Theater Reviews: Echo One-Act Festival, Pope Joan, Taking Over

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Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Wednesday, Jan 28 2009

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REVERB Leslye Headland’s sobering dramedy gives new meaning to the term “dysfunctional relationship.” Dorian (Wes Whitehead) is a struggling musician in L.A.’s rock music world on the verge of the “break” that will propel him to stardom. But his self-absorption and personality quirks often put him at odds with bandmates Hank (Brandon Scott) and Shane (Patrick Graves). However, the squabbles with his fellow musicians pale in comparison to the volatile complexities that inform Dorian’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend, June (Melissa Stephens). Both are ensnared in a grotesque attraction for each other fueled by lust, gratuitous physical brutality and shared, lacerating pain. When Dorian’s Bible-thumping sister, Lydia (Laila Ayad), informs him that his father is dying, Dorian is ultimately forced into a harrowing confrontation with his own demons. First-class performances and Headland’s smart direction don’t quite compensate for a script that’s cleverly written but is often too wordy and static. The characters are compelling and well sketched, yet the playwright doesn’t delve perceptively enough into their personalities to make their emotional and psychological fault lines truly convincing. Working Stage Theatre, 1516 N. Gardner St., West Hollywood; Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; thru Feb. 22. (323) 630-3016. An Iama Theatre Company production. (Lovell Estell III)

GO TAKING OVER From the way he walks across the aisle in front of the stage, you’d think that Danny Hoch has a lumbering gait, until he springs onto the raised stage as though his shoes had launchers in their heels. Hoch’s one-man show is worth seeing if only for the Puck-like nimbleness he uses to portray a series of men and women from a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Physical dexterity is matched by verbal, with his hypnotic renditions of rapid-fire local cadences. Hoch’s characters include an ex-con trying to hustle a job from an indie-film crew setting up on the streets. He finally offers to move boxes for free just to show his mom, who’s watching from a nearby brownstone window, that he’s needed. The parodies are broad, vicious and tender at the same time, as in the case of an African-American woman who sits on her stoop keeping an eye on the local kids, and a Dominican taxi dispatcher who verbally assaults the Puerto Rican and Mexican cabbies under his charge in Spanish (translations provided on screen). His tenderly spoken bigotry is a comedy act that would get him thrown out of an office building in most American cities were he to unleash his torrent from a different post. One character includes Hoch himself, responding to letters of complaint that all the white guys in his show are assholes: Leading that list is Stewart Gottberg, the investor-owner of a new luxury high-rise assuring his prospective clients that the residents of the “buffer” building next door — apparently mandated by some “affordable-housing” legislation that actually ushers in gentrification — won’t be using their spa or swimming pool. Hoch, as himself, also recites, with muted irony, viewer complaints that his show has no message. What do you want us to do — stop progress? they ask. Perhaps his show is just a showcase dancing around a plight. He claims that the blood of a fallen gang member is more “authentic” than an organic artichoke being sold in the Whole Foods market now occupying the site where the gang member died. But since he started touring his show about gentrification, an elephant has walked across his stage, and his determination to ignore it places what should be the hippest event in town way behind the curve. Since the economic meltdown, loans on construction of the luxury high-rises he finds to be such a symbol of numbing, sterile consumerism have themselves been mostly frozen, while the new president is appealing to us to reconsider former habits of debt-based conspicuous consumption and narcissistic isolation that have driven our county into its current crisis. For the first time in 15 years, rents are actually dropping. This is the paradox of creating a topical show in an era when the topics change even more quickly than Hoch’s turn-on-a-dime impersonations. Tony Taccone directs. Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 6:30 p.m. (added perf Feb. 22, 1 p.m., replaces 6:30 p.m. perf); thru February 22. (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org. (Steven Leigh Morris)

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VIBRATING SUN A rock band named Vibrasol performs with pole dancers (Goddess 13) performing in front of them. Each group — according to their creative statements in the program — have lofty artistic ambitions, but what they’ve put on stage, though entertaining, is actually quite commonplace. And though the event is billed as a collaboration, the band doesn’t play to the dancers, nor do the dancers seem to dance to the music. Each group is doing its own thing; only occasionally does a moment of synchronicity emerge. If this were happening in a club or bar around town, it could be fun and engaging — with a beer in hand, we could marvel on how damn good that electric violin player is. But a theater environment, with the audience welded to their seats, calls for some kind of story or at least a concept. Everyone in this rock concert is talented, and the potential for a rich theatrical experience is there, but no one has engineered a show that is more than the sum of its parts. Unknown Theater, 1110 N. Seward Ave., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 8 p.m.; thru Feb. 1. (323) 466-7781. (Luis Reyes)