RMT's The New Electric Ballroom

This Rogue Machine Theatre play is Irish. Oh so very Irish. Joyce and Beckett would be proud - as was I.

It begins in medias res, of course, and it takes us a while to catch on to the fact that this is a play about the epic nature of mundane lives in a small fishing village in Ireland. It's about finding safety in monotony, about the manipulative nature of repetition, about isolation and paralysis. It's a play that (much like Anton's Uncles), reminds us of how we're trapped inside ourselves, and how we rarely have the courage to break free from our own constraints - even when given the opportunity to do so.

Though all performances are stellar, Tim Cummings is a clear standout in the role of Patsy - a fishmonger whose life is forever changed on this one day. He's a beautifully tragic character who takes us on a tour of the fishing village every time he speaks (even though we never leave the room), who makes us laugh with his animated and simplistic remarks, who reveals himself to us while exposing how trapped we are, and how we're our own worst enemy.

Ultimately, it's a play that asks us to examine our own lives, our fixations, our fears, and dares us to be courageous through the stories of scarred, destructive women seeking safety in the expected.

T@BC's The Children

After seeing it 3 times, I can officially say I liked The Children, at The Theatre @ Boston Court.

Don't get me wrong: it moved me from the very first time I saw it, but it left me with so many mixed feelings that I didn't really know what to make of it.

I knew the play was going to be a take on the myth of Medea, and that someone was going to save the children from their fate. I even knew there were going to be puppets, but when the puppets first appeared, I was terrified.

We were sitting front and center, and they descended from the roof with a red light backdrop. They looked liked big, white voodoo dolls (I mistook the wires for really large needles) who'd been hung. It soon became clear that they were puppets, but it took a lot of disbelief to get past their creepiness for the rest of the show, and whenever a cast member would touch them or kiss their cheeks, I'd be reminded that they're puppets - not children - and I'd get creeped out all over again.

By the third time, the puppets were wonderfully endearing. I got to really appreciate their costumes - how they are made to look like little Greek children: the girl with the peplos a kore would wear, the boy whose hair resembled that of a kouros. I got to admire how much life Paige White and Sonny Valicenti breathed into the otherwise lifeless puppets with their emotion and their gestures.

And I got used to - and appreciated - the noise. There are many louds noises and lighting decisions that are purposefully meant to jolt you, replicating the shock of an accident upon impact. I hated these "interruptions" the first time and found them unnecessary, but I appreciated them so much more the next time.

Lastly, I LOVED the set design. We attended the talkback with the designer, and it was amazing to see how much metaphor is layered onto the set and how they reconciled what was going on in a child's imagination with what was happening in reality.

Overall, it was a deeply moving play with very wise choices, and I'm so glad I saw it more than once.

TMB's Anton's Uncles

The first time I heard of Theatre Movement Bazaar was through their collaboration with The Theatre @ Boston Court.

T@BC kicked off its 2012 season with The Treatment - TMB's adaptation of Anton Chekov's short story "Ward 6." It was strong start to the season, with comedy, dance, music and a deep existential reflection on imprisonment and freedom: when are we really free? Who is free? Where is the border between genius and madness?

This amazing show really made me think about how imprisonment is a state of mind - much more so than a physical state of being, and how we fall prey to our own thoughts and our own genius.

It reminded me so much of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, an existential text about how intelligent men become paralyzed by their own intellect, while ignorant men become men of action.

... But this post is about Anton's Uncles ... excuse the tangent ...

Suffice to say that we loved TMB so much, that The Mead specifically requested we follow them; he felt (and Scooter and I agreed) that we needed to see more of that, of words and stories being interpreted not only through words but movement. An amazing conversation with Tina Kronis, Richard Alger, and Mark Skeens confirmed that these were talented folks who were going to produce work we just couldn't miss - and Anton's Uncles would be Tina and Richard's next show, featuring Mark again!

So even though this meant we'd have to travel an hour to get there and an hour to come home, we got our tickets about a month or two ago for yesterday's show.

Anton's Uncles is based on another Chekov story, "Uncle Vanya," and it's essentially about how a professor has a new - much younger - wife, and how they move to the estate that Vanya (the brother of the professor's first wife) has been running for years. 

We found some of the same Chekovian themes (feeling trapped being a key one), and loved the movement and use of props. While TMB had more resources for staging at T@BC, they were given a very spare, small set-up at the South Coast Repertory - but they utilized every inch of it, especially with a rug that became so many different things as the play progressed.

One of the most striking things is that the character of the professor's wife is not present in the play. Well ... she's "present," but not in the traditional way. She has a music theme that plays every time she pressumably walks past the men, who watch her from indoors as she takes a stroll outside. Every time she passes by, they stop whatever they were doing, enthralled, entranced ... proclaiming their unrequitted love to her. Her music, in essence, becomes the missing character. 

I particularly enjoy the "absence" of this woman, who is hailed as "remarkable" and whose youth and beauty is being wasted on a man a couple decades her senior. I love that TMB hasn't given us a physical representation of what this remarkable being looks like, allowing us to fill in our blanks ...

... that is until they are then populated by the random selection of a female audience member!  

This show is going to London next, and perhaps even China, but I really hope it returns to the LA area at some point. It's a shame it was only on for four days because I would've seen it many more times. I've been regretting the fact that I only saw The Treatment two or three times, and it pains me that I got to see only this one performance. Alas ...

Theatre Movement Bazaar: www.theatremovementbazaar.org
The Theatre @ Boston Court: www.bostoncourt.org

"No, I'm not in theatre"

Scooter, The Mead and I are theatre aficionados.

WE ARE NOT IN THEATRE.

When we first started going to plays in the LA area, we'd stick around after the show to get to know the cast and crew of the wonderful production we'd just seen. At some point in our conversation, they'd ask us one of the questions below:

• So are you guys in theatre?
• Are you guys actors?
• So who do you know [in this play]?

Originally, I felt a little sheepish admitting that I was not in the biz and definitely knew absolutely no one in the biz - afraid that not knowing someone would become a barrier and would halt what was otherwise a stimulating conversation.

It soon became clear, however, that not being in the theatre actually proved to be "refreshing" to the actors.

I think there's a certain amount of cynicism in the LA theatre biz where people who are involved in it don't think there's anything as a true "theatergoer" anymore. Well, not one whose hair is still its original color. People who go to the theatre are actors, directors/producers/etc., friends and family of the cast and crew, or "blue hairs." In a recent conversation with a friend from the Theatre @ Boston Court, he revealed his first impression of us: he let us know that the staff were asking each other, "Who are those young people who are coming back a lot?"

We never really though of ourselves as being "young" theatergoers - we were just theatre appreciators. Probably the only time we actually felt young was when we went to see Carousel at a theatre in Downey, and we sat in the back, amidst a sea of blue hairs who were enjoying this classic musical while we struggled unsuccessfully to keep our snarky mouths shut.

Now, let's make something clear - this normally doesn't happen. At least Scooter and I tend to view plays with rose-colored glasses, so the fact that all three of us were not feeling a play is pretty significant. And it wasn't about the acting or the costumes or anything like that: it was the plot-driven storyline where events took place in an obvious effort to keep the story moving forward and leaving little space for character development.

So let's just say that we're no critics. We do, however, have a preference for the kind of theatre that draws us: edgy, thought-provoking theatre and productions that take risks. But we're not creating this blog to assign "stars" or scoring systems to plays, but to further the conversation. We have spent countless hours just standing outside a playhouse digesting the production, or lost track of time sitting in a car discussing some of the most hard-hitting themes or moments of a play. It's that conversation that we want to bring to you.

And of course, there is no conversation without comments ... so feel free to comment away!