THE BONEYARD 

SLEEPING GIANT at the Road Theatre Company

After beginning our troubled and worrisome year being force fed a near-lethal slug of (Arthur) Miller Lite, how encouraging to next be treated by the majorly prolific Road Theatre Company to Sleeping Giant, another artistically redemptive and timely new play by Steve Yockey, author of last year’s Mercury in the same space.

Directed by the equally prolific Ann Hearn Tobolowsky, who helmed the aforementioned Mercury, as well as Shem Bitterman’s current smash hit The Civil Twilight at the Broadwater, co-produced by the Road and starring the company’s founder and artistic director Taylor Gilbert, and several other successful productions for the complex. Her work on Mercury and the year before on Alessandro Camon’s Scintilla, also at the Road, was instrumental in both productions receiving TicketHolder Award honors in the Best Plays of the Year category two years in a row.

The supernaturally-inclined Yockey is known for his ability to creep audience members out—and I mean that as a great compliment. This time out, a private fireworks display at the secluded lake house inherited by a young man (Eric Patrick Harper) is meant to dramatize his marriage proposal to his hardly amused intended (Jacqueline Misaye), but instead it awakens a centuries-old sea creature with an all-seeing eye about the size of a Prius. 

This unsettling event unleashes an ominous conversion for all who are subjected to its power to create a kind of mesmeric devotion from people in desperate need to believe in something in a world dominated by confusion and chaos—you know, like today. "Cuckoos,” one of Yockey’s doomed lake dwellers opins about some of the region's more exotic residents, “keep making the same sounds as the world ends.”

It’s as though this slimy creature, so clearly akin to another real-life depraved orange monster who has recently mysteriously been successful in hypnotizing millions of our deluded countrymen into becoming ardent followers, a man clearly intent on destroying life as we know it, becomes a perfect analogy for current events in the news.

It’s amazing how Yockey can continuously conjure such outlandish storylines and then create dialogue that makes it all almost believable. “Everything symbolizes something,” a character muses prophetically. “Just hearing that makes me tired.”

Sleeping Giant is one of his best plays and certainly one of the most unsettling in another near-perfect partnership with Toblowsky, who so obviously “gets” him bigtime, and the unstoppably brave folks at the Road who never flinch attempting something risky. It is austerely but beautifully produced, with a jaw-dropping special effect shock of an ending created by scenic designer Katrina Coulourides and master carpenter Kurtis Bedford that must be praised for making us squirm in our seats.

The cast of four, Misaye, Harper, Andrea Flowers, and Justin Lawrence Barnes, willingly join to become poster children for what constitutes a quintessential ensemble cast, all equally committed to the challenging task of playing various citizens drawn into the bizarre cult of the Butterfly King and delivering Yockey’s darkly comedic material without resorting to a more easily adopted faux-gothic style.

Tobolosky is the obvious glue that binds this all together, not only in her ability to elicit a quartet of impressive performances but in her skill to stage the play’s seven vignettes without a moment’s clumsiness. Anyone who might regularly read my reviews will attest to how vehemently I often grumble about visible scene changes and how moving furniture around in blue light distracts from the flow of a piece, but here these choreographed moves become part of this remarkable play’s preternatural and eerie dreamscape.

We all need a diversion right now and Steve Yockey’s Sleeping Giant, although it hardly makes one feel encouraged that the future might not be a dystopian shambles for our poor maligned country and the world, at least makes us temporarily able to laugh at the prospects for hanging onto our ever-spinning planet for dear life while helplessly in the control of a dangerous and destructive bogeyman of epic proportions intent on destroying everything we hold sacred.

 *  *  *

DEATH OF A SALESMAN at the Colony Theatre

If any critic in any discipline takes pleasure in writing a negative review, in my opinion they should find another vocation. I’m lucky the last eight years to host my own website, since in my many years writing for Back Stage, Entertainment Today, and other publications, I was usually assigned plays rather than having the ability to choose what I wanted to cover. These days I have the luxury of choosing things I am almost certain I will enjoy supporting.

Such was definitely the case given the opportunity to attend this new mounting of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 classic Death of a Salesman at the Colony featuring veteran film actor Joe Cortese in the coveted role of Willy Loman and the always luminous Frances Fisher as his long-suffering wife Linda. I was extremely excited to kick off what I’m still confident will be another banner year in theatrical achievement for Los Angeles with what I was sure would be a guaranteed artistic milestone.

To say that this Death is deadly would be more than an understatement. How I would have loved to be able to say only wonderful things but unfortunately, under the somnambulant direction of Mark Blanchard, the result is more the death of a classic. It’s hard to imagine what enticed Cortese and Fisher to be a part of this; he is a sturdy veteran performer with an incredibly prestigious resume of film roles and Fisher is simply one of my favorite actors on the planet, a distinction she has confirmed over and over again, both in film and on LA stages.

The glaring problem is the casting of Cortese and Fisher in the first place, both of whom are at least a generation beyond the age where they can be believable as the Lomans. Willy is said to be 63, which makes his descent into dementia and his problems keeping his job and paying his bills heartbreaking, and Linda, we’re told, has “not yet reached 50.” It’s hard to imagine why Cortese’s continuously mumbling Willy hadn’t retired long ago and when their son Biff (Cronin Cullen) repeatedly calls his mother “Pal,” it seems the affectionate term MeeMaw would be more appropriate.

With the notable exceptions of Cullen and Robert Smythe as his brother Happy, the rest of the cast is almost embarrassingly inadequate to be supporting such major stars. Paul Ganus as the ghost of Willy‘s brother Ben, clad in an oddly ill-fitting white linen suit, delivers all his lines in a cartoon-like bluster as he struts onstage in each entrance pounding his ever-present cane on the stage floor for attention—and occasionally seeming as though lifted from a production of Noises Off as he has trouble finding his special spectral spotlight.

Gary Hudson as Willy’s neighbor Charlie turns in a far better performance if only he didn’t feel the need to turn out to the audience with each line he deems important, but perhaps the most outrageously what-was-he-thinking performance comes from Brian Guest, first in his depiction of Charlie’s young son Bernard and later in a bizarre cameo as the waiter in the play’s pivotal restaurant scene. As the awkward teenager, he utilizes every comedic caricature trait except wearing a beanie with a propeller on top and later as Stanley, he appears to be paying homage to early Dan Aykroyd at his silliest. As Willy and his sons sit in the café having a serious conversation, Guest upstages the action entering with a crooked walk and facial expressions to match, looking a bit like Beldar without his cone. Where was a director here when he was so desperately needed?

Actually, 90% of this production’s failures land firmly on the shoulders of Blanchard‘s indulgent direction, with staging that is not only clumsy but often unplayable—as when Ganus stands stage center staring into the abyss while totally obliterating an important scene between Willy and Linda taking place directly behind him on a staircase—but more importantly, how he let his players flounder and resort to search inappropriate measures on their own is truly puzzling.

Every actor, including those as gifted as Cortese and Fisher, needs a directorial eye, something that is simply nowhere to be found here. Even the choice to lift a crudely constructed papier-mâché tombstone out of the stage floor complete with wrinkled corners or decorating Ben’s briefcase with glittery stickers from the Party Store are clueless, but to let Fisher hug a post that represents a solid wall on Justin Huen’s abstract set as she talks about how much she loves her home is downright unconscionable.

Cortese, who has obviously never been counseled to help find a character arc, delivers his lines so slowly and indistinctly throughout that it’s hard to care what happens to the poor guy, especially since his performance adds about 15 extra minutes to an already disastrously indulgent production. He comes off more like a geriatric mafia don rather than a failing everyman lamenting the loss of his own personal American dream—and when Willy makes his final decision how to deal with his future, Cortese shuffles offstage as slowly as he moves throughout the rest of the three-plus hour performance and within seconds, a crash is heard when it’s hard to imagine he even had time to get into his car.

The only reason to see this production is to experience the wonder that is Frances Fisher from her earliest scenes to Linda’s final heart-wrenching monologue but sadly, what could’ve been a brilliant performance is also hampered by the decision to continuously hit us over the head showing the era’s treatment of women, something overemphasized by Linda always entering carrying an omnipresent laundry basket or opening her sewing kit to perform her housewifely chores. We get it, okay? More than that, without encouragement and guidance from a better director to show us the character’s inner strength and resiliency, even the brilliant Fisher is left swimming upstream.

It pains me greatly not to have better things to say about this Death of a Salesman but unfortunately, it truly is a production that almost made me angry to have to sit through.

 *  *  *