Write and wronged
For the end of Julia Cho’s Office Hour, premiering through April 30 as part of South Coast Repertory's Pacific Playwrights Festival, the audience looks into an empty university office. The three teachers who share it have gone home. However, Cho and director Neel Keller have just taken us down a path where alternate outcomes could have led to another reason why they are gone.
The ambiguity and forks in the dramatic arc are useful. Although the subject of alienated students turning to violence is of urgent concern, the causes are so varied and complicated as to seem unfathomable. Any ending that smacks of denouement and resolution would be a mistake. Complementing the structural ambiguities, Keller and his cast of four have provided the fearless production Cho requires and as a result moved Office Hour beyond stage drama to Art.
Ms. Cho is writing with even more muscle than she has in the three previous efforts reviewed by Theatertimes. The need for communication has been a subtle presence in all of these, whether between estranged generations in Durango, races and histories in The Piano Teacher, or lovers and linguists in The Language Archive. In Office Hour, however, it takes center stage when a sympathetic teacher senses what's at stake with an alienated student.
In the opening scene, adjunct professors Genevieve (Sola Bamis) and David (Corey Brill) are meeting with Gina (Sandra Oh) to tell her about Dennis (Raymond Lee), a student whose stories of violence, incest and rape along with his shadowy, menacing persona, have disturbed each of their English classes in turn. He is now enrolled in Gina's creative writing class and they think that, while she should be cautious, she should do something to get him off campus. Their message is clear: If ever a student was to telegraph a Columbine, Newtown or Virginia Tech shooting, it's Dennis.
We move to Gina's university office, where she is meeting with Dennis for the first time. Like her, he is an Asian American, but that doesn't provide any advantage in breaking through his stony silence. After several meetings, she gradually gets him to participate in some writing exercises, which cracks open the window into his world. It's when she role-plays his mother calling to check on him, and pushing some obvious buttons, that he explodes, unleashing his pent-up rage. He is intelligent, not a freak, but carrying the overwhelming pain the sensitive stockpile when they become the bullied outsider. He is candid about his gun collecting and explains that all are legal, including the registered handgun he brings to school in his backpack.
The artfulness comes in Cho's storytelling, which Keller brings to realization. The action moves along and then, suddenly, as if a psychological trip wire is triggered, violence erupts and victims fall. Black-out. Lights up. As if the scene had an "undo" function we are back, and walking around that trip wire. The gun does not come out. There is no shooting. We proceed, now aware of how easily a well-meaning encounter can go wrong. There are no answers, and Dennis' case is ultimately not like those who plan to die while slaughtering people around them. But there's a jolt of awareness: what might be done to help ease the future Dennises? How can we, as teachers, parents and colleagues avoid being direct or indirect carriers of alienation?
Ms. Cho has created two meaty roles for Asian actors and Keller has the good fortune to have had Oh and Lee available to play them. Bamis and Brill provide excellent support. Takeshi Kata and Se Oh are the scenic designers, and Alex Jaeger and Elizabeth Harper added costumes and lights, respectively. The beautiful occasional music was composed by Peter Bayne, who also provides the shocking sound effects.
We are left with the feeling that we have just seen both future and past, inevitabilities and alternatives. That the impressions will surely last a lifetime is an achievement of art's highest aspirations. The audience's role is seeing that its message helps more lifetimes last longer.
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Intolerance
Jesse Eisenberg's The Revisionist, in a generous production at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, is an exercise in tolerance. Though set in the long shadow of the Final Solution and featuring a Holocaust survivor named Maria, it isn't exploring humanity's capacity for mass brutality but a single individual's selfishness.
That character, and ultimately the production, serve as a test of tolerance for the play's friendship-starved survivor as well as the audience.
Anticipation is high upon entering the beautiful Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. This is a facility with ambition and purpose, and after a critically acclaimed 2007 New York premiere that featured Eisenberg and Vanessa Redgrave, The Revisionist is undeniably a wise selection. Inside the 150-seat Lovelace Studio Theater, scenic wizard Tom Buderwitz has fitted a detailed three-room set into the railcar-narrow stage that stretches between facing banks of seating.
Maria (Deanna Dunagan) is desperate to connect with any member of a family whose members, if not exterminated in the 1930s and '40s, fled to America. The pain of fleeing a country is underscored and brought up to date in a CNN report on the current Syrian refugee crises that plays quietly during pre-show and continues when lights rise on Maria, sitting anxiously when a knock at her door signals the arrival of David (Seamus Mulcahy).
Loss and loneliness have toughened her, and after welcoming him she soon rebukes him for being several hours late and not calling. His excuse is weak yet acceptable, but given more to shut her up than soothe her. Such behavior will soon prove part of a pattern. David, a published novelist in his twenties, wants to spend an undisturbed week here revising a manuscript. Maria, a distant relation, hopes to get to know him and spend time together.
He makes it clear he will be very busy and doesn't expect to have much free time.
Through the wall-less rooms of Budewitz' set we see David when he thinks he's alone. Clearly undisciplined, he blows quick hits of pot out the window and listens to music. The writer's block he fled back home has followed him here. Yet, he continues to insist he has no time to spend with Maria. He also snubs Maria's friend Zinco (Illa Volok), a man in his 30s or 40s who gives her free cab rides to the market and dotes on her in an unrestrained mother transference David finds especially creepy.
This is the dynamic that plays out. We learn little about David aside from his hunger for recognition as a writer. We do get plenty of evidence that he has personal selfishness on the magnitude of a black hole. At one point Maria lets slip some highly personal information about the true nature of her family connections with David. His response is to talk about another writer's success, which he felt was undeserved. This, coupled with awareness that he is wasting his time, is too much for her. She calls on Zinco to whisk him to the airport days before his scheduled departure, with tickets she already changed for a flight within hours.
Director Robin Larsen and Mulcahy may have exacerbated the David problem by failing to soften his brusqueness. In New York, Eisenberg played the part and perhaps his ability or his celebrity provided something to root for. As it is, his part of any conversation is so wearying that the extended exchanges between Maria and Zinco, all in Polish, are among the most enjoyable in the show.
The production is lovely and credit goes to Larsen's design team of Jocelyn-Hublau Parker (costumes), Leigh Allen (lights), and John Zalewski (music and sound). Allen has a couple of special gobo-cues that make the floor appear to show light through the slats of a railcar. Perhaps it's a suggestion of the imprisonment both characters are in. Perhaps it's just another shadow of genocidal cruelty. Unfortunately, so much needs to be made clearer.
In the published script, Eisenberg provides the CNN text used in the premiere. That report was on the World Trade Organization's vote to admit Vietnam in 2006. That would have dated the play if used now. But it may have been meant to remind us of the importance, perhaps inevitability, of forgiveness.
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Asylum seekers
If the actor's nightmare is forgetting lines during a performance, a playwright's might be watching a misguided adaptation sabotage his or her work. In 1921, Luigi Pirandello took up the case of a third category of theater "artist," the dramatis personae, creating a nightmare scenario in which six characters have been set adrift when the author fails to finish their play.
Six Characters in Search of an Author, now at A Noise Within (through May 14), gives new meaning to being off book. Their play's unseen creator, in a faint echo of mankind's, set them up for a fall by setting them into a melodramatic world of temptation, then aborting the story and launching them on an endless quest for resolution. Founding Artistic Directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez Elliott direct this fine introduction to Pirandello's work using the highly adaptive adaptation by Robert Brustein, introduced in 1988 and revised in 1996.
At rise, the stage is in work light and the actors out of character. Addressing each other by name, they reveal that the play's directors are away on artistic director duties and so company member Robertson Dean is running this rehearsal for an upcoming production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. No one is excited about the old chestnut. With stage manager Natalie Reiko at the rehearsal table and production assistants Carina Haller, Marcos J. Ruiz and Kathryn Ventress standing by, Dean asks Susan Angelo and June Carryl to pick up with a scene in the third act, with a third actor, Abubakr Ali, observing.
Brustein's version was tailored to his own American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. His "old chestnut" was The King Stag, an established ART crowd-pleaser. But he makes it clear he wants to share authorship with each theater that mounts his adaptation. "This version is meant to be liquid, spontaneous, improvisatory, adaptable," he writes in his introduction. "Treat it as loosely as I have treated the original text."
In Our Town, the Elliotts have a subliminal reminder of locality, but more importantly it allows much deeper resonance. While Brustein describes Stag as "a fairy tale [where], as in all the best fairy tales, everything ends happily ever after," Wilder's final act is set in a hilltop cemetery overlooking the town where a young woman has recently joined the ghosts. Wilder's rumination on life and loss helps deepen the role of Pirandello's castaway characters.
The characters are a family, with Mr. Elliott as the father and leader, Abby Craden as "Mother," Alison Elliott as "Stepdaughter," Rafael Goldstein as "Son," Jack Elliott as "Young Son," and Rigel Blue Pierce-English as "Young Daughter." Dean politely asks the intruders to leave but the Father begs to be able to just tell their unfinished story. Perhaps these theater people, so familiar with plotting, can help them resolve what, without a conclusion, threatens to remain infinitely endless. The actors begrudgingly relinquish the stage and we are soon immersed in a conflicted tale of sex, betrayal and death.
The actors all fit their assignments well, with the elder Elliott adding an interesting character to his gallery, and Mr. Goldstein continuing to impress with his range. Frederica Nascimento's set transforms from the rehearsal world to that of the play, with the help of Tom Ontiveros' lights and Robert Oriol's original music and sound design. Costumed by Jenny Foldenauer, with hair and makeup by Danielle Richter, to recall the Pirandello's 1921 Italy, there's an unmistakable echo of real people searching for permanence in America.
This is another winning production by ANW, one with the potential to gain sufficient popularity to someday become the "old chestnut" that is the play within its own play. That would really up the ante on Brustein's concept.
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Peacock proud
The title of Joshua R. Silverstein's one-person stage show, Tell Me I'm Pretty, points to the psychological irony that drives the piece. Bravado fueled by insecurity is a mainstay, a man-stay, that pushes people to overcome fear and show the world they deserve some respect, some credit, perhaps even some applause. Silverstein's energetic and comedic carousel of observational vignettes does earn him all three.
He is in good hands with director Diana Wyenn, who helps vary the pace so that Silverstein gets the right showcase for his talents and perspective. The theme is that of the serial outsider, whose bi-racial dual ethnicity is acknowledged in his opening statement, which abruptly challenges the audience to embrace the seeming incongruity of a black Silverstein, or be labeled racist. The premature push back is sarcasm, and both odd and anachronistic given the ethnically mixed, overwhelmingly young crowd. But behind the quick, rebounding smile, we know is a "Best Defense is Offense" posture that has been earned. As the son of a white Jewish man and an African-American woman, Silverstein has dual citizenship in the victimhoods of prejudice.
But his perspective isn't just from the receiving end of bigotry. He also seems to have fallen into a 'tween generation, signaled in a pre-show soundtrack that swings between '70s songs and contemporary tunes, and sustained through good-natured mocking of the old and new. The lingering strains of timeworn segregation and racism are obvious targets. But while the elders are ribbed for technological ineptness, 16-year-olds are smacked for listening to "terrible" music, and he's more alarmed by social media overreach and Facebook and search page marketing that instantly throws up ads for merchandise and services we just Googled or Binged elsewhere.
One of Silverstein's routines is a Top 20 list of names for his particular racial convergence. It's one that feels labored and stretched thin, which happens a couple of times, especially during long stretches mixing sound effects and beat-box rhythms. These wear out their welcome fairly quickly, which is odd given the great trio of musicians he has supporting him: Damien Curry (guitar), Gerry Doot (drums) and Erik Hallsey (bass). Any time they get the floor the show gets lift. They even fill in as fellow attendees of a "Small Parts Anonymous" meeting, which given Silverstein's challenges to get decent acting roles might have taken a higher road. Instead, member linkage lies below the belt.
But Silverstein is winning and the essence of his theme is worth rooting for. There are a variety of subjects covered, but they divide between those about himself and his struggles and those that make the case through more objective portraiture. These are the strongest. His acting chops get a workout in a couple of character sketches of neighbor's from his L.A. neighborhood. These are areas that could deepen and expand to better impress both audiences and casting directors.
One segment, supported by images in Matt Hill's video design, is a salute to bi-racial people, including President Obama, Halle Berry and England's Idris Elba, but not Jamaica's Bob Marley – who is mentioned elsewhere during the evening. Another face, coincidentally, from the same mix, is Lenny Kravitz, whose African-American actress mother, Roxie Roker, was half of the groundbreaking interracial couple on "The Jeffersons," one of the half-dozen historic shows created by Norman Lear, whose name is among those listed as supporters of Tell Me I'm Pretty.
A lingering image is Silverstein's peacock stance, a pose he strikes several times during the show. Arms shoot up, chest puffs out, and his face is now confidently expressionless. It is his frozen end-zone dance, a signal that beauty and pride come from inside.