LA Weekly

PICK BUG It’s taken 11 years for Tracy Letts’ searing play to reach L.A., via off-Broadway from its London premiere, but the wait’s been worth it. Somewhere outside Oklahoma City, middle-aged waitress Agnes White (Amy Landecker) paces her motel room awaiting the inevitable, with no idea what that is. It soon arrives in the form of a mysterious loner named Peter (Andrew Elvis Miller), who seems like a welcome alternative to Agnes’ abusive husband, Jerry (Andrew Hawkes), a paroled con who’s back in town. Agnes and Peter fall in love, sharing both Agnes’ bed and crack pipe. Their bliss is short-lived, however, as Peter becomes obsessed by the insects he believes are crawling out of his body after being planted there by government scientists. The drama unfolds partly as a piece of Grand Guignol theater, partly as a political fable but mostly as a study of romantic codependency. Director Scott Cummins and an excellent cast strip away the story’s sentimental possibilities to leave exposed a raw nerve of dread. Robert G. Smith’s motel set — neither the retro-kitsch-filled parlor of road movies nor a water-stained hell hole — compresses a psychic wasteland into a few precious square feet. Sound designer Lindsay Jones cranks up the sense of claustrophobic paranoia with the rumble of semis and the chop of helicopter blades, while Leigh Allen’s light plot fills the room with a foreboding chiaroscuro. Lost Angels Theatre Company at the Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., W. Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru June 3. (866) 811-4111.  (Steven Mikulan)

CHARLOTTE: LIFE? OR THEATER? This affecting production deserves a less self-important title. Based on the life and paintings of Charlotte Salomon (played by Megan Goodchild with endearing wide-eyed conviction) — a German-Jewish woman from a family plagued by suicides, she was killed shortly after her imprisonment in a Nazi-run concentration camp — Elise Thoron (book and lyrics) and Gary S. Fagin’s (music) “opera in three colors” slides gracefully back to the lives of Charlotte’s parents (Michele Greene and Bruce Katzman) and grandparents (Robert Lesko and Dorothy Constantine), in order to depict how who we are stems largely from whom we come from. The opera is fundamentally about the relationship of life to art, and should put to rest the commonplace that art is trivial compared to real things that matter. Here, art has a direct relationship to the hardships and agonies that accompany life. Charlotte’s paintings both ensnare those truths and provide her refuge from them. They appear throughout the action on Jack Forrestel’s beautiful set of screens and polished platforms. The play also repeatedly refers to its own theatrical devices, in case we forget that theater is also an art form. There are also many references to the power and purpose of music in general, and of opera in particular. A singing instructor (Andreas Beckett) wearing the infamous yellow Jewish star gives voice lessons to Charlotte’s stepmother (a gorgeous performance by Stasha Surdyke), underscoring the connection between art and inner truth. This argument is easier to sell when hunger and Nazis populate the backdrop, and life is clearly a moment-to-moment proposition. But to convince Congress for better arts funding will take more than a committee of artists saying how important their work is. And that’s the paradox, in theme and tone, of Louis Fantasia’s loving and lovely production. That, and the need in this opera for more powerhouse voices. MET THEATER, 1089 Oxford Ave., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru May 26. (800) 838-3006. (Steven Leigh Morris)


FOOD FOR FISH Adam Szymkowicz hangs his whimsical, semipoetic story on the hook of a plot resembling The Three Sisters, although parallels between Anton Chekhov’s characters and Szymkowicz’s three siblings who live together in Manhattan and pine to move to New Jersey should probably not be pushed too insistently. The story revolves around a young, suicidal writer named Bobbie (Joe Egender) who folds chapters of his novel-in-progress into wine bottles and places them in the Hudson River. He also takes to New York’s streets at night to kiss appreciative women he has studied. Meanwhile, his novel manipulates the lives of Barbara (Justin Alston), Alice (Inger Tudor) and Sylvia (Mandi Moss), who miss their late father so much that they’ve kept his coffin in their apartment a year after his death. Barbara’s husband, Dexter (Lauren Letherer), is drifting apart from her, and is drawn instead to her sister Alice — a science researcher who requires her first-time dates to provide her with DNA swabs and blood samples. This is the kind of play in which the writer Bobbie’s characters not only talk back to him but fall in love with him. It’s also the kind whose gender-bending includes the playwright’s strategy of having Barbara played by a male and Dexter by a woman. (Director Heather Holloway’s production takes this a step further by casting Barbara and Alice with African-Americans, and Sylvia with a Caucasian.) Sometimes these conceits stray into the no-man’s land called Cute, but overall Szymkowicz has written a refreshingly perceptive work about how love, work and interior narratives act to both blind and free the individual. Holloway directs a charming cast whose members grow on us without pandering to our expectations. THEATRE OF NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru June 2. (323) 856-8611 or www.­theatreofnote.com. (Steven Mikulan)

(Photo by Palladino Images)

FOWL A high-concept, low-content spectacle, writer-directors Robbie Daniels Jr. and Ryan Heffington’s musical is ostensibly about a bastard chicken (Daniels) who hatches three bastard chicks (Tara Avise, Lou Heffington and Nina McCneely), loses them, then finds them (in jail), sort of. All very touching. Daniels, a.k.a. Jer Ber Jones, is an unmitigated ham in drag, cavorting around the world stage (which here is about the size of a walk-in closet), holding a curling-iron wand and crooning tongue-in-cheek amidst little head jerks that are really choreographed to resemble small epileptic seizures. Heffington’s gloriously feathery costumes yield to silks and fetish chic. Avise, Heffington and McCneely’s dancing is simply breathtaking for its vitality and precision. Entering the basement venue, you’ll pass Richard Wainwright’s Nest Installation — a sculpture that’s just a sliver of the care that’s been taken with the tinsel-and-glue decorations. Beneath all the parody is, I think, a musical about hot blood and cold hearts, home and homelessness. Despite the campiness, the relentless pounding of the techno pop dance numbers makes a point about the world grinding on, and grinding up its fowl inhabitants. It’s terrified of taking itself, or anything, too seriously. Yet all through this low-tech glamor fest, underwear is showing. And this is really about what lies beneath. Peekaboo. Casita Del Campo’s CAVERN CLUB THEATER, 1920 Hyperion Ave., Silver Lake; Fri.-Sun., 9 p.m.; thru May 13. (323) 969-2530. (Steven Leigh Morris)