EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

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

TICKETS: skylighttheatre.org/tony-abatemarco 

Photo by Brian Hashimoto 

THROUGH MAR. 29: Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 Mentor Av., Pasadena. 626.683.6801 or BostonCourtPasadena.org

Photo by Austin Ciezko 

Hudson Mainstage Theatre

I don’t usually review plays that are about to close, but although writer/director Zach Shield’s arrestingly off-kilter and desperately dark comedy Dad’s Leg will go poof in its current incarnation after this weekend, not only is it a work that needs to be on everyone’s personal radar, there’s a good chance it’s on its way to a longer engagement at another theatre. Lord knows it deserves it.

Since everyone who conspired to bring Dad’s Leg to life comes from LA’s film industry, there wasn’t a lot of publicity, nor were reviewers initially contacted until it was too late to get attention from the usual channels. That said, the engagement was basically sold out every night during its four-week run since Shields is one of the most talked about new voices in film as a screenwriter, producer, director, cinematographer, editor, and musician.

Shields is a frequent collaborator with filmmaker Michael Dougherty, cowriter with him on the popular films Krampus, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong—and oh yeah, just for giggles he’s also Ryan Gosling’s other half in their popular gothic rock duo Dead Man’s Bones.

With that kind of emerging Hollywood pedigree, the intimate Hudson Theatre has probably hosted more famous attendees for Shield’s Dad’s Leg than ever before, including Al Pacino, Jesse Plemons, Amy Adams, Evan Peters, James Franco, and Austin Butler—twice. Still, the run went almost completely incognito within our scrappy and undaunted LA theatre community and Dad’s Leg definitely needs to have… well, legs… and a far longer and more celebrated life in theatrical circles as well.

It is a raw and convention-defying dramady that unswervingly goes beyond the usual confines of one of theatre’s most familiar and often overworked topics: the dysfunctional family unit trying to understand one another and heal despite damaged individual personal histories out to destroy their ability to survive and cope in our ever-increasingly more fucked-up world.

Brianna (Orange is the New Black’s Emily Althaus) and her sister Connie (Rain Spencer, Taylor Jewel in The Summer I Turned Pretty) have been estranged for many years but come face-to-face at the antiseptic hospital bed of their father (Ted Monte) on the eve of his surgery to remove one of his legs due to alcoholic neuropathy.

As their dad sleeps in a bed placed directly between them, the sisters grapple with the severe bitterness and animosity that has dogged their relationship in their adult years.

Brianna has a history of her own problems with substance abuse but has rallied enough to have adopted a square-jawed but shaky forgiveness for the inattention and many transgressions of her father, becoming the one stable influence in his health issues. She has visited him in the hospital every day and has become medical proxy able to make decisions for his care.

Connie arrives late to the party with a crucifix around her neck, a bible in one hand, and that familiar glowing framed picture of Jesus in the other, declaring herself a changed woman from the days when she rampantly exchanged sexual favors for her most basic needs. She also brings along a paper for her near-comatose dad to sign that would grant her possession of his soon-to be severed leg—or “cut off” as she keeps saying, much to the dissatisfaction of her sister who far prefers the term “amputated.”

Dad’s Leg becomes a Kafka-esque fight over custody of the limb in question. Connie believes she is on a mission designated to her from a personal vision received from her newly-minted savior and, if she is able to keep the appendage in question—presumably under her bed—she believes it will ultimately help alleviate all the pain the girls’ familial maladjustment has done to destroy their relationship.

The pragmatic Brianna, however, knows from experience this will only be another fine mess her sister will get them both into and she’ll be the only one left standing to sort it out. Besides, she’s always been the one left to care for things in her family and with her dad while Connie was off making mincemeat of her life and offering handjobs to any random dude she thought would help her in her quest to stay alive—including, most recently, her father’s doctor.

Shields’ kinetic, frantically visual direction is as strikingly bold as his dialogue and it feels as though along the way he’s granted these two exceptional actresses the freedom to find their own quirky way; I only wish I could have been a fly on the wall of their rehearsal process.

Spencer’s Connie is so awkwardly strange and courageously unconventional that she could outshine Sandy Dennis at her most idiosyncratic, somehow managing to portray a kind of trailer park everyman with body language resembling a sexually-charged marionette operated by a crackhead—and I mean that as a compliment.

There are few actors who could get away with her physical excesses with such qualified success and obviously Shields has let her explore these bizarre behavioral choices freely, if not encouraged them.

Althaus provides the quintessential counterpoint to Spencer as the commonsensical Brianna, finding an outwardly barely contained intensity that belies a seething suppressed fury that seems about to explode—and does.

When the tensions become insurmountable and the sisters begin to physically grapple, all hell breaks loose. Papers to be signed are shredded in all directions while that beneficent framed image of Jesus is erotically rubbed onto Brianna’s private parts, and soon Connie’s sweet bouquet of hospital visit blossoms become weapons flung everywhere, including into the first row of the audience.

Just when one might think strangulation might be the only possible end to all this, as the sisters violently wrestle on the floor in front of their father’s bed, dear old dad wakes up. All speculation that this is simply an unappreciated role that could only rival the title character in Weekend At Bernie’s, Monte’s hospital bed rises to become vertical and the actor delivers a jaw-dropping eleventh-hour performance that almost makes his long rest a necessary device for him to get through it.

Monte makes up for lost time, delivering a tour de force performance as the girls’ worldclass patriarchal mess, his powerful gravel pit of a voice instantly commanding the stage and eerily mutating the man from an alcohol-diminished broken loser to a kind of Christ-like figure, his final wall-shaking monologue, accompanied by flashing lights and thunder, possibly even revealing there might just be something intentional in that distinction.

Zach Shields’ Dad’s Leg is a simple, intimately told, yet monumentally unblushing theatrical experience, a fine example of contemporary and remarkably innovative storytelling at its best. If this haunting production doesn’t have a life beyond the limitations of upper Santa Monica Boulevard, it would be a terrible loss for us all.

THROUGH MAR. 8:  Hudson Mainstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Bl., Hollywood. www.onstage411.com

Photo by Craig Schwartz 

Antaeus Theatre

I’ve never been quite as impressed with the celebrated works of playwright Arthur Miller as I probably should be, but how hard and how obviously he hits his audience over the head with his moralistic hammer is usually problematic for me. Take the notorious Willie Loman, for instance, who whines so much in Death of a Salesman about how life has treated him that, long before he crashes his Chevy into a tree, I want to stand up and shout, “You have a loving home!” Your family dotes on you! Get over it already!”

The two immediate exceptions in the fatalistic arsenal of Miller’s plays for me are the cleverly allegorical The Crucible and his powerful 1947 masterpiece All My Sons, now being resurrected in a nearly perfect all-cylinder revival from our always rock-steady Antaeus Theatre Company.

Miller often tackles the universal themes of morality vs. what All My Sons’ everyman anti-hero Joe Keller calls “practicality,” but this time out the author leaves just a tad room for his audience to discover things for ourselves without incessant preaching as though we are in grade school learning for the first time how dastardly our world operates.

The play takes place in the wake of World War II in the comfortably arcadian suburban backyard of Joe (Bo Foxworth), a successful midwestern businessman whose company manufactures airplane parts. He and his loyal wife Kate (Tessa Auberjonois) have survived the war but only barely, as Joe’s company was accused of providing cracked cylinder heads to the U.S. Air Force which resulted in the deaths of 21 men. Although Joe spent time in prison, he was exonerated when it was revealed his partner was the culprit, not him.

Adding to their pain, the Kellers’ oldest son, also a pilot, was lost in the South Pacific five years earlier and the all but given fact that he’s gone is something his mother still vehemently refuses to accept.

True to its era, All My Sons is told in three acts and is loaded with many peripheral characters as was expected of plays at that time, something that can often make the playing of it so many years since it debuted (and won Tony Awards for Miller and original director Elia Kazan) feel unnecessarily dated. Luckily, under the leadership of director Oanh Nguyen and featuring a generally stellar cast and worldclass design elements, the creative teamwork somehow keeps it from feeling outmoded.

This is above all what makes this revival not only riveting but essential, as it clearly focuses not only on how morality can be sidetracked by the breakneck search for the American Dream, but how subtly Miller’s 80-year-old parable reflects on our country’s current situation, a time where personal greed and unbridled ambition have totally trumped (what a perfect word) almost everything that's just and virtuous.

Auberjonois is the soul of this production, her tortured wife and mother becoming a warning for us all to not to let ourselves be desensitized by what we see enveloping our country and ignore what’s right and wrong by trying to live our lives as though nothing is crashing and burning around us.

Foxworth has the most difficult task as our anti-hero Joe, written as though the guy might be the kindly family patriarch in an old Andy Hardy movie or the grandfather in a warmhearted comedy by Kaufman and Hart—that is until somewhere approaching Act Three when his dastardly wartime conduct comes to light.

The problem is, as brought to life by Foxworth, there’s something clearly missing in the first two-thirds of the playing time. His Joe is so geewillikers squeaky clean and goodhearted that what is later revealed becomes hard to believe.

As much as everyone loves good ol’ Joe Keller, right from the start the traditionally difficult role needs just a hint of the character’s dark secrets lurching below the exterior joviality, as well as a lingering fear he will be found out. Still, when Foxworth gets to the play’s devastating conclusion, he redeems himself gloriously with a compelling, exhausting, gut-wrenching performance.

Matthew Grondin is a major standout as the Keller’s surviving son Chris, someone who knows in his heart facts he’s desperately trying to starve down, and Shannon Lee Clair is outstanding as Ann, the former fiancée of his late brother and daughter of Joe’s now imprisoned business partner.

Appearing as the many peripheral supporting characters that if All My Sons was written today might not even be included, almost all of the actors are exceptional. Cherish Duke is particularly notable as the Kellers’ unhappy and bitingly cynical neighbor Sue Bayliss, Miller’s slyly comedic shadow of the “practical” and outwardly decent post-war American whose thinly veiled covetousness less tragically parallels Joe’s own unthinkable bad decisions.

Above anything, this enduring classic still has so much to say and Nguyen and the remarkable folks who keep Antaeus such a viable entity in the Los Angeles theatre scene once again could not say it much better.

It seems grievously true that our patterns of behavior as such a flawed species always cycle back and we befuddled humans continually make the same mistakes. If only people listened more often to what art and artists have to warn us about, maybe we wouldn’t currently be stuck floundering in the unshakable grasp of an out-of-control monster and his ball-less minions.

“Private revolutions always die,” Arthur Miller reminds us in All My Sons, but unless we all fight like we’ve never fought before, the epically obscene public ones we face right now might kill us all.

THROUGH MAR. 30: Antaeus Theatre Company, 110 E. Broadway, Glendale. 818.506.1983 or Antaeus.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Mark Taper Forum

What a monumental achievement for artistic diversity in Los Angeles is the west coast debut of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, the first non-replica regional production of the four-time Tony-nominated Broadway musical to be seen anywhere. With clever design adaptations to make it work in the Taper playing space and direction by Center Theatre Group’s artistic director Snehal Desai, the production features an all-Filipino cast and, as Desai proudly stated in his opening night speech, it was developed by an almost entirely AAPI creative and design team.

The ingenuity here is exposing the inhumane injustices of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ brutal dictatorship in the Philippines from 1965 to 1976 and managing to do so under the glittery camouflaging banner of a rousing disco-pop musical. Below the flashiness of Here Lies Love lurks a premonitory message showing how the Marcos’ bloody reign mirrors the frightening and ever-expanding dangers brought upon our own country by the corruption and pouty dysfunction dogging the obscenely aggressive administration of our current manbaby-in-chief.

Featuring the original concept and an outstanding score by one of my personal musical heroes David Byrne (who, I might add proudly, I first introduced performing with his Talking Heads to Los Angeles audiences during my tenure as talent coordinator of the Troubadour a few centuries ago), the origin of Here Lies Love is quite fascinating, based on Byrne’s obsessive research on the Marcoses.

It began as a 2010 song cycle concept album produced in a made-in-mythical-heaven collaboration with Fatboy Slim, who was instrumental in popularizing Great Britain’s “big beat” genre in the 1990s, and the title of the album was lifted from a comment made by Imelda Marcos when she first viewed the body of her husband, saying that she wanted the phrase “Here Lies Love” inscribed on her tombstone.

Byrne explained about the master plan back then:

“The story I am interested in is asking what drives a powerful person, what makes them tick. How do they make and then remake themselves? I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if, as this piece would be principally composed of clubby dance music, one could experience it in a club setting? Could one bring a story and a kind of theatre to the disco? Would that be possible and if so, wouldn’t that be amazing?”

The greatest risk taken in this production is the abandonment of the musical’s previous dance party setting. In New York, the entire orchestra section of the Broadway Theatre was removed to become a huge dance floor, virtually making the mezzanine the first row of traditional seating. Instead, Desai places the action in a Filipino TV studio as one of the country’s popular daytime televised variety shows replaces the New York premiere's dance-friendly nightclub surroundings.

Even with Desai’s visually glitzy staging and an ensemble featuring some knockout vocal talent and original choreography by William Carlos Angulo performed by a precision troupe of highly spirited dancers, still this reinvention of the original Broadway production barely masks one glaring weakness: a rather badly written book and confusing storyline that, without the razzle-dazzle, makes little sense as a historical timeline.

The evolution of Imelda Marcos in the show’s intermission-free 90-minute runtime from sweetly innocent farm girl to a real-life Cruella de Vil is a hard transformation to swallow. It seems here as though one incident, finding her notoriously womanizing husband (it’s said he fathered as many as 17 illegitimate children) in bed with his mistress Dovie Beams suddenly changes Imelda into the infamously hardened prima donna who, in her public quest to Make the Philippines Great Again, basically vows to take over the power while enriching and glorifying herself at the expense of her country.

Again… sound familiar?

In spite of the script’s impossibly expeditious metamorphosis of Imelda Marcos, Reanne Acasio does a remarkable job bringing the character to life despite the uphill task Byrne has left her to overcome. She is surprisingly believable as both the youthful impoverished Imelda and as the monster she becomes, doing her best throughout to smooth out the journey despite the Jekyll and Hyde-like character arc challenge she faces.

Joshua Dela Cruz is also a standout as her early boyfriend Ninoy Aquino, who leaves her in the dust to pursue political gain and later becomes a fierce adversary of her rise to power, as is Carol Angeli as her best childhood friend who, during her latterday Countess Dracula period, Imelda coldly has imprisoned after Estrella does an interview revealing the power-mad diva’s humble background.

In Desai’s altered vision, what was originally the role of the nightclub’s DJ who narrates much of the story, RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Aura Mayari becomes “Imeldaific,” a kind of alter ego shadow figure who mirrors Imelda’s extravagant lifestyle and well-documented passion for disco. Try as Mayari might—and as spectacularly as dressed by costumer Jaymee Ngernwichit—the role is oddly out of place, suffering from the lack of a convincing throughline that never pans out.

The highlight of the entire production is the eleventh-hour appearance of Joan Almedilla, the original Imelda when Byrne’s song cycle was first performed in concert at Carnegie Hall in 2007. As the grieving mother of Ninoy Aquino, who Imelda may or may not have ordered assassinated, Almedilla is astounding, delivering the musical’s most haunting balled, “Just Ask the Flowers,” over the casket of her martyrized son.

The design and creative aspects are all suitably grand, including Arnel Sanciano’s TV studio set, Marcella Barbeau’s lighting, Yee Eun Nam’s projections, and especially Ngernwichit’s incredibly colorful and evocative costuming.

Musical direction by Joe Cruz and Jennifer Lin does yeoman’s duty with the infectious and continually noteworthy score, but unfortunately one of the most conspicuous omissions hampering an otherwise well-appointed production is the music is prerecorded. The rather tinny and clearly passionless canned accompaniment considerably drags down the splendor of an otherwise lavishly appointed presentation.

Whatever its theatrical quagmires, this AAPI-spawned locally reborn reinvention of David Byrne’s passion project is a significant achievement; not only does it cleverly scrutinize and bring attention to a dastardly history of a time not long ago when an authoritarian political regime all but destroyed a country, it also pays homage to the courageous citizens of the Philippines’ homegrown People Power Revolution who bravely stood up to the madness and brought it to a stop.

This is truly an urgently important and most welcome cautionary tale that, beyond the flashes of the production’s overhead mirrored ball, its spashy costuming and choreography, and the casting of some splendid performers with praiseworthy vocal power, Here Lies Love is obviously meant to remind us as Americans of all colors and creeds that the people of our country now under seige have a duty to band together and end the insanity.

THROUGH APR. 5: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org  

Photo by Kelly Stuart 

Playwrights’ Arena and the Victory Theatre Center

The first scene in Nicholas Pilapil’s intriguing new two-hander is actually what normally would be the last. It depicts the end of a beautiful decade-long relationship, leaving us an entire play to unravel what went wrong.

And that, dear reader, is the frustrating thing about Pilapil’s Luca & Uri, now world premiering at the Little Victory, because the answer is: nothing. There’s nothing wrong—or wrong enough—to make these bright and strong survivors give up so cavalierly on a love as perfect and worth saving as theirs.

Luca (Roland Ruiz) and Uri (Kurt Kanazawa) meet serendipitously at a party and instantly feel that old inexplicable zap of electricity they can only attribute to “kismet.” Luca jokingly tells Uri he’s intrigued by his “mirthful lack of charm” while Uri counters by wondering how the more practical and grounded Luca “could be so white.”

In the play’s sweetest and most satisfying moments, simple everyday joys such as when the lovers share their happiness over receiving a free container of sticky rice from their favorite takeout place, prove theirs clearly is a match made in theatrical heaven.

Within a day they’re smackdab in the middle of a nearly idyllic relationship despite Uri’s reluctance to believe such a thing could happen and, as magically conjured by Pilapil, their immediately intense feelings for each other are gloriously real and certainly something worth cheering on.

The unlikelihood of such a love at first sight kind of bond sweeping them both off their feet so rapidly is made plausible by the lovely, gossamer dialogue that makes it clear right away that such a thing is possible. Both men share a sense of humor and intellectual curiosity as well as, although it’s hard to explain, the ability to express themselves with the same rhythms, if you will.

Still, the rule of opposites attract is quite in evidence too. Luca is a commonsensical science professor with his feet firmly planted in academia, while Uri is a somewhat flighty postgraduate student studying mythology and folklore with an emphasis on queerness.

Their relationship may be based on a magnetic mutual attraction that initially circumvents their differences, but as their story unfolds from the ending to the beginning and then flashes at breakneck speed back and forth through key moments in the relationship, both their philosophical and practical differences keep them butting heads on a regular basis—that is when they’re not hot-bloodedly butting their other heads, if you receive my meaning (with a well-deserved nod to intimacy director Giovanni Ortega).

This constantly shifting timeline proves confusing at times, especially because the lovers’ aforementioned viewpoints often shift and frustratingly directly take on the others’ point of view—yet never at the same time. Thankfully, director Jon Lawrence Rivera stages the mercurial colliding events smoothly and often playfully, keeping the two lone actors with so much dependent on their skills moving and connecting with great passion and liveliness.

The frequent filmic changes of place and time handled by Kanazawa and Ruiz in blue light can get a bit tiresome and sometimes unnecessarily too complex, which made me long for a larger playing space than the Victory Center’s cramped second stage, but this is a small druther in an otherwise electric presentation.

Under Rivera’s exacting eye for tapping into our often self-destructive and labyrinthine human condition, these two exceptional actors keep our interest riveted on their characters’ journey, though all the while wary since we are privy to how things devolve over their decade together.

Kanazawa and Ruiz have an uncanny ability to make us totally believe these are two people deeply in love trying desperately to stay connected despite the outside distractions of their careers and their individual maturation. Without these two exceptional actors and a director as keenly sensitive, Pilapil’s tale, even with his poetic language, could easily descend into melodrama.

All that said—and I picture my dear friend Jon Rivera on his well-deserved vacation lying out by the pool in his hotel in Hoi An saying, “Uh-oh, here it comes”—I did have one lingering quandary that dogged me watching Pilapil’s otherwise lovely, beautifully evocative play.

I try in my reviews not to give away plot points that should be left for the viewer to watch unfold but this time out, since the play begins with that concluding scene showing the couple breaking up, I guess I shouldn’t worry.

See, as much as I came to care for the characters of Luca and Uri, and as well directed, designed, and performed Pilapil’s tender love story was in the quest to bring it to life, in the final analysis the play felt devoid of a reason it needed to be told.

The fact is these two intelligent and well-matched lovers wanted to deserve, as Uri tells Luca, the “life I want to live,” I found it frustrating and unnecessary that in the end they were not allowed to find that together. Theirs is clearly a love not to give up on.

I truly believe great and true love can conquer anything and so, in that regard, perhaps I’m not capable of being as objective as I should be in the midst of sharing the most important and improbable love of my own in my often thorny time clinging for dear life on our wildly spinning planet.

Any relationship takes a lot of patience and the ability to make ridiculously hard concessions, so the fact that Luca wants to end things after many years working diligently to make it work left me feeling the play misses a satisfying resolution. Saying he wants to sever their relationship because he’s destroyed Uri’s dreams and feels he’s responsible for his lover abandoning searching for his personal windmills is an argument all too familiar to me.

I’ve spent the last 13 years fighting the same concerns, that as someone far older than the person I cherish more than anything else ever in my life, I’m holding him back from a future he deserves—and perhaps from finding a love that won’t be gone from his life far too soon.

Every time I dip into the quagmire of this emotional quicksand and try to convince my partner he should be looking for someone closer to his age with whom he’d have the ability to grow and mature alongside, he just rolls his eyes, calls me a silly goose, and we move on—together.

As much as I loved Nicholas Pilapil’s gossamer yet somehow hollow and heartbreaking Luca & Uri, watching this couple painfully go their separate ways was a huge letdown.

Instead of walking away and leaving Luca with tears streaming as he faces a solitary life, I wish Uri would have instead turned back at the last minute and asked, “So, what do you want for dinner?”

After all, I bet they still had a coupon or two for a free order of sticky rice from their favorite Thai place.

 *  *  *

ADDENDUM: Well! All is not lost in the world after all! There’s a quick tableau at the very end showing Luca and Uri sitting together looking forward in silence with their arms draped around one another. I took it as meant to be another out of time moment recalling better days for the couple but au contraire!

Over his yummy-looking Vietnamese breakfast in Hoi An, Jon Rivera texted: “It's a hard ending, because the final scene is an epilogue, two years later after they got married. Uri shows his hand with a ring at the end. For better or worse, they are together!”

I told Jon it was a shame since this is live theatre they couldn’t have added a cartoon arrow floating in the air pointing at Uri’s ring finger. Maybe Pilapil should consider my “What’s for dinner?” line after all!

THROUGH MAR. 15: Victory Theatre Center, 3324 W. Victory Blvd, Burbank. 818.841.5421 or thevictorytheatrecenter.org

Poto by Jeff Lorch 

Rogue Machine

It has come to my attention just now that listening to Debussy’s Clair du lune while attempting to write about a new play by Justin Tanner is simply not feasible. I’m not sure what is. Scriabin, maybe? Or Stockhausen? Varese? Yoko Ono?

Tanner, whose early works at the now iconic Cast Theatre beginning in the late 80s, such as the Pen West Award winner Pot Mom, as well as Teen Girl, Coyote Woman, Tent Show, Bitter Women, and the 10-year run of Zombie Attack, not only began the careers of such artists as Laurie Metcalf and French Stewart, it put our scrappy Los Angeles intimate theatre scene on the map and made the LACC-bred playwright something of a living local legend.

I had the privilege of working alongside Tanner in that other LA theatre counter-culture superstar Michael Sargent’s American Nympho in the late night serial The Strip: A Living Comic Book at the lost and dearly lamented Evidence Room in 2002, where each week us game performers would receive our scripts by Thursday night, rehearse once, and then each Saturday at midnight would perform new uber-wacky live episodes of three mock soap opera stories by Tanner, Sargent, and Patricia Scanlon as her notorious Hildy Hildy in what the LA Times then referred to as “savagely funny renegade hilarity” reminiscent of “R. Crumb meets the Cockettes on a bender.”

In 2009, Tanner’s Voice Lessons, in a much-extended run at the Zephyr and later Sacred Fools, also starring his then-fervent disciples Metcalf and Stewart, was swamped with award nominations, but it was his newsmaking antics with his 2005 production Oklahomo! at a small theatre in Burbank that raised the writer to undying eminence for me.

Justin’s deliciously irreverent take on one of the 20^th century’s sappiest musicals featured a small gay theatre company presenting an unauthorized all-male version of the classic Oklahoma!—and the playwright brazenly typecast himself as the show’s abrasive director who suffers a nervous breakdown during rehearsals.

When the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation found out about the production, they immediately issued an official Cease and Desist order demanding the production be shut down. Instead of stopping performances, however, Justin Tanner wrote in a new ending scene, with representatives from the Foundation (played by actors) rushing from the back of the house shouting “STOP!” and waving court orders. Oklahomo! defiantly continued its run to sold out houses.

Anyone who knows Justin knows his performance as that out-of-control director in Oklahomo! was hardly a stretch for the guy. Tanner’s personal reputation for being a tad… volatile, may I say?… is nearly as notorious in LA theatre circles as his outrageously off-centered and genuinely hilarious plays themselves.

In his maturing years, Justin has come to work diligently on his demons—and his plays have become more and more autobiographical along the way. Such was definitely the case with his last offering, Little Theatre, which three years ago began his tenure as Rogue Machine’s resident playwright and almost uncomfortably dredged up his early years and lingering trauma initiated during his beginnings at the Cast Theatre.

Still, as Justin conjectures in My Son the Playwright, his newest and most autobiographical play yet, now debuting in Rogue Machine’s upstairs second space, “trauma can be really good for creativity.” If that truly is the case, Justin Tanner’s theatrical fertility might be entering its epic stages.

When I first heard that this new work was more personal than any that came before it and Tanner would be performing it as a solo play, I have to say my first reaction was a bit apprehensive. Although I consider this guy a longtime friend-adjacent, when I wrote a review of Little Theatre that wasn’t exactly a rave, I had the impression my opinion wasn’t exactly taken as constructive criticism.

I decided to brave the possible upcoming firestorm to check out My Son the Playwright and I’m glad I did. Indeed, this is Tanner’s most personal play and as so, it’s not only both courageous and painful, it ultimately emerges as a fascinating monograph laying bare how personal compulsions can foster something akin to great art—and how life’s repeated letdowns and early familial cruelty can blur the edges between them. “Disappointment,” we’re reassured, “breeds character.”

In a two-act format, Tanner plays both a young El Lay playwright overwhelmed by massive career disappointments—obsessively fueled by drugs, alcohol, and a penchant for casual sex (“It’s like popping Kit Kats”)—and his equally dysfunctional rage-prone father who sees himself as even more of a victim than his son does.

Both characters kvetch incessantly about the other and how they’ve been treated, something that emerges most of the time as though we, the audience, are a cadre of mental health professionals studying a subject trapped in front of us like a character on an episode of Twilight Zone being studied by aliens.

Act One begins with a ringing phone in a cramped and blandly impersonal empty apartment (a perfect canvas for designer Mark Mendelson in the former Matrix’s tiny upstairs storeroom turned into a unique playing space in 2023) until Douglas, the father in question, emerges angrily from a side room accompanied by the sound of a flushing toilet.

It’s his son James on the phone, whose tardiness in his promised visit to Douglas’ Monterey Peninsula home has already reached the three-hour mark. When he finally ends the call, Douglas turns to us to lash out about what a loser his kid is. “He’s a playwright,” he shares in his frustration. “Not exactly the field a dad wants his son to go into.”

During his 45-minute rage-filled diatribe going off on his offspring, he all but kills an entire decanter of gin but somewhere, although he blames his “succubus” ex-wife for James’ many problems, underneath there’s another layer where a well-hidden and somewhat twisted love for his son lingers—as well as a bit of jealousy that James openly embraced his homosexual nature while he spent his entire life suppressing his own similar tendencies.

After a break to rearrange furniture and add a few movie posters to indicate the son’s equally claustrophobic LA apartment, Tanner reappears looking equally distraught under a youthful wig as James frantically searches the place for his missing bag of weed while letting us know how agonizing it is to drive up the coast to see his father without being sufficiently wasted.

The two men, although each rants to us about the horrors of dealing with the other, are in many ways like the same person. This is something Tanner, with the help of his longtime directorial collaborator Lisa James, works hard to overcome with subtle body language. Where Douglas has the tendency to physically pull into himself and bend deeply from the waist to somehow make himself smaller, James’ demeanor is large and even commanding, arms spread apart grandly to make his points.

It may be an understatement to say My Son the Playwright is exhausting, although it must be even more exhausting for Justin Tanner than it is for his audience. His performance is a huge commitment to his characters but hopefully, as the run settles in a tad, I think the play would be better served if it could be a little less frenetic and in-your-face.

I would think for even the most unfamiliar with the massive outpouring of work by Tanner, it would be nearly impossible not to realize how psychobiographical the piece is. At one point, when a quickie with an anonymous partner ends, his trick whispers into James’ ear, “By the way, I loved your play Pot Mom." It’s clear the line between fiction and reality is somewhat intentionally breached here.

My Son the Playwright is a phenomenal achievement, ironically both selfish and unselfish at the same time. Still, it’s impossible to leave the theatre without feeling, although you’ve been privy to something that in lesser and less comedically genius hands than Justin Tanner’s, as though you’ve been bombarded with more raw personal information than most people might want to absorb. I left not quite sure if I wanted to go home and write this review or to see if I could snag my monumentally talented though sometimes uncomfortably manic friend a prescription for Risperadone.

THROUGH MAR. 15: Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Av., LA. 855.585.5185 or roguemachinetheatre.net  

Photo by Guy Manly 

Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre

The premise for Catherine Butterfield’s Brownstone is both unique and clever, as separate storylines about three different pairs of tenants living in the same Manhattan brownstone at different periods of time in the 20th century are explored simultaneously.

The first couple resides there in the 1930s as the country tries to recover from the Great Depression. The brownstone at that point is still an elegant address, owned by an uppercrust New York industrialist. It’s where his rather spoiled socialite daughter Davia (Chelsea Spirto) is being pursued by a cheeky young journalist (Matthew Goodrich) as if they were characters in an old Phillip Barry play whose once prickly relationship goes from animosity and resistance to true love.

In the 1970s, at a time when the now crime-ridden streets of the once fashionable neighborhood have given way to poverty and urban decay, the brownstone has been divided into small walk-up flats, two wide-eyed young actresses just graduated from a midwestern college have arrived in the scary big city to achieve fame and fortune. How they survive their career challenges—and each other—is the basis of their third of the story.

The more pragmatic Maureen (Amber Tiara) is the stronger of the two since she comes from humble beginnings, but her roommate Deena (Rosie Byrne), a child of privilege being supported by her wealthy family, has promised her father if she’s not a star in two years, she’ll return home to Texas.

In the hanging chad days of the Bush Jr.-led years in the early 2000s, Jessica and Jason (Jade Santana and Issac W. Jay) are a hard-driven engaged power couple who have moved into the newly reclaimed and renovated building to begin their life together with nothing, they’re confident, but a yellow brick road ahead in their future.

Along the way, the journey of each couple is shaded by real life events and people: in the 1930s, both the loss of the Hindenburg and Hitler’s invasion of Poland changes the trajectory of the idyllic lovers’ life together, while in the 2000s, the rise of the dot-com bubble and the embracing of universally accepted “Greed is Good” mentality is part of what derails the future of Jessica and Jason’s relationship.

And ironically, when the world-weary and disillusioned Deena begins to fantasize a relationship with their nearby neighbor John Lennon, her disillusionment results in the fragile young woman having to depend on a lot more than the kindness of strangers.

The idea of this trio of divergent people sharing the same space in different decades is hardly a new concept, but Butterfield has created something fresh and special since all three tales of survival weave in and out of each other, surely the biggest challenge facing her husband and Brownstone director Ron West.

Much of West’s staging is fluid and innovative, but is somewhat done in by unwieldy production values, including a massive floor-to-ceiling, loud and wobbly white screen that’s dragged in and out from the wings for frequent scene changes to depict Maureen and Deena’s partitioned flat—something that could have easily been accomplished by a more creative lighting design.

Butterfield’s script is engaging but plagued by predictability and somewhat soap opera-y dialogue, saved by the crafty ways in which she manages to eventually weave elements of the three stories together. Still, the promise of Brownstone somehow falls flat. Where it could have been an absorbing treatise on blind ambition, avoiding social challenges, and the pitfalls of relying on approval from others—especially how those themes bring conflict to all three generations depicted—ultimately nothing is truly resolved, nothing about the play leaves us enriched or challenged intellectually.

Although West’s staging is beautifully and innovatively choreographed, it feels as though as a director he concentrated more on that visual aspect of it than helping this ensemble of six gifted performers find a path to develop their characters more fully and breathe real humanity into their individual voyages through time.

The promise here is a given, but as presented this time out, Brownstone misses becoming what could have been a far more satisfying experience.

THROUGH MAR. 14: Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. 323.882.6912 or www.openfist.org 

Photo by Ken Sawyer 

Road Theatre Company

During the performance of the world premiere of Robert Axelrod’s intensely moving new play Lifeline at the Road, a series of factoids are flashed on the back wall of Desma Murphy’s incredibly contextural in-the-round set. One reads: “Since 2022, nearly 1.3 million LGBTQ+ young people have reached out through dedicated crisis support asking to be heard.”

Indeed, Lifeline takes place in the multi-purpose room of one such center as a group of four volunteers begin training to provide a voice willing to listen for one of our troubled society’s most vulnerable and at-risk members: queer teens and young adults who find themselves at the crossroads of whether they want to live or die.

These sessions are being conducted by two of the facility’s counselors, a clearly nervous relative newbie named Jen (Brittany Taylor Visser), who is obviously for some reason apprehensive about being on this side of the game, and her super-cheery supervisor Drew (Tommy Dickie), a confident veteran of such procedures.

As much as these colleagues do their best to work together and support one another on their potentially fragile quest to get their charges up to speed and ready to hit the phone banks, along the way their relationship begins to unravel. It seems Jen has just returned from a personal hiatus after facing a crisis of her own with a caller and the gay white privileged Drew wonders if she’s ready to resume this responsibility. 

When she gently but firmly calls him out as possibly himself being someone not quite as able to identify with young people in need as he proudly claims to be, there’s a moment of tension between them they resolutely but uncomfortably strive to resolve.

Aside from their own shaky footing, we get to know each of the four trainees along the way, as well as a young gender-fluid homeless guitar player (Joh Chase, alternating with Lou Roy in the role not in Axelrod’s original script) who for the present calls the floor of the center their home and contributes to the proceedings by adding musical interludes to identify passages of time between the coaching sessions.

The trainees could not be more diverse. There’s Kai (Clifford J. Adams), a rather flamboyant club kid who seems able to breeze through the classes with a snap of the fingers and penchant for breaking into his titillating dance moves; Sarah Beth (Naomi Rubin), a disruptive and angry neurodivergent loner who can’t seem to keep from adding her opinion no matter how inappropriate; and Maya (Xoe Sazzle), a trans woman who's the best of the group at understanding what’s needed of her—and will probably make the best counselor of the bunch.

The fourth volunteer is an older suburban housewife named Patti (Amy Tolsky), who though well-meaning is somewhat of a visitor from another planet who might not ever comprehend the others’ more contemporary lingo and sensibilities or have the ability to get comfortable in these surroundings.

Getting to know and understand these eclectic characters and become privy to each of their individual stories is a lot to unpack here in the play’s 100-minute running time, but with the help of Axelrod’s highly accessible dialogue and this knockout ensemble of incredibly gifted actors, the inherent clumsiness and predictability of the storyline is quickly and expertly overcome.

The real glue that holds all the elements together here, however, is the sensationally malleable staging of award-winning director Ken Sawyer, who with this production makes his long overdue return to the Road, the company that first emboldened and honed his talents many years ago.

It was Sawyer’s idea to reconfigure the theatre’s proscenium stage into a four-sided arena playing space for this production, a conceit that brings the audience into the mix as the counselors and trainees acknowledge our presence during Lifeline’s training sessions as though we are guests invited to observe the process.

It was also Sawyer’s idea to add both the musical breaks and the projections of not only staggering real life statistics about the rampant numbers of queer youth contemplating suicide, but also images of the counselors as they grew up and how those sweet-faced kids became young adults who have probably seen more of our fuckedup world than anyone should ever have to endure.

The cast is uniformly excellent and the camaraderie between this intrepid band of players is something quite palpable—again, I suspect, thanks to the patient and beneficent leadership of Sawyer.

Adams is especially winsome as the continuously lighthearted Kai and Sazzle is a major standout as Maya, someone who has been through a lifetime of pain and social isolation but is still nowhere near giving up the strength to make things more equitable for our country’s legions of displaced young people.

Still, the heart and soul of this ensemble comes from the remarkable Tolsky, who delivers to us a breakable, discombobulated sweetheart achingly wanting to do her best, an uncannily relatable everyman we’re all left wanting to give a hug. Yet, although much of the play’s sly humor comes from her character, when the personal reason Patti wants so desperately to succeed at helping troubled youth is revealed, Tolsky succeeds bigtime in breaking our hearts—and sending at least one patron (ahem) out of the theatre totally unable to speak.

Axelrod, himself a volunteer with the Trevor Project, our nation’s leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention service for LGBTQ youth, has created a timely, urgently important work, a breath of compassionate fresh air as so much of our lives today seems tainted by racism and greed and people out to destroy everything the good people of our country hold dear.

“In the time you have been watching this play,” a final projection tells us, “1,060 calls have been made to the National 988 Suicide Hotline. We would like to dedicate this performance to those who were there to listen.”

Thanks for the cleansing generated here by each and every one of the committed artists who collaborated to bring Lifeline to the venerable Road Theatre stage; we all need it bigtime right now.

THROUGH MAR. 21: Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org 

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