Behaving Badly: Bad Apples, Empanada for a Dream and Slice, Reviewed

With that, Villa looks back on his childhood and young adulthood with his fierce mother and grandmother — his mother threw his father out of the apartment house for being an alcoholic — and an array of dynamic uncles, all now gone.

Villa's performance recalls those of John Leguizamo, for its fluid vivacity and street lingo. It's half celebratory, particularly with passages devoted to food and family gatherings. But there's a sinister undercurrent that manifests itself as a complaint — not unlike Lt. Scott's in Bad Apples. Where Scott blames Rumsfeld and Cheney for actively creating the environment for abuse, Villa blames his grandmother, whom he unrepentantly says he loathes, for encouraging the drug-dealing environment that condemned her sons and grandsons to untimely, violent deaths. "Why did you allow it?" he asks her.

PHOTO BY CHANTEL LUCIER

Juan Francisco Villa in Empanada for a Dream

Location Info

Map

Atwater Village Theatre

3269 Casitas Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Category: Theaters

Region: Northeast L.A.

Photos

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

Related Content

• Bad Apples
  October 18, 2012
• Henry Rollins: George Bush's War Is Still With Us
  April 8, 2013
• Theater to See in L.A. This Week, Including Jeff Goldblum as a Writing Teacher
  October 25, 2012
• Theater to See in L.A. This Week, Including a Triumphant Return of a Latter-Day Judy Garland
  March 28, 2013
• Canelé: 99 Essential Restaurants 2013
  February 28, 2013

More About

• Abu Ghraib
• Donald H. Rumsfeld
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Theater Reviews
• Musicals

"It was God's will," she replies in Spanish — a line that predates Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's similar accounting for pregnancy from rape. It's also a line that embodies expedience and passivity. As Bill Maher recently quipped, "If everything is God's will, why put out a fire? Or wipe your ass?"

Villa somehow sidestepped the drug trade, but that doesn't make him any less guilty by association. This "guilt" is the reason for his show-closing "confession," too histrionic to be reflective, or at least reliably reflective.

It is nonetheless a beautiful performance, thanks in large part to Pablo Santiago's delicate lighting design and Hana Sooyeon Kim's set. These enclose Villa within mental walls, here made physical but with twiglike cracks through which light blazes. There's also a wooden table, as though he's in some Colombian prison. And in many ways, he is.

Metamorphosis Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Paul Kikuchi's Slice at South Pasadena's Fremont Centre Theatre. It's a child's-eye comic book play set in 14th-century Japan. It too deals with the capriciousness of power but with the animated tone of a Disney flick.

Kai Matsuda (Scott Keiji Takeda) defies his mom (Emily Kuroda) by ignoring the responsibilities of their armor-repair business and devoting his efforts instead to the heroic task of crafting a sword for Lord Ito (Mike Hagiwara). Enter beautiful Fumi Tanaka (Elizabeth Ho), on the run from rival lord Watanabe (Aaron Takahashi), and we have a sitcom Diary of Anne Frank.

Takahashi weighs in with a funny, droll-pompous cameo as Ito's guard, and the ensemble is fine under Jeff Liu's staging. I simply couldn't locate an allegory, or a story worth caring about.

EMPANADA FOR A DREAM | Written and performed by Juan Francisco Villa | Latino Theatre Company at Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., dwntwn. | Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. | Through Nov. 18 (866) 811-4111, thelatic.org

BAD APPLES | By Jim Leonard, Rob Caris and Beth Thornley | Presented by Circle X Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village | Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m. | Sun., 4 p.m. | Through Dec. 1. | (323) 644-1929, atwatervillagetheatre.com.

SLICE | By Paul Kikuchi | Presented by Metamorphosis Theatre at the Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena | Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. | Through Nov. 18. (877) MTC-8777, metamorphosistheatre.org, fremontcentretheatre.com.