by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

THROUGH MAY 10: Ensemble Theatre Company at the New Vic, 33 W. Victoria St., Santa Barbara. 805.965.5400 or etcsb.org

Photo by Cooper Bates 

Echo Theater Company

Chris Field's Echo Theater has always been a place where the walls feel thin, not because of the architecture or the occasional sound of the Amtrak trains roaring by behind the reclaimed warehouse space, but because the emotional stakes of their productions tend to leak directly into the laps of the audience. Their latest brave and unapologetic world premiere, For Want of a Horse by Olivia Dufault, is no exception. It is a startling, thrillingly bizarre and off-the-wall interrogation of the limits of human connection and, more specifically, a rigorous deconstruction of the word empathy.

We often treat empathy as a soft, passive emotion, a feeling for someone or something. In the hands of Dufault, however, who has spent her career exploring the visceral boundaries of the “other”—vividly explored in her previous and most notable work, the cockfighting drama Year of the Rooster—her Quixote-esque mission is to blend the outlandish with the visceral as she moves away from traditional domestic tropes. This time out, she insists we accept the concept of empathy as a grueling, active labor by introducing us to a third wheel that defies easy categorization: in this case, a horse named Q-Tip, a symbol for tackling the validation of a reality that’s not your own, even when that reality is presented in a language you don’t speak.

Dufault’s For Want of a Horse is a radical labor revolving around two characters who beg to be seen. At the center of this hurricane is Griffin Kelly in a remarkable turn as Q-Tip, who becomes the catalyst for a couple’s domestic dissolution. Calvin and Bonnie (Joey Stromberg and Jenny Soo) are young marrieds living a basically quiet suburban life until their world is upended when Calvin confesses his long repressed sexual attraction—to horses.

Bonnie, a kindergarten teacher who views herself to be a progressive and supportive partner, refuses to judge her husband. Instead of leaving him, she encourages Calvin to embrace his true self, believing that their love is strong enough to withstand this revelation, ultimately suggesting they bring a horse into their lives to keep their marriage intact. They acquire Q-Tip, a huge Arabian mare who in her monologues to us reveals she is both dependent on ancient, steadfast realities and detached from human morality at the same time.

Calvin finds a sense of community and liberation in his new romance while also sharing a kinship with his friend PJ (Steven Culp), someone he met in a zoophile chatroom who shares his proclivities and is himself in a committed relationship with a dog.

Soon Bonnie begins to realize her intellectual commitment to radical empathy is in direct conflict with her emotional reality. Her attempts to be the perfect, understanding wife lead her into a spiral of isolation and resentment while Q-Tip remains an enigmatic center of the conflict, an innocent party caught in the middle of a very human psychological crisis.

As the situation becomes increasingly volatile, For Want of a Horse forces a confrontation over the nature of consent and the limits of unconditional love, shifting deftly from a dark comedy about taboo desires into a tragic examination of how far one person will go to save—or destroy—a relationship.

As Calvin and Bonnie struggle to navigate the presence of Q-Tip, we see the systemic failure of their own fragile bond. The title, evoking the “for want of a nail” proverb, suggests that a single failure of empathy can lead to a total collapse. If we cannot perform the radical act of seeing the being standing in front of us, the entire kingdom of any relationship is lost. As the couple’s relationship buckles under the weight of the comely mare’s presence, we see that the want of a horse is really the want of recognition. The play suggests that the collapse of our social and personal structures stems from a failure to perform the radical act of empathy—the kind that requires us to look past the snorts and neighs of our differences to find the sentient being beneath.

The cast is uniformly golden, although the other three fine actors bow to the haunting performance of Kelly, who is nothing short of brilliant, delivering a true masterclass in physicality. As a transgender artist, Kelly brings a meta-textual weight to the role that cannot be ignored.

There’s a profound irony in watching a human being inhabit a character that the world refuses to see as human, demanding recognition while being met only with confusion or dismissal. Without the crutch of a literal costume, she conveys the equine spirit through a tilt of the jaw, a sharp exhale, and a restless, powerful energy. While the audience is gifted with Q-Tip’s richly poetic internal monologues, revealing a soul of immense depth, the human characters onstage hear only the snorts and neighs of an animal, creating a heartbreaking empathy gap that mirrors the experience of anyone who has ever had to fight to be seen as their authentic self.

The production values at the Echo Company’s home in the Atwater Village Theatre complex remain as suitably austere and top-tier as always on Alex Mollo’s simple yet effective set that leans into the claustrophobia of the setting, forcing the audience to sit in the discomfort of the aforementioned “other,” making it impossible to look away from the mirror Dufault has held up to our own capacity for connection.

It is a concept that could have been more fully and successfully explored were it not for the production’s only Achilles’ heel: the clunky and pedestrian staging by director Elana Luo. With a stage as wide and physically accessible at the Echo’s well-trod (if you’ll excuse the pun) space, Luo’s choice to have her actors drag the same clunky furniture on and off over and over again in blue light was a total distraction when the omnipresent bed that becomes a bench and a chest utilized for costume changes could have easily become stationary objects on various areas of the stage instead captured by Matthew Richter’s usual imaginative lighting plot.

Even with that druther, For Want of a Horse is a significant production, a take-no-prisoners piece of theatre that manages to be both intellectually rigorous and deeply visceral. It isn't just a play about a horse; it is a play about the exhaustion of existing in a world that demands you translate yourself into a recognizable form, emerging as a riveting, beautifully acted, and courageously off-centered piece that doesn’t just ask for your applause—it asks for your evolution.

Dufault is truly a groundbreaking wordsmith, an architect of the strangely whimsical and a potentially fearless voice in contemporary theatre. Her history as a trans woman writing for the stage, screen, and even comic books, informs every line of this script. She has a singular gift for taking an absurd premise and using it to slice open the most private nerves of a relationship. She asks us: Can you love something you don’t understand?
The saga of Q-Tip and who really needs what more, lingers long after the house lights come up, forcing you to wonder what horses in your own life you’ve been failing to truly hear.

THROUGH MAY 25: Echo Theater Company, Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. EchoTheaterCompany.com or 747.350.8066 

Photo by Mike Palma 

East West Players at the Aratani Theatre

There was a palpable sense of homecoming at the Aratani Theatre in the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center last night as East West Players returned to this iconic stage as part of their “Diamond Legacy” season to raise the curtain on a newly refined production of the 1958 musical Flower Drum Song.

Serving as the grand finale of the venerated and long enduring company’s 60^th anniversary season, this revival isn’t merely a revival of a mostly overlooked Rodgers and Hammerstein classic; it’s a reclamation.

In this new interpretation of a show once created for traditionally white-only Broadway audiences, thanks to a perfectly revised and theme-sharpened new book by none other than David Henry Hwang, it becomes a boldly reenvisioned mirror of the modern immigrant experience—although this is something sadly now also nauseatingly challenged by the current state of American politics and its Destroyer-in-Chief, an ugly scourge that hangs over this production and the lives of us all like an enveloping shroud.

After the release of the 1961 film version of the musical, which as presented was rife with casting issues and fears that Asian Americans would take offense at how the characters were portrayed, FDS was basically put on the shelf marked "UNPLAYABLE" before Hwang dusted it off in 2002 and gave it a more equitable life.

Now, under the direction of EWP’s artistic director Lily Tung Crystal, this even fresher look at the once severely dated storyline proves with the right hands at the helm, even a glaringly sappy golden era musical can somehow be made to feel urgently contemporary.

The heartbeat of this production is Hwang’s 2026 all-new version of his own now 24-year-old updated Tony-nominated book. While the original original often felt like a tourist’s view of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Hwang’s latest incarnation, polished to a gleaming sheen, digs deeper into the grit and grace of the notorious City by the Bay in the 1960s.

We follow Mei-Li (performed by the luminous and golden-voiced Grace Yoo) as she flees a changing China after the arrest of her politically dissident father, carrying only his treasured antique flower drum and his traditional Chinese opera heritage into the neon-lit, jazz-infused world of Grant Avenue.  

Yoo anchors the emotional stakes of the evening from the very beginning, as her quietly optimistic rendition of "A Hundred Million Miracles” isn’t just a charming introductory number but a quiet manifesto on pure survival. She finds a perfect counterpoint and enjoys a palpable chemistry with Scott Keiji Takeda as her hard-to-get love interest Ta, who along with Yoo shares the two most noteworthy voices in the production. 

The same unfortunately cannot be said for Krista Marie Yu as the sexy vixen Linda Low, the showgirl who Mei-Li must overshadow to put herself on Ta’s distracted romantic radar. Although Yu is charming in the role and dances up a storm, her vocal powers make her more a double-threat player than a triple one. As charming and funny as she is in the show's most popular song “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” let’s just say her vocals are at least the only thing about her that’s flat.

That number is far more impressively conjured at the show’s tacked-on EWP encore by the standout Kenton Chen as Harvard, the company’s resident and somewhat light-in-the-loafers dresser who longs to be a star himself and, thanks to this production, gets his chance bigtime in the show’s personalized post-ending ending.

The legendary Gedde Watanabe is also a major asset here as Chin, the Chinese Opera star turned janitor in the not-so brave new world, offering a performance that balances the comedic requirements of the genre with a poignant, lived-in weariness. His sweetly furtive eleventh-hour ballad “My Best Love” might have been my favorite number in the entire show.

The generational friction is further ignited by the ever-amazing Emily Kuroda, who brings a steely, sophisticated wit to Madame Liang. Although her well-meant but vocally slender musical belt number “Chop Suey” survives basically from the production number that surrounds it, Kuroda understands the specific rhythm of Hwang’s modernized text as a woman navigating two worlds, providing much of the evening’s pseudo-intellectual weight. 

Marc Oka as delightful throughout as Wang, the San Francisco theatre owner desperately trying to keep his doors open while being staunchly stubborn about presenting only tradition fare, who is soon compromised—or is it dazzled?—into becoming something akin to Sessue Hayakawa transforming into P.T. Barnum. His specialty number in “Gliding Through my Memoree,” complete with his rather substantial belly protruding from Harvard’s purloined sailor costume, is a showstopper—as is "Don't Marry Me," his hilariously non-lovers’ duet with Kuroda.

Visually, the production could have been a feast, especially if it had been performed in EWP’s o in wn home down the street, a quaint and warm let's-put-on-a-show-esque reclaimed church where sometimes the less professional elements of a largescale musical can easily be overlooked because of the venue itself. At the cavernous Aratani, however, sometimes Chen-Wei Liao’s sets and the show’s other design elements are swallowed up by the austere nature of the space itself.

Janelle Dote Portman’s choreography clearly marries the rigid, poetic movements of Chinese opera with the explosive, mid-century Americana of the swingin’ urban nightclub scene of the era it depicts, becoming one of FDS’s most visual representations of the show’s central theme: the messy, beautiful process of the difficult assimilation from one culture into another.

If there is a flaw in Flower Drum Song, it has always been the struggle to reconcile the broad strokes of old style musical theatre with the nuances of the real-life Asian American experience. However, Tung Crystal’s direction leans into those contradictions rather than smoothing them over and the result is a production that feels deeply respectful of its roots while remaining fiercely protective of its characters’ humanity.

With an uber-enthusiastic opening night audience obviously ready to cheer, as the final notes of R&H’s sometimes predictable and not often enough exciting score hit the massive auditorium, gamely interpreted by musical director Marc Macalintal and his onstage orchestra, we are swept from the final production number somewhat clumsily rewritten to be endemic to East West Players and led into a rousing standing ovation.

Immediately it was instantly clear, despite any reservations that aren’t at all hard to overlook, that the prolific EWP team has once again done more than just put on a show. They have reminded us that our precious life stories are not static artifacts but living, breathing things that deserve to be revisited, revised, and above all celebrated.

THROUGH MAY 31: Aratani Theatre, 244 San Pedro St., LA. eastwestplayers.org or 213.625.7000

Photo by Robert Sturdevant 

Road Theatre Company

Los Angeles wunderkind playwright Tom Jacobson’s newest and most idiosyncratic work, now world premiering at the stalwart Road Theatre, chronicles a fascinating descent into the divine—and the damned.

For 35 prolific years the Road, under the fiercely dedicated leadership of founder and artistic director Taylor Gilbert, has been a sanctuary for championing and presenting only ambitious new works, but Jacobson’s Hell Mouth is a venture courageously taken on even beyond that well-earned mantle. It is a work awash in a singular, ultimately haunting scale as it delves into a young man named Tim (Danny Lee Gomez), whose name is surely intentionally only one vowel away from the author’s own for a reason. Jacobson, a master of blending meticulous historical research with the surreal, has this time out clearly crafted his most personal work, a piece that feels less like a play and more like an incantation.

The story is described as a blend of art history and heretical theology, juxtaposed with being a heart-wrenching family drama. In it, Tim is caught between two worlds: his Lutheran-austere upbringing and—at first glance, at least—sheltered Oklahoman mother Lois and his dying father Russell (Gilbert and Tony Abatemarco) and a pseudo-sophisticated and ridiculously pretentious Hancock Park fashion icon named Spencer (also played by Abatemarco in one of the play’s most challenging narrative obstacles) who may just be owner of a previously unknown painting of Judas by Caravaggio. It shouldn’t take anyone who’s been around LA a few decades to realize Spencer is based on the lategreat and rather charmingly monstrous Mr. Blackwell, someone with whom both Jacobson and Yours Truly worked and knew personally, perhaps rather too well.

Employed as an acquisitions manager for a tony LA art museum (Jacobson worked for years as a fundraiser for LACMA), Tim struggles to reconcile his humble midwestern roots with the extreme wealth and ostentatiousness of the LA art world—there’s even a sly plot point about his worrying his parka-clad mother might just land on Spencer’s annual “Worst Dressed” list.   

The play is described as having “blood, profanity, and meta-commentary,” which fits perfectly with the high-intensity, almost industrial energy that makes this playwright’s work so unique. It deals with hidden secrets, intense transformations, and the pressure of being caught between two different lives.  

Set against a backdrop where the veil between the mundane and the macabre is dangerously thin, Hell Mouth follows Tim and his ultra-sophisticated but hardened former New Yawk-er fine art broker Samara (again played by Gilbert) as they navigate their career-making task of getting Spencer to donate his possibly historically important canvas to the museum. His journey quite literally takes him from LA to Oklahoma to Provence, France to try to unearth details about Caravaggio’s mysterious and never substantiated death—and perhaps, at least in the hallucinations Tim begins to suffer, on to a metaphorical and possibly even literal visit to the Valley of Hell itself.

The script is a dense thicket of language, rich with wit, and chockful of existential dread. Jacobson doesn’t only demand a lot from his actors, he asks a lot of his audience as well, refusing to hand over easy answers and instead layering the plot with thematic questions about redemption, legacy, and the literal and figurative pits we flawed humans tend to dig for ourselves.

Having myself been closely connected not only with Blackwell—whom I personally befriended bigtime while for several years editing his weekly column in the Tolucan Times and then taking it and him along with me in the early 90s when I moved on to be editor of the now defunct Beverly Hills Post—but Tom and his husband Ramone Munoz have also been pals almost as long. His up-until now unproduced Hell Mouth has been on my radar for some time, although I just learned from him opening weekend at the Road that he actually wrote it 18 years ago after the death of his own father.

One of the reasons the play remained in a drawer so long was the intense difficulties of presenting it, especially as the actors playing the parents and LA art-fashion figures must switch identities, as well as clothes and wigs, at lightning speed. Luckily, the Road secured the collaboration of one of the company’s finest and most imaginative directors of past successes Ann Hearn Tobolowsky who, along with a crackerjack design and creative team, has finished the puzzle, managing to make the intimate Road space feel cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time.

The staging leans heavily into the supernatural requirements of the text without ever veering into camp. The visual palette is striking, with Mark Mendleson’s austere yet versatile and highly modern set utilizing deep dark red shadows and sharp, angular light designed by Derrick McDaniel that easily suggests the encroaching darkness of the story’s titular gateway to Hell itself. Add in Nicholas Santiago’s masterful video projections, a combination evoking something between Hieronymus Bosch and the real-life images of works by Caravaggio himself, and the result is a masterclass in mood over literalism.

While the script is undeniably wordy, Tobolowsky’s direction keeps the energy taut, ensuring the philosophical debates never stall the forward momentum of the plot. The success of any Jacobson play always rests on its actors’ ability to handle rhythmic, heightened dialogue without losing the human pulse beneath it.

In this premiere, Gomez delivers a grounded, soulful performance that acts as a necessary anchor for the play’s more complex elements, while the undeniably arresting chemistry between veteran thespians Gilbert and Abatemarco provides the emotional stakes needed to make the play’s cosmic consequences feel personal.

Hell Mouth is undeniably a challenging, rewarding piece of theatre that commands its audience to work almost as hard as its performers. That Tobolowsky and her team have successfully found a clear pathway to do just that perfectly reaffirms Tom Jacobson’s status as one of the most erudite, gifted, and daring playwrights of our time. It isn’t merely a story; it’s a sensory experience that lingers long after the final blackout. For those who prefer their theatre with a side of intellectual vertigo, this is an essential sit.

THROUGH MAY 24: Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org  

Photo by Cheryl Mann 

Diavolo l'Espace

In the rich and sprawling landscape of the Los Angeles dance community, the pioneering Diavolo: Architecture in Motion has always been the equivalent of heavy metal music transformed into the truly thrilling environment of the LA movement scene. 

Diavolo is most widely known for dominating the austere Pasadena Civic stage over the 12th season of America’s Got Talent in 2017 and for opening the 2024 Grammy telecast with Dua Lipa. Their signature performances have played in 250 cities and 14 countries around the world to an estimated 100 million significantly gobsmacked patrons.

Still, for me the most indelible personal connection came in February of 2005 when I was invited up to Las Vegas to cover the entire opening week of Cirque du Soleil’s long-running KA at the MGM Grand for Entertainment Today, where I was not only granted several days backstage access to meet the newly-bonded and remarkable troupe of unearthly gifted artists from all over the world, I also had the privilege to sit in on the final rehearsals and observe the design and structural tweaks before the show’s spectacular opening night.

I might also mention the Cirque’s typically flashy and unreal opening night party in the MGM Grand Garden Arena, dominated onstage by a huge ice sailing ship manned by partially-clothed worldwide members of the troupe brought to Vegas as they always are for every opening night, lasted until noon the following day. It was quite a trip, I assure you, one I will never forget where I also made friendships that have stayed strong for the past 21 years.

As part of my press access, I was also given permission to interview KA’s insanely talented designers and creative team, including the show’s charismatic Paris-born choreographer Jacques Heim.

Heim is the inspiration, driving force, and creative director of Diavolo, which he founded here in 1992 and his company is still today only one of three dance entities to survive our fickle and quickly bored reclaimed desert climes over the past 25 years.

Getting to hang out and pick the fertile brain of this incredibly innovative artist, one of the first choreographers to blend modern dance with acrobatics and gymnastics, forming what the LA Times once noted as the “dance bridge to the 21st century,” was one of the highlights of my stay.

Diavolo’s latest production, ESCAPE, currently running through mid-June at their own unique creative space downtown at The Brewery, trades the stadium spectacle for something far more raw, vulnerable, and—quite literally—sweaty.

Tucked away in the exciting and electric arts district in the company’s permanent home and studio Heim calls l'Espace Diavolo, ESCAPE is a 70-minute exploration of the human struggle against a chaotic world. 

While the company is famous for its gravity-defying feats, since it’s being performed in this eclectic private former warehouse studio, this production brings the audience literally within five feet of the action. With only 90 seats in the house, the massive yet somehow intimate black box setting transforms the performance from a distant marvel into a shared endurance test.

Watching 22 worldclass artists grapple with Heim’s self-designed signature architectural metal structures at such close range is staggering. You don't just see the athleticism; you hear the breath, you feel the vibration of the wood and the steel, and above all, you sense the sheer stakes of the danger involved.

The performance is propelled by a high-octane soundtrack—a mix of pop, EDM, and rock spanning from the 1970s to today. This sonic backdrop mirrors the surreal landscape of ESCAPE the performers must navigate. Themes of survival and community aren't just subtext here—they are the literal foundation of the show.

However, the intimacy of the space is a double-edged sword. On the night I attended, the atmosphere inside the black box reached a fever pitch. The energy was electric, but the temperature within the venue was equally intense. The physical toll of the performance isn't just felt by the dancers, as the audience is also plunged into the human struggle for air and space. It is a testament to the power of the work that even when the environment becomes overwhelming, the sheer beauty and drama of the movement remains undeniable.

Breaking—or should I say smashing—the fourth wall, Heim’s vision for ESCAPE extends beyond the performance itself. The show aims to break down barriers, offering pre- and post-show interactive opportunities where guests can actually ride the colossal structures themselves. It is a rare chance to touch the art that usually exists behind a proscenium arch.

I would imagine most people find one or two performers in any dance or group performance to focus on throughout the show as I always tend to do. In this case, my attention kept returning to a young man smaller in stature than most of the other male dancers named Evan Hernandez. Although his positioning in less prominent places during the show and his youthfulness made me think maybe he is a newer member of the company, I also found him to be, besides equally gifted athletically, one of the more graceful and passionately  committed members of the troupe. Expect great things from him in the future.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that ESCAPE is a one-of-a-kind visceral and breathtaking experience that captures Diavolo’s 34-year legacy in a pressure cooker. It is bold, it is loud, and it is undeniably Los Angeles.

Just a word of advice: despite the fact that at the box office they pass out quite effective little personal electric fans to each patron and even though you should bring along a sweater or jacket just in case Dallas Raines turns out to be full of crap the day you attend (this is LA after all), definitely dress light under the layers and prepare for a real workout yourself—even from your seat.

It isn't easy to endure but what an opportunity to understand at close range just what each and every one of these 22 phenomenal artistes must undergo physically on a daily basis to bring us such undeniable sorcery.

THROUGH JUNE 14: l’Espace Diavolo, 616 Moulton Av., LA. www.daviolo.org/escape 

Photo by Cherly Mann 

Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning English is set in a classroom in Iran long before a monstrous powermonger pretending to be acting like any other U.S. President in our country’s history warned that he was about to annihilate the entire country and threatened that a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Although some people say the long-running Best Play Tony-nominee, just transferred from Broadway and opening here for a far too brief run at the Wallis, is being presented at a bad time, it’s something with which I could not disagree more strongly. To me, this stunning play lifts us from the discouragement and ugliness of the moment as it reminds us that human beings living their own daily lives so far away from us are just as worthy of being alive as we are.

In any language, Toosi’s surprisingly noiseless and quiet little play is much more than what it presents itself to be on the surface: a study of syntax and grammar. It is a profound exploration of what is lost when we are forced to navigate the world in a tongue that isn’t our own. All the humor, the frustrations, and the deep-seated longing inherent in the fragility of the human condition are explored in the story of four adult students in the city of Karaj, the capital city of Iran's Alborz province, preparing for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).

Simply, English is a masterclass in subtext, something that must have influenced the Pulitzer nominating committee and voters, who in general only consider plays written by American playwrights and dealing with American life. Still, the Board’s criteria state the work should preferably deal with American themes, the same clause that brought Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth similar honors in 1932 despite being entirely set in a Chinese Village. Because the clause uses that terminology, the members have the flexibility to reward plays set anywhere in the world as long as the author meets the citizenship requirements.

English examines themes of identity, the struggle for translation, and the universal desire for people to find a new life—themes that are deeply rooted in the American immigrant narrative. This incredible work clearly captures the perpetual translation that, I’m sure, many Iranian-Americans feel, making it a tale that certainly resonates with the fabric of the American experience—or at least did before Donald J. Trump and his cronies started on their quest to tear the “give us your tired, your poor” concept into small, narrow-minded pieces.

The brilliance of Toossi’s writing lies in its linguistic conceit: when the characters speak English in the play, they in general speak with a halting, thickly-accented struggle; when they speak Farsi, represented here by fluent, unaccented, linguistically athletic everyday English, their true personalities—witty, sharp, and confident—burst forth. This creates a fascinating dichotomy as we watch these vibrant individuals almost reduced to being children by the limitations of their vocabulary skills.

The exceptionally harmonious and totally connected ensemble cast of Irani-American performers, four of five of whom come directly from Broadway via the Atlantic Theater Company and Roundabout Theatre’s joint production, deliver a veritable symphony of distinct motivations.

Whether it’s the older student Roya (transgendered actor/activist Pooya Mohseni, Obie-winner for her work in this production off-Broadway), who yearns only to speak enough of our language to be able to join her family abroad in Canada without humiliating herself, or Elham (Tala Ashe, who was Tony-nominated for this performance when the play transferred to Broadway), a character who has failed the exam five times but desperately needs to pass to be accepted into med school in Australia without losing her cultural identity, the stakes feel totally life-altering.

The classroom setting, often a place of academic coldness, becomes a pressure cooker of emotion. Under the jarringly simple but effective Tony-nominated and Obie-winning leadership of director Knud Adams, the pacing captures the rhythmic tick of a clock, a palpable sensibility mirroring the urgency these characters feel as they desperately try to “pass” into a new life—whether they really want to or not.

The also Tony-nominated and Drama Desk-winning Marjan Neshat is arresting as the group’s strict but passionate instructor, an Irani who has returned to her native country after living many years in Manchester, England, a dedicated educator whose true love for the English language is still somehow infused with longing and a kind of nebulous sense of regret for coming home.

Her sincere, thoughtful performance is cleverly juxtaposed with that of her somewhat giddy 18-year-old charge Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), who brings a cassette of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” to class for show-and-tell and then quite seriously proceeds to translate the lyrics to her classsmates word for word.

The fourth and final student is Omid (Babak Tafti, the only new member of the cast although you’d never know it), who was raised speaking English and seems perpetually odd man out in the class, although he claims he needs to be there because he’s aiming to obtain his Green Card. His real reasons are clearly not that, it is revealed in the play’s eleventh hour, bringing a whole new tension to the strain of the study sessions.

All three of his fellow students have different desires and complex explanations in their individual attempts to master the difficulties of conquering their task at hand. Conflicts rise and fall like a tropical storm of emotions.

For the feisty and outspoken Elham, who hates English, believing her thick accent is a “war crime” and clearly admitting she wishes she didn’t need to study, our language is far less lyrical, making the rule that only English be spoken in Marjan’s classroom exceedingly frustrating.

“English does not want to be poetry like Farsi,” she believes, while her native tongue speaks of her soul. Goli is less poetic, explaining that to her English only floats; it stays on the surface above the more profound depths lurking below.

For Roya, her motives are the most profound. She wants to join her family abroad and not be an embarrassment to her son and the daughter he is raising to only speak English. If her character’s one heartbreaking phone call with her less than enthusiastic son fails to bring tears, there’s no empathy left in your bones. To me, Mohseni’s performance is the true heart of the play.

Marsha Ginsberg’s starkly barren classroom set looked completely nondescript to me beforehand as seen only in photos, but when it begins to revolve and Reza Behjat’s seasonal lighting plot filters through the room’s ever-shifting filmy curtains denoting the passage of time, I realized what these designers have accomplished, along with Sinan Refik Zafar’s sound and hauntingly effective music and Enver Chakartash’s colorfully otherworldly costuming, all components show themselves to be something quite special.

Seeing English unfold through the eyes of my companion for the evening, my former Brazilian New York Film Academy acting student Oscar Pereira, someone I’ve watched over the past 16 years go from having almost no English skills at all to being completely (and charmingly) fluent in our language, I believe I could appreciate the characters’ journey even more—especially at the end when I saw the glistening in his eyes bathed in the light of the company curtain call.

It’s not language that defines us as a species—it’s our voice, if that makes any sense at all. English is a compelling argument for just that, delving into how language shapes who we are and how we navigate the world around us. While the play is specific to the Iranian experience, its themes are universal. It asks a haunting question: who are we when we cannot find the words?

Sanaz Toossi's lean, 90-minute masterclass in empathy manages to be both hilariously funny and quietly devastating, particularly while we currently sit with hands tied behind our backs as an ignorant racist saber-rattler attempts to redefine everything good and just our country once prided itself in being.

THROUGH APR. 26: Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Bl., Beverly Hills. 310.746.4000 or TheWallis.org 

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Whitefire Theatre

I’d thought in my long life I’d suffered through more than my share of plays about small-minded backward countryfolk and their massively dysfunctional families, but au contaire, it seems. The world premiere of Julie Shavers’ outrageously twisted new The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville, now in a limited run at the Whitefire, proved I had just a little room left for one more.

Although I have to admit Shavers’ rather predictable tale of a Fourth of July family reunion in the rural Tennessee backyard of the miserable Moon family womenfolk covers no new ground, Shavers breathes glorious life into the familiar convoluted goings-on with her unique knack for creating lovable—though suitably exasperating—characters and harbors a deliciously clever off-color sense of humor that takes anything Lanford Wilson ever wrote one step farther.

The one family member who long before fled the dead-end existence of the Moon-scape is the eldest daughter Lucinda (Mamie Gummer), who had made her reluctant way from her adopted home in Los Angeles to be berated by her unhappy kin who wonder if she’s become a lesbian because she no longer wears lipstick and “smells like a woodpile.”

Lucinda’s mother (Gigi Bermingham) is someone, of course, who spouts the gospel with every breath and wails about how hard she’s had to work through prayer to try to exorcise the multitude of pesky demons who inhabit the bodies of her three ungrateful and sinful daughters.

Her view of Lucinda’s life in California has been honed by watching the news (“What you watch is not the news,” Lucinda interjects) and she’s convinced LA is practically a third world country where homeless people have been so infested by rats we have an epidemic of typhus in our courthouses here, that “Mexican rapists wander back and forth across the border,” and all us Hollywood liberals have regular abortion parties and are part of child molestation rings.

You know, like things Donald Trump would say; all that’s missing is a rant about Haitian immigrants eating our household pets.

The remaining female members of the woebegone Moon household, whose male counterparts aren’t present but are talked about so much they might as well be, are Mama Moon’s other daughters, fraternal twins Kitty and Birdie (played by Ashley Ward and the playwright, respectively) and Birdie’s young daughter Lottie (Angelie Simone).

It doesn’t take long to realize the three siblings have spent a lifetime bickering with one another and continuously hurting each other’s feelings—and Lottie, who seems to have shared a genetic knack for perpetual fertility, has also inherited her mother’s sharp tongue.

Then there’s Granny Moon (Juliana Liscio), a bedridden basically offstage presence who continually screams for attention throughout the proceedings and keeps her offspring jumping. Her ornery longevity is not seen as much of a blessing, especially by Birdie, who among other duties has the ineviable task of applying Desynex to her grandmother’s nether regions.

It’s clearly a miserable existence and no one is very pleased that Lucinda has successfully escaped to our left coast while they’ve been stuck behind to deal with a string of often incarcerated husbands and boyfriends, as well as dealing with a Jesus freak of a mother who believes all good church-goin’, bible-fearin’ Christians must be ready to engage in spiritual warfare as the targets of such worrisome archenemies as Al-Qaeda, North Korea, and Hillary Clinton.

Despite the inherent predictability of the modern adult-oriented Ma Kettle genus it commemorates, The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville is lifted from the play’s all-too customary bucolic genre by Shavers’ wonderfully snappy, hilariously irreverent dialogue—as well as her own dead-on performance as the hardboiled and verbally unfiltered sister who’s more than aware that everybody knows how fucked up she is. “It’s right there in the open,” she proudly proclaims, a statement none of her family members make any attempt to dispute.

Her hilarious homespun countrified palaver—perhaps coming somewhat naturally since her program bio proclaims Shavers was actually born and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee—is continuously punctuated by a riotous barrage of a kind of Hee Haw-inspired oneliners, such as describing drunken swimmers at the community watering hole as “flailing around like an octopus caught in a lawnmower” or warning that her mother has the “caged up nutty look of a wild dog in a Christmas sweater.”

The always watchable Bermingham works seamlessly against her usual refined and gentile type as Mama, making the role her own despite the script describing the character as a “big woman with long white hair who’s somewhere between Gandalf and Stevie Nicks.” Bermingham transcends her drastic physical dissimilarities with Shavers’ scripted vision of Mama, even handling the shotgun she uses to dispatch the farm’s overabundance of rats with a technique that could rival Annie Oakley.

Ward and Simone are perfect foils for their characters’ more colorful relatives, while Gummer smoothly synthesizes an uncanny simplicity and honesty as Lucinda that quickly identifies the character as the moral compass of the clan, the one reasonable outcast with whom us jaded urban observers can better relate.

While occasionally her performance feels as though it’s been transported from another less broad play altogether, it’s clear Gummer is an exceptional actor who has inherited some worldclass familial chops. I would love to one day see her play Barbara in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, perhaps with her esteemed mother reprising the role of Violet that brought her the 18th of her staggering 21 Oscar nominations (among three wins).

Still, under the direction of Daniel O’Brien, this world premiere mounting of Shavers’ promising and refreshing play is in general a bit of a conundrum, presented at the tiny Whitefire for only seven performances and featuring glaringly bareboned production accoutrements, with black curtains pulled across the stage to indicate new locations and a huge screen featuring projections in place of a real set, while clunky scene changes are accomplished by the actors and a couple of stagehands in black carrying furniture. Why, there are even papier mache tombstones in the family graveyard hand-inscribed with epitaphs worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The script itself suffers in the eleventh hour by quickly wrapped up resolution, especially puzzling when the regurgitating of a dastardly family secret is revealed and then glossed over with disappointing results that leave us thinking, “Wait… what about…?” and when Mama’s fiercely passionate religious beliefs are challenged, she does little to appear sufficiently shocked or to stoically defend her position.

That said, hopefully this brief and imperfect first pass of The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville, with this precision cast and Julie Shavers’ flair for creating endearingly drawn characters, will be just that. It’s a play that in a fair world definitely deserves a rosy future, albeit with some judicious fleshing out and far more professional production values.

THROUGH MAY 1: Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. 818.687.8559 or whitefiretheatre.org 

Photo by Thomas Alleman 

Open Fist Theatre Company and Circle X Theatre

In my early teen years, I definitely crashed past the usual youthful interests in homecoming dances and status seeking as warp-speed, instead embracing my darker, more aesthetically morbid side; had I been born later, I’m sure I would have been referred to as Goth. By 14, I was soaking up Kerouac, Genet, Sartre, Nathanael West, and certainly Franz Kafka. Why, I was one dream away from turning into a cockroach myself.

I had an especially powerful connection to Kafka’s Amerika or, The Man Who Disappeared, which told the convoluted and somewhat dystopian tale of Karl Rossmann, a 17-year-old German immigrant in the early 20th century sent packing to the New World after he knocked up his nanny—and for anyone who knows my own personal history or gleaned my past from my “auto-novel’ Waiting for Walk, it shouldn’t be hard to see the parallels.

Told with Kafka’s familiar electrifying edge of wandering into the surreal, I identified greatly with poor Karl. I too felt as though I had in a way been sent away to fend for myself early on since I was hardly the typical example of the perfect midwestern suburban teenager being constantly asked by adults what I wanted to do with my life. That I knew—and no one who heard my answer was terribly happy about it.

Karl was forced in Amerika to face a ridiculous barrage of challenges in his young life, which to me always seemed an insurmountable series of events for anyone to try to adapt the work for the stage.

Writer/producer/editor of children’s programming Dietrich Smith has done just that—and the result is monumental. His adaptation of Amerika, now returned to the Open Fist after an initial run there last fall, is nothing short of epic. It’s a sprawling, extremely respectful homage to Kafka, who envisioned a future for our species 100-plus years ago that frighteningly doesn’t seem too far from the truth at this particular place in time.

With the help of an astoundingly innovative and unstoppably visionary design team, Smith has proven that, with a lot of brash confidence and a buttload of imagination, intimate theatre doesn't need to be all painted black cubes and recycled Goodwill couches.

On Frederica Nascimento’s Caligari-like set made up of levels and platforms and modular cubbyholes stuffed with model sailing ships and steampunk gears and bolts, poor Karl (played by transplanted South African disciplinary artist Oqalile Tshetshe in what must be an astronomically exhausting LA professional stage debut) wanders through each and every period Kafka thrusts him into headfirst.

In the production’s nearly three-and-a-half hour, two intermission-worthy running time, our young hero bounces from the steerage bowels of a massive ship to the Manhattan mansion of his industrialist uncle (a juicy turn from the always-sturdy Pat Towne) to wandering the open roads with a pair of untrustworthy opportunistic also European-transplanted wags (Elliott Moore and Matthew Goodrich) to being taken in by a goodhearted hotel restaurant manager (Maria Mastroyannis) and given a job running one of the facility’s many elevators.

From there, after being railroaded by an outrageous accusation, Karl faces possible jail time and is eventually thrust into Amerika’s most out-there location: a bizarrely freakish theatre company that may be located in the afterlife or just may have something to do with Oklahoma.

I always saw the final chapter of Karl’s journey as something unearthly—especially since it occurs after he chooses to take a swan dive from a third floor balcony. In Smith’s adaptation, the entrance to the Theatre of Oklahoma is populated, as it is in the novel, with angels blowing trumpets to welcome prospective castmembers, but somehow in translation, many of the more magical aspects of the story are blurred and some of the more surreal touchstones that made the story on the page so mystical get lost in the stagecraft.

I’m not saying anything here should be eliminated or condensed—although I do think that there should be a published warning, especially for members of the scrutinizing press, of the production’s Homeric running time—but I do wonder if the playwright should have stepped away and let someone direct who was less personally embroiled in seeing his longtime dream come to fruition.

Aside from perhaps needing someone less involved with a fresh perspective to take the reins, Smith also appears to have focused so completely on the story and the implementation of the design facets of his passion project that the actors have suffered being ignored.

The acting, although occasionally noteworthy—particularly Towne, Mastroyannis, Jade Santana in a hilarious quickie as a somnambulant Italian elevator boy, and Jeremy D. Thompson in a rich variety of eclectic characters—is in general a mixed bag. Seldom are performers working in the same playing style or even at the same volume, things that hurt the production immensely.

Still, the aforementioned stagecraft is worth any misses, from A. Jeffrey Schoenberg’s meticulous period costuming to seven-time Oscar winning Gary Rydstrom’s redolent and often echoing soundscape to Gavan Wyrick’s suggestive art deco-tinged lighting which so sumptuously bathes Nascimento’s highly versatile set in wild geometric light.

And then there’s Elizabeth Moore’s striking huge paintings on drops depicting New York City and every other location along Karl’s travels and the whimsical, comic book-like projections designed by legendary Courage the Cowardly Dog creator John R. Dilworth that take this Amerika to a wonderful new level, bringing out some of the novel’s welcome comedic aspects that the performances often miss.

Whatever the misses are here, the overall effort is quite remarkable. Smith’s adaptation finds all the sly Kafkaesque complexities and colors that, as in the source material, are camouflaged by the narrative: the eternal battle between the haves and the have-nots, the shabby treatment of individuals deemed lesser than others, and the search for a reason to be alive in our puzzling and too-often apathetic society.

Amerika or, The Man who Disappeared was one of Kafka’s earliest novels, written when he was in his late 20s and without its author ever having stepped foot in America. It remained unpublished until after his untimely death at age 40 and was unleashed into print against his fervent wish that it never would be made public.

Dietrich Smith has done an incredible job transforming Amerika for the stage. To me, breathing life into a classic antagonist whose doomed search for personal identity and the rapidly disintegrating American Dream in an uncaring world is far more interesting and relatable than anything Arthur Miller ever imagined.

THROUGH MAY 3: Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. Tickets: openfist.org or circlextheatre.org 

Photo by Jacques Lorch 

Odyssey Theatre

The coolest part of this evening of two seldom performed Pinter one-acts, performed under the banner Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, is the crackling smart and most welcome revival of The Lover, his original 1962 playlet for television written for his wife Vivien Merchant.

Directed by veteran master regisseur Jack Heller and starring Ron Botitta and Susan Priver, two of LA’s sturdiest and most prolific performers, this lovely and tasty little theatrical morsel subtly attacking the bored bourgeoisie of the times by delving into their kinkiest secret sexual desires, could not be much better.

With a grandly Caligari-esque expressionistic set by Joel Daavid, Pinter’s bitingly urbane dark comedy sizzles in the hands of Heller and his talented pawns, who clearly understand how to play material that remains brutally corrosive just underneath the fine silks and satins and swirling scotch in his thinly-veiled send-up of British manners and pretentious civility.

Heller’s crisply effervescent staging of The Lover is a quintessential textbook example of how to play the always challenging dialogue of Pinter, how to make these mannered characters real and hilariously devilish without falling into the many massive traps inherent in any script by one of the latter half of the 20th century’s most unstoppable and groundbreaking wordsmiths.

Oddly, the first act event of Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, the dramatist’s 1991 politics-skewering Party Time, is exactly the opposite.

Set in the same ultra-posh and polished wood-paneled flat during an upscale cocktail party where eight guests discuss country clubs and summering at their country homes while ignoring some kind of ominous military insurrection taking place just outside their windows, could have been something perfect at this particular time in our poor country’s own currently disparaging history, but something is terribly amiss in the playing of it.

In class, the lategreat Uta Hagan once said that when approaching a Pinter script, the very first thing one should do is take a big black marker and cross out all stage directions—especially all the frequent and, to me, inappropriate demands that between lines actors must “Pause.”

Somehow, Heller’s ensemble clearly missed such a memo. The pacing is deadly and in general—with the notable exceptions of Mouchette Van Helsdingen as a stately countess-type trying desperately to fit in and Isaac W. Jay as a dashing young lothario—the ensemble cast hasn't a clue about how to play the difficult postures and eccentric rhythms of Harold Pinter.

It’s rather a shame it was decided that The Lover would be performed after Party Time because personally, if I hadn’t been there to review Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, I would have definitely made a quiet exit at intermission and missed the evening’s totally outstanding and deliciously satisfying second half.

THROUGH APR. 26: Odyssey Theatre, 2055 N. Sepulveda Blvd., West LA. 310.477.2055 or OdysseyTheatre.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