Theater Reviews: Eclipsed, Naked Boys Singing, Scarecrow, Underground Woman
Also, The Mystery of Irma Vep, Shining City, Gogol Project and more
GO THE NEED TO KNOW In a much-evolved solo show that she first presented at Burbank’s tiny Sidewalk Studio Theatre seven years ago, and which she’s been touring ever since, April Fitzsimmons has grown into the role. Given that her show is autobiographical, this is a bit like saying she’s grown into herself, which is also probably true. Perhaps the show has taught her more about the complexities of life, but it’s also taught her how to act. Her impersonations of family and friends, her vocal range, her physical dexterity and her comedic timing are now more fully accomplished, and a scene referring to Obama has been added. What starts as a domestic romp from her childhood in Montana and her fling with a man engaged to somebody else, slides into an adventure monitoring Russia and the Middle East as part of a U.S. Air Force intelligence team. Partly to spite her father and her family’s Navy heritage (her father refused to support her wish to pursue an acting career in L.A.), she joined the Air Force, and found herself in the south of Italy, working as an intelligence analyst. Even then, she had a raw morality that simply bristled at evidence of nuclear materials being illegally trafficked across foreign lands, evidence that never made it into the press, because the “need-to-know” standard, and U.S. relations with those foreign governments, prevailed against it. That bristling was also the germinal fuel of Fitzsimmons’ eventual antiwar activism: It’s not wars that protect our freedom, it’s the Bill of Rights, she tells a heckler at a beachfront, antiwar ceremony honoring U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Having marched with an M-16, and been privy to the byzantine workings of the military-intelligence network, Fitzsimmons’ has earned the right to stage an agitprop performance. She describes being a teenager in the south of Italy, living on the estate of an older Mafioso as refuge from her barracks. He sidles up to her and complains of his “tensseeon,” that the cure is “amoooree.” Yet Fitzsimmons flips this cheesy pickup line into poetry, when, at show’s end, she speaks of the tensions in the world, and how the only cure is amore. Steven Anderson directs. Actors Gang, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City; Thurs., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; through October 24. (310) 838-4264. (Steven Leigh Morris)
SCARECROW Playwright Don Nigro’s Midwestern Gothic makes for an uneasy fit on a legitimate stage. Perhaps that’s because the one-act psychological horror began life as the script for a 1979 experimental video shot at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, in which the cinematic, windswept vistas of Iowan corn fields stood in for the roiling subconscious of Nigro’s sexually frustrated young heroine, Cally (Linda Tomassone). In director Antony Berrios’ production, those fields are necessarily pruned to a dozen, desiccated stalks (on designer Vincent Albo’s farmhouse set), thereby diminishing the figurative effect and throwing the poetic onus onto Nigro’s humorless, derivative text. The tale deals with the troubled, claustrophobic relationship between 18-year-old Cally and her reclusive, repressive, evil-obsessed mother, Rose (Deborah Lemen) — think Carrie and Margaret White, albeit without Stephen King’s telekinetic fireworks. Their chief contention is over boys and sex, both of which Rose considers ultimate threats to be kept apart from her virginal daughter with a shotgun. Rose’s vigilance cannot extend into the adjacent corn fields, however, into which Cally daily disappears to rendezvous with the mysterious Nick (Ian Jerrell), a beguiling drifter who may either be a figment of her romantic fantasies or the malevolent incarnation of Rose’s worst fears. Both Tomassone and Lemen acquit themselves well in the melodramatic clinches (though Cally appears more salon-groomed than corn-fed), and while Jerrell delivers a measure of dash, he misses the menace that might stoke Nigro’s otherwise suspense-starved story. Avery Schreiber Theatre, 11050 Magnolia Blvd., N.Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through October 17. (818) 859-3160. (Bill Raden)
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GO SHINING CITY Conor McPherson’s pristine study in urban loneliness, first produced in 2004, unfolds in a Dublin walkup where a sexually confused therapist, Ian (William Dennis Hurley), listens, and listens, and listens some more to the half completed sentences spewed by his despondent client, John (Morlan Higgins), who keeps bursting into paroxysms of sobbing over the loss of his wife, killed in an auto accident. Making matters worse, the couple were estranged at the time, and what will eventually unfold is John’s story of his blazingly pathetic and unconsumed adultery with someone he met at a party — his blunderings, his selfishness, and his need not so much for sex but for the validation that comes from human contact, which his now–late wife couldn’t provide to his satisfaction. John is haunted by her ghost, and Ian must ever so gently tell him that what he saw or heard was real, but ghosts simply aren’t. (That gently yet smugly articulated theory will be challenged, along with every other pretense of what’s real, and what isn’t.) While listening to his forlorn client, and answering with such kindness and sensitivity, Ian is himself going through hell: A former priest, he must now explain to his flummoxed wife (Kerrie Blaisdell, imagine the multiple reactions of a cat that’s just been thrown out a window) that he’s leaving her, and their child, though he will move mountains to continue to support them financially. Ian’s plight becomes a tad clearer with the visit of a male prostitute (Benjamin Keepers) in yet another pathetic and almost farcical endeavor to connect with another human being. Director Stephen Sachs’ meticulous attention to detail manifests itself in the specificity with which Ian places his chair, in the sounds of offstage footsteps on the almost abandoned building’s stairwell (sound design by Peter Bayne), in the ebbs and flows of verbiage and silence, in Higgins’ hulking tenderness, and in the palate of emotions reflected in the slender Hurley’s withering facial reactions. This is a moving portrait, in every sense: delicate, comical, desolate and profoundly humane. It’s probably a bit too long, the denouement lingers to margins of indulgence, but that’s a quibble in a production of such rare beauty. Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through December 19. (323) 663-1525. (Steven Leigh Morris)
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