An Age-Old Story

Stop me if you've heard this:

An elderly parent, quite possibly losing his faculties, engages in domestic discord with his offspring. The adult children quibble with the parent and each other as property is divvied up and brain marbles plop out and roll across the shiny floors of a manse.

It's almost impossible these days to avoid news articles on Alzheimer's, dementia, living wills and how to have "that talk" with an aging parent. As it turns out, the Elizabethans dealt with similar issues and our old pal, William Shakespeare, wrote it down in King Lear.

Of course, the Bard being the Bard, he escalates the plot to dizzying heights. Sisters fight over a lover, spike drinks with poison, send old friends into the stocks and yank out eyeballs. As with all of Shakespeare's tragedies, the audience is left to count up the bodies.

It's great fun to watch other families handle their business so errantly.

I had the pleasure of attending opening night of the Globe Theatre's production of King Lear at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica. In keeping with the original style of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre — which, by the way, burned down because real cannon fire was used in the war scenes — this production is set on a rustic stage without lighting changes. The actors and the audience are lit as if they are all gathered on a sunny day in London circa 1607.

This production of King Lear was directed by Bill Buckurst, with only eight actors playing all the parts. I applaud the sheer energy and imaginative approach of this production. Lear's youngest daughter, Cordelia, is all one hopes the character to be in the hands of Bethan Cuillinane. Astonishingly, this same actor takes on the task of playing the Fool. With vocal and physical changes she clambers all over the King, teasing and pulling off some very tricky Shakespearean jokes.

Her duplicitous sisters, Goneril (Gwendolen Chatfield) and Regan (Shanaya Rafaat) gambol about the stage singing, playing musical instruments, and additionally taking on many male roles.

Bill Nash, as the loyal Kent, is committed to giving his all, as is Daniel Pirrie, having a whale of a time as the evil Edmund. These actors also play multiple roles, with the slipping on of a hat, cloak and dialect adjustment. They are matched equally in skill and with a brazen attack on the text by Alex Mugnaioni as Edgar and John Stahl as the tragic and blinded Gloucester.

Topping off this adept and gifted cast is Joseph Marcell as the lord himself, King Lear. Marcell embraces the madness of a man losing his mind, his family and his royal status. His constant swerving and surprising choices had me agape and transfixed. Where would he go next? What would he do now?

No acting decision Marcell makes is expected, right down to his skewed and oh-so-human entrance carrying (spoiler alert!) the dead Cordelia. She is splayed in his arms as if he'd seized her off the floor in a moment of emotional reckoning.

A signature scene of King Lear is the storm sequence, and we're used to seeing this with all the high-tech bells and whistles modern theatre can provide. Not here. Not for the Globe Theatre, no siree. Every actor participates in creating the sounds of rain, thunder and swishing gales — yet I'm pretty certain I saw soaking-wet, windblown characters. Magnificent.

This acting ensemble provides universally strong performances, which is no mean feat because they are asked to do so much. Opening and closing the show, the actors joined together in a rousing, foot-stomping song that had me feeling transported through time as a likely groundling cheering for more blood, guts and family wrath.

♦

The production runs until November 16th. The Broad Stage offers a 20% discount for weekday tickets: code LEAR.

photos by Ellie Kurttz

Play Review: God of Carnage

The word is in bold caps and across the poster it struts, clad in an exclamation mark:

HYSTERICAL!

I saw the production of "God of Carnage" at the Ahamanson Theatre in Los Angeles with the original Broadway cast: Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis and James Gandolfini.


Hysteric, for sure. Histrionic, agreed. Hysterical, not so much.

French playwright Yasmina Reza won the Tony Award in 2009, along with director Matthew Warchus and actor Harden.

I've been open in this blog regarding my fussy temperament as a reluctant theatre attendee, but I was gung-ho for this show. I'm a fan of all these actors and I love to laugh.

For the ninety minutes of "God of Carnage," I didn't so much as crack a smile. On the contrary, I gnashed my teeth at a display of age-old parlor tricks.

The premise: A quartet of parents meet to discuss, in a pre-determined civilized fashion, the wayward behavior of their eleven-year-old sons.

That's all I need to say, and anyone can guess how this plot will unfold.
The perfect tulips, in their perfect vases, decorating a spare yet elegant home, will lay scattered as adults unleash behavior worse than their children. Lesson learned.

Dormant bitterness erupts, reminiscent of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but sadly lacking the volcanic build and tangy wit of that more skilled writer.

I once had a screenwriting teacher who refused to endorse vomiting or cruelty to small animals. Yasmina Reza could have used the tips.

Granted, the projectile vomit from Ms. Davis was a good rig, but the bucket brigade continued as she was forced by her director and writer to upchuck for another forty-five minutes. Davis fared well despite being handicapped by the many spells of nausea.

When a character causes the death of child's pet, in this case a hamster left to die on a Brooklyn curb, any iota of sympathy for that human being is abandoned. I felt more sympathy for Gandolfini's Tony Soprano, who exacted far worse.

Harden kicked her legs and flung her arms, showing a spasmodic distaste for her husband, played by Gandolfini. Showing is the operative word.

Reza has written Daniels' lawyer as a boorish cell phone hog who not only irritates his wife, played by Davis, but struck me as a rude dolt beyond interest.

The forced, declamatory acting, hurled from stage right to stage left and finally into the audience's innocent laps, made HYSTERICAL impossible. We know better. Our theatres have held too many examples of subtle and truly funny human behavior for us to be expected to accept this kind of work from any writer, director or actor.

Truth is funny when it's true.

A Review: Next to Normal

As I've previously mentioned on this blog, I'm not the world's best theatre audience. I'm awfully critical and impatient — but if I'm won over, I can be an enthusiastic fan.

I bought a season ticket to the Ahmanson Theatre this year because I wanted a guaranteed seat for the national tour of "Next to Normal."

This show not only won a 2010 Tony Award for Best Musical, but also the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for its lead actress, Alice Ripley.

Along with jazz and baseball, the Broadway musical is a mainstay of pure Americana, and it's interesting to observe how the art form has morphed over decades as the nation itself has grappled with social change.

Contrast a show like "Oklahoma," with its romantic tale of early settlers in Indian territory, to "Hair," decades later painting a portrait of the country's youth in upheaval, protest and sexual revolution.

"Next to Normal" is the story of a modern family struggling for equilibrium in the churning waters of mental illness. For how long have we incorporated the term bipolar into our lexicon of everyday usage? It hasn't been decades, yet we now know what behaviors of mania and depression can mean. Many of us are intimately involved with issues of mental strain or know of children or adults wrestling with drug regimens and therapies as they look for answers and cures.

This is not your "normal" musical theme. I wasn't sure what to expect and had avoided reading too much advance information. I knew it was an effort committed to a darker theme, but there could well have been a chorus line of dancing Xanaxes for all I knew.

Written by Brian Yorkey and directed by Michael Greif, "Next to Normal" is wall-to-wall music, with lyrics illuminating plot and relationships more than conventional dialogue. I was moved and thrilled that the show doesn't duck, doesn't lead us gently into its dark alleys and doesn't let us off the hook. There is a beam of sunshine, there is humor and there is affection, but I did not see sentimentality or glibness. I was grateful for that.

All members of the cast were stellar in musical and acting ability, and they were led by the formidable performance of Alice Ripley, a true acting animal. With a tremendous belt of power and vulnerability, she ripped her own heart apart and took ours along for the ride. And make no mistake: "Next to Normal" is a ride. It's the Mad Mouse, House of Mirrors and Zipper combined.

My entrance into the theatre the night I saw the show was prefaced by a soulful sax performance on a rainy plaza. The combined effect of the musical interlude outside and the commitment inside had me rethinking the glory theatre can be when it goes the distance.

CHILDREN'S WRITES: A Journal Entry

Adventure to me is to go some where you have never been at in your life or want to go agin.

—Amaya, 5th grade