Theater Reviews: The Unexpected Man, Influence, Old Glory, Dreamgirls

Also, Control Me/Parents Who Love Too Much, Don Juan Dispenso and more

Comments (0) Thursday, Mar 11 2010

GO BUG The set design in USVAA's production of Tracy Letts' play is uncredited, but whoever littered Agnes' (Maribeth Monroe) motel-room home with bottles of Boone's Farm and Maker's Mark (empty but likely kept as a memento of an "upscale" night), and decorated it with a dorm-room refrigerator and once-white lamp shades that emit a dingy bedside glow, deserves a big ol' country music round of applause. Letts knows how to orchestrate multicharacter vehicular collisions on emotionally desolate Okie roads (as in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning August: Osage County), but the crash in Bug is particularly spectacular. The hurtle toward that wreck clips right along, gathering the speed and intensity of a cranked-up trucker; then the abrupt change in tone after such a high-octane death race feels too calm, and the climax is, well, anticlimactic. Don't mind that too much, as the acting more than compensates. Monroe, with a wrong-side-of-the-tracks voice made more ragged by cheap cocaine drain, is a tightly wound ball of pent-up loneliness and fear; her descent eventually leaves her backed onto the corner of her bed like a feral cat. She's the star here, but as her newfound protector and lover, Christopher Sweeney matches her degeneration with tics that gradually become a manic flurry of paranoia. As Agnes' just-paroled ex-husband, Casey Sullivan's brute swagger is compounded by his gittin' religion. The play is a darkly comedic commentary on the murky role the government plays in wars both abroad and at home, and director Keith Jeffreys' subtle touches — whirring helicopters, a doctor who hits the crack pipe — are so effective at drawing the audience into this shifty world, you'll likely leave with a niggling urge to crush the bugs in Agnes' room. USVAA, 10858 Culver Blvd., Culver City; Thurs.-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through March 20. (310) 559-2116. usvaa.org/bug. (Rebecca Haithcoat)

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CLOUD NINE Distinguished by cross-gender casting, Caryl Churchill's 1979 play starts as a penetrating lampoon of gender and class stereotypes among upper-class Brits in 1880 colonialist Africa. (Evoking African wildlife, designer Christine Ownby's sound furnishes a droll prologue in an otherwise nondescript production design.) Stuffy and myopic, Clive (Joyanna Crouse) holds rigid ideas about the place of women and blacks, so he's oblivious to his son Edward's (Lindsay Evans) effeminacy, his servant's (Chad Evans) simmering rage, and his wife, Betty's (Thomas Colby) obsession with their libertine houseguest (Derek Long). In Act 2, the time frame shifts to the 1970s; social and sexual repression remain the themes, but the web of events ensnaring the contemporary characters, while still farcical, becomes more recognizably real. Carnal shenanigans — and the emotional chaos that accompanies them — proliferate. These involve Betty and her children, Edward and Victoria — held over from Act I. (Though 100 years have elapsed, the trio has only aged 25.) Directed by Colby and Lisa Coombs, the production's opening half is shrill, flat and lacking crispness, with only Colby comically consistent as the feather-brained Betty. But the show improves considerably when recalibrated to the present. The performers have switched roles. Though miscast as Clive, Crouse springs to life as a lesbian enamored of a married woman. Lindsay Evans delivers a nuanced portrayal of an unhappy wife at a crossroads. Chad Evans as the vulnerable grown-up Edward, and Dorrie Braun as his lonely mother, are also effective. Lyric Theatre, 520 N. La Brea Ave., L.A.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through March 28. (323) 939-9220. lyrictheatrela.com. (Deborah Klugman)

CONTROL ME/PARENTS WHO LOVE TOO MUCH Playwright Michael Sargent (Hollywood Burning, The Projectionist) has an eye for oddballs. Merciless toward the delusional, and wary of the Man, he spins his suspicions into outlandish satire. These two world-premiere one-acts, loudly directed by Chris Covics, both scream "Beware!" The first, "Parents Who Love Too Much," starts quietly as the nine-person ensemble slips one by one into the theater lobby and sets up chairs for their eponymous support group. Their name is a misnomer, or really a self-mollifying feint — each of the parents is there (often ordered by the court) because the children they adore have met with bad ends. Says one, she'd rather let her kid live with the aborigines than visit her ex on the weekend — not that she knows where her disappeared daughter is, of course. The gang swaps stories, fights break out, their therapist, Cherokee (Tina Preston), fights to be heard, and it all feels aimlessly outré. "Control Me," the longer of the two, is set in a '90s-era battered Manhattan radio studio (Kovics' set design stretches asbestos panels across the stage, recalling the opening credits of Star Wars). Long John Silver (Bruce Katzman) and charm-school queen Cherry Rogers (Maria O'Brien) broadcast shows about Waco and Area 51 to the after-midnight conspirators and crackpots hovering for the inside scoop. The co-hosts agree with guests, who belt out, "The CIA, FBI and Mob are all the same!" Tonight, they have as guests two supposed CIA sex slaves (Jaqueline Wright and Andrew McReynolds), one hanger-on (Dan Oliverio) and an attention-seeking psychologist (Suzanne Elizabeth Fletcher), who would validate anyone except her offstage overweight daughter, who's locked herself in the studio bathroom. Again, Sargent dishes out bitter one-liners and a glimpse of the need to feel special for anything. Like his characters, Sargent is full of wild tales, but he needs a more compelling reason for us to hear them. There's a dark tide swelling beneath these two pieces, and on the surface, some very fine acting. The result, though, feels as shapeless as the surf crashing onto the rocks. Unknown Theater, 1110 N. Seward St., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 6 p.m.; through March 27. (323) 466-7781. (Amy Nicholson)