4. John Pollono's messy, contrived but explosive one-act, Small Engine Repair, for Rogue Machine Theatre, about a testosterone-fueled late-night meeting of buddies in a car-repair shop. Through the layers of its character manipulations, it exposed the workings and misworkings of modern social aspects, from the Internet to the treatment of women, directed with almost excruciating precision by Andrew Block.
3. David Harrower's Blackbird featuring Sam Anderson and Corryn Cummins as, respectively, a convicted child molester and the victim who returns to confront him years later, presented by Rogue Machine and directed by Robin Larsen.
PHOTO BY VALENTINA NEWMAN
Trinidad Gonzalez, left, Jorge Becker and Mariana Munoz in Teatro en el Blanco's Neva
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2. The Hollywood Fringe tent, a huge canopy with a bar and late-night karaoke, located for the 10-day summer festival in the Santa Monica Boulevard parking lot of Art/Works. What our theater lacks is a centralized watering hole, and here was one, at least for 10 days, where the community could imagine it actually was a community: drinking, networking, discussing what they were doing and what they'd seen. It was like social media, but without the media.
1. In the Radar L.A. fest in June, Chile's Teatro el Blanco presented writer-director Guillermo Calderón's three-character drama, Neva, about the anxiety of Anton Chekhov's widow, Olga Knipper, wrestling with guilt from playing at the Moscow Art Theatre while her husband was dying of tuberculosis in Yalta, and while the Russian revolution was fomenting. As Olga, Trinidad Gonzalez gave a performance with the full blast of range, from slapstick comedy to stridency to the tenderest of pathos, and the production, bathed in soft candlelight, was nothing short of a conjuring.