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Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Henry Purcell and Nahum Tate | Dido and Aeneas / 2014

hello, i must be going

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henry Purcell (music), Nahum Tate (libretto), Dido and Aeneas / LAOpera, Los Angeles, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the production I attended was a matinee on November 2, 2014

 

Henry Purcell’s lovely Baroque opera, first performed in the summer of 1688, was probably part of the annual spring celebrations at Priest’s boarding school for women. The work represents Purcell’s only “traditional” opera—if we define the tradition to be the kind uninterrupted musical theater that developed later through Handel, and the dominant forms of the genre in the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly, after Dido and Aeneas Purcell did not abandon writing for theater, but the musical forms he worked in were so-called “semi-operas,” music mixed with speech.

 

    After seeing an high-definition, live broadcast of the Met’s Bizet’s Les troyens just last year, in which the relationship between Dido and Aeneas  played out over the last two long acts of the work, during which, much of the time, the two languidly lay, embracing upon a huge, multi-pillowed bed, the LAOpera production, based on the Frankfurt Opera version directed by Barrie Kosky, seems so-attenuated in its hour of performance time, that we hardly get a chance to actually realize that the two have consummated their sudden love before the hero, most emphatically, trots back to Italy, slamming the door behind him, a bit like Ibsen’s Nora.


     Everything in Purcell’s representation of the tragic romance is theatrically played out before the entire court, within the kind of frontal friezes that that might remind one more of gestural early human-scapes of Boris Godunov than a jaunt into the local countryside Tate’s libretto calls for. Indeed, the first scenes are played out in this version of the Purcell work on a long bench upon which the entire cast is seated beside Dido (Paula Murrihy) as she cries out in her suffering for her desires to embrace of the new conqueror, Aeneas (Liam Bonner). No sooner has the beautiful Carthaginian queen declared that “Peace and I are strangers grown,” than her maid Belinda (Kateryna Kasper) reassures her that Aeneas shares her passion and agitates for a marriage between the two royals, despite Dido’s reservations. And almost as quickly as she and others have joined in their court-wide blessing, all rush to hill and dale to celebrate—with the Kosky production suggesting in the secondaries’ behavior and—at least in two cases—their in-the-buff attire, wilder goings-on than that original young boarding school girls might have ever imagined. Although Purcell’s opera makes little to-do about the Dido-Aeneas romance—a brief scene of flirtation and a couple of short kisses representing their formal introduction to each other—we surely recognize that something far more serious has occurred between the two lovers than a simple sharing of a picnic and hunt.

     Even these seemingly uneventful festivities, however, are quickly interrupted by distant thunder, the sound of which is first picked up with the already suspicious Dido, who, along with Belinda, encourages the entire court to scurry back to the castle (“Haste, haste to town.”). Dido might well fear for those claps of thunder, for, as we already have been shown, through the meeting of the Sorceress and her two witchy comrades within a nearly cave (the marvelously comic trio of the large-framed Black countertenors John Holiday, G. Thomas Allen, and Darryl Taylor), evil plans are being hatched to destroy the Queen and her city both; and soon after, Aeneas is accosted by Mercury’s spirit demanding that he return, as he promised Jove, to rebuild Troy. 

     Even these seemingly uneventful festivities, however, are quickly interrupted by distant thunder, the sound of which is first picked up with the already suspicious Dido, who, along with Belinda, encourages the entire court to scurry back to the castle (“Haste, haste to town.”). Dido might well fear for those claps of thunder, for, as we already have been shown, through the meeting of the Sorceress and her two witchy comrades within a nearly cave (the marvelously comic trio of the large-framed Black countertenors John Holiday, G. Thomas Allen, and Darryl Taylor), evil plans are being hatched to destroy the Queen and her city both; and soon after, Aeneas is accosted by Mercury’s spirit demanding that he return, as he promised Jove, to rebuild Troy.



     As attractive as Aeneas may appear to both Dido and the audience, he is clearly dunderhead when it comes to love, worrying more about how we find the words to explain his decision to choose duty over his just-consumed relationship. That other great African explorer, Captain Spaulding of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers assertively proclaimed the sentiment now so perplexing the young Aeneas in the Kalmar-Ruby song, “Hello, I Must Be Going.” Margaret Dumont, however, was no Dido; and Aeneas surely realizes that his leaving can only end in her death. Accordingly, despite the fact that she has heard the rumors of the Trojan men preparing to weigh anchor (“Come away, fellow soldiers”), Aeneas attempts to placate the queen by lying.


     Dido reacts with scorn to his hypocritical declaration that he has decided to remain, declaring that even having thought of leaving her has already betrayed her—as indeed he has! Given her insistence that he now leave her, Kosky’s Aeneas, as I have suggested, plays it almost comically, rushing off just as abruptly as he has previously arrived in Dido’s court. 

    There has indeed been something about his speedy comings and goings that, along with the abbreviated story the opera tells, Tate’s plot dooms any fruition of the sentiment that its characters might have felt. And in that sense, Purcell’s tuneful garden-party-like opera suddenly becomes something far-more dangerous and threatening, as if its central character has not only been frightened by a clap of thunder but by the specter of a snake swallowing its own tail.

      And so, quite naturally, Purcell’s work end as it begin, with Dido singing of her fears upon her long bench-like throne. But this time she is not accompanied by the entire court, but stands and sits alone, singing now not just her doubts, but regrets, which gradually converge into a dirge for her own death, “When I am laid in Earth.”

 

     Despite the seeming lightness of Purcell’s work, which doubtlessly led Kosky to wrap his production within so many comic-like moments—and apart from the sometimes comic-book-like series of friezes with which the composer and his librettist encapsulate the abbreviated adventures of their heroes—the opera, finally, is transformed from a display of vernal gavottes into a dance of death.

     Purcell’s music beautifully reveals this transformation, gently shifting throughout the last scene from fury, to pain and sorrow, and, finally, to silence and death. Unfortunately, Kosky, evidently unable to figure out a way to help his Dido attain the same shifts in character as she fluctuates between these emotions, forces Murrihy to cry out in spasms of what is evidently meant to represent internal pain, turning the final tragic moments of Purcell’s work into a kind grand Guignol-like travesty as utters what first might appear to be sobs that turn into gurgles of vomiturition In the beginning, these simply make the audience a bit uncomfortable, but they finally leave us with a deep sense of embarrassment at the very moment when tears might instead be welling up beneath our eyes. As a young man standing near me intoned to his friend during the intermission: “I thought she’d never die!”   

     I’ll forgive such an overall graceful production, however, that rather serious flaw. And Purcell’s music, under the direction of Steven Sloane, stood up to the test, charming every one of us again.

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2014).

Monday, June 24, 2024

David Javerbaum | An Act of God / 2016

divine lite

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Javerbaum An Act of God / Los Angeles, the Ahmanson Theatre. The performance I saw was on February 10, 2016

 

I don’t know what has happened to my sense of humor. At Sean Hayes’ pleasant but also somewhat aggravating performance last night of David Javerbaum’s An Act of God, the audience in the near-to-capacity Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles seemed absolutely delighted with what being said, laughing, sometimes quite boisterously, upon cue throughout the play, while I sat on the aisle stone-faced. Certainly, it’s not that I don’t have a long-lens perspective when it comes to anything religious. As I’ve written elsewhere in these pages, I gave up without any religious convictions that I may have had years ago, and any “god” I might today envision has very little do with the Judeo-Christian one which this play joyfully parodied.

 

      Perhaps it’s simply that I don’t watch enough television, particularly television comedies, and, accordingly, the stream of lame one-liners that this confection proffered up, just wasn’t—to use what today has almost become a political metaphor—my cup of tea. I mean, come on, shouldn’t I be able to chortle over a god who admits that he has nothing against gays, lesbians, transsexuals, or any other sexuality?; who reveals the fact that the first couple upon earth were actually Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve? It was all that phallic snake’s fault, who, after feeding them that apple, made them feel as if they’d sinned, that cast them out their gay paradise.

     If the Coen brothers can mock Job, the endless sufferer, why shouldn’t this good-spirited god find the whole story a hoot? And here, for the first time in the history of Judaism and Christianity (although this god, in his seeming pantheism, seems a bit closer to Zeus; Mary is certainly not deified in this comic portrayal) admit that everything in the Good Book should be taken quite so literally. As he explains, there simply would not been enough room on the ark for Noah to have taken two of each earthly animal along on the voyage, let alone to carry the various kinds of food necessary to feed them all; and where might Noah have ever found two of each those beasts?

 

     And who mightn’t like a god who’s fed up with everybody taking his name in “vain,’ thanking him for anything and everything they have achieved on their own: “Kanye, next time you win the Grammy Award and you thank me for your ‘God-given talents,’ they’re going to get God-taken, understand?” And this god seems spot-on in his observation that there’s something perverse about a child, laying down to sleep, praying “if I should die before I wake.”

      Indeed this good natured fellow was kind of fed-up with the centuries of human misunderstanding regarding his Ten Commandments and other teachings, realizing through this TV-like talk appearance that there is “something seriously wrong with me.” And by the end of the evening, god is perfectly willing to let us folk go our own way and to stop relying on him. He doesn’t even answer all our prayers, let alone can he explain the Holocaust, the Flood, and his insistence that Abraham sacrifice his son. I mean this is a god who has obviously gone through therapy (even if it’s only self-therapy) and is perfectly able to confess that he’s not always very nice—which, of course, makes us like him all the more! It’s hard not to believe in such a jovial fellow. Certainly the audience did, applauding his march right up the stairway to heaven—beautifully conceived, I must admit, by scenic designer Scott Pask.

 


     So what’s my problem? Why couldn’t I laugh along with all the others? It’s not easy to explain, but I guess even in my disbelief I take true belief more seriously than the well-dressed heathens who made up this audience. I mean, even as this user-friendly god points out, terrible things have been allowed to happen in the name of the Christian god, so terrible that’s it’s not so simple to just forgive and forget as he might command. And every day others who can’t or won’t give him up go on cooking up more terrible things to do for those of us who can’t or won’t believe in Him. And after all, this is just one “god.” What about all the others?

      So frankly, it’s hard for me to believe in a PC god, who just wants to be loved, even for one night. Why is it funny to dish what so many deeply believe in, when the belief itself can continue to be so destructive to all?

     Oh come-on I can hear you saying, “lighten up!” Even this god seems a little amused by the constant suffering of his son—not his only child evidently. But then, that has always been the big problem for me: I was never touched by the divine lite.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2016)

     

 

Saturday, June 22, 2024

Kirk Lynn | The Method Gun / 2011

approaching the real

by Douglas Messerli

Kirk Lynn The Method Gun, created and performed by the Rude Mechs / Culver City, California: Kirk Douglas Theater / the performance I attended was on June 14, 2011

In their play The Method Gun the Austin-based collaborative Rude Mechanicals has created a delightful theatrical work that combines satire, whimsy, history, and naturalist theater in a way that few works today have attempted.

     The subject, or one might say the missing center of their work, is a drama teacher, Stella Burden, with whom the five players of The Method Gun had long worked—that is until she suddenly disappeared into Ecuador or Paraguay.


    Actress Hannah Kenah explains to the audience at the play's start, that her Rude Mechs company had found play texts, lesson books, films, and interviews about Stella Burden and her method—nicknamed the "The Approach"— in libraries and other locations near Austin. And, by coincidence, a grant led one of their members to Ecuador, where Stella was evidently last spotted.

    As early as August 14, 2006, the company posted a Stella Burden site, explaining that they were "conducting research" for The Method Gun to create "a fictional biography and a theatrical production tracing the life and tragic death of Stella Burden (a.k.a. "the other Stella"), the "other" obviously referencing Stella Adler, whose "Studio of Acting" helped to make famous "The Method" of the Stanislavski system.

     The work that the Rude Mechs created centers on those five remaining students (Carl Reyholt, Connie Torrey, Koko Bond, Robert "Hops" Gilbert, and Elizabeth Johns), now without a leader, but attempting to keep their company together in an interminable rehearsal of several years (based on Burden's own methods) of a production of A Streetcar Named Desire—without the major characters of Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch. We experience, accordingly, the company's reenactment of some of Stella Burden's principles, most notably on "how to cry" and "how to kiss," the company members' squabbles, sexual interrelations, fears, doubts, and later, questionable fame for being the last students of Burden, as they are interviewed, filmed, and trotted out in university theater conferences. One by one they reveal the few objects Stella left behind, a small plastic tiger and a bird cage wherein sits a gun, suggesting to the actors that everything they do is a matter of life or death.

 

   At the core of these various activities is the almost empty play they are rehearsing—the characters consisting of Pablo, the Paper Boy, a Tamale Vendor, a Colored Woman, a Mexican Woman, a Negro Woman, Steve, Stella's friend Eunice, the Nurse, and the Doctor—a truly lunatic production, which, nonetheless, is quite revelatory of the play itself.

     Every now and then the actors step out of character, speaking directly to the audience about events or, at one point, asking audience members to take out small pieces of paper and write down the teacher or other person who most influenced them. The action also includes—in contrapuntal reaction to the absurdly strict methods of "The Approach" (hinting at the equally absurd restrictions of Adler's and Lee Strasberg's "The Method")—a ridiculously witty tiger, who from time to time appears ready to dine on the actors, and in the end, goes off with their most contentious member, Elizabeth Johns. The play also presents a truly gratuitous sex scene, wherein the women begin kissing and the men run in from the wings, stark-naked, except for balloon's tied to their penises, thus keeping them seemingly erect.

     If this all sounds strangely experimental, it is not. For the Rude Mechs have balanced their play between satire and a sense of modest reverence. They are, after all, actors themselves, and as loony as Burden's techniques may appear, the actor-characters keep a respectful distance from all-out camp.
     Of course, the play is a satire at heart, and as much as the audience may wish to believe in such a strict theatrical authoritarian or that good theater results from such stunted techniques, the play itself pushes against this. Yet the actors (Thomas Graves, Hannah Kenah, Lana Lesley, E. Jason Liebrecht, and Shawn Sides, who also served as director) have not only a respect for the fiction they have created but have expanded the myth of Stella Burden far beyond the theater stage. In response to their various web calls for information about this obscure teacher, the group or others noted her interest in the Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who not only shared her last name but was himself injured by a gun during an art performance. The artist claims no knowledge of her.

 

    In some reports, Stella is said to have been killed by a gun similar to one left behind. In still another commentary, a writer notes that when Stella Adler performed in film she added an "r" to her name (Ardler), while Stella Burden dropped the "r" when she performed in that medium (Buden). When asked by a student whether this had any relationship between the two, Stella wittily and vaguely punned: "Some are and others aren't."

     The strangest suggestion is that Burden's close relationship with Marilyn Monroe may have been behind the actresses' breakup with Joe DiMaggio!

     All of this lovely nonsense reminds me, in part, of Eleanor Antin's establishment of her performative dancer, Eleanora Antinova, for whom Antin created photos of works she had choreographed, a series of performed plays, drawings, autobiographical writings, etc., going so far as to lecture on her life with Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where several people approached her in awe, one even offering to support her balletic school. It also reminds me a little of my own self-created author Claude Richochet, whose various works have appeared in books and journals over the years.

     In short, The Method Gun is not simply a work of the stage but is a grander creation of theatrical history and fiction.

     On stage, the actors finally reach what appears to be an impasse, Elizabeth Johns suggesting they sell everything and go away to another country. The others, however, are adamant in their devotion to the single performance of their play-without-a-play the next day. The tension becomes so palpable that one member grabs the gun, shooting it at each of them. It is, after all and fortunately, only a stage gun that shoots blanks.

     Yet when they actually do perform Williams' "shell," the actors (both Burden's supposed company and the Rude Mechs) do endanger their lives. Swinging several lamps in opposing directions, company members silently enact their roles within range of the missiles with a balletic intensity, balancing the real possibility of being killed or at least knocked out with the concentration on their miniscule roles put into motion. The effect is absolutely stunning, and the audience was truly awed. The company responded to the audience with a projected listing upon the walls of the those figures who had been so important in their lives. Among them was the playwright Mac Wellman. I had written the name of my mentor Marjorie Perloff, which somehow was misread as Penloff—the "r" disappearing just as it had for Stella Burden, she too becoming one of the ones who "aren't."


Los Angeles, June 17, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2011)

Thursday, June 20, 2024

John Steppling | Sea of Cortez / 1993

the verge of possibility

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Steppling Sea of Cortez, the performance I saw was at the Workhouse Theater Company, New York in 1993

 

 

To Dr. Cousa’s seedy laetrile clinic, located on Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, come Eddie and Malone, the first in search of a father—or at least his inheritance as a son—and the other in search of a son—or at least the son he would have inherited. Rejected, down-and-out, temperamentally explosive, and sexually starved, these two have entered the “standard” John Steppling territory: a dark world in which instances of illumination and poetry only underscore its bleakness.

 

    Dr. Cousa, sophist and sham dreamer, has reached the end of his long run from the clutches of officialdom he expresses in the acronyms confronting every paranoid: CIA, IRS, AMA, FBI. The patient, Mance, sits out his last days in stony hate for the human race. His adopted son, Eddie, desperately courts the disgusting porno distributor in search of financial remains.

     In the hands of a lesser playwright, say a David Mamet, the results of such encounters would be predictable: a play filled with accusations, suffering, and ultimate forgiveness. Although Steppling’s play contains all of these elements, the various interchanges between these figures and Eddie’s communications with a neighboring fortuneteller (who speaks in an eerie and magical gibberish) and his sensual translator result in no answers, no real communication. For in Steppling’s world people are what they are, doomed to suffer their own predetermined destinies. There is no hidden money; no escape from the forces that be—natural or man-made. Guilt is inexpiable.

     The little love to be discerned in this landscape is perverted: Dr. French ineffectually strokes the shoulder of his only young patient, the naïve Russ; Eddie pays the fortuneteller for a few inane words from his translator; Malone, a former lover of Eddie’s mother, pointlessly regrets he did not take over the responsibility of raising the child.

     The author reiterates these issues by ending each of the dozens of character “encounters” with a possible—if illusionary and epigrammatic—question or answer; but as the director, he stymies that connection with an immediate frieze and blackout. In each scene the characters must begin all over again. At times this is extremely frustrating, and overall, it slows the play down to an almost excruciating crawl. The ultimate effect, however, is to point up Steppling’s underlying Romantic sensibility. For even while the figures of this play have no actual hope of communicating, they forever remain on the verge of possibility. Face to face the figures almost scream out not only for communication, but for a simple caress, even a touch; but the dark surrounding silence serves as a kind of coitus interruptus, and the characters are forced to sink back into their determined alienation. Desire is all they have left.

     It is precisely this desire which takes The Sea of Cortez in an entirely other direction. For although the characters seldom communicate with one another, their flights of poetic language represent their feelings brilliantly to the audience. Steppling’s crippled beings reveal to us what they can’t to the rest of the world at large: that they are capable of and desperate for love. Full of humor, dreams, and crazy belief, they live linguistically (and imaginatively) in a place where their physical beings cannot inhabit. The role of Eddie, in particular, demands that a vaguely incoherent anger be converted through language to a kind of dreamy poesy, but unfortunately the actor in this production recited his lines instead of discovering them. Overall, however, the New York production confirmed the Los Angeles recognition of Steppling as one of the major playwrights of our time.

 

Los Angeles, 1993

Reprinted from El-E-Phant: A Language Arts Review (August 1993).

 

 

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Paul Sand | The Pilot Who Crashed the Party / 2022

the man who fell to earth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Sand (writer and director) The Pilot Who Crashed the Party / Odyssey Theatre, April 28, 2022 

Comedian, actor, and playwright Paul Sand’s most recent play, The Pilot Who Crashed the Party—which received its premier workshop performance last evening, April 29, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles—might be best described as an odd mix of the absurdist-like work of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (undergoing a Broadway revival even as I write) and a late Edward Albee play such as Me Myself and I.


       Like Wilder’s world, Sand presents us a gathering of individuals who, like most of us today after two years of a pandemic disease and a war in Ukraine, may soon find that we have “come through”—the phrase that D. H. Lawrence uses to describe his and his lovers’ psychological and emotional survival—a number of individual crises; but in surviving, each of them are now focusing very much on Albee’s “me myself and I,” fixated on their superficial lives despite their closely knit little society.

      The occasion of their rainy night celebration is the 50th birthday of Sally (Jacqueline Wright) who is hosting the event in her Santa Monica Mountains home. With her is her housemate/companion Daniel (Lee Boek), best friends movie actor Laura (Megan Rippey) and Laura’s ex-husband, a bisexual gadfly Ilo (Irish Giron), and their friend Valerie (Debra Lane) who seems to be in charge of the meal and celebratory cake. Sally has hired a violinist (Yennie Lam) to accompany the evening meal and after dinner games, at which point the audience enters into their presence.

      The game they appear to be playing as the work begins is a kind of live-version of the old board game Clue, in which the celebrants must guess which of their party has just killed one of their guests, in this case Ilo playing the dead man, a knife in his back as he sits dead at the dinner table.

       This is clearly Daniel’s forte as he picks up an almost invisible thread from the oriental carpet, examines it, and traces it back to the red tab of a Band-Aid which Sally has placed upon her finger after cutting herself on the knife. But before they can truly close the case, the dead man announces that he simply has to go to pee, rises, and closes down the game.

       Once more the night has become a rather dreary one, despite their clever talk and games, since the rainstorm seems to be one of those that descends upon the city only once every other decade. The creek below the mountain upon which Sally’s house sits has already overflowed its banks and turned into a torrent of mud, and the houselights are blinking of and on.

        And as if a heavenly force had determined that very night to punish this little Sodom, the large-windowed villa is buzzed by a small airplane several times before crashing into the house, a wing landing upon the very dinner table where moments early they were all gathered. A moment later the pilot, dazed and confused knocks on their door. At the very moment of the crash they also lose their lighting and the use of their single telephone, cellphone reception in the mountains being unavailable.

        Before he can ever explain who he is, the young man (Sol Mason) collapses, as the startled houseguests and their hosts carry him off to a bedroom and Sally rushes to read her medical encyclopedia about remedies for brain hemorrhages.

        Fortunately, the young aviator awakens to explain that his name is Anthony but that he can remember nothing else. He knows the names for objects and their purpose, but can’t recall whether or not he has a home or in it a worried wife. He seems to be convinced that it was his car that crashed into the house, not an airplane, particularly since he has never flown as far as he recalls and, as Erica Jong explains it, has a fear of flying.

       Leaving him to get some rest the party guests re-gather to try to imagine how they might proceed, only to have Valerie recall that someone with a head injury should never be permitted to fall asleep since it may result in a coma. Accordingly, they rush in to pull him from his bed and throughout the rest of the play insist that he cannot for one moment sleep.

       Realizing that with the storm none of them will be able to leave that night, Sally assigns the bedrooms to each guest, and arranges that they alternate a watch over their incredible guest.

       That quirky plot device allows them each to get better acquainted with their handsome guest, as one by one they tell him their histories accompanied by the dramatic musical renditions of the hired girl, who herself attempts to follow the pilot around and charm him a bit like a gypsy violinist in a Hungarian restaurant.

       Their stories, obviously, also help us to get to know the characters better, although it quickly becomes apparent that the tales they tell, even though they appear to be autobiographical, reveal more about the inner imaginations of these figures than their true lives.

        Sally, for example, tells him a long yarn of a romantic adventure she has had in a small Brazilian town with a gaucho, replete with a white horse and a large silver buckle circling his denim pants. The tale sounds more like the kind of narrative one might hear on the famed Brazilian TV soap operas, so popular in South America, more than a real-life experience. But it is certainly entertaining and perfect for actor Wright’s flair for the theatricalization of the old kind of  melodramatic thee-a-ter!! She quickly becomes convinced that the unknown guest, like her, is a true romantic, suggesting—when they later play the game of “guessing the guest’s name”— that he has to an “ Erik.”


       Down to earth opera singer Valerie believes it must be Bart, while Ilo, who keeps the young man entertained with stories of his and Laura’s travels through Italy where, he claims, they served as lovers to a wealthy polyamorous couple, insists that their guest is obviously gay, even if he hasn’t yet come out of the closet.

       Laura insists that, like herself, he is deeply suffering inside, having been tortured by having lost, as she has 2 ½ times, someone whom she/he deeply loved.

       But Daniel, who disappears throughout much of this play, has the strangest theory as to the origin of the young man. He insists that he is a threat to them all, having come to kill them; and, confronting the young man, he claims to not only know who he is but why he has been sent, which he maintains is from an FBI or CIA cell, knowledge he has gleaned from having served in Peru and other spots where spies have trained and been assigned. He knows, so he claims, because he himself has served just such a role, and now they have sent someone to get rid of him.

        His paranoia becomes so overwhelming that ultimately he pulls a gun on the stranger threatening to kill him, the pilot saved only when Daniel’s friends restrain him and take away the gun.

        As morning finally arrives and the storm abates, the pilot’s wife, Bess (Caroline Quigley) arrives to claim her errant husband, who she insists has long been a reckless adventurer, wrecking several airplanes and disappearing for months at a time. But he is also a well-known orthodontist with boys and a large dog at home. The moment he sees his wife, the Pilot remembers everything of his basically banal life—except for his adventurous moments of course. And he now has no memory of his amorous adventures that night with Sally.

        The couple leave behind the stunned party guests, hardly believing the truth about the pilot who has so seemingly altered their own lives, Sally is particularly shocked. So disappointed with truth, they can hardly imagine that the woman really was his wife, that he has kids and a large dog home awaiting him. And then...well they now can’t find Daniel. Where could he have gotten to? They check out the entire house, the garage, and from the large window they search the landscape below without finding him. Maybe Daniel was not as paranoid as it seems. Perhaps Daniel was right?

       If the play begins sounding a bit like Wilder mixed with Albee, by the end we perceive that it is perhaps much closer to an earlier “absurdist-like” play of the 20th century, a work that, as the darkness of World War I began to settle over a frivolous European world, would eventually change everything, creating the angst and chaos that helped, in turn, bank the flames for World War II and its aftermath. That play, George Bernard Shaw’s great comedic drama, Heartbreak House (1920), spoke of a heartbreak very different from the kind of which Valerie speaks, of a universal devastation of the soul the likes of which we are confronting still today.

       We doubt the disappearance of one seemingly mad man from the Santa Monica Mountains will have much effect outside of this mad household, but symbolically it expresses just how little it takes to spark terror among allies when one recalls that it simply took the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Pincip—the Duke journeying through Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, recently annexed by Austria-Hungry—to bring about the War that killed 15 to 24 million people, although perhaps a quarter of the imprisoned soldiers may have been killed by the flu pandemic of 1918. 

      And what if Daniel is truly a CIA spy, the pilot an interloper sent to get rid of him? It doesn’t take much for madness to embrace any individual, as these birthday celebrants make clear, particularly when people begin to remake others over in their own images of themselves.

      Sand’s play perhaps needs a little tightening of its various entanglements, and maybe another director or Sand himself will be able to energize his other performers to balance the mercurial performance of Wright; as it is she tends to dominate a work in which the other talented actors seem waiting their turn to shine. Finally, as wonderfully frightening as the rain, lightning, and thunder is upon the stage, it needs to be tuned down just a little so that we can fully hear the witty script.

     But these are minor quibbles about a play that is quite remarkable otherwise. I think this would also make a perfect film or TV drama.

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2022

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2022).

 

 
















































Index of Entries (by author, composer, lyricist, choreographer, or performer)

TABLE OF CONTENTS John Adams, Lucinda Childs, and Frank O. Gehry | Available Light / 2015 John Adams and Alice Goodman | The Death of Klingh...