Around Town - LA Theatre or Why I Love Netflix

I had never really stopped to think about the fact that Los Angeles really is a theatre town...
not in the way of London or New York, with their well defined theatre districts, debuts and big productions. LA is all about small productions where the local acting populace can hone their craft. Across the city, in tiny theatres from Venice Beach to Hollywood to Downtown, you can find all kinds of plays, from the obscure to the well known.
And that's what I got on two subsequent evenings this week.
First was the well known...David Hare's "The Blue Room", a play about sex that was anything but sexy.
I liked the idea of the play with only one actor and one actress playing multiple parts that interacted in a quick succession of scenes.

The Girl (Irene) (Scene I & X)
The Cab Driver (Fred) (Scene I & II)
The Au Pair (Marie) (Scene II & III)
The Student (Anton) (Scene III & IV)
The Married Woman (Emma) (Scene IV & V)
The Politician (Charles)(Scene V & VI)
The Model (Kelly) (Scene VI & VII)
The Playwright (Robert) (Scene VII & VIII)
The Actress (Scene VIII & IX)
The Aristocrat (Malcolm) (Scene IX & X)

Considering the intimacy of the scenes, staged in the tiny Odyssey Theater in Westwood where the audience was seated no more that a few feet away from the actors, I would have thought that it would have been easy to have been drawn into the play as it progressed. Unfortunately I was bored by scene VII and just didn't give a damn about any of these characters and who they were screwing and why.

Fortunately it was a play in one act.

The next night I was off to another adventure in theater in Hollywood.

Now to drag me into Hollywood for anything is no small thing and I'm glad that I went just to remind myself that culture (good and bad) is everywhere and that the borders of the city don't end at Doheny Drive. Luckily, preceding a theater experience from hell, was a nice dinner at Cafe des Artistes, a charming restaurant with a decent frenchy menu and lovely service. After hoovering down my dinner and two much needed glasses of wine, it was off to see the "Buffalo Hole" the Arena Stage at Theatre of Arts.

Here's the description

A Dirty Bloody Black Comedy. From his outpost single wide, 30 miles from nowhere in freezing Foxholm, North Dakota, Braggert Strong awaits the arrival of his family to say their last goodbyes to a father, Patton L. Strong, Medal of Honor “winner” who has been a little less than “fatherly.” Between vicious dog bites, a mother who arrives 60 and pregnant, a sissy brother who won’t leave, and a sister who’s rode hard and put away wet, Braggert has little if no idea what he’s in for. A story of revenge, “dog food” and…amputation.

I don't even know what to say about this horrendously bad black comedy. It was insulting on so many levels, with characters so cliche that it made the playwright and lead actor, Robert Riechel Jr., just look like a smug ignoramus. The play was insulting to men, to veterans, to medal of honor winners, to fathers, to Midwesterners, etc. in a way that only a hip Hollywood writer would think was clever. But we've all seen these stock white trash characters before, so there was nothing daring or amusing in this production.

Out of politeness I didn't walk out.

Thank God for netflix so I could watch Balzac's "Cousin Bette" at home in my comfy bed after sitting through that pathetic play. Yeah, give me a well acted classic film over a wanna be edgy play any day.

Around Town - The Geffen Playhouse

I've always found it odd that the city of Los Angeles doesn't have a distinct theater district like New York or London, particularly given that this is an entertainment industry town. Actors here can easily move from stage to television to film work and you would expect LA to have a thriving theater business, but it doesn't.
Our theater choices are pretty much limited to The Ahmanson and the the Mark Taper at the Music Center in downtown LA which is 30 minute drive on the 10 freeway (on a low traffic night) or The Pantages in Hollywood for those silly big stage musicals like CATS (snore) or random small theaters dotted about town in dodgy neighborhoods that are hard to find, and worse, don't have parking.


Fortunately, on the west side of town we have the Geffen Playhouse. Conveniently located in Westwood across the street from UCLA, in a charming old Spanish style building, it's the only place close by to see a decent play.

The architecture is unpretentious and intimate and it has this charming interior courtyard where you can have a cocktail before the play.

I hadn't been to the Geffen in ages, and I ventured out last week to see The Female of the Species written by Joanna Murray-Smith

and starring Annette Bening as the Germain Greer-ish feminist author

David Arquette as the sexually ambiguous son in law

and Julian Sands in a small role, Merritt Wever, Mireille Enos and Josh Stamberg.

Here's the short review

Three-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening (Being Julia, American Beauty, The Grifters) returns to the Geffen Playhouse as Margot Mason - feminist theorist and author of such influential works as "Madame Ovary" and "The Complete Insignificance of Male Sexuality." Loosely inspired by a real-life incident, The Female of the Species begins with Margot at her country home attempting to pen her next masterpiece in the peace and quiet. Problem is, nothing's coming. Nothing, that is, except for Molly (Merritt Wever), a former student who is intent on taking Margot hostage as punishment for her mixed message ideology. Enter Margot's overlooked daughter (Mireille Enos), her simplistic son-in-law (David Arquette), her longtime publisher (Julian Sands) and a disgruntled cab driver (Josh Stamberg) ... and all of a sudden a simple kidnapping turns into a battle over who can throw the first punch and get the last word.

The in depth review from Variety is here

I thought that the play was really well written and clever and I enjoyed the subject of what Feminism has wrought, both good and bad, but this specific production was difficult to sit through. The veterans Bening, Arquette and Sands were great but Merritt Wever and Mireille Enos both overacted their parts. That's not a comment on their acting skills but on the direction by Randall Arney.

And as much as I enjoyed seeing a play in a small intimate theater with great acoustics, the acting was so loud that I felt like I was being yelled at for 95 minutes. It was painful.

I couldn't wait to get home to finish my book, Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth. I have enjoyed this book more that anything that I have ever read by Jane Austin.

The book, published in 1802, is brilliantly written with interconnected themes of marital discord and harmony, friendship, jealousy, social class and gender roles. I would loosely describe it as a literary response to Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 The Vindication of the Rights of Women. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the book is the mention of an interracial marriage which is described in such a blase manner that you would have thought that it was the norm in Georgian England.

If you haven't already read it, here's the short description from Amazon

The lively comedy of this novel in which a young woman comes of age amid the distractions and temptations of London high society belies the challenges it poses to the conventions of courtship, the dependence of women, and the limitations of domesticity. Contending with the perils and the varied cast of characters of the marriage market, Belinda strides resolutely toward independence. Admired by her contemporary, Jane Austen, and later by Thackeray and Turgenev, Edgeworth tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. The 1802 text used in this edition also confronts the difficult and fascinating issues of racism and mixed marriage, which Edgeworth toned down in later editions.

So, while I enjoyed the clever writing in Joanna Murray-Smith's play, I'm not sure that it will endure for the next 200 years like that of Maria Edgeworth.