EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

 

CURRENT REVIEWS 

From TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER  

 

"Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors."   ~ Ernest Hemingway   

 

A Froggy Becomes 

Photo by Jenny Graham

Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre

Lordie, I needed this. Unlike so many new plays these days, the world premiere of Becky Wahlstrom’s delightfully silly A Froggy Becomes from Open Fist doesn’t bombard us with weighty reminders of the massive trials and insurmountable inequities plaguing our fuckedup world, yet it still manages to covertly have something uplifting to say while leaving us laughing ‘til it hurts.

The conceit of Froggy is that it’s meant to be presented as children’s theatre but it’s not—although any potty-humor-loving 12-year-old would be rolling in the aisles when the giant puppet depicting the leading character’s obnoxious tighty-whitey-clad father starts belching his Coors and lifting one massive leg to pass a loud crescendoing trumpet call of gas.

Bumpy Diggs (Sandra Kate Burck) is a typically overdramatic and traumatized puberty-challenged seventh grader who struggles at home with that ogre of a dad (Peter Breitmayer in Joe Seely’s phenomenal 8-ft. beer-guzzling, ball-scratching puppet costume) and a mousy mother who’s secretly schtupping their equally mousy parish priest (the hilarious Johanna McKay and Michael Lanahan), while at school she’s teased relentlessly and ignored by her dreamy first crush (a geewillikers-y Tom Sys, playing the role as though lifted directly from an Andy Hardy movie).

Remember the seventh grade? Everything a kid experiences in that difficult, awkward period of adolescence is always magnified a hundredfold and seems as though each daily ordeal is marking the end of our lives, but despite all the drama that descends on Bumpy, she is a feisty little thing and refuses to let it stop her from surviving.

Under the leadership of Pat Towne, whose own signature humor and precision comic timing permeates the entire production, his cast is uniformly committed to the material and thankfully devoid of concern about going too far. The actors playing the 12-year-olds are especially successful finding that age and behavior within themselves, led by the sweetly gawky and endearing performance of Burck and the growth-spurting Sys, as well as Kyra Grace, Kyle Tomlin, Bradley Sharper, Jeremy Guskin, Deandra Bernardo, Ana Id, and especially the ever-apologizing Carmella Jenkins as Bumpy’s sufficiently melodramatic friends and schoolmates.

Nothing ever goes right for Bumpy Diggs, from a nagging science class project that fails horribly to the heartbreaking aftermath of her first kiss, but what makes this contemporary fairytale hybrid such a refreshing and uplifting experience—not to mention offering an irreverent humor that permeates the tale and the performances—is Wahlstrom's forward-looking peek at the inherent resilience of the human spirit.

Although all but one of the poor doomed tadpoles don’t make it through Bumpy’s ambitious school project, that single scrappy amphibian escapee has hopefully hopped away to a better future—or at least an adventure or two before it croaks (pun intended). The road ahead can often be quite Bumpy for us all, but with a little steadfastness and determination there’s hope about what any froggy can become.

THROUGH APR. 13: Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. www.openfist.org

Faithless 

Photo by Tim Sullens

Victory Theatre Center

In the world premiere of the award-winning Jon Klein’s newest play Faithless, two adult siblings are called to the home of their stepfather to discuss what he sees as a family crisis. Their discomfort is obvious, especially when they realize the issue involves a drastic life-altering decision being considered by their teenage stepsister.

It’s been only a couple of years since Claire and Calvin (Melissa Ortiz and Jon Sprik) lost their mother to COVID, so there’s naturally some discomfort being thrust back into the world of her second husband and recent cancer survivor Gus (John Idakitis) and Rosie (Josee Guardine), the daughter the couple adopted late in life.

This is Klein’s fifth play to be presented in collaboration with the Victory Theatre Center since its inception in 1979, particularly poignant since the role of Gus was written for the complex’s late founder and co-artistic director Tom Ormeny, a dear personal friend and a giant in our scrappy little LA theatre community we lost last July after a valiant personal battle with brain cancer.

This is the first production brought to fruition by Ormeny’s widow and co-artistic director Maria Gobetti since Tom’s death and, as she readily admits, the journey to make it happen without her life and producing partner of 54 years by her side was not an easy one.

Not only is Faithless meticulously produced and smartly designed by the production’s co-producer and another longtime Victory collaborator Evan Bartoletti, under the precision directorial expertise of Gobetti, who keeps things moving at warpspeed when Klein’s subject matter could easily become bogged down in its own fascinating but long-winded rhetoric, it’s an impressive milestone in both her much-honored career and that of the theatre complex she and Tom so lovingly created and nurtured.

Faithless is a play about navigating family relationships in a family where no one is on the same page when it comes to religion. Calvin is a Presbyterian minister, Claire is a high school teacher who has a degree in comparative religion but has developed sincere doubts about her own beliefs, and Gus is a confirmed atheist who’s not afraid to tell his stepchildren why.

The reason the adult siblings have been summoned by Gus is a mystery, although Claire is purdy sure Rosie has been knocked up by one of her students, a lad she not so professionally refers to as “that little creep.”

When Rosie instead delivers the news that she has decided to convert to Catholicism and become a nun, her sister begs her to tell her she’s pregnant instead as that would be so much better. As she warns her, “It’s not all singing and escaping Nazis.”

Klein explores whether or not organized religion at this moment in the world’s evolution is something we really need or, as Gus (and I) believe, it’s been the cause of most of the world’s problems over the last 2000-plus years. “Faith and force,” as the otherwise deluded Ayn Rand once wrote, “are the destroyers of mankind.”

Although Klein infuses his sufficiently thought-provoking work with an abundant supply of much-needed topical humor, under less skillful leadership than that of Gobetti, long established as one of the best directors working in our town, quite honestly this could have been a dry and potentially difficult slog.

Clearly, the most obvious ally she had to work alongside to bring Faithless to life is Ortiz, whose performance as Claire, landing somewhere between the warmly compassionate delivery of Marian Seldes and the acerbic asides made famous by Eve Arden, is the anchor of this production.

Guardine makes a lovely LA intimate theatre debut as Rosie, spunky and real and completely endearing. Still, as much as I loved the women in the cast, I found the performances of both Sprik and Idakitis less successful.

Perhaps hampered the afternoon we attended by Sprik’s trials trying to get the theatre through the barricades and street closures of the LA Marathon that gave him about 20 seconds to get into costume and be thrust onstage, I have to admit I found his performance a major distraction.

Projecting as though trying to reach the far back bleacher seats while performing Shakespeare at some grand outdoor venue when the Victory is in no need of such blustery augmentation, while telegraphing Calvin’s reactions by employing continuous eye-rolling and biting his knuckles to show his character’s vexation, proved antithetical to the emotions he was assigned to convey.

Like Sprik, Idakitis understands his character’s journey intellectually but he simply just works too dang hard. And by beginning as ornery and irascible and grumbly as he could possibly muster, way too often pointing an angry finger at his dissenting family members I might myself have been inclined to bite off, he leaves himself with nowhere to go when Gus has even more reason to vent his frustrations.

Still, the efforts of Gobetti to set a fire under Klein’s compelling yet craftily neutral treatise on the nature of faith as something more than a flawed and rigidly demanding effort to “sell death insurance” at the expense of human connection with the world around us, is a remarkable achievement. I left the theatre with a lot of things to ponder about my own life and what could be better than when art makes us think about our own personal odyssey.

As much as I admire the notable achievement brought to fruition here by the partnership of Klein and Gobetti, who obviously share a palpable mutual trust for one another that infuses most everything about this production, forgive me if I feel the need to deliver a general rant about something that has been brewing within me for quite awhile—something that should not be considered a detriment to the appreciation for this beautifully mounted world premiere.

Granted, I attend a lot of theatre and all things theatrical have been my passion and my life for my seven-plus decades careening around this planet. As a critic, I do my best to keep my mind open and evaluate things as objectively as possible, to see things unencumbered by my own history and personal knowledge of the many other plays with similar themes that have come before it.

That said, I sure wish there could be some kind of moratorium on dramatic literature dealing with dysfunctional families bumping heads over their divergent beliefs and insisting on telling one another how they should live their lives.

Granted, veteran and much-awarded wordsmith Jon Klein’s newest play is well written, often achingly funny, and ultimately quite touching. It is beautifully constructed and sharply directed by the incredibly gifted Maria Gobetti, but there isn’t a lot new here to contemplate. It took me about two minutes to surmise by final curtain poor ol’ Gus would be in an urn being toasted by his surviving family members vowing to work at trying to better understand one another.

Again, as exceptional a production as the world premiere of Faithless definitely is, if the play’s themes were new and fresh to me, I might have been a lot more engaged by it. This surely might be my own world-weary perspective; if I hadn’t seen this kind of family conflict tale presented on a regular basis for most of my life, I might have been considerably more moved. Call it an occupational hazard, one that shouldn’t stop you from making up your own minds. There’s a lot of compelling themes introduced here for someone who won’t automatically see it as familiar and instantly predictable.

THROUGH APR. 16: Victory Theatre Center, 3324 W. Victory Blvd, Burbank. 818.841.5421 or thevictorytheatrecenter.org

Fatherland 

Photo by Jenny Graham

Fountain Theatre

According to Merriam-Webster, the second definition of the term "swan song” is:  “A farewell appearance or final act or pronouncement.”

Last month, just as his new play Fatherland was set to world premiere at the Fountain Theatre, the continuously groundbreaking facility’s artistic director Stephen Sachs announced his retirement from the pioneering 78-seat non-profit space he founded in 1990.

I proudly consider myself part of the Fountain family, having appeared there as the Witch of Capri in Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore directed by the Fountain's producing director Simon levy, with Karen Kondazian and yours truly traveling on to play our roles at the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, and in a special encore presentation of the award-winning Hollywood Fringe Festival hit The Katrina Comedy Fest by NOLA playwright Rob Florence.

Over the past 33 years, the Fountain has produced 36 world premieres and 54 U.S., west coast, or L.A. debuts, each chosen to reflect a unique cultural voice with a fierce determination to make waves and to serve our town’s incredibly diverse ethnic communities.

During that time, Sachs has directed dozens of award-winning productions at the Fountain and across the country, authored 18 of his own plays, including the comedy-drama Bakersfield Mist that has toured extensively and was presented in London’s West End, and among numerous other achievements gave a welcoming theatrical home to Athol Fugard where several of his newest plays were introduced to the world.

And so, Fatherland might indeed be Sachs’ crowning achievement while helming the Fountain and nothing could be more celebratory. Created as a “verbatim play,” meaning every word spoken and all situations presented in the script come from actual court transcripts and testimony, interviews with the real people involved, and public statements, it provides a riveting, unsettling experience that will hopefully (intentionally) haunt us all as we watch the current unconscionable election season unfold in our poor befouled country besieged from within.

Although the two leading pivotal characters are only listed as “Father” and “Son,” Sachs’ play is indeed written about Guy Reffitt of Wylie, Texas (where else?), the first defendant convicted and jailed for his involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and his son Jackson, who made the incredibly brave and heart-wrenching decision to turn his father in to the F.B.I.

As the blusterous deluded father in Sachs’ scarily cautionary tale, one of our community’s scrappiest and most prolific theatrical treasures, Ron Bottitta, is nothing short of magnificent in the incredibly demanding role.

From loving dad slinging burgers in the backyard to rabid conspiracy theorist ready to overthrow the government in a brief 80-minute ride, Bottitta brings an uncanny believability to the challenge, making his character alternately both pitiable and absolutely terrifying. It is a tour de force performance that, if I were currently back teaching the craft on a daily basis, I’d insist each and every one of my acting students attend to see a true master craftsman at work.

As his 19-year-old son, the trajectory of the Carbondale, Colorado native and LA newcomer Patrick Keleher’s journey from backpacking around 11 African counties, Asia, and Australia to his current incarnation being cast in Fatherland is the stuff of which, in a fair world, future legends could possibly begin.

Back in his hometown after reading about the Fountain’s search to cast his character, on a whim and with a lot of chutzpah Keleher flew to LA, auditioned for Sachs, and the next day while debarking back home from his brief trip, received a text that he’d been cast.

His performance is a gripping, amazingly multi-layered thing of wonder, quite unexpected from someone who hasn’t been around this nasty ol’ business long enough to have become disillusioned or have had time to doubt himself in any way. Resembling a kinda corn-fed, farm-grown version of a modernday James Dean, Keleher is the heart of this production as a sensitive kid torn between his love for his father and his family and what he knows is a twisted assault on the very fabric of democracy.

Guy Reffitt began his career as an oil worker and eventual rig manager before the 2016 collapse of the price of oil. Losing his $200,000-a-year position as an international oil industry consultant, he moved his family back to Texas and, as his savings began to dissipate, his interest in politics concurrently began to move dangerously right as he sucked in Trump’s laughably masturbatory The Art of the Deal.

To the horror of his son, he linked and quickly fell under the twisted spell of a virulently ultra-conservative Texas militia group called the Three Percenters—naming themselves that because they believed only three percent of A’murkins had the cajónes to stand up against what they saw as a police state.

“When tyranny becomes law,” Bottitta’s father bellows to his horrified son, himself turning in the other direction after the murder of George Floyd, “revolution becomes duty.”

This of course leads to him becoming instrumental in calling for 10 million equally deluded souls to join him and his ragtag tribe of racist fake Christians for the infamous storming of the Capitol under the spell of that orange-hued monstrous antihero unable to believe he lost an election and enjoy a brief almost orgasmic high that made him finally “feel like a fucking American.” Eventually, of course, his euphoria led to Reffitt’s sentence of 87 months in federal prison.

What Fatherland perhaps inadvertently exposes is what causes such a person to become radicalized. It’s not necessarily a "patriotic" rational calling for justice and change as it is a desperate need to be a part of something, to be right about something, to be better than others in a world that has continually left such people behind and their voice unheard. It’s what my partner and I refer to as Little Pee-Pee Syndrome, a far more dangerous version of souping up one’s car with oversized wheels and a sound system able to blast all those people who ignore you on that arduous and treacherous road we call life.

Under Sachs’ passionate leadership and sharply fluid direction on a nearly bare stage framed by Joel Daavid’s exquisitely simple set and Alison Brummer’s jarringly effective lighting plot, Bottitta and Keleher are mesmerizing as their characters’ relationship tragically devolves and their lives are forever changed by the boy’s commitment to help spare our democracy from his father and his twisted band of treasonous cohorts.

As the defense and prosecuting attorneys grilling the son in court, characters here utilized as conduits to present the material—again completely gleaned from actual testimony and other statements craftily manipulated by Sachs to become a play—Anna Khaja and Larry Poindexter are sufficiently serviceable in roles which by their very nature are rather thankless.

Kudos are especially in order for Khaja, who must introduce each of the play’s new thought by the questions her U.S. Attorney asks the boy. As I try to impart to every actor I coach, dialogue is best memorized by learning lines thought-by-thought but, as with the psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s classic play Equus, Khaja must have had to learn her lines in some kind of sequence without the benefit of prompts from the lines themselves; one random question asked out of the proper scripted order and she could singlehandedly wipe out pages of dialogue.

To say that Fatherland is arresting and highly polished playmaking is a given but still, as brilliant and perfectly seamless as this production and its performances may be, it is by nature not something that can simply be referred to as an entertainment. It is incredibly disturbing and, as any such project sadly preaching basically to a likeminded choir, I wish there was a way it could be presented to a far wider audience. It might even change the minds of people we as left-coast liberals only began to realize existed and were about to crawl out from below their Morlockian rocks with the rise of that malevolent antichrist Donald J. Trump.

So, I mentioned Merriam-Webster’s second definition of the term “swan song” at the beginning. Actually, the first is:  “A song of great sweetness sung by a dying swan.” This in no way reflects the retirement of Stephen Sachs from the incredible theatrical space that has benefited immeasurably from the many projects he has championed into existence despite what must have been some thorny challenges and ups and downs over the past three decades.

One can only hope that, although Sachs has quite literally left the building, his new life will lead him to develop many, many more amazing artistic statements such as the world premiere of his remarkable Fatherland. This “swan song” isn’t sung by a swan on his way off to Valhalla by any means; it signals the flight of a great and unstoppably majestic creature with an enormous wingspan ready to travel off into new directions that will surely prove the betterment of everyone and everything in his path.

THROUGH MAY 26: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Av., LA. 323.663.1525 or fountaintheatre.com

 

See? I'm an Angel.