lives and how they can pull themselves up to make it happen in a heartless world that no longer seems to have a place for them.

THROUGH JUNE 2: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 800.982.2787 or broadwayinhollywood.com

Photo by Brian Graves

Road Theatre Company

Science, we’re told by a character in the Road’s world premiere of SINGULARITIES or the Computers of Venus, is a series of contradictions working together to make truth.

Three female astronomers from different periods in time work toward the same goals in the world premiere of Laura Stribling’s arresting new play, each contributing important discoveries about the mysteries of the universe, and each functioning under the thumb of their male counterparts who take credit for their explorations.

For anyone naïve to the perceived notion that women are not given their due as equals in the scientific community—let alone the world—will be challenged by Stribling’s poetic yet to-the-bone text, which includes a trio of real-life historical figures, women toiling in 1789 to the post-Civil War era to modern times.

Stribling employs a fascinating device, seamlessly and innovatively melding history and fiction, with groundbreaking astronomers Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) and Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), as well as author/poet/abolitionist/suffragette Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) as major protagonists, each presented interacting with some equally interesting fictional characters beaten down by the inequities of being a member of what was long dismissively referred to as the “fairer sex.”

All three sections take place in the same observatory at different periods in time, the first storyline featuring Herschel (Avery Clyde) confronted by a young admirer named Elizabeth Leland (Noelle Mercer) who longs to have a career as rewarding as what she envisions her mentor’s must be, but instead she is consumed by the demands of the late 1800s expectations of the role to which a woman must conform.

A century later, as Mitchell (Susan Diol) is visited by her friend Howe (Blaire Chandler), the temptations of breaking the bonds of society’s demands as their relationship turns to love overwhelms the great scientist, while in the play’s last coupling, the yearnings are reversed.

Set in the present time, Sophia (Krishna Smitha), the assistant of the former boss of astronomer Lena (Lizzy Kimball) is sent to spy on her research by her main competitor, but along the way she enters into totally new territory for her when she instead falls in love.

In the first act of SINGULARITIES, the three storylines unfold consecutively, while in the second part, they begin to defy the restrictions of time and scenes between the time zones are cleverly woven together. This is accentuated as the older characters stand watching as the others, despite the loosening of acceptable norms, still must deal with the same issues that originally kept them from achieving their objectives, receiving the recognition they deserve, and living their lives without judgement both personally and professionally.

The production, playing in repertory with Peter Ritt’s sadly far less successful High Maintenance, is elegantly austere, neatly sharing Brian Graves’ appropriately simple set that augments the serenely psychedelic projections by Ben Rock. Beginning with an extended 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque light show highlighted by Derrick McDaniel’s lighting and David B. Marling’s sound, the feeling is rather like a live imageless tribute to Koyaanisquatsi, the 1982 documentary favorite of all us inveterate stoners everywhere.

Directing one’s own play is often a huge mistake, but Stribling’s imaginative and often-choreographic staging of her SINGULARITIES is as mesmerizing as her intelligent and often quite strikingly lyrical text.

Her cast is quite superb, uniformly believable in their committed and heartfelt effort to create characters striving to uncover the mysteries of the solar system as they fight the need to find love that reaches beyond what the societies of their various timeframes find appropriate.

Kimball and Smitha are especially touching in their starcrossed emotional journey, while Chandler brings a delightful spirit to the already spirited Howe, who in real life worked magic to change the injustices and male-dominated partisanship of the America she so passionately advocated.

The always sturdy Clyde is quite compelling to watch as Herschel, the discoverer of several comets including one named after her, even though the character’s achievements and career never quite crawled out from the shadow of her more famous brother William. Unfortunately, Clyde’s performance is somewhat hampered by a rather indecipherable German accent further frustrating due to her low volume, at least for the ancient ears of this particular 938-year-old observer.

Beyond everything, SINGULARITIES or the Computers of Venus, developed from scratch in the Road’s fourth prolific Under Construction workshop, is a remarkable effort, although promising new playwrighting voice Laura Stribling could still judiciously trim the more repetitious exposition and eliminate the need to include some clever but unnecessary historical elements, no matter how artfully they have been woven into her script; a 90-minute runtime without intermission would be more than enough to tell her exciting and timely tale.

THROUGH JUNE 2: Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org

Photo by Jenny Graham

Antaeus Theatre Company

It’s a given that anything offered by the venerable Antaeus Theatre Company will be the crème de la crème of any intimate theatrical presentation in Los Angeles.

From the most imposing design and creative team elements delivered anywhere to the talented troupe of member/actors who tread the boards of the Kiki and David Gindler Performing Arts Center, the state-of-the-art playing space created especially for them, everyone involved with Antaeus does so with passion and a true dedication to the artform.

The current tenant at the Gindler is Swedish filmmaker icon Ingmar Bergman’s Nora, his 1989 one-act adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s groundbreaking late 19th-century three-act masterwork A Doll’s House.

Bergman’s intention was to expose the contemporary import of the powerful but austere classic that changed the world when it debuted in Copenhagen in 1879, an era when its previously unthinkable pro-feminist message rocked the social mores of the time—even causing one theatre where it was mounted way back then to be burned to the ground by horrified and massively offended patrons.

Set in a small Norwegian town at a time when women had no individual rights, to say it emerged within a drastically male-dominated society would be a major understatement. A Doll’s House was immediately a most controversial shocker, depicting the plight of a typically obedient wife who grows a set and ends up standing up to her controlling husband, eventually walking out on her family in an effort to find herself and her own self-worth.

As Nora slammed the door of the Helmer household behind her, theatrical literature was metamorphosed forever after.

Ibsen’s most famous work is still to this day one of the most frequently performed theatrical classics of all time—and how desperately I wish Antaeus had instead chosen to present the original rather than Bergman’s CliffsNotes version that does such a disservice to the play.

By leaving the actors and director Cameron Watson only a truncated 90 intermissionless minutes to tell the tale and delve into Ibsen’s rich and fascinating characters is a most unfortunate choice and, sadly, it shows.

Nora’s original coming of age saga, which follows her personal journey from being only her husband’s worry-free pet into a strong-willed and determined person no longer willing to be treated like a possession, takes all three acts to tell. Here, the brilliant Jocelyn Towne has only those aforementioned 90 minutes to make her difficult transformation.

That said, Towne is triumphant making this happen, beginning playing Nora as a total Spring Byington and ending up with a jarringly impressive monologue worthy of Liv Ullmann herself. It is an astounding performance that very few actors could so perfectly navigate and her work singlehandedly saves the production from descending into total telenovela status.

Brian Tichnell has a more uphill task realistically bringing Nora’s husband Torvald to life. At least in the original, the actor playing the role has time to slowly unveil the news about what a total dick the character is.

Much of Bergman’s updating involves modernizing the dialogue to a point where it quickly begins to seem downright silly—and a majority of it is delivered by Torvald, who besides from referring to his little porcelain doll of a wife as his “little songbird,” also spouts such almost funny endearments as “My sweet little Nora,” “My dear little Nora,” and my favorite, “My happy little lark.” Anyone would have left this Torvald long before, making Tichnell’s task in this adaptation nearly insurmountable.

As for the other supporting players, Michael Kirby as Krogstad, Mildred Marie Langford as Mrs. Linde, and Peter James Smith as Dr. Rank could all be so interesting if only they were less restricted in the creation of their roles. As is, Bergman turns them into caricatures of Ibsen’s characters, only allowed to perform perfunctory service to the play’s central relationship and theme.

It’s clear from the work of Kirby and Langford that it would be fascinating to see how their personal connection would have evolved if they were actually doing A Doll’s House and Smith’s lovely interpretation of Dr. Rank deserves a more respectful opportunity to explore his character’s bittersweet side story.

Watson is a long-proven director with a stellar track record of interpreting classic plays with great imagination and fiercely individual style. He too is hampered here by the restrictions of time, something he has valiantly attempted to overcome with boldly contemporary staging, wildly dramatic lighting by Jared A. Sayeg that accentuates the prison-like loneliness of Nora’s existence, and especially a hauntingly evocative sound design and romantic original musical interludes contributed by Jeff Gardner and Ellen Mandel, respectively.

How I would love to see all this talent reunited for a more rewarding mounting of A Doll’s House. An adaptation of an already perfect work of art must offer something deserving of being said in a new way; Ingmar Bergman’s Nora is not in any way better than the original, just shorter.

THROUGH May 26: Antaeus Theatre Company, 110 E. Broadway, Glendale. 818.506.1983 or Antaeus.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch

Geffen Playhouse

Helder Guimarães is a phenomenal magician, all right. When it was first announced he would be returning to the Geffen with an all-new show called The Hope Theory, I went back into my files to check out what I had written about his last appearance there in his spectacular and many-times extended Invisible Tango.

I looked back to my 2023 file. Nope. Farther back. 2022? Uh-uh. I keep accessing my files of older and older reviews and finally found my piece on Invisible Tango—written in 2019. So, it’s obvious everything surrounding this guy is magical, since his last memorable appearance at the Geffen was five friggin’ years ago and is still indelibly stuck in my mind as one of the most unique and jaw-dropping performances I’ve ever experienced.

As with that first time out, The Hope Theory is again directed by Guimarães’ longtime mentor, admirer, and collaborator Frank Marshall, himself a lifelong amateur magician and EGOT-winning producer of such notable film franchises as Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, and the Jason Bourne sagas.

As Guimarães quietly takes the stage entering through the audience, he immediately allows us to see him for exactly who he is: a rather nondescript guy with an easily identifiable Portuguese accent holding a deck of cards—and his genuine non-theatrical humility naturally imbues him with the power to set his audience at ease. 

His welcoming simplicity helps bring his electrifying magic to life when subtly introduced into the story he shares about his immigration to the States. As it unfolds, Guimarães gradually begins to win over our trust as he welcomes us into his first cramped Los Angeles apartment, recreated onstage in masterfully simplistic fashion by that always impressive LA wunderkind designer François-Pierre Couture. 

Throughout the performance, he takes piles of wooden storage boxes and scattered pieces of memorabilia from his life and organizes them into a bookcase display in an attempt to transform his dismal apartment into a home, all the while reminiscing about the struggles of being an invisible twenty-something from another country trying to navigate the cultural inequities of the American experience.

As he attempts to tackle the usual difficulties of establishing a professional showbiz career, for him compounded by his broken English and lack of networking opportunities, he is also quick to admit his uphill battle and sad lessons learned about trust in others were still better than living through the political oppression his family faced while he was growing up in Portugal in the 1980s.

The Hope Theory is all about survival and the necessity of maintaining some kind of hope in a basically uncaring society, although for anyone less scrappy and committed to success as Guimarães, the experience could have easily broken him.

His long journey to American citizenship and the creation of his own personal space is of course peppered with his mind-boggling magic, something reviewers have been asked by Guimarães and Marshall to “refrain from including major plot and illusion spoilers,” but let me say no one in the audience is exempt from possibly being called upon to help prove his abilities are real and completely inexplicable—and opening night that included three of us pressfolk, one of whom nearly crawled under his chair in an effort not to be included.

Witnessing a single card trick from Helder Guimarães alone is enough to make anyone slide to the edge of their seat realizing his unearthly gifts are grounded in something far deeper than first appearances reveal. The underlying message of The Hope Theory comes through this worldclass conjuror and raconteur’s skills and, for a brief time, he makes the chaos we all share these days disappear with the ease of his sleight of hand, shuffling our communal cares and worries back into the deck. 

THROUGH JUNE 30: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Av., Westwood. 310.208.5454 or geffenplayhouse.org

Photo by Brian Hashimoto

Boston Court Performing Arts Center

A recently retired Californian couple embark on a “long zombie crawl” roadtrip across America in Tira Palmquist’s The Body’s Midnight, now world premiering at the Boston Court in association with IAMA Theatre Company.

The ultimate goal of Anne and David (Keliher Walsh and Jonathan Nichols-Navarro) is to visit all those places that live in her early childhood memories and eventually end up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where their daughter is about to give birth to their first grandchild.

The couple has reached that unnerving point in their lives where they’ve realized the clock is ticking faster for them all the time and suddenly “everyone is younger than us,” part of the reason she has insisted on making the trip by camper instead of hopping a plane, something David has reluctantly agreed to undertake despite some major misgivings.

This trip also worries the heck out of their very pregnant daughter Katie (Sonal Shah), especially since her father has shared with her the secret that Anne has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia and, presumably, eventually Alzheimer’s.

As Anne struggles to find long-familiar words and begins to feel the approaching fog that will eventually consume her life and her cherished memories, the loyal and loving David does his best to calm and reassure her despite her frequent resistance, asking her to “let me be here to admire you, to look at you, as if it were my job.”

Palmquist’s well-meant and occasionally beautifully poetic play could have so much to say and her characters should be people we quickly come to care about—and with whom so many of us at a certain age can identify—but unfortunately, somewhere it completely and glaringly misses its mark.

Although Jessica Kubzansky, one of our town’s most treasured and continuously impressive directors, makes a yeoman’s effort to lift The Body’s Midnight out of its rather insipid cliche-ridden status, not even her talents or Palmquist’s often elegiac dialogue save it from becoming trite—like, would anyone suspect for a moment that by the end Anne wouldn’t be tenderly holding her newborn granddaughter as her other family members look on lovingly?

The most inexplicable thing about this production is the talent that came together to bring it to fruition. The production values are excellent, particularly John Zalewski’s remarkably redolent sound design, Benedict Conran’s evocative lighting wizardry, and David Murakami’s sweeping projections of passing Americana as the couple visits the Grand Canyon and other postcard points of interest.

As Katie and her husband Wolf, as well as playing myriad other various park rangers and other eclectic characters the couple meet along the way—prompting a running scripted joke about how they all look alike, something both my outdoor educator partner Hugh and every Huell Howser episode ever shot easily verifies—Shah and Ryan Garcia are the best thing about this production, even when their characters are suddenly bathed in rosy lighting effects to spout mystical quasi-Eastern philosophical affirmations about the nature of our existence on this troubled planet or warning about how Anne needs to approach her future.

These supporting performances only accentuate the most obvious problem with the production: the peculiarly one-dimensional performances of their usually sturdy and dependable costars.

Nichols-Navarro does his best to bring his soap opera-ish hero to life, but the go-nowhere state of David’s journey as written limits him at every turn, as does partnering with the surprisingly depthless Walsh, who spends so much time superficially telegraphing her Anne as internally needy that she leaves herself little room to show her love or appreciation for her adoring life partner.

What’s missing most in Walsh’s performance is any kind of character arc. Her Anne is merely scared and fearful of the future throughout the play when that should only be one color; she never exhibits even a hint of ballsiness or inner strength that could make us root for her.

Every aspect of The Body’s Midnight, with all the long-proven talents collaborating to breathe life into its creation, should prove it to be a winner, including the welcoming hints of lyricism in Tira Palmquist’s dialogue that’s continuously done in by the disappointing predictability of her script and the performance of Walsh in its most pivotal role, which only indicates a real person below the pretend emotions she expresses.

As is, its promise in this first pass is more a pitch for a future movie on the Hallmark Channel than it's indicative of what we’ve come to expect from either the Boston Court or IAMA Theatre Company.

 THROUGH MAY 26: Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 Mentor Av., Pasadena. 626.683.6801 or BostonCourtPasadena.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch

Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre

May I begin by saying I have enormous respect for the Rogue Machine Theatre Company and its founding artistic director John Perrin Flynn, recipient of the LA Drama Critics Circle Warfield Best Season Award for 2023, as well as being number one of my Best Production TicketHolders Award winners for their sterling production of Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which also won top honors for Will Arbery as Best Playwright, Samual Garnett as Best Supporting Actor, and was runner-up for Best Ensemble.

That said, the current offering from Rogue Machine, the Los Angeles debut of Christian St. Croix’s Monsters of the American Cinema directed by Flynn, is a major disappointment and, for me, even bordered on being offensive.

Keeping in mind that critiquing any art form is incredibly subjective and almost every review of this production from other LA reviewers so far has been quite positive, my response to the production is definitely a minority opinion.

Perhaps my reaction is due to my own personal experience. St. Croix’s extremely topical two-hander deals with the relationship between a gay man who has taken over raising the typically conflicted testosterone-sparking teenage son of his late husband.

As someone who raised my own son under very similar circumstances, all I can say is if I had reacted to David by rolling my eyes with both hands placed petulantly on my hips, or if I had raided his room and looked through his personal items to search for evidence of what made him tick, he would have been on a greyhound bus booking it back to his maternal grandmother’s home in about 20 minutes flat.

Now that I’ve made that disclaimer, here are all the reasons I disliked Monsters that I don’t think has anything to do with my unique personal history.

First and foremost, I thought it to be a badly constructed and often confusing clunker of a play that couldn’t possibly be more predictable, with a continuous series of monologues played directly to the audience that droned on with tired exposition that did nothing to make me care a whit about either character—both of whom should be infinitely relatable.

Although I have often admired Flynn’s talents both as a producer and as a director, not to mention last year his skills as an actor, I felt bewildered and saddened he didn’t appear to understand the nature of the complex relationship between Remy and his charge Pup (played with admirable commitment by Kevin Daniels and Logan Leonardo Arditty).

Flynn’s oddly clumsy staging is even more of a puzzlement, especially when both actors deliver their generally wistful competing monologues, each stopping for sections of the other’s thoughts while seated on complete opposite sides of the Matrix’s notoriously wide and shallow stage, thus forcing audience members to face possible whiplash as though spectators at a rousing game of ping-pong.

Ironically, one early scene depicts both characters in the same space existing at different times and so not seeing one another, which is then never further explored. With that time-warping fantasy already established, it would have been the perfect solution for both actors to be able to stand shoulder to shoulder as they deliver their individual monologues at the same time, thus eliminating the need for audience members to later need a neck massage.

The obviously talented Daniels resorts to every possible stereotype of an older gay male, especially evident when he rushes into their home’s main room from his bedroom wearing a bathrobe and an animal-print plastic shower cap—itself an inexplicable choice considering that Daniels is totally bald. Trying to hide the fact that he has a hot trick rinsing off in the shower, the moment comes off more as a slapstick and slightly homophobic scene from La Cage aux Folles than something that belongs in this production.

As Pup, the theatrical debut of Arditty, who at 19 has only been acting for the last year, signals what hopefully will be a prestigious career. His natural aptitude as a promising young actor is obvious, his intelligence and understanding of his character are a given, but he needs some judicious training in stage technique to bring his talents to their fullest fruition.

The device of enabling Remy and Pup’s mutual passion for bad 1950s horror movies is a wonderful and endearing way to solidify the bond between the drive-in movie owner and his grieving lost boy, but when Pup’s dreams and fantasies creep into real life, it becomes confusing, which is then made worse by the last scene where what is really monstrous and what is not is difficult to follow.

I wanted so much to love Monsters of the American Cinema but unfortunately, I did not. Instead I found it remarkably unsurprising, glaringly formulaic when it could have been so inventive, and potentially disrespectful to anyone who has ever faced forging ahead in a similar relationship.

THROUGH MAY 19: Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Av., LA. 855.585.5185 or roguemachinetheatre.net

Photo by Jenny Graham

Fountain Theatre

According to Merriam-Webster, the second definition of the term "swan song” is:  “A farewell appearance or final act or pronouncement.”

Last month, just as his new play Fatherland was set to world premiere at the Fountain Theatre, the continuously groundbreaking facility’s artistic director Stephen Sachs announced his retirement from the pioneering 78-seat non-profit space he founded in 1990.

I proudly consider myself part of the Fountain family, having appeared there as the Witch of Capri in Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore directed by the Fountain's producing director Simon levy, with Karen Kondazian and yours truly traveling on to play our roles at the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, and in a special encore presentation of the award-winning Hollywood Fringe Festival hit The Katrina Comedy Fest by NOLA playwright Rob Florence.

Over the past 33 years, the Fountain has produced 36 world premieres and 54 U.S., west coast, or L.A. debuts, each chosen to reflect a unique cultural voice with a fierce determination to make waves and to serve our town’s incredibly diverse ethnic communities.

During that time, Sachs has directed dozens of award-winning productions at the Fountain and across the country, authored 18 of his own plays, including the comedy-drama Bakersfield Mist that has toured extensively and was presented in London’s West End, and among numerous other achievements gave a welcoming theatrical home to Athol Fugard where several of his newest plays were introduced to the world.

And so, Fatherland might indeed be Sachs’ crowning achievement while helming the Fountain and nothing could be more celebratory. Created as a “verbatim play,” meaning every word spoken and all situations presented in the script come from actual court transcripts and testimony, interviews with the real people involved, and public statements, it provides a riveting, unsettling experience that will hopefully (intentionally) haunt us all as we watch the current unconscionable election season unfold in our poor befouled country besieged from within.

Although the two leading pivotal characters are only listed as “Father” and “Son,” Sachs’ play is indeed written about Guy Reffitt of Wylie, Texas (where else?), the first defendant convicted and jailed for his involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and his son Jackson, who made the incredibly brave and heart-wrenching decision to turn his father in to the F.B.I.

As the blusterous deluded father in Sachs’ scarily cautionary tale, one of our community’s scrappiest and most prolific theatrical treasures, Ron Bottitta, is nothing short of magnificent in the incredibly demanding role.

From loving dad slinging burgers in the backyard to rabid conspiracy theorist ready to overthrow the government in a brief 80-minute ride, Bottitta brings an uncanny believability to the challenge, making his character alternately both pitiable and absolutely terrifying. It is a tour de force performance that, if I were currently back teaching the craft on a daily basis, I’d insist each and every one of my acting students attend to see a true master craftsman at work.

As his 19-year-old son, the trajectory of the Carbondale, Colorado native and LA newcomer Patrick Keleher’s journey from backpacking around 11 African counties, Asia, and Australia to his current incarnation being cast in Fatherland is the stuff of which, in a fair world, future legends could possibly begin.

Back in his hometown after reading about the Fountain’s search to cast his character, on a whim and with a lot of chutzpah Keleher flew to LA, auditioned for Sachs, and the next day while debarking back home from his brief trip, received a text that he’d been cast.

His performance is a gripping, amazingly multi-layered thing of wonder, quite unexpected from someone who hasn’t been around this nasty ol’ business long enough to have become disillusioned or have had time to doubt himself in any way. Resembling a kinda corn-fed, farm-grown version of a modernday James Dean, Keleher is the heart of this production as a sensitive kid torn between his love for his father and his family and what he knows is a twisted assault on the very fabric of democracy.

Guy Reffitt began his career as an oil worker and eventual rig manager before the 2016 collapse of the price of oil. Losing his $200,000-a-year position as an international oil industry consultant, he moved his family back to Texas and, as his savings began to dissipate, his interest in politics concurrently began to move dangerously right as he sucked in Trump’s laughably masturbatory The Art of the Deal.

To the horror of his son, he linked and quickly fell under the twisted spell of a virulently ultra-conservative Texas militia group called the Three Percenters—naming themselves that because they believed only three percent of A’murkins had the cajónes to stand up against what they saw as a police state.

“When tyranny becomes law,” Bottitta’s father bellows to his horrified son, himself turning in the other direction after the murder of George Floyd, “revolution becomes duty.”

This of course leads to him becoming instrumental in calling for 10 million equally deluded souls to join him and his ragtag tribe of racist fake Christians for the infamous storming of the Capitol under the spell of that orange-hued monstrous antihero unable to believe he lost an election and enjoy a brief almost orgasmic high that made him finally “feel like a fucking American.” Eventually, of course, his euphoria led to Reffitt’s sentence of 87 months in federal prison.

What Fatherland perhaps inadvertently exposes is what causes such a person to become radicalized. It’s not necessarily a "patriotic" rational calling for justice and change as it is a desperate need to be a part of something, to be right about something, to be better than others in a world that has continually left such people behind and their voice unheard. It’s what my partner and I refer to as Little Pee-Pee Syndrome, a far more dangerous version of souping up one’s car with oversized wheels and a sound system able to blast all those people who ignore you on that arduous and treacherous road we call life.

Under Sachs’ passionate leadership and sharply fluid direction on a nearly bare stage framed by Joel Daavid’s exquisitely simple set and Alison Brummer’s jarringly effective lighting plot, Bottitta and Keleher are mesmerizing as their characters’ relationship tragically devolves and their lives are forever changed by the boy’s commitment to help spare our democracy from his father and his twisted band of treasonous cohorts.

As the defense and prosecuting attorneys grilling the son in court, characters here utilized as conduits to present the material—again completely gleaned from actual testimony and other statements craftily manipulated by Sachs to become a play—Anna Khaja and Larry Poindexter are sufficiently serviceable in roles which by their very nature are rather thankless.

Kudos are especially in order for Khaja, who must introduce each of the play’s new thought by the questions her U.S. Attorney asks the boy. As I try to impart to every actor I coach, dialogue is best memorized by learning lines thought-by-thought but, as with the psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s classic play Equus, Khaja must have had to learn her lines in some kind of sequence without the benefit of prompts from the lines themselves; one random question asked out of the proper scripted order and she could singlehandedly wipe out pages of dialogue.

To say that Fatherland is arresting and highly polished playmaking is a given but still, as brilliant and perfectly seamless as this production and its performances may be, it is by nature not something that can simply be referred to as an entertainment. It is incredibly disturbing and, as any such project sadly preaching basically to a likeminded choir, I wish there was a way it could be presented to a far wider audience. It might even change the minds of people we as left-coast liberals only began to realize existed and were about to crawl out from below their Morlockian rocks with the rise of that malevolent antichrist Donald J. Trump.

So, I mentioned Merriam-Webster’s second definition of the term “swan song” at the beginning. Actually, the first is:  “A song of great sweetness sung by a dying swan.” This in no way reflects the retirement of Stephen Sachs from the incredible theatrical space that has benefited immeasurably from the many projects he has championed into existence despite what must have been some thorny challenges and ups and downs over the past three decades.

One can only hope that, although Sachs has quite literally left the building, his new life will lead him to develop many, many more amazing artistic statements such as the world premiere of his remarkable Fatherland. This “swan song” isn’t sung by a swan on his way off to Valhalla by any means; it signals the flight of a great and unstoppably majestic creature with an enormous wingspan ready to travel off into new directions that will surely prove the betterment of everyone and everything in his path.

THROUGH JULY 21: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Av., LA. 323.663.1525 or fountaintheatre.com