Theater Reviews: K2, The Train Driver
Also, Venice, On Emotion, FDR and more
KIDNAPPED BY CRAIGSLIST: THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT It has been a mere three years since Katie Goan and Nitra Gutierrez's original collection of Craigslist-inspired comedy sketches premiered in New York, and only two since director Lori Evans Taylor's L.A. production bowed for TheSpyAnts Theatre Company. In online-cultural terms, however, those 36 months might as well be a lifetime. Because, even in Taylor's recycled Halloween edition, which has been partially rewritten by Goan with a decidedly gothic spin, the show's weird and wacky assortment of cranks, kinks and jaw-dropping confessions of perversity — pulled from the site's actual postings — today feels like rather tepid and everyday online fare. Perhaps that's because during the interim the show has been upstaged by Craigslist itself, which in 2007 expanded from classifieds to the crime blotter in a series of user-perpetrated, headline-grabbing tragedies that have themselves become commonplace. And though the director steers clear of those real-life horrors, Taylor's transfer of her original staging's carnival sideshow to the creep show (courtesy of Adam Haas Hunter's effective lights and spiderweb-festooned, haunted-house set) turns out to be more than just seasonally fitting. MC Amy Motta is back as the Crypt-Keeper, this time in eye-popping, mistress-of-the-dark fetish drag (by costumer Marina Mouhibian). Returning as well are some of 2008's crowd-pleasers, including Motta's hilarious "I Love You. Leave My Butt Alone," a folk-song complaint about her boyfriend's penchant for anal sex, and "I Like You so Much I Farted," in which Jennifer Etienne Eckert mourns a dream date gone bad due to a bout of uncontrolled flatulence. Also returning is a crack ensemble in an unrelentingly frenetic fusillade of 40 hit-and-miss comedy skits and musical numbers whose batting average makes this 90-minute show feel a half-hour too long. Elephant Lab Theatre, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; call for schedule; through Nov. 13. (323) 860-8786, thespyants.com (Bill Raden)
THE QUARRY John Markland's quiet and largely uneventful play captures the awkward silences and elliptical exchanges between disaffected youth in Midwestern America. As two taciturn teenagers chug beers and converse by a waterlogged, disused quarry, the image of a small-town, dead-end existence is lightly sketched. Pete (played with deep intensity by Zachary Shields) is a tough loner, prone to goading and bullying his friend Gary (Max Barsness). With numerous cartoony, homemade tattoos decorating his arms, fingers and torso, plus his incessant chain-smoking and fascination for guns, Pete is a closed book you don't want to open. Gary's heading for college and urges his mate to visit his girlfriend Jessie's (Addison Timlin) hip preacher father, RD (Nicholas Guest). Pete does, and gains some guidance from the kindly father figure. In the process, he becomes entangled in Jessie's dark secret. Markland's direction of his own work lacks the necessary distance and perspective to open up the material for greater impact. Important plot points have to be inferred from the sparse script and it certainly doesn't help that all of the actors, save Timlin, mumble their lines. Straining to hear them in this small, deep space is almost like eavesdropping on a conversation next door. The penultimate scene may or may not contain a creepy undertone that propels the tragic finale — it's hard to tell. Markland squanders the opportunity to have both that scene and the preacher's final sermon impart the drama they deserve. Moth Theatre. 4359 Melrose Ave., L.A.; Fri.-Sun., 8 p.m. (no perfs Halloween weekend; added mat Sun., Nov. 14, 2 p.m.); through Nov. 14. brownpapertickets.com/event/126184. (Pauline Adamek)
SORT OF A LOVE STORY Joseph Bologna and Richard Krevolin have written sort of a play, sort of directed by Bologna. It's not unusual for married stars to join forces, as Bologna and wife Renée Taylor do here, acting together on the stage, but it's odd to find the wife playing her husband's mother. On a nearly bare stage, the two treat us to the fiction that: a) this is the first performance of a workshop production; and b) Ms. Taylor is not an actress. Taylor plays a fantasist obsessed with Ginger Rogers (she calls herself Gin) who was seduced and impregnated at age 15, and reluctantly gave up the baby (predictably named Fred) for adoption, before launching a career as a paid escort. Meanwhile, Fred (Bologna) is an incorrigible kid whose great ambition is to be sent up the river to Sing Sing. A failed heist wins him his dream. But he's obsessed with finding the mother who abandoned him, and of course he does. After many supposedly comic misadventures, they fall into hard luck. He becomes a drug addict, she a hopeless drunk. This is played out in a series of sitcom one-liners, till the ludicrous, inspirational ending. What were they thinking? El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 3 p.m., matinee Oct. 20, 2 p.m.; through Oct. 24. (866) 811-4111. elportaltheatre.com. (Neal Weaver)
GO THE TRAIN DRIVER South African playwright Athol Fugard's plays have dealt with the havoc wrought in his country by apartheid, but his more recent works also often possess the feel of a ghost story, as they grow to encompass the guilt and grief that were the legacy of his homeland's decades of racial inequity. This is particularly true in his powerful new play, in which the spirits of the forgotten dead are all around us, unseen. As he drives his locomotive through the black shantytown area of the city, Roelf (Morlan Higgins) accidentally runs over a mother and infant, after the mother commits suicide by stepping onto the tracks before Roelf can stop. There's nothing the train driver could have done to save them, but he is consumed with guilt over his role in the death. At the graveyard where indigent, unidentified bodies are buried, Roelf searches for the dead mother's grave so he can expiate his guilt. Elderly, impoverished grave digger Simon (Adolphus Ward) is sympathetic, but also desperate to send Roelf home, before the white driver's presence in the black region of the country causes disaster. Although Fugard's plot is narratively smaller than what is found in many of his other plays, the overall mood of sorrow and resigned, barely controlled rage at how the universe is arranged is powerfully palpable. A deep-seated, thought-provoking pessimism about men's nature is constantly evident. Director Stephen Sachs' character-driven production is stunning, from the dusty squalor of Jeff McLaughlin's desolate, gravel-covered shanty set to the dense, evocative acting work. Higgins' mingled rage and sorrow — anger over being forced to kill someone he didn't know, along with his grief over the pair's death — is powerful, but it's Ward's slightly ironic, underplayed turn as the grave digger that captures attention every moment he's onstage. Fugard has written that the play is a metaphor for the moral blindness of an overclass that has ignored the plight of the hopeless — but the play cunningly concludes with a tragic coda suggesting that, to the underclass, even white guilt is a luxury that harms more than it heals. Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hlywd. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Dec. 12. (323) 663-1525. (Paul Birchall)
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