EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

 

CURRENT REVIEWS 

From TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER  

 

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

 

Faithless 

Photo by Tim Sullins

THROUGH APR. 16: Victory Theatre Center, 3324 W. Victory Blvd, Burbank. 818.841.5421 or thevictorytheatrecenter.org

[REVIEW TO   COME]

 

Fatherland 

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 nothing short of 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 MAY 26: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Av., LA. 323.663.1525 or fountaintheatre.com

Three 

Photo by Zev Rose Woolley

Davidson/Valentini Theatre

As many times over the years the plays of Shakespeare have been relocated to places such as Matthew Bourne’s mental institution for troubled teens, smackdab in the turmoil of World War II, rip roarin’ through the old A’murkin west, or featuring juvenile delinquents with greased hair and tight pants dancing around New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in an effort to establish their turf, perhaps the classics of no other playwright in history have been adapted more often than the angst-ridden inhabitants of that great late-19th century Russian dramatist whose work inspired the term “Chekhovian.”

From theatrical transformations such as Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird and Life Sucks, Tennessee Williams’ The Notebook of Trigorin, Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor, and Halley Feiffer’s Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow to Christian Carmago’s 2013 film Days and Nights and Louis Malle’s 1994 Vanya on 42nd Street, reimagining the seven plays and many short stories from the creative mind of ol ’ Anton remain among the most often rewritten.

It must take a bit of an artistic deathwish and a rather enlarged set of cajones to attempt to once again reinvent Chekhov and find something fresh to focus upon, but this new version of The Three Sisters, created by one of LA’s most enduringly prolific actor-playwrights, manages to thrill us and give us something contemporary and uniquely cutting-edged to ponder.

Three, written by Nick Salamone and presented as a co-production between Playwrights’ Arena and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, overcomes far more than the overexposure of the original source material: it transcends the Center’s cramped Davidson/Valentini Theatre, one of LA’s most limited and unwieldy places to create art—especially anything as inherently epic as anything reconstructed from the crowded framework of a play by Anton Chekhov.

Don’t get me wrong. Many successful productions have graced this same space and, for something intimate and raw, it could not provide a more perfect wellspring for promoting theatrical innovation and creativity.

Thanks to Jon Lawrence Rivera, the unstoppable and ridiculously prolific founder and artistic director of Playwrights’ Arena, who directs here and has assembled a dropdead aggregation of some of our town’s best performers and designers, Three surpasses all the odds stacked against it—and then some.

This isn’t the first time Salamone—with whom I’ve had the intense pleasure of sharing a stage playing two 1930s Chicago Fascistic mob bosses in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for Classical Theatre Lab and as Shelley Levene opposite his fiery Ricky Roma in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross—has taken on Chekhov.

His unforgettable Gulls, which he turned into a dynamic musical version of The Seagull with composer Maury McIntyre set in 1959 Greenwich Village and Hollywood, debuted at the Boston Court under the equally inspired direction of Jessica Kubzansky and became one of the most talked about artistic achievements of 2008.

As with that production, which brought all the passion and longing and unrequited dreams of the original story into the 20th century, Three becomes a “queer meditation” of the more recent but clearly similar soul-searching challenges we face today in the twisted times which all living creatures on our mess of a planet strive to navigate.

And if such daunting challenges aren’t enough, the dexterously masochistic Salamone has given himself one more by setting each of the four acts of his play in four distinct and groundbreaking eras over the last 78 years of life in our country while his characters themselves age no more than five years.

Beginning at the end of WWII in 1946, then moving to 1982 and the beginning of the AIDS crisis during the Reagan years, Three then finds the play’s four lost siblings dealing personally with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 before concluding in our present day post-pandemic and still shell-shocked America.

Salamone explains: “Firstly, I wanted the audience to see themselves in the characters in a direct way. I made an effort to adapt Chekhov’s characters with a concern for the diversity of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity that I hope will reflect our audience.

“Secondly, I wanted the adaptation to live in the world of the last century of American life in a meaningful and resonant way… I tried very hard to find analogs to the very intentions of Chekhov’s characters and the obstacles and conflicts that exist between and among them that would root my characters in these seminal American touchstones.”

Mission accomplished—bigtime. Salamone’s courageous quest finds its quintessential partner in his longtime collaborator Rivera, who has focused his whole career in championing diversity and equal rights and does so with a fierce commitment to bring the too-often overlooked art of outsiders to a more universal audience.

Here he not only furthers those efforts majestically, he has managed to also seamlessly choreograph the large cast of 10 to move around one another in an impossibly small and inhospitable playing space where even the audience members have to take their lives into their hands to settle into their seats.

Likewise, the show’s designers, especially Matt Richter’s lighting and Jesse Mandapat’s sound, work alongside Rivera devotedly and smoothly complement his clever staging.

None of this would have worked so well without this incredibly committed and trusting cast of noteworthy players however, each of whom manages to persuasively deliver their individual stories in a uniformly deferential classic playing style while still breathing real contemporary honesty into their individual characterizations.

As the sisters, Rachel Sorsa as Masha, Hayden Bishop as Irina, and Emily Kuroda as Olga are the heartbroken hearts of the production, as is James Liebman as their tortured brother and Alberto Isaac as their beloved pensive uncle who watches the drama unfold from an unsought-after ringside seat.

Rebecca Metz is, as always, a standout as the sisters’ nasty racist sister-in-law, as is Tracey A. Leigh as Masha’s torrid military love interest. Robert Almodovar, Eric B. Anthony, and Clay Storseth hold their own as the family’s various friends and lovers, helping to make this cast an early formidable candidate for Best Ensemble honors at the end of the year.

Still, nothing about Three could be this exemplary without the strikingly intelligent wordsmithery of Salamone, who doesn’t shy away from poking some sneaky fun at his own ambitious efforts along the way.

“This has been the longest night of my life,” Masha proclaims at one point as characters enter covered in dust and debris from helping out after the Oklahoma City disaster. “It’s like one of those 100-year-old Russian plays where so much goes on offstage in the third act you think it would be a fucking melodrama if anything actually happened.”

If at first the barebones elements of this production and the playing space it inhabits begin to overpower the tale, it doesn’t take long for the Homeric nature of Nick Salamone’s script and the brilliance of Jon Lawrence Rivera’s direction, exceptional ensemble cast, and design team make the Davidson/Valentini feel as though Three could be playing at the Ahmanson—which I hope someday it actually will.

THROUGH MAR. 18: Playwrights’ Arena at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, Davidson/Valenti Theatre, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. www.playwrightsarena.org or lalgbtcenter.org/events/

 

See? I'm an Angel.