Thursday, October 28, 2010
14 Days till Summer in Hell
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
LA Weekly says 'GO!' to Leiris/Picasso
NEW REVIEW GO LEIRIS/PICASSO "We try not to have [too] many guests. It disturbs what's left of the neighbors," says Michel as he stumbles around his Paris home in the dark, falling down stairs, knocking over crudités, and scalding himself on a hot teakettle. It's all rather amusing . . . until you realize that it's 1944 and there's a Nazi patrol outside.
This [is] just the sort of dark humor that characterizes writer and director David Jette's farcical take on an actual evening at the house of Michel Leiris (Michael Bulger) when notable members of the French Resistance produced Pablo Picasso's final work: a play entitled Desire Caught by the Tail. Picasso's play itself is nonsensically awful (but oh, how the man could paint), so Jette has instead created a play about the circumstances surrounding its production, a sort of play without a play, except that we do see part of Picasso's piece during Act 2. What comes before, however, is the preparation, as Leiris, his wife Zette (Jenny Byrd), Albert Camus (Tyler Jenich), Jean-Paul Sartre (Patrick Baker), Simone de Beauvoir (Amy K. Harmon), and Picasso's mistress Dora Maar (Melissa Powell) scramble to set up while they wait for the master. Besides their own petty but hilarious squabbles, they also have to deal with a Nazi (Joseph L. Roberts) who keeps popping up, as well as the leader of the resistance, Sam Beckett (Dan Gordon); Beckett's men steal a six-foot swastika from the Louvre and bring it as a gift for Picasso. When Picasso (Fred Ochs) finally arrives, the craziness comes to a climax, and costumes are handed out in the staging of a ridiculous work that features characters such as Onion, Big Foot, Fat Angst and Thin Angst.
Jette's direction keeps all the moving parts well synchronized as the actors enter and exit Juliana de Abreu's well-designed, multi-door set, complemented by Sarah Krainin's properties and [Andrew] Thiels' set dressing. The ensemble is strong overall, though Baker's over-the-top bombastic caricature of Sartre's and Bulger's sincerity as the put-upon host stand out. And while Jette's work doesn't pretend to be historically accurate in the least, it succeeds for that very reason because, as Camus says, sometimes "happiness feels better than truth."
Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru July 24. (213) 290-2782. http://www.BrimmerStreet.org
(Mayank Keshaviah)
Reposted from LA Weekly: http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/stage-news/stage-raw-a-memory-of-what-mig/#more
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Beauty is Not an Idea
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Tech Week: 3 Days Left
Monday, June 7, 2010
Hurry Up and Wait
I spent a good portion of the day backstage listening and waiting to go on, filling my downtime with some light napping and reading. At one point, I was waiting backstage for about 3½ hours, before coming on to deliver two lines right before an hour long dinner break.
There’s a scene late in the play where Mike takes off my pants and puts them on, leaving me sitting in my underwear. Not a problem. However, I don’t exactly have my costume pants yet, nor any other costume pieces from the waist down. (Consequently, this means that my jeans were the ONLY pants I had.) So were we really going to run this move with my jeans and whatever boxers I happened to be wearing that day? The answer was yes. I couldn’t very well say no, since Melissa had already had one “wardrobe malfunction” and Jenny was standing behind me in her underwear. I suppose ending up strapped to an overturned chair on stage in my underwear was unexpected, but not as unexpected as sitting backstage afterwards, pants-less and cold, and waiting for Mike to finish his scene so I could get my pants back. I’ll make sure on Tuesday that I’m prepared for any and all eventualities…
- Joseph L. Roberts