Cassiopeia

The latest play at The Theatre @ Boston Court is a "Duet" called Cassiopeia. The play unfolds in haphazard fashion starting at the end, backtracking to the beginning and dashing in bits of backstory here and there. The narrative is a little fractured and may be a little less accessible to the novice theater-goer. The characters are what make the play come alive. Quiet and Odetta are polar opposites representing detachment and humanity. This is a welcome change from the more common duality of science vs. emotion. While Quiet is deeply steeped in science, he is also a very emotional character filled with hopes and frustrations. I greatly enjoyed the interplay both resonant and dissonant between the characters.
The set was another triumph by Boston Court. With every new function I find myself eagerly anticipating what marvel they will come up with next. This time we have a door large and imposing that seems to float a few feet off the floor center-stage back. leading up to this is a rift in the wooden floorboards that make up the rest of the stage. This rift serves as barrier and a location as the story unfolds. To either side are window-like walls that glow with little lights like stars. The backdrop is black and again lit with stars, this time forming constellations that come and go as the story moves between places and times. The third character, The Voice, provides another level of background acting as chorus and theme. She sings us from place to place and fills in for the other people that Quiet and Odetta must deal with. 
If it seems like I have been vague in my description, it is entirely intentional. The play is less about concrete things and more about contrasts and impressions. The hopes and fears of the two main characters. The contrast of separateness and togetherness that binds us all into each other.
I would recommend this to any playgoer who is ready for a challenging and thought provoking play.

EST LA's The Belle of Belfast

This is a play I was very happily surprised by, and it saddens me that I caught it at the very end of the run, as I would've have loved to have seen it again.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, really, as I didn't particularly know what it was about. I guess I wasn't expecting the humor. I didn't anticipate that the conversations between the characters and their reactions to one another would be so realistically funny. And there's no easier way to make me fall in love with a character than when they make me laugh.

I never realized how fantastic it is to stage conversations at a confessional. It's so clever! You get both actors facing the audience directly in an extremely believable why, and they are free to express surprise, disgust, anger, and so many other emotions in a way that allows us to see these reactions while the other person is oblivious to them.

This is a play, of course, about Belfast - a land caught between two cultures. A place where Irishmen desperately cling to their heritage in an area ruled by the English. A place where being Catholic and revolting against the English is considered patriotic - even at the expense of the lives of your own people.

"The Belle" is a highly sexualized seventeen-year-old girl who feels lost and alone ever since her parents died as collateral damage from a bombing. Her coping mechanism - besides drinking, smoking, etc. - is to deliberately make people uncomfortable and fabricate lies. The object of her affection is a Catholic priest who's also 18 years her senior.

It's not difficult to see why he falls for her: she's clever as to exclude great potential, but she's engaging in self-sabotaging activities, so all you want to do is hold her and make her happy to she can fulfill her potential. This, naturally, leads to the priest having a crisis of faith - a moment that changes the course of both their lives.

Developing a taste

So after posting a lot recently, I've come to realize that I've really started to develop a taste for the kind of theatre that I like.

It used to be that I liked all theatre: I enjoyed musicals, comedies, tragedies, etc. Chicago was my absolute favorite. And I loved Wicked, even though I had to make a point of separating it entirely from the book.

But I've come to accept that there are, in fact, things and performances that I don't enjoy ... and that's okay.

It's hard for me to not like a play. It's difficult for me to be critical because I know how much work and effort is put into a production, so I typically make an effort to try to like a performance, and I avidly look for positive things to say and feel about it. It's also part of my ethos as a person: I try to see the good in you, even when you give me reason not to. In fact, when I get a bad first impression of someone, I often catch myself playing devil's advocate with myself and reminding me that there are any number of reasons why a person could have been in a bad mood that day.

But there have been productions I've gone to lately that I just haven't enjoyed. And when that happens, I make a point of separating out the parts from the sum and focusing on the parts that I like.

But the fact of the matter is that the more plays I go to, and the more discretionaty my income gets, I'm bound to become more selective.

I've also grown to be critical about plays with subject matter I'm familiar with (e.g. Shakespeare and Greek mythology) - mainly because I can't help but to formulate expectations about them. (This is actually the main reason why I'll try to see the movie before I read the book: that way I maximize my experience, enjoying the movie and feeling like I'm getting more in-depth, insider's access when I read the book.) But this is okay as well. I didn't study these subjects extensively and write plenty of thoughtful essays on them just to relinquish my opinion.

So I need to learn to be okay with the fact that there are going to be productions with people I love in them that I ultimately dislike - and that's okay. Because that's art. And the same piece can't possibly mean the same to everyone.

So it's okay if I don't like Les Mis (yes, disgruntled imaginary readers, I can hear your non-existent gasps from here), and it's okay if I haven't liked a few plays lately. Especially because I do, in fact, like most of what I see, and I can't always bet on the right horse ... right?

RMT's A Bright New Boise

So I didn't quite now what to expect with Rogue Machine's A Bright New Boise, as I knew very little about it: it's name, that it takes place in a break room, and that the artwork had a cross in a grey landscape.

The play is about Will - a man who's come to town trying to find the son he gave up for adoption to make a connection with him. He gets a job at a Hobby Lobby, which is where his teenage son works, and he struggles to connect with this very troubled teen, who is naturally rattled by the sudden appearance of his biological father.

Throughout the play, we come to learn that Will is devout to his faith - his own faith, in which he believes in The Rapture. But his faith has been a little shaken since the Church he helped establish imploded after the Pastor's decision brought about a teenager's death. We see that Will struggles to remain attached to his faith because his belief is all he really has, and without it, life is "meaningless."

This play - as humorous as it is poignant - is really about connection. About feeling connected to your coworkers, to your neighbors, your community, your partner, your family - and to life itself. It's about the deeply rooted need within us to feel that we're a part of something.

Some people, like Will, need to feel connected with an almighty entity. Others, like Leroy, feel the need to connect through art - especially when that connection brings about an uncomfortable tension. And then there are people like Alex - people who just want to connect to something or someone.  

 

T@BC's Creation

It's not very often that I encounter a play where I want to both cheer on and yell at each and every one of the characters.

In Creation, the Theatre @ Boston Court's last theatre production of the 2012 season, I love each one of the characters, and I feel that I get to know them and understand them(where they're coming from, and what struggles they're facing) whenever they use direct address and give us that insight into what's going on. And then I watch them doing something or saying something, and I want to stop them, to make them realize what they have, but I also completely understand why they're making a different choice.

Creation is a play that discusses "creation" in the sense of artistic inspiration and execution as well as a discussion between religion and science. It's a play where scientists are asked to think like artists and vice versa.

It's almost a play about what we choose to believe and the events or moments that lead us to listen to one thing and stop listening to another.

The acting is so beautiful, so realistic with its incomplete sentences and derailed thoughts, that some moments make you feel uncomfortable, like you've just walked in on the characters, infriging on their privacy, or stalking them through the window, or reading their journal.

The language, allusions and metaphors are stunning and extremely clever, woven in so subtly that they seem natural.

The set design is beautiful, making you feel cold when the characters are cold, making you happy that you're inside when it's raining.

I think this is a good moment for me to stop and admit something: I was afraid to write this post. I actually skipped over it and started writing some of the earlier posts. I wasn't exactly sure why I was afraid to start writing about this, but I think I've figured it out now: Creation shows us that things don't last forever.

Especially abstract things, like beliefs and love. It shows us that one thing can happen on a given day and due to different brain paths or divine intervention you can essentially become someone else, someone with a different focus, who cares about new and different things.

And that's terryfing. 

The thought that one day a random (or is it?) event could change the course of my life.

I think about that first scene of the two main characters on the dock, of how real and wonderful their parternship seems, how in love they seem to be in that moment ... and to think that by the end of the play they've found something or someone else* ... that troubles me deeply and makes me hold back tears as I write this.

Kudos, Boston Court, for bringing us yet another play that makes us comfront our fears and challenges the way we view the world.

*Okay, maybe that needed a spoiler alert, but really all you have to do is look at the promotional artwork for the show to know something's gonna go awry with that couple.

 

ANW's The Doctor's Dilemma

I like George Bernard Shaw.

I didn't know about The Doctor's Dilemma, but I had definitely read Pygmalion and Saint Joan, and seen My Fair Lady on film and Antaeus's production of Misalliance. But A Noise Within's The Doctor's Dilemma really made me come to the conclusion that I've enjoyed what I've experienced of Shaw's legacy.

I love the humor. I love the evident class disparity, the tensions inherent in that disparity, and his commentary on the social, political and economic levels of his time. I love his portrayal of conceited successful men and their flaws.

A Noise Within put on a wonderful production with quality acting, costuming and set design, taking us from the pompous household of the newly nighted Sir Colenso Ridgeon to the romantic outdoor dinner party to the artist's messy and bohemian studio apartment.

What's also beautiful about this play is that it has a surface dilemma that is explicitly called out as such, but there are layers of other dilemmas happening simultaneously.

The main surface dilemma is about deciding which man's life is more "worth" preserving: the moral scumbag artist who has unparallel artistic talent and promise, or the good-natured, poor altruistic general physician whose career will never bring about any significant discoveries to the medical field. To me it seems that in these modern days, this would be a no-brainer: save the GP.

My reaction to this makes me question why I readily assume that's the right answer. Evidently in the early 1900s artistic expression was held in a much higher regard than it is today - a notion that saddens me to the very core as a patron of the arts and a lover of museums, books, and theatre. I get upset when I hear schools are cutting out music and theatre programs left, right and center because of the budget cuts, deeming art as a "nice to have" rather than a "must have."

Yet even as a patron of the arts, I'd still pick the physician's life - not only because he's an altruistic, morally upright character, but also because he, in turn, is doing more good for the general public than the artist or many of the other doctors in the play, for that matter.

Another dilemma, of course, is Ridgeon's own personal struggle: he's in love with the artist's wife, so to keep him alive means that she gets to continue living with a man unworthy of her, but to knowingly kill him by leaving him in the hands of a "lesser" physician in order to marry his widow is morally dubious and reprehensible.

A third dilemma is that of the medical practice itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations between the doctors and how each of them argued staunchly about how their particular medical approach was better than the rest. It made for delightfully predictable and comedic moments, but it also brought to the forefront an issue that was happening in Shaw's day. Shaw, as I learned just now, meant to expose what some doctors were doing at the time: they would make up diseases and procedures that were harmless to the patient, so they'd make the doctor a lot of money and wouldn't harm the patient - but it wouldn't cure them, either. I loved learning about that ethical dilemma.

I could go on about research and ethics and get into a whole dissertation on the Stanford prison experiment of the 1970s, but I'll stop myself now. :)

 

Impro Theatre's Chekov Unscripted

Probably one of the biggest reasons why I love theatre is that you never get the same show twice. It doesn't matter how many times we go see a play, each live show is different. Maybe the actor turned left instead of right. Maybe a prop fell. Maybe someone forgot their line. All those little things make each performance unique.

Well, this is especially true with Impro Theatre's Chekov Unscripted.

Here's how it works:

All the actors read Chekov plays and stories for three months. During that time, they get to know the language and understand the themes and the common tropes and plotlines that appear in his work. They dress up in appropriate garb, and when it comes to showtime, they ask the audience for two prompts, which the entire play will be based on.

Prompt #1 opens the first act, where they ask us to describe something in a field that the characters could be looking at from inside a house through a large window.

Coming back from intermission, all actors stand in a line and discuss who they think they are and who they might be in love with.

Then Prompt #2 opens the second act, where they ask you which 2 or 3 actors you'd like to see on stage first.

I went to see them twice, so I got two very different plays.

Cheese

A group of foreign exchanged students had purchased tickets that night. They looked to be teenagers, and they had actually gotten the date wrong and had wanted to see The Twilight Zone Unscripted. One of them suggested "cheese" as Prompt #1, as what a wonderful choice that was.

This gave the actors the ability to have discussions about the working class and the upper class by looking at the cheesemakers from outside the window. It allowed for wonderful comedic moments, where an artist makes a cheese bird for the woman he's in love with, which she then loses, and it gets eaten by the doctor.

At one point, one of the actors walked across the stage as though he was rolling a big wheel of cheese from one side of the room to the next.

When a student's phone went off in the middle of the performance, the actors all turned to the window, and one said, "Those unruly cheesemakers! They're singing in ringing tones! What gives them the right to sing?"

The students left at intermission, and when the Act II opened, the first line spoken was, "The cheesemakers have all gone!" The artist later stated that he was leaving to follow the cheesemakers - only after having crafted a life-size cheese ostrich.

So yes, this theme was heavily and humorously used throughout a play full of love triangles where love is either unrequited or unfulfilled. After all, love matters don't typically end well in a Chekov story.

The Lake

This play turned out to be a much more somber play of, again, unrequited love, but more than that, of characters who are insecure about their lives, their professions, and how these unfulfilled dreams lead them to sorrow.

At the very end, the play suggests that one of the characters has fallen into the lake, probably intentionally.

Given that the previous play was so funny, I kept expecting her to come back, drenched, saying or doing something comical. But she doesn't. The play ends like a truly Chekovian play, and it speaks wonders of Impro Theatre and how committed they are to the work they're doing, going wherever the story and the audience are leading them to work.

Wicked Lit

Watching plays in a cemetery is FUN.

I thought it was going to be creepy, that the stories were going to be so scary that I'd get nightmares. But Wicked Lit has probably seen to many wimps to put on veritably scary plays. Instead, they really focus on the experience itself, on shepherding you through a cemetery, staging each place in a completely different location.

They create these wonderful storyteller characters who are tied to the story they lead you to, but they also interact with one another during moments of intermission between plays, where they performed short Neil Gaiman stories.

One of the storytellers is this young girl whose job is to creep you out by merely staring at you intently or touching you or making you uncomfortable with her proximity and with the fact that she says nothing at all. This, of course, becomes wonderful because your eye is constantly trained on her as you're waiting for the next play, watching intently to see who she creeps out next and how she does it. The Mead actually threw a wrench at her when he asked her to dance with him! She adapted beautifully to the situation, mirroring Brian's movements but not allowing him to touch her, and they had all eyes on them.

The stories improved as the night progressed.

The first story, a Swedish tale, was boring. The play's main character is wonderfully acted, but the script calls for him to argue for a long time with a porter and then with the bishop to let him into a mausoleum to find the sarcophagus of Count Magnus - a legendary evil man. This man is desperately trying to find proof of real evil, as he's been obsessed with it his whole life, so the play is mostly about him arguing to be let inside and approaching the matter with different arguments after they all get struck down.

Eventually, the bishop tells us a tale of the evil Count, and as he tells it, we see a projection in the back wall of the story he's recounting, which is pretty cool. But I found the legends to be inconsistent and not all that evil or scary or particularly intriguing.

Finally, the man sneaks into the mausoleum and finds his very predictable death.

The second story (an English tale) begins at a church, where we find that a town has been struck with a certain plague. A man comes in seeking a representative of the church and finds a nun who happens to be his ex wife. We discover that he left her for another woman, but the woman is a beast and has just tried to feed on their son.

We are led to a graveyard, where the Devil himself reveals to us that the man made a pact with him to wake his first wife from the dead, and in order to stay alive, she needs to feed on human blood and has caused this plague.

I found this play mostly funny, not scary, but more entertaining than the first.

The last play was the best one - an Irish tale about a scary family curse that haunts generations. It's set both at the cemetery and in several indoor rooms, where they do a wonderful job of showing us falling rain.

It's a moral tale, and it's actually the scariest one. At the very end, it leaves us wondering whether the young couple can actually break the curse, or whether the sins of their elders have been passed onto them.

Overall, this was a very entertaining experience, and I'd love to do it again.

Bootleg's Death of a Salesgirl

I can't say this play was a disappointment because I didn't have any real expectations for it, so it couldn't quite fall short. So instead I'll just call it like it is: it was awful.

It starts out wonderfully promising with a meditation about how the main character doesn't understand that line, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Right before she turns, she tells us that the past is the only country she knows, and it's the present she's scared of.

Then everything goes downhill from there. She turns around, revealing her gaudy makeup, and then she takes off her trench coat to reveal a silly condecorated Girl Scout outfit.

Throughout the play, we see this woman struggle: with herself, with her boyfriend, with her life, with her environment. The room starts to literally cave in on her, with weeds and plants oozing out of the wall and even the mini-bar.

But at no point do I particularly feel for her.

It is revealed to us towards the end that her boyfriend might actually be her husband, and that he might be in a hospital room, and that it's possible that they had a son named Michael who died, but all those questions are left lingering, unexplored.

I loved the set design and the projections ... but that was about it. Disappointing for Bootleg, since I've had great experiences there, like The Interlopers and Synesthesia. Had this been my first play there, I would not be returning.

EST LA's The Year of the Rabbit

The Year of the Rabbit, produced by Ensemble Studio, is a play about two young airforce pilots who are partners, so they inevitably fall in love but have to wrestle with their personal agendas, their past, their notions of themselves and about who they want to be.

The tensions between this couple bring up ethical dilemmas about war and about how crucial seconds can lead to a lifetime with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Through their parents, we also learn about the atrocities of the Vietnam War (leading us to believe that the young couple must be fighting in the Gulf War). We learn about their upbringing about how that history informs their behavior, their beliefs, their drive.

I loved the theme of the rabbit and how it's woven throughout. One of the main characters learns to morph into a different person, acquiring different skills throughout her life - skills and behaviors that match the Chinese zodiac ... all, of course, leading up to the year of the rabbit, which is when the male airforce pilot dies.

The rabbit, we come to learn, is his symbol. He carries a rabbit's foot for good luck, which he got from his mother, and he has a rabbit on his helmet. But the rabbit is ever-present, in Alice in Wonderland allusions and even a very subtle Beatrix Potter reference (for those who don't know, Beatrix Potter was a Victorian writer who wrote The Tales of Peter Rabbit).

Beautifully, tenderfully acted, with realistic, heartfelt dialogue, this play explores themes of guilt, death, regret, and how to move on.
 

Greenway's The King of the Desert

Scooter told me about The King of the Desert - a one-man show put on by the Greenway Arts Alliance, where earlier this year we saw The Bewildered Herd, which we loved.

Scooter tried telling me more about the play, but I ignored his synopsis. I enjoy not knowing what the play is about. I prefer to go in cold, leaving any kind of expectations at the door. Because I will, inevitably, form expectations - especially when I'm familiar with a subject, like Greek mythology or Shakespeare (see plenty of examples in this blog!).

So I trusted his judgement, and we saw the play ... which left me feeling angry. Angry because the subject hits a little too close to home. It's about a Mexican American man who wrestles with his Mexican American identity as he grows up in a little town in Texas and pursues an acting career in New York.

If you're read my Rant & Rave-inspired post on Blood, you probably have a sense of my conflicted national identity, and this play really brought all that into question.

As a Mexican - and I feel like I can call myself that when juxtaposed with a Mexican American - I got really excited when we got references to Mexican history. Not Mexican American history, with heroes like Cesar Chavez, but true Mexican history with heroes like Miguel Hidalgo, el Padre de la Patria (The Father of the Nation). I got excited when he talked about indigenous groups other than the Aztecs and the Mayans, referencing the Toltecs and the Olmecs and such. But then I'd just as quickly get enraged when those indigenous groups would get mixed up into one.

As far as the play itself goes, I both loved and hated Rene Rivera's acting. At moment of great crisis, when the character breaks down and cries, I felt his acting overdramatic, his sobs too loud, too fake - which angered me when, at the end of the play, I discovered that the play is actually, legitimately based on his own life.

Apparently his wife wrote this one-act play about her husband to understand her husband's past, his roots, and how they will inform their daughter's history, her upbringing.

What I absolutely adored about Rivera's acting is how he portrayed the other characters in his life - his friend, his brother, but mostly his parents. I loved how key gestures made me see that I was watching the mother speak.

So I feel probably as conflicted with this play asI feel with myself ... only perhaps angrier at the play because I can project that anger onto something else.

 

Diavolo at Grand Park

Diavolo's performance at Grand Park was delightfully simple. There were no big tricks and tumbles, no complicated dances, but the simple, gracefully executed moves were captivating nonetheless.

The dance crew appeared in identical bright blue body suits, and the movement intensified in tandem with the music. They began in simple formation along the part of the fountain you can walk through, and as the piece progressed, they danced all over the fountain, climbing to the top tier where a large fountain is operated with a blossoming water display.

The piece culminated in a jubilant explosion, with the water fountain bursting to the sounds of joyful mariachi music.

After the show, it was great to see children playing in the fountain - some of them dancing.

SCR's Eurydice

Sigh.

South Coast Repertory's Eurydice, like Helen, was a great disappointment. This is yet another play inspired by a Greek myth that I was really looking forward to ... and it did not live up to my expectations.

And I do have very high expectations for adaptations of Greek myths or tragedies. After all, I studied them extensively, so I assume that if you take on the challenge of bringing a myth to life or reimagining the story in an ancient text, you're doing so deliberately with oozeloads of meaning dripping from your words.

Essentially you will get me to buy tickets to your play if I know it's a take on a Greek myth.

And so Eurydice lured me in with its siren call, but what I didn't know is that Sarah Ruhl wrote this play as a means of working through her feelings when her father passed away. I learned that night at the talkback that Ruhl didn't even consult the myth as she was writing this play; she was using the myth as a therapeutic tool.

In doing so, I have but to question whether choosing Eurydice was really the right myth to go with. Ruhl wanted to write a play about connecting with her dead father, about finding a way to reach the dead, about that familial bond that transcends death. But the myth of Eurydice is all about her and Orpheus - the story of sorrow of losing the person you love twice.

I noticed in this production that there were profound echoes to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - and those I found fitting, for Ruhl portrays Eurydice as a girl who doesn't really know who she is, a girl who's wrestling with ideas of identity and love in a strange world.

Don't get me wrong - the story of Eurydice and her father is a very powerful one. I absolutely bought that the father loved his daughter, and that he was devoted to her even in death. Ruhl's Eurydice is really a story about a father losing his daughter twice.

Tim Cummings, who plays the Hades character, is deliciously, creepily malevolent, selfish, and disturbing. He first appears as A Nasty Interesting Man, luring Eurydice down the rabbit hole. Then in the Underworld, he's a child, then a teenager, and finally an oversized man. Cummings' commitment to the role is unapologetic and amazing, creepy to the very core.

But other than the father and the devil, all other performances were quite lacking, lifeless. The amazing set design and lighting projections couldn't make up for that.

 

Accessibility in Shakespeare

How hard was it for you or perhaps many of your high school friends to get into Shakespeare? 

The language, of course, is the first barrier to entry. High school kids in particular are often not ready to invest the time in getting to know Elizabethan English in order to get to the story. But there are plenty of other challenges in a Shakespeare play that can make it inaccessible or unrelatable to a modern audience. 

Sure, many would argue that Shakespeare's themes are "universal,": love, unrequited love, love triangles, jealousy, greed, etc. But it's the way in which these themes are rendered that can either cause an audience to "get it" and love it, or dismiss it. 

There are also many "scenes" that take place off stage, and a character rushes into the scene to update us on what's been going on. For instance, one of my greatest struggles is Lady Macbeth's decline. She disappears for quite a while and comes back demented, obsessing over the blood on her hands, when scenes before she was manipulative and fueled by greed. 

There are many more scenes that may be unrelatable to a modern audience with modern tastes. There are scenes that we now want and need to see displayed before us in order to continue suspending disbelief. 

One of the key elements about Theatrum Elysium's production that I think addresses the issue of relatability quite well is the dancing. The dancing fills in the gaps and provides us with the much needed bits of character development that a modern audience needs in order to believe the character, to feel their happiness and their sorrow. 

In ANW's Cymbeline, Imogen and Posthumous are separated from each other so quickly that it's hard to me to understand that there was a connection before Posthumous gets banished. What Theatrum Elysium did beautifully was add a dance right before they're separated where Imogen and Posthumous are being forcibly removed from each other, and you can see their struggle to get back to one another - danced, of course, to a beautifully evocative song.

Throughout Theatrum's production, dances appear at integral moments that help us feel what the characters are feeling. I could write an entire post for each one of the dances, but probably the most important dance is the war dance. 

Right after our battle scene, in which Posthumous fights like a champion, we enter a scene in which Posthumous is surrounded by dead bodies: the ones he killed and the ones of his compatriots. The song playing in this war site is beautifully chosen, as it combines two extremely evocative songs: This Bitter Earth and On the Nature of Daylight.  Each blindfolded, nameless body rises in jolted movements, their limbs unable to extend in the graceful way they did when living. After heartbreaking twitches and struggles, each body lets go of a white handkerchief and falls to the grown again, lying still. 

Posthumous throws himself to the ground and tries to cover himself with dirt. This singular gesture, had it just been acted, would've potentially been hyperbolical and overly dramatic. But in the context of the song, of the dying bodies, this gesture of regretting his survival and wanting to be buried with the horrors of war moves every emotion I could be clinging to. It makes his despair in the subsequent scenes much more tangible, as I've lived through the horrors with him through the dance. 

This beautiful way of rendering emotions that are not written in Shakespeare's folios was unexpected and so moving that I regret seeing this production only twice. 

ANW's Cymbeline

How wonderful it is to get the opportunity to compare and contrast two different productions of the same play. 

I feel that this is one of the great benefits of Shakespeare's legacy: every new production I see (the good ones, at least) tell me something new about the play - even when it's a play I've studied ad nauseum and know intimately (see my thoughts on Macbeth). 

We actually saw Theatrum Elysium's Cymbeline precisely because we knew that A Noise Within was putting it on a month later. We couldn't let this chance for comparative theatre to pass us by. In fact, we've already secured tickets for a third Cymbeline production this year, which will take place in December at The Broad Stage. 

Having said that, I'm going to try my best to focus on ANW's Cymbeline independently from Theatrum Elysium's, leaving some of my comparative observations for a subsequent post. 

I got excited when I realized that Adam Hunter was going to be playing the parts of Posthumous and Cloten. I knew that he'd make a killer Cloten, having just seen him in Boston Court's The Government Inspector, where he played Khlestakov - a self-entitled, arrogant, self-interested, good-for-nothing, vice addicted son of someone of moderate importance. I was really intrigued to see how Hunter would play Cloten's foil, Posthumous, and I must admit that I enjoyed his lethargic portrayal of this banished, conflicted, credulous man. 

I also enjoyed the two boys, Cymbeline's abducted sons who have grown up as mountaineers. I buy the sibling rivalry, and their immaturity helps solve two main problems:

1. They sell the idea that the boys would feel a kinship to Fidele upon first meeting him. The idea of kids making fast friends is readily acceptable.
2. It explains why Guiderius somewhat hastily kills Cloten and then proceeds to cut off his head.

A weak point in this production, however, was Imogen. Now, I understand that because Cymbeline is a Romance, it most closely resembles a comedy, but her character wasn't believable in any way. For instance, during the final court scene with the Disney ending where all loose ends and neatly tied into a big bow of love, Posthumous wouldn't keep his eye off of Imogen, regardless of where she moved or who she interacted with. She, however, seemed to forget she was supposed to be tragically, painfully in love sometimes. She's too quick to accept the different solutions that come before her: too quick to accept the plan of being a boy, too quick to be with the mountaineers, too quick to leave with Caius Lucius. Not only did I not believe that she was hurting for her husband when she believes him dead, but her performance was outright laughable (literally: people cracked up) when she asks the corpse where his head is.

Regardless, I enjoyed the accessibility of ANW's Cymbeline. The pacing and the direction made it easy to follow this Shakespearean play, which can be challenging at times. 

Diavolo's Transit Space (and Trajectoire)

We learned about the dance troupe, Diavolo, through Steve Connell - a spoken word artist we saw last year in his two-man show, The Word Begins (co-written and performed with Sekou Andrews). 

We enjoyed The Word Begins so much, that we saw it twice, and we were sold on any future projects Connell and/or Andrews participated in in the future. So we had been waiting for Diavolo's show for months with much anticipation.

It's difficult whenever you build up that much hype for yourself about something: you run the risk of being let down. But Diavolo's performance The Broad Stage far surpassed any expectations we could have had. Going to a Diavolo show is like seeing a stripped down version of Cirque du Soleil: excellent dancers/performers/athletes with no elaborate costumes, props, light, set changes, trapeze, etc. With Diavolo, you get a piece where beautiful movement interacts with an intricate architectural element, combining dance, gymnastics, and in the the case of Transit Space, spoken word. 

Trajectoire

The first piece Diavolo opened with was Trajectorie, a piece that first debuted in the 90s. It's obvious why they still do it: not only does it show us tremendous feats of athleticism, but it also conveys a story of struggle. Of teamwork. Of the beauty and difficulty of a journey. 

The architectural element in this piece looks like a boat that rocks back and forth. It gets turned 360 degrees, deconstructed and even stopped completely. The dancers perform around it, over it, below it, inside it. The movement is exciting, keeping you at the edge of their seat wondering what they're going to do next or how they can possibly top the previous trick. The piece plays with you, scares you, make you think the dancer might fall of the boat, or get caught below, or won't make their landing. 

But the constant movement also renders the moments of silence - of stillness - beautiful and tender. 

Transit Space

This piece aims to reflect Los Angeles, echoing Dogtown and its skater culture. To that end, the piece contains more props and moving pieces, such as skateboards with no wheels and a network of wooden and steel slides.

These slides get connected, separated. They become bridges, walls. 

The spoken word aspect of it brings forth themes of discovery, journey, belonging, escaping, going home. Through its different voices, both male and female, it reflects the ethnographic diversity of the area and the shared conflicts between people and the sense of community. We see the dancers as lovers, friends, and neighbors, trying to find themselves while also reveling in the moment. 

The piece itself moves like the slides, with highs and lows: movements of great intensity evolve into moments of stillness - pausing for reflection. 

It's meaningful that both pieces are about journeys, both physical and internal ones, yet they're expressed in very different ways, through a variety of means. It's wonderful to note how much of that expression comes through movement along, how a single hand gesture can carry emotion that we struggle to articulate. 

RMT's Rant & Rave: Blood

*Reminder: this is not a review of the performances, but my own attempt at writing with the one-word prompt, like Rogue Machine does for this monthly event of awesomeness.

When I hear the word "blood," several gory instances of my youth flash by. Like the time I fell off my high chair and landed on my chin on the kitchen tile, needing stitches. Or the time I fell and cut exactly the same spot while ice skating, needing more stitches. Or the time a kid punctured my skull with two wooden sticks in a bouncy house, ruinining my pink and purple party dress. Or the time I spit coagulated blood after a vessel burst in my inner lip, and I had to tell the foreign exchange student who was staying with me that I was fine. Or the time I learned how to surf in Hawaii, and how the coral cut my knee open, requiring eleven stitches.

No, blood and I aren't strangers. We're more like acquaintances who run into each other at parties and exchange banal pleasantries while we each busy ourselves with our phones or the hors d'oeuvres until someone comes to relieve us from our awkward societal duties.

But when it gets down to "blood" in a more metaphorical sense, I can't help but to think in matters of national identity.

I never really thought about my blood until my sophomore year in college, when a friend came to visit me in Mexico City over winter break. Here's where my background gets a little complicated, so in a nutshell: I was born in Miami, Florida one month early but grew up in Mexico City, where my parents were born and raised. I lived there until I was eighteen and went to college in British Columbia, Canada. I went back to Mexico City every summer until I graduated - point at which my parents were living in the Los Angeles area, so I moved here.

Now back to the story. Over Christmas break, a friend came to visit, and as I was telling him all about Mexican history at the National Palace, he stopped me in the middle of my narrative and asked, "Who's 'we'?"

"What?" I asked.

"Who's 'we'?" he repeated. "You just said, 'We welcomed them.'"

"Oh. 'We' is the Aztecs. 'Them' refers to the Spaniards - Cortez and his crew."

"So you're Aztec?"

"Well, no. Actually, no."

"Where's your family from?"

"Spain and England on my mom's side. Polish and Russian on my dad's."

"Then wouldn't you be 'them'?"

This was the first time I thought about blood in terms of familial lineage - as opposed to a collective cultural history. He was right: technically, my blood brought me closer to 'them,' the conquistadores. But I grew up as Mexican: the history of Mexico, of my country, being my history.  

And so began my exploration into a national identity and what that means. When and how do we leave one identity behind and pick up the other?

When I lived in Canada, being Mexican was cool and exotic. Someone would ask me where I was from.

"Mexico City," I'd reply.

"Oh! Mexico!" They'd say enthusiastically. You see, most Canadians I talked to knew more about Mexico than just the beachfront resorts and their reputation for excellent nightlife; many of them had been to archaeological sites and spoke highly of my home country. I was proud to be Mexican in Canada, and I often used that as a way of describing my behavior. 

For instance, if I barged into your room - akin to Kramer in Seinfeld - this invasion of your privacy could easily be explained by the lack of personal space issues in a city with 23 million people. You try riding in the metro at arm's length of the next passenger ... 

But when I moved to LA, the conversation went something like this:

"Where are you from?"

"Mexico City."

"Oh." 

It was a slap in the face. It was a crude awakening to the realization that being Mexican in the United States - and particularly in Los Angeles - meant something different. "Mexican" here is a loaded term that carries a lot of baggage. Immediately people make assumptions about my level of education, my family, how I got here, and what gives me the right to be here. 

This one time, I caught one of my friends describing me to one of his friends as his "educated Mexican friend." 

And I heard my dad doing something really brilliant whenever he got asked where he was from. "Originally from Mexico," he'd say. Sometimes he'd also responded with, "I moved here from Texas," which is a statement of fact that cleverly avoids the question. 

You see, my dad is white. As I mentioned earlier, his parents were born in what is now Ukraine and Poland, and he speaks English with almost no accent. Similarly, I could "pass as white" if I wanted to.

When I first moved here, right out of college, right after Canada, The Land of Tolerance, I thought it was disgusting that my dad would play into this rejection of our national identity. I wanted to live here and be the proud example that Mexican people have a rich history, a rich culture, and can have the same level of education and be just as wordly - or perhaps more so - than your average Joe. But I soon found that introducing myself as Mexican within the first five minutes of a conversation put up a barrier. I was surprised to see how many people won't carry a conversation with you after that. Or how they suddenly hear my accent, when they had no idea I had reason to have one five minutes ago.

Soon enough, I, too, began responding with, "Originally from Mexico." Just last month I actually claimed to be from California while on a Vegas trip with my girlfriends. 

And this makes me feel like a traitor. 

I think back on this one time when, at a club, a very white, very blonde guy was hitting on me and asked me where I was from. "Mexico," I said. "Are you, like, 100% Mexican?" he asked. 

"Really? 100% Mexican? What does that even mean?"

'Cause I guess percentages and fractions mean something here. If you're all American, what makes you different from one another? "Oh, well, I'm half Irish on my mother's side and half Polish, but my dad's family is from Holland." 

But how much of that are you really? What makes you Irish or Polish or Dutch? Is it the random holidays your family might still celebrate? Or songs your mom sang to you at night when you were little? Or traditional family dishes that you have at special occasions? Or is that all gone? Is it solely your genetic composition ... and is that enough to claim heritage? 

Poor guy ... he had no idea what he'd gotten himself into when he asked that. I bet he wasn't expecting to get a whole dissertation at a club.


I miss the days when I was sure about who I was and what impetus made me me. 

'Cause I was never the posted child for Mexico, either. I grew up in a household where my whole family spoke English and Spanish. We all graduated from the same high school - an American high school - with Mexican and American high school diplomas. And I always wanted to study and build a career abroad. I knew that Mexico was going to have very little to offer me - unless I dropped my dad's name at every interview I ever went to. 

I used to be in tune with Mexican politics, and I used to be a much more political person. And I feel so out of touch now. Mexican issues don't feel like my issues anymore ... but neither do American issues. I feel wrong, deceitful forming a stance, a strong opinion on what I think is right for either country. 

And every time I go back to my home country, to the city I was raised in, I feel further and further removed from it. 

All my life, I've started off sentences in one language and ended them in another. I've celebrated Halloween just as much - if not more - as Dia de los Muertos. I grew up in a bilingual, bicultural environment. 

So I feel Mexican, and I feel American, but I don't feel Mexican American - at least not in a chicano kind of sense. So I don't really know where that leaves me, or what that means. The intellectual side of me tries to remind me that it's just a label, and that people are far more complex than a single label. But my emotional side has trouble accepting that as a reality. My emotional side wants to belong, wants to wave a flag fervently, and it'd be easy to say that I could just raise two flags, but it feels hypocritical. 

So where does that leave me? What do you do when your blood is not enough to define you? How do you create a new definition?

RMT's Rant & Rave: Intro

Once a month every month, Rogue Machine Theatre puts on "Rant & Rave," - an event they describe as follows:

We take a group of vocal LA writers, give them a topic and a time limit. It's an evening of cathartic thinking by some of the most dangerous minds in the city.

One of the wonderful things about the selected performers is that not all of them are actors. They are professionals in all sorts of fields and bring different perspectives and approaches to the same topic. 

As the host, Ron Bottitta acts as the emcee, introducing the one-word topic to us through an array of well constructed, humorous metaphors and including his own, short personal approach to the topic. Then three or four performers take the stage, one at a time, then there's a short break, and then another three or four performers take their turn in making us laugh, cry, and reflect.

Last night, for instance, was a particularly great night over the following topic: Blood. It's wonderful to see how each performer took it in a different way, some talking about familial bonds (or lack thereof), others talking about gashing wounds, and most talking about both.

Because Rant & Rave is a difficult experience to describe, instead of reflecting on the different performances, I'd going to take it as a writing exercise and write about the one-word topic myself - because what better way to reflect than to make it my own?

My next post will be on last night's topic: Blood.

RMT's Three Views of the Same Object

This entry is going to break from norm and get personal.

Rogue Machine Theatre's Three Views of the Same Object was a cathartic experience that made me bawl. It's a harsh look at aging and how many relationships deteriorate as their bodies do. It's a realistic portrayal of the anger, the helplessness, and the hurt of old age.

Moreover, it's a reflection of what's currently happening to my family.

My grandmother has had cancer since 2007, and she's fought it every step of the way. She's won battles, reclaimed her hair, climbed the Great Wall of China - only to get it back and get ready for Round 2 ... and Round 3.

This will be the last round.

There are very few options available to her at this point, and the treatment she's currently undergoing is harsher than before. The treament is meant only to keep her alive as long as possible, as the cancer isn't going to go away. The chemo this time has made her sick and miserable and angry. It's also taking a toll on the entire family, especially my grandfather, as she is his world.

He sits stubbornly by her side, tending to her when she can't move, holding her hand in his. When she does walk, his hand never lets go of hers. And he's so worried for her that he's keeping her like a princess locked away in a tower, as if she were made of porcelain and could break upon touch.

I'm certain that when I lose her, I will lose them both - that is, if he doesn't go first. At 91, my grandfather is still fit and perfectly healthy, with all his wits about him, but he proclaimed a few months ago when the cancer got angry again that he wasn't going to make it past 92 - whether that was with or without his wife.

I dread visiting them now. Not because I'm scared of seeing her sick, but because the quality of the conversation has become so negative that I'm having difficulty retaining the happy memories of my grandmother. I have to coax her into talking about our travel adventures or our collective family memories to hear something positive.

Old age is ugly. Frustrating. Demanding.

The sickness has infiltrated everyone's lives. My mother lives in limbo, unable to forge a life of her own because she's constantly drawn back to take care of her parents. She's put her life - and her marriage - on hold, waiting in denial for the inevitable.

At one point in the play, one of the character remarks how envious she is of people with Alzheimer's. The already shocking statement becomes more powerful when you've actually experienced what Alzheimer's is. My great-grandmother had it. I remember the typical scene of my family members constantly asking her if she recognized us, if she knew who we were. But I also remember seeing dried up poop wiped in the window curtains, up and down the staircase. I would've never thought of dementia as a blessing.

But when you think about all the people you have loved and lost, all the things you can no longer do, the places you can no longer go ... well, then it starts to make some sense.

As my grandmother turns the page to her last chapter, I begin to assume the role I play in my family - the youthful sunshine that comes into their lives, lights up their days, and lets them live vicariously through my discoveries, my accomplishments, allowing them to forget for a moment how dark everything is now. I cannot break down before them, or else they will all fall like dominoes.

So if I can't cry in real life, I'll cry when I see Three Views again. And again.

Getty Villa's Helen

This has been the greatest disappointment of the year.

Harsh, I know, but true.

It's hard to leave expectations at the door, especially after seeing wonderful plays at the Getty Villa. Not only is the Villa my favorite place in Los Angeles, but I have also seen wonderful performances there: Agammemnon, Peace, Elektra, and The Trojan Women.

But Helen is an adaptation of Euripides' original that tries to do too much. In its overly ambitious effort to try to do too many things, it leaves excellent critiques and themes on the table.

One of the most wonderful notions of the play is how it imagines an "old" Helen, one who is still beautiful, but whose beauty has waned. This production depicts Helen as a Hollywood starlet, and there was so much potential with that: if your looks are all you have going for you, what happens when you lose them? How does that shape your identity?

This production, however, merely scratches the surface by having many characters make quips about how old she looks and having her do a ridiculous pose whenever someone realizes who she is. Very few of the quips are clever, namely the one where Menelaus mistakes her for Clytemnestra - a comical "blow" exploiting the tension between Helen and her sister, as Clytemnestra was not Zeus' daughter, according to the myth, and therefore "inferior" to Helen and her beauty. Then the joke gets old as the play continues.

There were moments for great political tension - and political tension is, after all, why Euripides was writing in the first place, sick of the Peloponnesian War. But instead of milking these moments for all their worth, the production seems to me more concerned with shoehorning in references to Hollywood moments and personas.