Category Archives: Theatre

The highs and lows average to solid in ISC’s Richard III on until the 24th July at Griffith Park.  Impresario David Melville assumes the mantle and a couple of other positions surrounded by an often amazing cast and disturbing electrification.   Director Melissa Chalsma codistills the original and Colley Cibber‘s once-popular adaptation amplifying the action but wisely restoring some of Cibber’s deletions.   Melville forgoes the hump for a limp,  is convincing when raging and scheming, and less-so when sweet-talking and seducing.  Amid the new faces is the welcome return of company veteran Lorenzo Gonzalez  whose own Richard dazzled at Barnsdall Park in 2005.

There’s a lot of ground to cover in the first half, mostly with corpses.  Not short by any means, it feels rushed and it is often a strain to figure out who is doing what to whom and why.  With so much real and implied gore, we wonder if nibs of the Merrie Olde were bound by any laws at all.  Post intermission fares better especially in a superb scene redolent of the Trojan Women in which exhausted ladies of war-ravaged houses contemplate a grisly future.  Bernadette Sullivan, Mary Goodchild,  Aisha Kabia, and Kalean Ung swim this 4×100-m hatred relay brilliantly and it is a good job that it was part of the restoration.   That anchor leg is a pipterino and further marks Ung as one to watch.

ISC is rightly proud of the number of people it reaches through the summer fest.  But, pursuing and serving that metric isn’t free.  The kit grows every season.  2016 features a large lighting rig courtesy of a foundation grant, more microphones, more speakers, a NASA-sized mixing board, ever fancier costumes, and stage fog.  Some of the tech does afford the leeway to cast actors with differing levels of vocal preparation but it grows farther from the no-frills aesthetic the company brought to LA back in 2002 and preserved until the past few seasons.  Most intrusive is the addition of a loud rock band that strikes up  to crush the magic the moment a scene ends.  The Duke of Buckingham pleads with King Richard, “Give me some little breath, some pause, dear lord.”  We know where he’s coming from but we too aren’t requited.  There’s no time to savor the words because a quartet of the play’s supporting cast occasionally supplemented by Melville shred the air with guitar and drum.   To be fair, most of the crowd ate it up.

ISC takes care to survey its audiences and perhaps this is what it has to do to keep people coming to the Old Zoo.  The festival audience could be of the growing belief that silence of any kind is not to be trusted.  Maybe we’ll see two distinct sets of offerings in the future: Old school ISC indoors at its studio and a flash-bang summer season for the Internet generation at Griffith Park.

The Tempest begins July 30th.

RICHARD III

Adapted by Independent Shakespeare Co. based on the work of Colley Cibber
Begins Saturday, June 25 and Sunday, June 26 Then plays Wednesday – Sunday until July 24
Performances at 7:00 pm  at The Old Zoo, Griffith Park

FREE (donations gratefully accepted)

http://iscla.org  

 

“Honesty. That’s the thing in the theater today. Honesty … and just as soon as I can learn to fake that, I’ll have it made.”
— Anonymous

Grab the speedometer and move it, the car does not speed up. Mock up an airport, planes will not come. We are conditioned to causality and that the mere appearance or measure of a thing is not (usually) a handle into the thing itself. We smile when happy, cry when sad, and believe that we can tell when emotions are genuine or contrived. It comes as some surprise that this may not be entirely true. There is evidence that outward expressions, real or fake, may drive physiological processes instead of merely being driven by them. This two-way street is at once interesting and lucrative. Demagogues and marketeers profit by inventing stimuli to induce specific responses. A big part of culture and its preservation is in the transmitting feelings and emotions through performance.  Authenticity – whatever its definition – is considered essential.

Click image  to enlarge: G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, Synoptic plate 4 from Le Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine. 1862 – Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain

Playwright David Bridel takes on the latter in ‘Lunatics and Actors’ mounted through the end of May by The Four Clowns at Shakespeare Center LA. Scientist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne (Thaddeus Shafer) asserts that he can evoke performances from his trio of patient/inmates (Tyler Bremer, Andrew Eldredge, and Alexis Jones) that surpass in intensity and authenticity those by conventionally trained actors. His electrochemical method will find gleeful interest from results-oriented directors tired of having Stanislavski flung back at them. The intriguing premise draws from nineteenth century events. The historical Duchenne performed early research in connecting human physiological and physiognomical reactions to electrical stimuli. He applied shocks to patients, photographed their faces, and in time could evoke specific expressions from them at will. Much of this work would be frowned upon today for ethical reasons but it came with other results in different areas that persist. Duchenne laid the foundations for modern neuroscience. The bidirectionality of emotion has since been intensively and controversially studied by Ekman, Zajonc, and others.

(standing) Thaddeus Shafer as DR. DUCHENNE (seated from left to right) Tyler Bremer as BON-BON, Alexis Jones as FIFI, and Andrew Eldredge as PEPE. Photo courtesy of Andrew Eiden

The setup requires actors in the audience to volunteer for light onstage duty. This being Los Angeles, it isn’t a problem. Duchenne runs through an interview followed by exercises and a compare/contrast. Meisner, Linklater, and Alexander may help the aspiring actor but a healthy zap from the glowing Volta pile invokes a style of its own. The inmate trio, all experienced clowns, win the intensity fight in a walk. Director Jeremy Aluma has to take his time churning the cream and the laughs hide a somewhat lengthy introduction. It snaps into butter when the contest shifts to ‘Hamlet’ and its endless opportunities to test authenticity (or anything else of interest to artists). Convention holds its own for subtlety but not for pain, fear, or terror. A change from funny to harrowing occurs in a tight, disturbing vignette to rival ‘Clockwork Orange’ or ‘1984’. A final distillation of ‘Hamlet’ to a delicate touch of ‘Pagliacci’ is a marvel. Focussing on the terrifying, it is entirely different from the troupe’s recent reimagining. Give substantial credit to the large design team. Their coherent efforts drive a fanciful story which might fall flat in less skilled hands. The Clowns don’t skimp on production and one wonders how they balance the books against a batguano-crazy $15 ticket price.

There are inside jokes aplenty within the world of the play. Theatre in Los Angeles is considered the domain of the insane.  Are the three inmates victims of an unscrupulous workshop-monger?  Bridel is the incoming Dean of Theatre at USC. Does this foreshadow his plans for the school?  Perhaps only artists can or will get the full scope of it. But, the promise and threat of machines has been a staple of storytelling from ‘Frankenstein’ to ‘Blade Runner’ and beyond. Can we controlled by electrodes? Yes but we’re attached enough to our screens to make such a physical connection unnecessary. A more unnerving question is what form the next evolutionary step will take once we or our algorithms figure out what makes us tick. The reductionist approach claims that once we find the root of the structure that everything will follow. Others argue for multiple processes that compete with and against one another in a sort-of roshambo. Either way, the tacit assumption is that machines would then emulate us, only much much faster. Why stop there? The Melancholy Dane may have been overly optimistic about the Godlikedness of man – we are most likely just another step along the path. That’s what make these clowns the ones of nightmares. Go see them but leave the kids at home.

Four Clowns presents
Lunatics & Actors
by David Bridel
directed by Jeremy Aluma

A WORLD PREMIERE

April 29 – May 28, 2016
at The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles
1238 W 1st Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Performances start at 8pm
Street parking in the neighborhood

Stage Manager Ashley Jo Navarro
Assistant Director Amaka Izuchi
Set Designer Fred Kinney
Lighting Designer Azra King-Abadi
Costume Designer Elena Flores
Sound Designer Kate Fechtig
Propsmaster Niki Mercs
Technical Director Matt MacCready
Producers Jeremy Aluma and David Anthony Anis
Associate Producers Jennifer Carroll and Julianna Stephanie Ojeda

[Updated 28 September 2015]

24th Street Theatre does exceptional work in arts education, outreach, and after school programs with a special focus on its underserved neighborhood next to USC.  It has also produced plays over the years with mixed results.  Since 2012, it’s production arm deliberately shifted to “Theatre for Young Audiences” (TYA) and things have frankly gone downhill.  ‘Roma al final de la via’ landed with a thud, ‘Nearly Lear’ was passable but far short of the hype.  I did skip the Dead Grandma show that ran for months and toured to good reviews.   The program  purports despite its name to bring sophistimacated work to all ages.  This is strange since there are plays from antiquity to the modern day that do exactly that and in front of broad demographics.  Rather, TYA seems to be a newish industry with international conferences, showcases, and a substantial caste of arts MBAs overseeing hookups between a cadre of authors and producers.  There’s even a white paper on the topic aggressively titled, “Does Youth Theater Really Have to Be So Pandering and Simple-Minded?”  It’s an interesting read but only for the subtext.

‘Man Covets Bird’ by Finegan Kruckemeyer, a prolific 34 year old Irish Australian, is a wan rehash of the Up With People, Free to be You and Me swill some of us were fed in the ’70s and ’80s.  Live your heart, open your dreams, follow your laugh, dance your dissertation, live in an ice cream van down by the river.  Two beardy emerging artists from from your locally-owned, fair-trade, carbon-neutral coffeeshop’s open mic night perpetrate the text to projected animations.  One of the two is responsible for the alleged music.  This after school special is as specific as a horoscope, as flavorful as tofu, and open to any interpretation one might wish to hang on it. It’s a piece calculated to leave talking opportunities for adults and any associated kids – the term ‘conversation’ is popular these days. This usually means the person in power frames the discussion and defines the boundaries. It is a common enough gimmick in the manager-employee relationship. It is also around in the arts world where critics try to justify their marginal value as dialogue mediators. In both cases there’s hell to pay if the employee or reader calls b.s. and chooses to have his own view of things. ‘Bird’ and TYA may be good vocational preparation but the artistic claims are overstated.

It is unfortunate that the company has gone down this route. The curtain speech explains that 24th Street spends most of its money on two pillars of education and outreach, producing theatre only when needed and when funds permit. Here’s to hoping they focus on the nobler work,  abandon the production arm, and occasionally rent the attractive performance space to other organizations.

Aside: The marketing materials for ‘Bird’ all say, “Because it’s a liberating thing to talk publicly about things you’re only supposed to think privately.”

Really?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcYk16W7WHQ

Image courtesy The Four Clowns

The human eyes can only sense a vanishingly small part of the energy that makes up our Universe. The wonders and horrors out there are mostly invisible to us. Fortunately, we have instruments that can collect where we cannot and translators that can shift those sights and sounds that we may perceive them. The images that come out of our observatories great and small are almost always in false color. There is nothing intrinsically hot about red or cool about blue yet these associations, in expert and honest hands, can reveal something about the world to the layman.

‘Hamlet’ by The Four Clowns takes such a look at the Shakespeare’s violent, philosophical, mad, and maddening Denmark in a limited run at Shakespeare Festival, LA.  This play has always been fodder for interpretation, especially whether the title character is on either side of the fine line between sanity and madness or whether he’s straddling it for his own purposes. Director/adapter Turner Munch has subtracted some of the themes and turned up the gain on the fantastical and bitterly funny elements of the story. It is a false color palette entirely appropriate for a troupe of nine actual clowns playing over a dozen roles.  Who would have thought the old play to have such humors in it?

It is, not surprisingly, hugely physical with pratfalls aplenty and a lot of clever business with props to convey the sometimes suffocating confines of that particular castle. Andrew Eiden’s Hamlet starts off as a prop himself, shaped and molded by his and Ophelia’s families. He quickly brushes them off and transforms into a Hyde-like maniac capable of any torture. His interrogations of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Dave Honigman, Tyler Bremer, and vice-versa), two of the play’s three manifest clowns are violent and brutal. Elizabeth Godley’s charming, porcelain Ophelia fares little better at his hand.   Scotty Farris’s thickly bearded Polonius looks straight out of any LA theatre’s production of [ugh] Chekhov. He is especially put upon, killed with courtesy, and then brought back as one of the gravediggers. Connor Kelly-Eiding is put upon by just about everyone as a Lisa Loopner version of Horatio. Joe DeSoto shatters the fourth wall early as the Ghost and comes through it again as Laertes. It all hangs together very nicely. A father-daughter reunion told in shadow for the fleetest of seconds is a blessed moment of tenderness amid the gore and packs a wallop.

Munch stresses repetition and pauses to set the nerves on edge and as a guide to what lurks underneath. Pinter could be well pleased. He also reworks the text to meet the needs of time and the troupe. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do get theirs for example but not at the hands of a foreign king. The sadly uncredited sound design frames the slapstick nicely but truly shines in the darker stretches with an eerie piano (Visions Fugitives?) ratcheting the tension. Though it is a violent play as written, it culminates here in something out of Sam Peckinpah.

This version runs ninety minutes, about half the span of a full production. In that compression, some loss is inevitable and no two viewers will agree on specifics. The leads, clowns though they may be, mostly handle the demands of Shakesperean language. A shade less R&G and a little more time on the meatier dialogues would have been nice. That’s a minor point in a show that is honest about its purpose and commits to its choices. It is getting repetitive to compare The Four Clowns to other area companies. Indeed Nancy Keystone who has done similar reimaginings is explicity credited in the program. But, perhaps they along with others are together part of something larger. This is not a ‘Hamlet’ for purists but those with the capacity for fun and a little give and take should put it on their calendar quickly. It runs only through 10 October.

And, as we look at the Presidential campaign now underway, remember: When insanity becomes normal, bet on the clowns.

Four Clowns presents Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
adapted & directed by Turner Munch

September 18 – October 10, 2015
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm
8 shows only

at Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles
1238 W 1st Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Tickets via Squadup.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmcrreUVBeo