Anybody listening?

The old stumper about whether or not a tree makes noise when it falls unheard by people gained new applications for me while watching Robert Redford’s ‘Lions for Lambs.’ Commercially, this Socratic-method look at personal responsibility in the era of Bush’s War on Terror, had fallen on deaf ears. Despite above-the-title stars Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise and Redford (acting and directing) – audiences quickly cooled to the November 2007 release, leaving it with $15 million in domestic business. Fortunately, foreign sales were triple that and the film brought in nearly double its $36 million production budget.

More damning was the response. Websites Yahoo and boxofficemojo averaged the grade from movie critics at C+ and the audience’s at D+.

I found the dialectics gave the Hollywood film a rare stage intimacy. The isometrics of muscular intellects going at each other from opposing views requires precision and power. Unfortunately, film critics were as disinterested in these onscreen dramatic face-offs as society is of their theatrical counterparts. Los Angeles Times Critic Carina Chocano put it clearly, "...looks like a stage play and plays like a policy debate."

Interestingly, buried within Redford’s quiet message was a tribute to the silent sacrifices of Americans who fall out of earshot on the battlefield. In the climatic scene, two GIs are cut down on a frozen Afghan peak. They are alone after Taliban fighters ambushed a U.S. helicopter before it could drop off the first platoon of a new, smaller-unit invasion. The shot-up chopper gets away, but not before one soldier is jostled out an open door, followed by his enlistment partner, who jumps to help him. As the enemy circle tightens around them, the men appear to the military personnel watching a satellite transmission, as little more than blackened rice kernels on the snowy screen. Unprotected and unheard, the soldiers gather their strength to stand and face their executioners. Their final words of commitment, like their futures, are lost.

The hour of Afghan night in which this happens is the late-morning hour in Washington when Cruise’s hawkish Senator announces the campaign to Streep’s Cable News reporter. It is also the morning hour in Los Angeles that Redford’s university professor tries to re-ignite the passion for political science a gifted young student has lost.

As their hour winds down, the student, played by Andrew Garfield, confounds his mentor by asking what the difference is between the lack of political involvement of a soldier killed at 19 and a student who does not participate.

Redford’s character is speechless, but his film answers osmotically. The difference lies beneath the surface, beyond sight or sound, in purpose. The soldiers – former students of Redford’s character – had had a political and social agenda that began with Afghanistan. Their lives had purpose, even if no one was listening. Like them, the film has purpose, even if the majority of audiences turn a deaf ear. Finally, the art form of theater that is recalled here in its truest, most articulate form, survives despite continuing to slide under America’s popular culture radar. Because it has a passionate purpose, it succeeds, whether people listen, and whether those listening actually hear it for what it is.

Photo: Michael Peña, Derek Luke take the fall in 'Lions for Lambs'

Entertaining Notions on the Borders

My preparation for a March interview with playwright Theresa Rebeck came the morning after a dramatic prime time news show about Narco violence. Something about the CNN Special Report, which covered the murder of a Texas lawman by Mexican drug traffickers, resonated as I learned of Rebeck’s ‘Our House,' opening at Playwrights Horizons on June 9.

The subject at hand was ‘Mauritius,’ her most popular play to date, at the Pasadena Playhouse. But reading that ‘Our House,’ which premiered in January 2008 at Denver Center Theatre, asks, “Are news and entertainment interchangeable?” recalled my reaction to the Anderson Cooper program. Not being a regular viewer, I had been surprised by the level to which he and his team wrapped their coverage with a clear, though muted, sensationalism. While this kind of 'news' is not news, the preference for the language and imagery of violence – shrouded corpses, shadowy identity-protected interviewees – and disinterest in reasoned discussion of the issues behind it, was stunning. Brief, perfunctory moments of talking head stats were allotted to how America's voracious appetite for drugs fuels the international drug economy. That message would fall to Secretary Clinton the following week, and President Obama this month, to make.

Entertainment is a useful addition to any communication. Try plowing through academic writing if you disagree. In reporting, however, it’s best kept as sweetener. Junk journalism on television is as dangerous to American health as junk food in school cafeterias.

Much of Rebeck's work aims to strike the right balance: “I’m trying to create art that entertains.” While finding that dividing line is up to each artist and viewer, the breaking point between the two lies somewhere along the stretch where meaning is lost in fluff. It isn't that art has to be true. Far from it. Novelist John Barth suggested art can be truer than fact. He once had a character describe his stories as “too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe – but truer than fact.”

The popularity of theater and journalism are both being tested in the current economy. Television, where a majority of people get both their entertainment and their news, offers entertainment masquerading as "reality," and real news blurred by theatricality. The preference for this altered state may have more to do with the rising death count of newspapers than the free home delivery offered by the Internet. The Internet, which offers more opinion that anything, is just picking up where television started.

And, that, getting back to Rebeck's concerns in 'Our House,' rewards reporters who are showmen rather than ‘regulators.’ The defanging of financial regulators is much more reversable than will be the grind of keeping City Halls, school boards, and legislators in check through regular news coverage. The current ‘Atlantic’ suggests that “the Internet trains readers to consume news in ever-smaller bites. This is a disaster for newspapers and magazines. If you're not covering your state delegation in D.C., or the state legislature back home, or the city council, bad things are going to happen, undiscovered.”

But as Cooper's tone and Rebeck's play reveal, these things have already happened. News is entertainment. Want something more insidious? Try news as religion. We can already see this creeping in at the borders of TV's reporter-punditry. FOX news, which Charlie Brooker jokes “generally leans more to the right than a man who’s just had his right leg blown off,” has a number of these "news anchors" putting both bully and pulpit in their nightly “bully pulpit.” TIME Magazine's James Poniewozik cited Glenn Beck as a key voice in the shouting match.

“Beck embraces fear," he wrote of Beck's appeal. "Fear of what? Take your pick. . . . That fat cats and bureaucratic 'bloodsuckers' are plundering your future. That Mexico will collapse and chaos will pour over the border. That America believes too little in God and too much in global warming.”

Here's to keeping our house in order: leave the news to journalists, the drama to dramatists, and the fire and brimstone to the preachers.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION. Molly Ward, center, as Jennifer in the Denver Center Theatre Company world premiere production of Our House (Terry Shapiro), surrounded by Anderson Cooper, Julie Chen on 'Big Brother,' Final front page in Denver, Glenn Beck.

A Cold Case of Frostbite

The year after the Bicentennial commemorated America’s declaration to fight off British monarchy, another historic Anglo-American face-off took place. This time, a single Brit would confront the American who had attempted to reign as ‘Imperial President.’

British television interviewer David Frost had paid Richard Nixon $1 million for a dozen interview sessions that would be broadcast over a week in shows sure to be heard around the world. While some clarification of history was inevitable, both men were primarily concerned with improving public sentiment towards them.

As we have seen in subsequent Presidential over-stepping such as the Iran-Contra Affair and the misuse of intelligence gathering to deceive the public about the urgency of invading Iraq, a sense of supreme self-righteousness permeated the Nixon Presidency. It was not seen as criminal for government employees to leak damaging lies about the other party’s front-runners in order to have them withdraw in disgrace and make way for less viable candidates. Or, for them to attempt electronic surveillance of the Democratic National Committee leadership so they could learn the opposition's tactics in time to sabotage them. These activities were not seen as illegal because they were sanctioned by a President who, in their eyes, was as sovereign as King George III.

The surveillance of the DNC never happened because the men sent to break in to its Watergate Hotel offices in June 1972 were caught by the night watchman. From then on, the former President continued to barricade himself behind executive privilege and fallen bodies of sacrificed staffers. He held his ground through his landslide re-election, but by August 1974, with impeachment a certainty, he handed the reign to Gerald Ford.

CONTINUATION FROM 'NOTEBOOK' BEGINS HERE: In August 2006 Peter Morgan's dramatization of Frost’s interviews with Nixon premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Frost/Nixon came to America in 2007 and within a year was a film version was on its way to several Academy Award nominations including best picture, director, and actor for Frank Langella as Nixon. This week the play opens its West Coast premiere (with Stacy Keach as Nixon) at the Ahmanson Theatre.

For most theater reviews, rather than enter a play with preconceptions affected by inevitably interpretative marketing and publicity materials, I prefer to listen to what the play has to say for itself. However, in the case of semi-documentaries, preparation is necessary. Here, the work of the playwright and actors is not rooted in the realm of imagination but in the real world. To gauge how their artistry enhances the recreation, we must freshly re-gather as accurate as possible a picture of what happened.

A short cut to this is provided by the recollections of Frost and two research assistants: reporters James Reston Jr. and Robert Zelnick (both of whom are also characterized in the play).

"It is a curious feeling to go to the theater and watch yourself onstage," Frost writes in Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes. "I attended a preview of Frost/Nixon two or three nights before the play opened in August 2006. I thought it was brilliantly written, directed and acted. There were more fictionalizations than I would have preferred, although one such piece of fictionalization – Nixon's phone call to me on the eve of Watergate – was, I thought, a masterpiece.”

Last year, prompted by the film, an enterprising reporter at Boston University's student paper, interviewed Zelnick, who said he had not seen the film, “but I’ve seen the play."

“It was great theater,” he said, “and the overall account is reasonably accurate. But there was poetic license taken for the stage that was somewhat in excess of what I was comfortable with.

"The character of Frost as portrayed on stage presents him as the kind of guy who rose to the occasion one time in his life. I don’t think that’s true. . . . [Whether it was once in his lifetime or more] he should be applauded for doing that. A lot of people have the opportunity and don’t rise to the occasion."

“I was not so sure about some of the other fictionalizations," Frost continues. "Why was Watergate now the twelfth of twelve sessions and not – as actually happened – two sessions in the middle? Why did James Reston's discoveries from the Watergate tapes only reach me on the morning of the Watergate session and not eight months earlier, as had actually been the case? Why did the early sessions, which contained a lot of good material, have to be depicted so negatively?. . . . Whenever I made these points to Peter [Morgan], he would simply sigh and say, 'David, you've got to remember this is a play, not a documentary.' However, aware of my concern, he thoughtfully added an author's note to the program, making the point that he had sometimes found it irresistible to let his imagination take over."

That note has not made it to the Ahmanson program. (Ironically, the description of this as "a new play" has survived from the original Donmar production.) However, the folks at Center Theater Group have honored Morgan's promise by incorporating the caveat in a question asked of director Michael Grandage in a program Q&A entitled "The Fact and Fiction of Frost/Nixon."

Ahmanson audiences will now weigh how theater has used language to balance reality and myth in depicting how one fallen leader used language to navigate around fact and fiction. It should be a fascinating battle between the imaginative and the impeachable, in the state whose only native son to become President was the only one to resign.

Spring Forward

Of the many pleasures in the Geffen Playhouse world premiere of Donald Margulies’ Time Stands Still (through March 15) one is finally having due cause to write about Anna Gunn. She plays the play’s lead, a photographer named Sarah. I had seen her onstage once before in the first reading of David Lindsey-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, during the 2005 Pacific Playwrights Festival at my alma mater, South Coast Repertory.

Gunn made an indelible impression in the lead role of Becca, half a couple dealing with the death of their little boy. Late in the play, the poor teenage driver who had hit the child seeks some healing by dedicating a curious science fiction story about time travel, rabbit and worm holes, and parallel universes with Becca. Though I would see three subsequent productions, something set Gunn’s reading of the part – with Kevin Kilner, Sarah Rafferty, Lynn Milgrim and Philip Vaden – apart.

I touched on the phenomenon in "One Degree of Separation," a blog prompted by Amy Ryan's excellent performance in the Geffen's West Coast premiere. The title hints at how an incident can create a huge, undetectable gulf within a person. It also refers to how one undetectable element in a performance can distinguish it from all others.

When I diplomatically asked the playwright if my impressions had any merit, Lindsey-Abaire diplomatically responded, “Yes, I was blessed by those PPF actors who understood the material implicitly and got it across to that audience so wonderfully.”

Jump from NOTEBOOK begins here . . . I had worked with Alastair Duncan, Gunn’s husband, when he, Lynnda Ferguson, Cindy Katz and François Giroday were in SCR’s production of Private Lives, winner of five L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards including one for Duncan. I had met her with Alastair at a Gregg Henry concert at L.A.'s Genghis Cohen. (Henry, a great singer, rarely has time to perform his music, though coincidentally he had a show shortly after we saw Time Stands Still last Saturday.)

In my review I interpreted Margulies’ title as ironic. He wants us – I presumed – to take the phrase at face value when the play begins, and apply it to the ability of photography to capture an event for our understanding. But two hours later we are to question that acceptance. Reality is beyond the grasp of cameras, reporters, and even playwrights. What we get is something else: the mirror, according to Shakespeare. Our reliance on these as more than mere representations is dangerously self-deluding. Not only will time not stand still for a photo, it’s constantly changing our lives and relationships as it carries us in its floodwater.

A few days after posting the review I received a press release that on Saturday L.A. TheaterWorks would air its recording of Margulies’ Sight Unseen – with Gunn in the cast, along with Randy Oglesby from SCR's world premiere, Adam Arkin and Jordan Baker). That was the final prompt to write something about Gunn and the Rabbit Hole that did not make sense in Monday’s review. Anyway, it was raining all that day in Lake Arrowhead.

First, however, I decided to hit the treadmill. Before I could get started the doorbell rang. A dark wet shroud filled the doorway. Within the over-sized cowl my neighbor was smiling as the DVD he had offered to loan me earlier in the week emerged from the slit in his slicker.

I had seen bits of What the Bleep do We Know? on cable a year or so ago and had been keen to watch the whole thing. I started the film and the jog together. A handful of experts explain quantum physics while a photographer played by Marlee Matlin goes bumping and bruising through life in anecdotal applications of the theory.

According to the scientists, with quantum physics – or mechanics – time can just as easily move backwards as forward. Hmmm, I thought as I jogged (my bounding in place now feeling suspiciously like time standing still), maybe this is what Margulies’ title was on about.

Roughly 19 minutes into the film, I was stopped in my tracks – or would have been if my track hadn’t been moving of its own accord – by a statement by Dr. David Albert, Director of Columbia University's Philosophical Foundations of Physics and a specialist in how quantum mechanics impacts the “philosophy of space and time.”

“There’s a great mystery called the mystery of the direction of time," said the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience and Time and Chance. "There’s a certain sense in which the fundamental laws of physics that we have don’t make any interesting distinction, say, between past and future. For example, it’s a puzzle from the standpoint of the fundamental laws of physics why we should be able to remember the past and not have the same kind of epistemic access to the future. It’s a puzzle from the standpoint of these laws why we should think something like by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. These things – that we have a different kind of epistemic access to the past than the future; that we have kind of control by acting out over the future than we do over the past – are so fundamental to the way that we experience the world that it seems to me, not to be curious about them, is to be three-quarters of the way to being dead.”

Once off the treadmill, I went online to find out more about the film and discovered a wonderland of additional information, including news that a 3-DVD Director’s Cut, called Down the Rabbit Hole, was now available.

'Time Stands Still’ continues at the Geffen Playhouse through March 15, and there are tickets still available. Saturday's radio broadcast of 'Sight Unseen' will also be available online for the following week following the March 7 broadcast. For more information on "What the Bleep Do We Know," visit its website.

Photo Illustration: Anna Gunn in 'Time' (Michael Lamont), Marlee Matlin on the ‘Bleep’ dust jacket; the wild hare himself by John Tenniel

Kings and Creativity

There was an echo in the house the last week of January. My house. On Sunday evening, January 25, I’d seen ‘Pippin’ pop-open at the Mark Taper Forum. The co-production with Deaf West Theatre – which literally halved the title character for a House of Sight & Sound – left me reverbeatin’ with those feelings of the late-late ‘60s. (When they’d become the early ‘70s.)

Pippin is a variation on Pepin, the powerful father and ineffectual son of Charlemagne, or Charles I. The original show opened on Broadway weeks before Richard Nixon’s re-election, in 1972 which means it came at the tail end of the most subverted Presidential election in American history. (As far as we know.)

Nixon’s pursuit of ‘Imperial Presidency’ – the title of the Arthur Schlessinger wake-up tome published the following year – led many artists to compare him to kings. Paul Conrad did it in his amazing string of 'L.A. Times' editorial cartoons, Steely Dan and Jefferson Airplane did it in rock songs, and Stephen Schwartz certainly was ready for the tie-in when he wrote music and lyrics for ‘Pippin.’ In contrast to folks like Charles (and Richard), who crave Kingdomination, ‘Pippin’s' second act offered representatives of the ordinary life. The woman who becomes 'Kid' Charlemagne’s true love, describes herself as “your average ordinary kind of woman, competent and neat, making life a treat.”

The lyrics may not be Fagin and Becker (who that year released, in ‘Kings,’ with expectant lines like “We’ve seen the last of Good King Richard; ring out the past his name lives on; roll out the bones and raise up your pitcher”), but it makes its point about being satisfied with one's even share.

Two nights after ‘Pippin’ opened, the echo came while listening to PBS’ NewsHour. In tribute to writer John Updike, who had died that day at age 76, portions of an interview conducted by Jeffrey Brown were replayed. The conversation had been part of Updike’s 2003 promotional of a new collection of short stories.

Brown asked, “In the Foreword, when you’re describing writing short stories, you write, ‘My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful due.’
What does that mean, ‘to give the mundane its beautiful due?’”

“I worked hard at that sentence,” Updike said, “‘cause I was trying, you know, having challenged myself to say what did I think I was doing, I then had to find the phases for it. But I’ve always had, I think, even before I began to publish, this notion that the ordinary, middle class life, was enough to write about. That there was enough drama, interest, relevance, importance, poetry in it.”

“You didn’t need the grand, epic,” Brown assumed.

“I was stuck for my own limits, really, with middle class life, or the mundane let’s call,” Updike responded. “And so I was trying to serve my story, encapsulate some aspect of life as I was experiencing it, or observing that this was a time when the American way of life was coming in for a lot of hard knocks, some of them deserved, but nevertheless, I thought that somebody should be bearing witness to the kind of ordinary life that was going on.”

He was speaking of that same era which, like failed joke tellers always say, you had to be there to appreciate. Much too much rhapsodizing has been made of it. Those who were there still have it in their bones. While it couldn’t make the morrow, it still salts the marrow.

How beautiful that Center Theatre Group will now present the real end of King Richard’s public performance, in ‘Frost/Nixon,’ opening weeks after this weekend’s Academy Awards will bestow – according to most critics including TIME’s Richard Corliss – an Oscar upon theater’s own Frank Langella.

Looking forward to more echoes at the March 12 opening of that production, starring Stacy Keach and Alan Cox.

Bizarro Synchronicity

If you have experienced synchronicity, an aligning of random, disconnected events into something of possible significance, you are familiar with what Carl Jung’s “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” The concept may be best as living theater, in which we are both innocent participant and curious spectator. But tuning in to synchronicities is a fairly harmless way of noting and to some extent honoring, the inexplicable universals, allowing oneself to hear another orchestra section in the great symphony of universal connectedness. While never intend as an operating principle, it has nevertheless found eager discrediting by psychologist’s who dismiss any linking of unlinked events as a psychological disorder. Apophenia, coined by Klaus Conrad in 1958, may want to be the antithesis of synchronicity. But I prefer an equally opposite but considerably more fun reverse concept. This is not the mere absence of serial unrelated events. That’s normal, and requires nothing more than ignorance. How about the series of events that gain meaning by failing to connect as expected? Call it Bizarro Synchronicity.

Recently, the day's planned events included driving a weekend houseguest from Lake Arrowhead to Fullerton where she would take the train to Union Station; dinner with a friend at 5 p.m.; a playwright lecture at 7 p.m.; and a sleep test at 9 p.m. However, that morning, before things could get started, the dinner date was canceled. I attempted to cancel everything and drop my friend at a closer train station but there were no trains and the sleep center would charge a $250 cancellation fee. So, I thought I’d spend the dinner hour using a movie gift certificate abd see “W.” At the station we learned that all trains were running 90 minutes late because a trespasser had been killed on the tracks in Solano Beach. We had dinner instead and I missed the movie. The streets where I usually parked for the lecture had all be turned to "Permit Only," so I went in search of the movie theater. I had the address of the one where the gift certificate could be used, but the Stadium Theatre in Orange, at 1701 Katella, is apparently not in either Orange (across from the stadium) or in Anaheim (near Disneyland). So, I drove to a big cinema near the sleep study office prepared to pay, hoping there would be something of interest. The only one starting near the time of my arrival was . . . “W.” I slipped in only five minutes late and, hunching down to not block others' view, took a seat. After 15 minutes I thought I'd see if there were people behind me, or nearby, as my eyes were now accustomed to the darkness. I looked around at 400 empty seats. I guess it was no surprise that I was the only person in this Orange County theater for Oliver Stone's take on George W. Bush.

Of pit bulls and pit bands

Cubed and Quartered. Claire Bennett’s set for the Road Theatre Company’s production of Mickey Birnbaum’s Big Death, Little Death, which has its West Coast premiere at the company’s Lankershim Arts Center space through July 21, shows a raft-size chunk of ceiling simultaneously before, during and after it breaks free. Similarly, Birnbaum’s nihilistic screed on struggling through adolescence without a believable dream to pursue, attempts concurrently to show the causes, effects and possible future of one family’s loss. The ceiling has collapsed under the weight of a discarded pit bull, which innocently is left for dead at the top of the show and resurfaces like a depth charge as it nears its end. While the puppy matures within the walls of the home, the rooms of the house are filled with an empty embrace of death. There are ghostly appearances by a mother (Rhonda Aldrich) who died in a car wreck after picking up her soldier husband (Jeff Le Beau) back from the first Gulf war. There’s the surviving father’s emotional death, which he attempts to relieve by photographing death scenes. But Birnbaum connects these mini-voids to the vast cultural void that explains everything from infidelity on the home front to infidels at war. The teenage kids, Kristi (Jeanne Syquia) and Gary (Sean Wing), tossed about in this black hole, fill it to distraction with a comparatively safe flirtation with death, Death Metal music (performed live nightly by the scorching pit band nestled house right). Death Metal, an offshoot of rock that probably traces back to Black Sabbath, may not have had the respect of other forms, but it had what it takes to stay relevant long after more mainstream genres got dusty and classic. Whereas those other forms were deaf to the punk, grunge and rap movements, Death Metal's rawness allowed it to feed off them, growing ever heavier and darker. This music is both the most off-putting part of the show (earplugs are eagerly handed out) and the aspect which adds the greatest energy to the production. Like a cubist painter does with images, Birnbaum breaks the narrative into chunks and welds the scenes back together with the band's acetylene torch sound. He’s not always successful, and the whole story sacrifices some impact to its fondness for obfuscation and dead-ends: bringing the dog in as a character may be in the spirit of the show but it does nothing for the nice arc the human characters had going. It’s a fine cast throughout, with standouts by Syquia, Wing, and Ann Noble, as Gary’s quirky guidance counselor Miss Endor, who unravels into a Death Metal erotic reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s Zuul in Ghostbusters. The others are Ammar Mahmood, Mark St. Amant and Zach Dulli. It may not be the most cohesive experience in a theater this year. But it is likely to be the most jarring. And thank God there are people willing to dedicate a production slot to that noble cause.
Above, Sean Wing and Jeanne Syquia

A Fallen Speaker, A Father Found

The absence of something can be a heavy burden, and eventually not knowing the details of her parents’ early lives became unbearable for Marissa Chibas. In ‘Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary,’ which CalArts recently provided with an evocative production at its REDCAT space in Disney Hall, Chibas dramatizes her one-woman journey into a family's extraordinary past.

Like Dan Evans' simple set – a raked, sand-covered square beneath a narrow, wing-spanning projection screen of pegboard – Chibas' story incorporates powerful symbols. Broken radios, spectacles, a microphone, a blind man and some massive parade ground loudspeakers advance her personal story of discovery as they resonate an underlying theme of communication.

At rise, she kneels inches in front of the first row of the audience. She rises in a pool of light and turns to address a house full of her contemporaries, telling of a near-death experience of her own in the Venezuelan Amazon, which she enters by stepping onto the platform and into the past. An effect by lighting designer Rebecca M.K. Makus sends ripples from her bare foot across the sand as if she were reactivating the spilt contents of a ruptured hourglass. Colbert S. Davis IV weaves a fabric of frequencies that blend ocean waves, radio static and political speeches into a beautiful sound cue as she wades up stage through lost time. (Adam Flemming's remarkable video creation – which must wrestle with an impossible aspect ratio twenty times as wide as it is tall – is constantly filled with supplemental visuals that complement without distracting, like the fuzzy image that may combine a low line of breaking waves with a sound wave.)

Chibas takes us across the water to Cuba, across the years to the 1950s, and through fading photographs to meet her extended family – ancestors as well as current Cuban cousins. Her mother was a captivating beauty whom Miss Cuba judges in 1959 awarded duplicate top prizes despite her second place finish. Her father was so much the conscience of Cuban injustice that after articulating what would become the revolution's written architecture, he saw problems ahead and had concerns, which in turn caused Castro to drop him from the circle of founding fathers. And her uncle, Eddie Chibas, Cuba's most popular and influential radio personality, raised rabble-rousing to the level of oratory before ending one broadcast with his suicide in a disquieting call to action.

'Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary' is another of the wonderful one-woman shows we have seen this year in Los Angeles. This seems to be an age of theater reminiscent of the halycon first days of the singer-songwriter, in which the same artist lives through, writes down, and eventually performs a story with personal investment no one else can rival.

In the theater these stories are amplified by three-dimensional imagery. For Chibas, the most versatile icon is the massive metal speaker, now lying in the sand, which once hung above the stage with the others. It's a stark reminder of the great communicators who fell – from grace or by their own hand. Chibas' reconnaisance has artfully righted them all, and reminded us that we keep our currency by maintaining the stories of those who went before.

There is a moment in the play where Chibas is validated by a coincidence of great signficance. Similarly, the brief drive home following the show provided an illustrative story about the resuscitative power of language. Appropriately, it came through the radio. A story on the ill-fated Scott expedition ended with the reading of the explorer’s final letter to his “widow” before he froze. Even in a woman's voice, the words of the letter brought Scott alive again. He could be clearly seen, huddled under a skin of frozen canvas, packing himself like gunpowder into each word, to be revived in some unimaginable future, through a strange speaker, to share a night ride home.

PHOTO/RALLYING STRENGTH. Marissa Chibas, above left, discovers her presence in her father's past. Raul Chibas, right. Her uncle Eddie Chibas' funeral center.

The Long and Fisher Road

Gene Splicing. Fifty years after their birth into show business families – one famous, one a footnote – two writer-actors have cherry-picked their pasts for one-woman shows about the performance gene. In Jodi Long’s celebratory Surfing DNA at East West Players, she dives into her genetic pool and backstrokes upstream among Chinese, Japanese, Australian, American and Scottish ancestors. In Carrie Fisher’s comic Wishful Drinking, her famous family album becomes an open tabloid in which she jokes about “having my DNA fumigated.”

Ms. Fisher’s entertaining show – a kind of pot-shot-spraying drive-by of herself, her father (crooner Eddie Fisher) and her mother (movie star Debbie Reynolds) – is filled with such neatly phrased jabs. But it’s a stretch to call it theater. Especially compared to Ms. Long’s carefully shaped evening of filial showbiz piety. Beyond the common age, sex and coincidental L.A. premieres, the women have vastly different stories and present them in vastly different ways. While Ms. Fisher provides scandal sheet fodder to remind the audience her parents (and she) are just people, Ms. Long works to get her people into a spotlight that makes them memorable. And where Ms. Fisher seems uncomfortable on stage, delivering her stories as she paces the apron like a shooting gallery target, Ms. Long owns her stage and uses it to perform the role of her lifetime.

Growing up at opposite ends of the country, these women share only one cultural reference point: Gene Kelly. Kelly co-starred with Fisher’s mother in Singin’ in the Rain, her most famous role, but fired Ms. Long’s feisty father Lawrence from his staging of the Broadway premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song. (Although he would later tour and direct productions of the show, his name does not appear on IBDB's Opening Night credits and, according to Ms. Long, he was blackballed from the first national tour and the 1961 film.)

That near miss does not seem to have hurt Ms. Long's stage, television and film career, however. It just adds to the awe and empathy with which she presents her parents’ story. Especially given the limitations they endured based on discrimination, which persist but were clearly worse a generation ago. This helps contextualize the bittersweet experience of her own Broadway debut at age 8, which was somewhat dampened coming so soon after her father’s close call with Kelly. But the same musical provides dramaturgical arc, as the family shared the pride when Ms. Long returned to Broadway in 2002 as Madame Liang in David Henry Hwang’s re-working of Flower Drum Song. “Grand Avenue,” her big number from that show, opens Surfing and she delivers it – “sells it” as we say – with a grin wide enough to span the song’s two-generation significance.

Her Chinese-Australian father and Japanese-American mother, Kimiye Tsunemitsu, met, married, and raised a daughter while working the ‘Chop Suey’ circuit in San Francisco and New York. They were talented dancers, singers and comics. They worked up a Vaudeville style act that outlived Vaudeville in nightclubs. It was a hard life of rejection and low earnings. But every performance day ended on stage, with those big smiles helping to convince their audience better times were ahead.

Like her parents, Ms. Long embodies this tradition. But she wants to leave us with more than comic and soft-shoe patter. She takes us behind the scenes and behind the smiles. Her parents were like the countless chorus girls, sidemen and understudies who fill the stage beyond the spotlight, quietly reshaping their dreams to fit their achievements. On behalf of them all, Ms. Long has gathered her own variegated roots into a presentable bouquet, and sent it floating downstream to their descendants.

Surfing DNA closed at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theatre on November 19. Wishful Drinking is packing houses in an extended run at the Geffen, with a specially enhanced ticket price of $103.

A review of Wishful Drinking is available here. http://www.theatrealtor.com/specialassessments.html

Photo. Jodi Long, left, and Carrie Fisher flank a helix-climbing Gene Kelly.

One Degree of Separation

Couched Condolences. While enjoying David Lindsay-Abaire’s ‘Rabbit Hole’ (at the Geffen through October 13, 2006), the stand-up comedy of Albert Brooks came to mind. Before he started making films in the mid-70s, Brooks, like Steve Martin, was creating comedy not by telling jokes, but by being a joke. Each created characters in his likeness. But where Martin’s wildly silly character was obviously 180 degrees from his true personality, Brooks’ persona was only off by a tick of the dial. Many did not see the humor. But in that single degree of variance, Brooks managed to be just as ridiculous if not more so.

Lindsay-Abaire’s ‘Rabbit Hole’ is close enough to reality to be mistaken for simple melodrama, especially after the playwright’s previous central characters were given 180-degree turns: ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ is a teenager who looks 50 because she’s aging at an accelerated rate and ‘Fuddy Mears’’ principal characters are an amnesiac and a criminal crippled by limp and lisp. The folks in ‘Rabbit Hole’ are not only normal looking but quite attractive. But while the damage has been internalized, it has not been minimized. And Lindsay-Abaire and Carolyn Cantor, his director with talent aging at an accelerated rate, offer a versatile metaphor to help us get at it.

Becca (Amy Ryan) and Howie (Tate Donovan) lost their only son when he chased something into the street and was killed by a teenage driver. Jason (Trever O’Brien) was alone, sober, paying attention, but unable to stop his car in time. Though still angry, Howie wants to limit the loss of life to one, his son, and salvage what's left of his and Becca's. She, however, cannot function in that way. She has been blasted out of her orbit by the loss. Though she wanders her home, cooking and cleaning, she has separated from it as cleanly as a capsule from its booster. Floating this way, and to her husband’s incomprehension, she gravitates to her fellow damaged drifter, Jason, who has dedicated a story about unseen corridors – the kind the physicists theorize link to parallel universes and the kind Lewis Carroll did link to one – to his victim.

In the way Brooks held his comic mirror up close to our faces, Lindsay-Abaire and Cantor keep Becca unmistakable – as recognizable as any neighbor we might pass in the market. It's impossible to guess the displacement and alienation she is suffering. That tight clutch of normalcy, as Ryan and the rest of the cast (which also includes Joyce Van Patten and a stunning Missy Yager) show, is what makes for such a huge explosion when the fission finally comes. The physical production is also stunning, with a beautiful set by Alexander Dodge, lit by Matthew Richards.

For the record, credit must be given to a first public reading of the play, also directed by Cantor, two summers ago at South Coast Repertory. SCR had commissioned the script from Lindsay-Abaire, as it had done with 'Kimberly,' which it premiered. Anna Gunn as Becca, Kevin Kilner as Howie, and Lynn Milgrim, Sarah Rafferty and Phillip Vaden filling out the rest of the cast proved this untested script so road worthy that its next public performance would be on Broadway. With virtually no visible separation between art and audience, those five actors also reasserted the simple magnificence of great theater. In an auditorium of a few hundred people in casual clothes, five virtually indistinguishable from the rest sat before the others on stacking chairs, turning a hundred or so pages of fresh text into two hours of life experience. They rendered it to such a degree, that everyone in that room was moved.

Photo: Trever O'Brien and Amy Ryan.

Counter Intuitive

‘Nighthawks,’ sang Tom Waits on his 1975 live recording, ‘at the diner of Emma’s Forty-Niner, there’s a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonight.” That sketchy nod to the frozen loneliness of Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting was a palatable bit of extra-disciplinary referencing. But according to Los Angeles crama critics, Douglas Steinberg has gone one worse in his 'Nighthawks,' receiving its premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre through September 24, 2006. With some inspired in-breeding, Steinberg has apparently produced a mutant child of tableaux vivant and film noir. His reason for doing so is a mystery -- in more ways than one – involving the diner’s three customers and attendant and a couple "off-stage" characters. The Los Angeles Times’ Charles McNulty suggests that the reason “they don't yet exist in three dimensions only underscores their need for someone with an imagination big enough to hear what they really sound like.” In 'Variety,' Robert Verini calls it a 'clumsy, interminable dramatization,' with 'cheap gags in his first act and over-the-top melodrama in the second.' Whether there's sufficient heft in the Steinberg stylus to pull off this sleight, one wonders whether such conversions can ever take. With due respect to Jon Hendricks and the vocalese set, I wager that if Joe Zawinul wanted singing in ‘Birdland' he'd have written lyrics. Same with Paul Desmond and ‘Take Five.’ (The exception that proves the rule is Cassandra Wilson’s ‘Run the Voodoo Down,’ which eerily expands Miles' universe.) Siimilarly, a great song is only diminished by becoming a video. I remember losing interest in MTV (even before I lost interest in the next generation’s music) because I didn’t like limiting the songs of Talking Heads or Squeeze or whomever into a single visual interpretation. (I still see Chevy Chase's stupid mug every time I hear 'You Can Call Me Al.') It’s what people complain about when artists sell their songs for use in advertisements. It's not the sell-out we object to. It's the way songs that were once important to us are now appliqued over with with images of Cadillac SUVs (Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’), Kaiser Permanente health care (Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’) and Chase credit cards (The Beatles' ‘Love is All You Need’). Just as I prefer letting my subconscious throw up images for 'Birdland,' 'The Weight' and ‘Burning Down the House' each time I hear them, I'm sure I'll be glad I can create my own seedy stories for those denizens of Hopper's diner.

Photo collage: Brian T. Finney and Colette Kilroy "step outside" Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' for a little play.

Old Times, Good Times

All Together Now. The good news about the 12th Annual West Coast Jazz Party is that it lives up to advance billing. As promised, it’s a unique atmosphere in which to relax and enjoy middle-ground, straight-ahead jazz. Organizers, musicians, and audience mingle like lodge members, clearly veterans of many previous events – either here at the Irvine Marriott over Labor Day Weekend or at the Newport Marriott over Presidents Weekend. Interviews with drummer Jeff Hamilton and trumpeter/conductor Bobby Shew for a story in The Orange County Register drew high praise for the 'Party's' special way of allowing musicians to see friends they haven’t seen in a while and play with people they’ve only heard. The way the players are mixed together by co-Founders John McClure and Joe Rothman – the latter a born emcee – keeps the energy and imagination keen. Among the highlights was trumpeter/vocalist Byron Stripling, graciously leading a Louis Armstrong tribute, but keeping his own style evident. He has the timbre and easy accuracy of Nat Cole, with a dash of vocal unpredictability reminiscent of Diz. Bill Mays provided another indelible when he offered up Jimmy Rowles’ ‘Peacocks,’ a colorful rumination for solo piano in honor of his late friend. Pianist/singer Dena DeRose displayed great feeling in her sets, providing plenty of jazz and soul without resorting to scat. She was ably backed by bassist Christoph Luty and Hamilton. Hamilton was an omnipresent utility player. He had said he was most looking forward to introducing Hammond B3 player Atsuko Hashimoto to America through the Party. In the first of two sets together, they teamed with tenor saxophonist Houston Person – another musician who seemed to be everywhere – on Friday night. While some musicians in the audience were cool to the keyboardist, I was generally impressed, primarily for what a surprisingly soulful streak that occasionally made its way into tunes, especially her big showcase, 'That's All.' Hamilton, Person and she will record and appear elsewhere in the next week or so, and I’ll be anxious to hear more. Bassist Chuck Berghorfer, who also played with just about everybody, said from the stage last night, during a two-man set with Person, “Looking out at this audience brings tears to my eyes. It’s the only place we can play where people aren’t talking during the set. The only thing missing are the 20 year olds!” It was and wasn’t what the crowd wanted to hear. But, it leads us to the bad news: the average audience member was in his or her 60s, quite possibly high 60s. Maybe it’s not fair to judge jazz’s audience by a group who – although pound for pound are among the most educated and supportive – look like extras from a ‘This is Florida Retirement’ infomercial. Perhaps a three-day-four-night event in a classy hotel has a prohibitive tab for youthful, casual fans. Then again, there aren’t many young adults who love jazz so much they’d spend the weekend with clones of the their grandparents. No matter how hip they are. Fortunately, in the months ahead, we’ll be reporting on some teenage jazz players and their fans. All of which should make folks breath a sigh of relief.
Photo: Berghofer, Wycliffe Gordon, Hamilton, Stripling, Person, DeRose, Hashimoto.

Blustery Days

Promo Seltzer. This week the Windy City was blowing gusts of disgust in a knock-down exchange of letters, emails, blogs and articles. The tempestuous snit between the 'Chicago Sun-Times' and Theater Building Chicago, a 30-year-old company, attracted the input of nearly two dozen of theater’s most distinguished blowhards, including Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Arthur Kopit and Dramatist Guild President John Weidman.

What sparked the dramatists' high dudgeon was Sun-Times Critic Hedy Weiss’ review of the company’s 2006 showcase of new musicals. Even though the works are billed as in development and in some cases not completed, Weiss, a former dancer who has been reviewing for more than 15 years, had drifted from doing advances to help promote the festival to doing reviews.

In her defense, Ms. Weiss, who truly seems not to know better, was not condemned in 2005 after writing what amounts to brochure copy on that year’s works-in-progress. She called the musical Tevya, "a remarkably fine piece of work. Not only does it play fully on the powerful frame of reference created in Fiddler, it moves the story forward in intelligent and believable ways, stepping gracefully and confidently into those giant footprints while building on the blend of humor, bitterness and debate that animated the original."

She said the musical version of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, "deserves a thriving future. Along with its ready-made tragicomic story and marvelous characters, it comes with a lovely, lyrical score that very skillfully blends traditional Irish melodies and a Broadway sound.”

On August 16, 2006, her overview story stated that "the eight deeply flawed new musicals showcased in this year's Stages 2006 marathon at the Theatre Building seemed to suggest the artform [sic] has fallen on very hard times."

This was an egregiously inappropriate opinion for a major paper to print regarding theater pieces that were expressly available as part of their development. But technically, it was no worse that the raves she gave shows last year. The problem for the American theater is that our only true allies are newspapers, a community that is itself increasingly marginalized. The point of contact between theater and paper, which I know only too well, requires a kind of rigidity that may cost a story.

As barrage after barrage of pent-up critic-critique from America's greatest living playwrights was gathered by DGA to be dumped on the desks of Sun-Times editor John Barron and publisher John Cruikshank (like Albee's "Ms. Weiss has a reputation as an irresponsible critic, and there are many occasions that are brought to my attention where her reviews have been shocking in their irresponsible provocation and others in which her opinions and prejudices have seemed curiously contrived."), the theater's executive director Joan Mazzonelli began to look for cover. Whereas she earlier had told Jeffrey Sweet (as reported on his blog), "Ms. Weiss was explicitly told that these presentations were not for review," when she spoke to Campbell Robertson for yesterday's New York Times story, she was "acknowledging that she had not made the festival’s policy clear to Ms. Weiss, whom she had encouraged to attend, along with other members of the press."

Whether Ms. Weiss is a good witch or a bad witch, the issue of theater criticism in this country is one which needs much more attention. (And, publicists need to keep a stiff spine despite the potential loss.)

Fall from Grace

Used Karr. Last night, Headline News' Nancy Grace made little effort to mask her contempt for the Boulder County (Colo.) District Attorney’s performance in first arresting John Mark Karr and then yesterday announcing she would not press charges after determining that his DNA did not match that found on the murdered JonBenet Ramsey a decade ago. Each night Grace proudly wears her "perspective as a former violent crimes prosecutor and as a crime victim herself,” accessorized with pearls of disdain. Monday’s target was Bolder DA Mary Lacy, who was somehow to blame for allowing Karr’s impromptu Bangkok press conference to launch ten days of round the clock speculation. Lacy, a relatively small-town prosecutor handed the crime of the turn-of-the-century, didn’t realize that what she thought were peanuts of disclosure would attract a thunderous herd of media attention. The empty story became the elephant in America’s living room for a week and a half, and Grace and her stern-faced far righteous experts got a boost in ratings as revitalizing as a stiff breeze at the condor roost. Not surprisingly, when the unsatisfying end came, Grace and her flock were pissed. But the jury is still out on whether Lacy erred. Later Monday night, DNA expert and Simpson Defense Team Member Barry Sheck ranted about media over-reaction to ‘Nightline’ host Terry Moran as if he were the team captain. On Tuesday morning, other anyalysts were crediting Lacy with taking the appropriate steps in a difficult process. The obviously put-out Grace would call it a "Colossal blunder." That might justify how – despite the story dropping off both CNN's Top 10 most important stories and Top 10 most popular stories, Grace would announce shows that looked into "the next step in the decade-old investigation" (Tuesday), "piece together 'what went wrong' in the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation" (Wednesday), and an hour-special on the case September 1 and 4.
Photo: Putting the CNN in Nancy.

'24's' Heaven

Counter Television Unit. My one TV series indulgence fared well this Sunday when ‘24’ broke into the Emmy winner circle with its fifth season. Fans will no doubt be crawling all over the show’s elaborate Web site to digitally high-five each other and argue whether this was really the season deserviing such status. For my money, however, it was a good one. For starters, as a seasoned viewer, I thought that with Season 4 '24' had chosen to take its own life. It did not end with a cliff hanger so much as with a fatal, precipitous fall: there was no way our hero, Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland, who earned one of the show’s three awards for Lead Performance), could return after faking his death so he could change identity and disappear to avoid a vengeful Chinese official (Tzi Ma). All this made the Season 5’s 24-segment arc all the more severe, gripping, and – as any true fan will happily admit – ridiculous. Providing the biggest goose to the storyline was our friend Greg Itzin’s President Logan, who did a Shakespearean turn of changing from Dogberry to Richard III in one revelation, playing opposite Jean Smart as First Lady. Another of the show’s 12 nominees, Itzin lost to now-five-time winner Alan Alda. Logan will not be back next season, so we’ll be seeing Greg back on stage, where he has been missed. According to the cliffhanger that appeared to spoil last season's happy ending, Jack will begin Season 6 in the hands of the Chinese. That's right. It was less than a day before Mr. Ma’s character picked him up, taped him over, and tossed him in a holding cell until January. Photo: Keifer in Sutherland.

Once in Love With Emmy

It's Itzin's Hour. Tonight’s Emmy Award nominees include an old theatre colleague, Greg Itzin, for his role as President Logan in FOX’s ’24.’ Itzin was critical to ‘24’s’ breakout year, in which it received 12 Emmy nominations to lead the series category. When I ran into Greg at a recent Ahmanson opening, he was the only actor among a plaza full of them, posing for pictures with fans. When I joked that he had take well to being famous, he beamed and admitted – “Loving it. Having the time of my life!” His character, who changes from a forgettable vice president to a forgettable president with behavior that doesn’t mesh with a veteran of campaigning, is explained in a mid-season plot twist as the most conflicted character in the show’s history. Suddenly he – and his First Lady Jean Smart – were at the center of a Shakespearean maelstrom. As is the case with every moment of this show – the one series I know – the entire enterprise would collapse under its own cartoon logic if it weren’t for these great actors making their characters so believable. And Itzin's character will hopefully triumph over a final round of candidates – William Shatner of "Boston Legal," Oliver Platt of ‘Huff,’ Michael Imperioli of ‘The Sopranos,’ and Alan Alda of ‘The West Wing.’ This time, however, he shouldn't need to resort to subversion.
Photo: Jean Smart and Gregory Itzin

Cut and Run

‘Post’ Traumatic. Freedom Communications, Inc., the publisher of ‘The Orange County (CA) Register’ is among the first to seek more readers by offering less to read. A snappy new six-day tab, ‘OC POST,’ is full of bite-sized stories and large ad, with ‘color on every page!’ The ad campaign for the launch – without reference to the Register or its other one-year-old weekly, SqueezeOC, includes billboards and bus shelters – without reference to the parents. In the television spots, a woman gets her first issue and becomes so excited about the concept of the trimmed news format that she immediately asks a stylist for equal treatment for her hair. However, the second tv ad suggests people may be justified in dismissing too demanding lengths in their art. After flipping through his new ‘Post,’ a male reader imagines a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that jump-cuts to the finale in minutes not hours – and still earns a standing ovation! This rush by papers to better compete with cable and internet news delivery seems ironic when, at the same time cable news is filling entire weeks with one story, and one story with only the faintest trace of factual news. This is, of course, the story of the self-confessed (and possibly insane) John Mark Karr, who, not surprisingly graced the cover of the ‘POST’s’ premiere issue.

Cruise Control

Here's Your Back End, Sumner! So Paramount says it will not renew Tom Cruise's contract because of his 'behavior.' Excuse me!? Cruise has just been saving Paramount money by generating the kind of publicity Paramount used to need a bungalow of flacks to manufacture. No, it's not bonkiness killed the deal. 'Twas money. It's always money. If MI3 had grossed what MI2 had, so far it's short about $110 million, Redstone would have kissed both Cruise cheeks north and sound on the steps of L.A.'s City Hall rather than let him get away. More likely, Redstone needs to bury a contract that gives the actor too much up front and at the back end -- again, north and south. We'll see who laughs last. But a precedent might be another L.A. institution who dumped an overpriced star thought to have grown more outspoken than productive. That institution, the Lakers, sent Shaquille O'Neill to Miami. That's the same Miami that currently has the 2006 NBA Trophy in its offices. And Happy 28th Birthday (yesterday) to Kobe Bryant. [Originally published August 25, 2006]