Given the largely justified hand-wringing about the state of the arts in LA, I looked into the beleaguered Center Theatre Group’s upcoming season. For thirty years, the CTG has meant nothing to me but Michael Ritchie is gone, there’s a new guy in charge, Covid has left the arts reeling, and maybe it is time to give the 800-lb gorilla another look.
Or, maybe not. Four musicals, a puppet show, and Hamlet is innovation? Or maybe it is the Free Parking that comes with the subscription. That must be it. The Kirk Douglas which had the occasional hit among many misses is relegated two kiddie musicals.
Over the years I’ve seen so many bold, insightful, daring companies fold due to lack of audience, lack of attention, lack of money, and the exhaustion they bring. And yet, this large-assed Creosote lives off of what largesse is left.
Maids of “The Penelopiad” Photo by Paul Rubenstein, courtesy of City Garage Theatre
Each page a victory At whose expense the victory ball? Every ten years a great man, Who paid the piper? — Brecht A Worker Reads History
Whose and who, indeed?In 2005, Margaret Atwoodshook the dust off of The Odyssey and turned it to her own purpose looking at those left behind as Odysseus went off to war and wandering.The stage adaptation of The Penelopiad receives a bracing, audacious performance as Santa Monica’s City Garage returns to full swagger.
Atwood casts a gimlet eye on the great men of Sparta and Ithaca where most lives didn’t matter and all the standards were double.Her sympathies are squarely with Penelope and even moreso her maids who receive an untimely end upon Odysseus’s eventual return.The novella is set in a timeless Hades as Penelope narrates her very lonely life.In the play, she watches it unfold.Despite ostensibly high station, she is pitiable – an afterthought to alland always second fiddle to her cousin Helen.But that isn’t the generational servitude into which so many were born or taken as spoils of war.“We too were children” say the maids, “We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents; parents who sold us, parents from whom we were stolen.” It snaps how little has changed through the centuries.
The all female cast of thirteen portrays twenty five roles and the adaptation is a corker. Peggy Flood is a wistful, melancholy spirit-Penelope watching Lindsay Plake relive her life.Odysseus (Emily Asher Kellis,) woos, weds, and beds her before sodding off to recover her hated cousin – “the septic bitch,” in one of many fine turns of phrase.Flood is one of two singly-cast, the rest weave in and out of a fluid, polymorphous chorus budding here as a suitor, there as a son, and collectively as a boat or an army through chant and shanty.The script is eminently suited to Frédérique Michel’s idiosyncratic style and discreetly supported by Charles Duncombe’s production design.
Peggy Flood and the cast of “The Penelopiad” Photo by Paul Rubenstein, courtesy of City Garage Theatre
With even Telemachus (Courtney Brechemin) taken from her to be raised by a nurse (Geraldine Fuentes,) Penelope bucks tradition and her in-laws to make work and a life for herself.“Remember this – water does not resist. Water flows” said her Naiad mother (Angela Beyer) and daughter dutifully goes around obstacles she can’t go through.She takes up weaving and stewards her husband’s estate in hopes of his pleasure upon his return.Yes, she deals in slaves and selects twelve young ones for her inner circle.They do her bidding in the house, at the loom, and much, much more when the suitors arrive. The maids are her eyes, ears, and arms in keeping the youthful louts somewhat at bay through directed canoodling. When the shroud artifice goes awry, the suitors turn from mere pillaging to the rape of Penelope’s favorite, Melantho (Marissa Ruiz).In a play full of CG’s hallmark nudity, this fully clothed scene shocks. Atwood progressively ratchets the cynicism.Penelope and Helen (Marie Paquim)– both knowing how things turned out – lob barbs at each other, the latter as unrepentant and caustic in death as in life. Clever Odysseus is a conniving businessman and silver-tongued devil. The chorus snarks at his supposed heroics and marvels at his ability to avoid getting home for ten years. And, no break for the lady of the house even upon his disguised return. While she sleeps, father and son slaughter the suitors. Egged on by the nurse, they snuff the loyal maids in thanks for helping the house stave off total ruin. Isolated from birth, estranged from son and husband, Penelope can’t explain, complain, or mourn her only real family and has to accept the collateral dommage.
Although a couple of the choral interludes are a tad silly, the author’s concept and political vision come off like fine espresso – fragrant, dark, and bitter with an eye-opening kick.The adaptation omits two chapters: “Anthropology Lecture” proposing an interesting literary theory and lobbing preemptive strikes against critics would have been draggy and hard to stage.“The Trial of Odysseus” would have presented its own problems but starkly showed the man getting away with it to the horror of his victims.Then as now, justice punches down.Despite the sprawling saga, the production is a tight, symmetric two hours with intermission.“Penelopiad” was in rehearsals in March 2020 just before the world went on hold. In that time of shutdown the carpet pulled back and we saw at least briefly the countless, nameless “essential workers” risking all to make the world fit for the profiteers.Atwood performs a similar service by turning a well-worn story on its head for a different perspective.Wily Kinbote was right,it can be the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and it is the commentator who has the last word.
Bergamot Station was alive and hopping on opening night with multiple galleries having their own events.CG’s neighbor BBAX hosted the opening of textile artist Carmen Mardonez‘s solo show.Brilliantly colored and explorable sails of cloth and yarn along with eerily humanoid sculptural shapes offered both preface and counterpoint to the equally nautical although somber play next door. The artist echoes Penelope inher statement, “As a woman, my entrails have always been governed by others.”It is one of those confluence of forms that in an ideal world would be much more frequent in an art colony.Unfortunately the galleries close up shop long before curtain leaving a mostly dark and unfestive parking lot for theatregoers.The exhibition runs through January 2023 and is worth a stop.
Clockwise from center: Erika Soto, Trisha Miller, Rafael Goldstein, Cassandra Marie Murphy. Photo by Craig Schwartz, courtesy A Noise Within Theatre and Lucy Pollak Public Relations
ANW’s tribute to myth, art, and engineering is both visually dazzling and a chutzponic choice for this temporary breather from the pandemic. Water is everywhere – onstage and on the audience – as a gifted cast seamlessly weaves eight stories and a coda from Ovid to impressive stagecraft. The play is sufficiently well-known that there’s no point in recapping the fables-for-grownups by Mary Zimmerman, a brand unto herself. Locally, Stephen Legawiec’s long-departed and much lamented Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble did exceptional service to myth. The Sacred Fools and Coeurage also deliver technical miracles on a budget. Zimmerman ups the ante requiring an onstage pool central to her theme. ANW has built the resources over the years to afford the rights, the engineering, and the resident ensemble to pull it all off. The costs must be astronomical especially for a barely four week run, an oddly appropriate leap-of-faith in art over economics.
Nicole Javier (top) and Rafael Goldstein (bottom). Photo by Craig Schwartz, courtesy A Noise Within Theatre and Lucy Pollak Public Relations
On top of the usual artistic concerns and choices, director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott has to see to the safety of her performers who are feet, knees, and backs in the water as much as they are out of it. This is no mean feat given costumes (Garry Lennon), props (Shen Heckel), walking continuously on a wet stage, and a disease spread by droplets. The company has hewn to its resident artist model (six of the nine performers) although it seems to have gone away from its roots in repertory. It is interesting to note the changing of the guard having followed the company closely in the 90s to mid 2000s and sporadically thereafter. Geoff Elliott remains a constant of the motion with Rafael Goldstein and Erika Soto now regular members along with unfamiliar faces with extensive company and classical credits. That Shakesperean training pays off handsomely with uniformly rich, resonant, and nuanced voices inhabiting instead of reciting the text. It’s a heady mix of comedy, drama, pathos, and bathos. Trisha Miller is excellent as Alcyone, Sydney A. Mason as a nasty Aphrodite, and DeJuan Christopher as Ceyx. Elliott is all the fathers; Pythonesque as Helios negotiating with Phaeton (Kasey Mahaffy) as well as Midas and Cinyras navigating daughter problems. The physical demands are great as the cast have to carry one another in and out of the water throughout the piece where one slip could end many careers. The level of trust engendered by long and close collaboration must be off the charts and hard to conceive with a team assembled for one production.
But, oh, that engineering – Francois-Pierre Couture (design), Ken Booth (lighting), and Robert Oriol (sound) – deserves a loud, two-syllable, “Damn!” Even if we take the pool for granted, electricity, water, and people don’t mix. This constrains the high powered lights to surround the stage and there again from safe a distance – yet nothing essential is in shadow. Glowing orbs are undoubtedly enabled by LEDs. Their collective play off the water and onto the walls are a splendid touch – carrying the audience along waves of action floating on Oriol’s effective yet unobtrusive soundscape. And we should not take any of this for granted. Going from page to stage is a tough artistic job but no easier than taking a technical concept through design, build, test, and delivery. ANW’s timelapse shows the large uncredited crew that made it happen and glimpses the kind of backstage preparation area accessible to very few of the city’s theatremakers. Yes, there are a couple of songs but … what are you going to do? Barring extension, only five performances remain so act accordingly.
Note bene: While there are no bad seats at ANW, the raised stage does obscure the water’s surface from the front rows. There is a benefit (and certainly no harm) in going to the middle or even the back of the house. Those up front will get splashed.
Metamorphoses
Based on the Myths of Ovid
Written and originally directed by Mary Zimmerman
Directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott
for A Noise Within Theatre Company 3352 E Foothill Blvd.
Pasadena, CA 91107
Thursdays through Sundays, closing 5 June 2022
Two performances Saturdays
Running time: Ninety minutes without intermission
Performance times vary, see the theatre’s website for details
Proof of vaccination/booster required, Masks must be worn inside the theatre
‘Wakings!,’Ron Sossi’s quartet of lesser-known Pinter, unknown Coover, and better-known Hesse attempts with varying success to explore ‘models of consciousness’ as Occidental eyes turn inward and then Eastward.
In ‘Rip Awake,’ Darrell Larson who excelled in pre-COVID Strindberg lets it fly as Rip Van Winkle left to figure out what and who is left of his former world.Robert Coover, the only non-Nobelist on the bill, has written a nice although a touch too long fourth-wall breaking rant where Van Winkle limns the difficult mechanics of his awakening to soft bones, spiral toenails, and frayed mind.It’s a meaty monologue for the ‘actor of a certain age’ and Larson rages and brawls about the stage with mountain-goat confidence.
Pinter the writer had long become Pinter, dissertation fodder by the time he wrote ‘A Kind of Alaska’ in 1982.Deborah (Diana Cignoni), now 45, awakes after succumbing to sleeping sickness at age 16 with her devoted doctor (Ron Bottitta) and long-suffering sister (Kristina Ladegaard) attending.Deborah is nostalgic, uncertain, and kind of a … jerk towards the few she has left and there is a small twist in why these two people still hang about her.There is some good writing in her coming to and coming to grips with her situation but the mixing of German, Nordic, and British accents dislocates the situation. For all the acclaim, Pinter is narrowly focussed on specific castes of British jackholes (that American audiences find endlessly fascinating) and efforts to apply him outside that milieu can run into trouble.
The bookends are less effective.‘Victoria Station’ another 1982 Pinter effort has taxi dispatcher Bottitta trying in vain to get driver C.J. O’Toole to pick up a fare.The driver has, to be charitable, checked out, cruising around long gone London landmarks infatuated with a possibly dead passenger.These Pinters are lesser-known for a reason, the malevolent craftsman behind ‘The Caretaker,’‘No Man’s Land,’ and ‘Betrayal’ is barely visible with scarcely a memorable line in the pair.O’Toole returns in a non-speaking solo in the closer as Siddhartha rambling wild like Rip at first, later finding a secret of time and his enlightenment in a river.Castmates narrate earnestly from the novel to a clichéd music track.
Yet it is still worth a look. Self-admittedly a scratching of the surface, Sossi paradoxically succeeds even when the playlets individually stumble. Models of consciousness aside, there is a strong resonance to a world full of bottled rage peeking out from years of isolation, relearning how to act among others, and looking for some meaning in it all.The dispatcher’s bosses don’t care that he’s alone, overworked, and can’t get through to a disaffected employee – there’s profit to be had.Self-centered Deborah alternately denies her condition and snarks at her long-suffering caregivers.Rip is out for revenge against those, real or perceived, responsible for his prolonged slumber.He turns wild and this being America, turns gun against dog and daughter imagining them to be others all the while. The woman to my left just had to consult her phone well into the fourth act.We live this insanity each and every day with no end in sight and even worse on the horizon.Against all that, the Hesse is an earnest attempt at hope and release. Whether it succeeds or not is up to each viewer.
There are doubtless easier ways to rebuild audience after a plague.Many ManchinDemocrats argue that this is the time for trivial comedy by the usual suspects.Audiences should consider rewarding The Odyssey for going against that grain and taking this calculated risk.
Wakings! Directed by Ron Sossi for the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble
Through 5 June 2022
Friday & Saturday 8pm, Sunday 2pm, May 25 8pm
Anders Zorn is the most famous painter I’ve never heard of. Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his portraiture earned him fame and fortune all over the world. He is equally known for using only four colors in his eponymous palette: White, black, yellow ochre, and vermilion.
The Old Holland paint company pays tribute to Zorn in a series of videos exploring how their oils and his methods work together. Each video is a hypnotic few minutes of a person mixing four paints with a Bob Ross-style narration by artist Lennaert Koorman. The color arrays at the end are little works of art that would look good on any wall. The company offers a staggering number of colors but deserves credit for showing how a limited palette and a painterly eye can capture a universe of shade and shape. Start with the reds and explore the rest.
Wayne and Schuster set a standard, Andy Griffith providedcommentary. Now, Key&Peele and Nolke&Nolke face off in the Posterize William contest. Be sure to vote in the comments (Jeez, I kill me.)
From the Sad-but-True department. Leave it to the NYT to highlight the problems LA theatres face in the aftermath of COVID and bearing the brunt of the ills of the gig economy. Uber and Lyft skate while tiny arts orgs have to conform to new wage laws while trying to reopen. Whatever Dr. Soon-Shiong may have done for the LA Times, his inaction on the sacks of filth at his arts and culture desks is unpardonable.
This animation is making the rounds of the classical music world. Pavel Hudec adds gorgeous visuals to a sparkling performance of the spiky 2nd movement of Ravel‘s A minor Piano Trio. “Journey of the Pantoum” evokes some highborn traveler from distant land but, the pantoum is no potentate, panjandrum, or padishah, only a type of poem that informs the piece.
The Sitkovetsky Trio‘s playing is otherworldly. The video coincided with the release of the album on BIS featuring the full work along with the Saint-Saëns Trio No. 2 in E minor. It is (surprisingly) available in “hardcopy” as a compact disc or as a digital download from eClassical.com in high quality formats with PDF liner notes and cover for under $10.
Playing the piano is damnably hard. I have accepted that I will never practice consistently or wisely enough to reach my original wildly unrealistic goals of competence and am contenting myself with slow progress and occasional discoveries. Coaxing a good sound requires talent, coordination, flexibility, and freedom of movement. There’s nothing that can be done about the first item but occasionally something in the joints unsticks enabling a small improvement in the rest. I feel kinship with weekend athletes who get that occasional moment of grace amid hours of futility.
One of the many frustrations is pressing a key in the same place with the same pressure five times in a row and hearing no sound two of those times. The hammer misses the strings by a fraction of a millimeter and flops back with a click and a dull thud. This makes any kind of phrasing next to impossible for the duffer. He either settles for good enough or goes nuts trying to adapt as the instrument itself changes with the time of day and the weather. It never bothers the professionals who figure it out on the fly.
The piano action itself is a bizarre marvel of wood, felt, physics, and prayer. It is surprising that it works at all and there are eighty eight of the bloody things that have to work consistently. It is a lot to ask, perhaps too much. Robert Grijalva of the University of Michigan explains it in painstaking detail using a model of his own invention. For those with less time, a Dutch animator posting as Hoe Ishetmoegelijk (hoe is het moegelijk = how is it possible) has a concise summary.
On inauguration day, a large chunk of America unclenched and exhaled for the first time in four wretched, miserable years. Five if we count the rancid campaign of naked bigotry and full throated lies that preceded and presaged the disaster of 45.
We now have some sanity in the ship of state and can hope that any honeymoon lasts long enough to get people vaccinated, businesses restarted, and the arts out from under hiding. Even before COVID, anything on the finer side of life was ignored at best and ridiculed at worst under the moron of Mar-a-lago. Many of us who eagerly awaited 20 January and some sign of support to the better things woke up to surprise and not a little disappointment at the overwhelmingly pop-culture besotted inauguration that actually occurred. The shark sandwichplaylist promised much and delivered nothing.
“Whether you are a country soul, a jazz enthusiast, a hip hop head, a classical sort, or just love that old-time rock and roll, music clarifies, inspires, unites, and heals.”
— Inaugural Committee CEO Tony Allen
Us “classical sorts” got jack shit, not even the ubiquitous OFFS not-him-again Yo-Yo Ma bowsynching to Copland as in 2009 although the equally overexposed Rénëê Fleming was said to have sung at one of the side events. The rest, excluding Bob Marley, was as America-centered and nobrow as anything the MAGA movement could scrape together, excepting of course getting the performance rights. The perpetually inept LA Times arts and culture department, or at least one of its representatives, thinks things are looking up. This schlemiel, a tv critic no less, views the cultural future as the wasteland of the Discovery Channel, Bravo, History, and TLC which at one time actually had some decent programming but which long ago sold out to the perpetually dropping lowest common denominator. It might get better for the arts but it is more likely that the arts will just get redefined just as science was for ‘The Science Channel.’
What galls about the 46-0 shutout is that the United States does not lack for options. Copland and Gershwin are overplayed but we have Ives, Joplin, and Gottschalk. Dvorák was inspired in Iowa, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky lived out their lives here (as did Schoenberg but let’s stay within realistic limits). Hell, John Williams or Peter Schickele could have done something if asked. And, if all of that is still too off-the-radar, there’s good ol’American John Philip Sousa transcribed by good ol’ American Vladimir Horowitz. One pianist, one piano – saves on cost and brings everyone to his or her feet. Regardez from the Hollywood Bowl in 1945.