Stone Cold Pimpin'

SAINTS PRESERVE US
TED MILLS, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
February 28, 2006 12:00 AM
Westmont College adds yet another bizarre chapter to Santa Barbara's theater scene with its current production of Erik Ehn's "The Saint Plays."
The chance to perform four of these short works is a coup of sorts for the theater department -- even more so considering one of the plays derives directly from workshopping with the students themselves. Needless to say, this section is a world premiere.
According to the playwright, he has written almost 100 short plays based on the Catholic saints, from 40-minute pieces to short, wordless tableaux, with more to come.
Some are hagiographies, while others are "exploded biographies" -- a phrase he never really defines, but, after watching Friday night's performance, must allude to the hundreds of small pieces of narrative that will never get put back together again.

Though Mr. Ehn's writings come with fabulous word of mouth, and he is definitely reaching for the gold ring, a lot of this night's work remained under a cloud of confusion. These are difficult plays made more so by awful acoustics in the empty Porter Theatre.
Without a set and with the stage pared back to the three breeze-block walls, words dissipated in the air like smoke (ironically, the walls were covered with words and phrases, most illegible.)
Poetry is present in these works, but a lot of gaps in the dialogue needed to be filled in.
It's not that you need a degree in religious studies to know all the saints presented here. After a brief song, we are introduced to "Wholly Joan's," the first play, based on Joan of Arc (played by Amber Angelo). Mr. Ehn focuses on the voices inside her head (played by the ensemble, whispering, murmuring, running about) and the two guards who discuss her execution.
Somewhere along the way, Saint Joan, who was fond of dressing as a man and who wears black blazer and slacks onstage here, morphs into Hamlet, who is a man, but is played by a woman. Then begins the most involving section of the "The Saint Plays," devoted to Saint Vincent de Paul.
Saint Vincent, according to the program, was a French contemporary of Shakespeare. A peasant's son who studied theology, he was captured by pirates, but escaped after leading the master to God.
Mr. Ehn proceeds to mash up Saint Vincent's biography and "Hamlet," creating a variation on a theme by Shakespeare that should delight fans of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" and Heiner Mueller's "The Hamletmachine."
He imagines an alternative reality in which Hamlet and Vincent are actually twins separated at birth. Ophelia, pregnant with Hamlet's child, fakes her death, a ruse set up by the Queen to protect the unborn child. Instead, to a nunnery Ophelia goes, to begin a lineage that ends in modern times, way out west.
The 14th Ophelia (Heather Bancroft) finds this secret history in a box delivered by UPS to her ranch, and relates the tale over a fireside coffee with her fellow ranchhands.
Hamlet and Vincent meet mid-ocean, in that pirate-borne epiphany that exists in the linear no-man's-land of acts four and five in Shakespeare's play. Vincent, played by James Caldwell, swaps roles with Hamlet, who can now live with Ophelia. Vincent then becomes the changed Prince who returns with a new (saintly?) outlook on life, and is promptly killed for it. But what would a saint's life be without an untimely death?
The second half of "The Saint Plays" returns to the 20th century with the tale of Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe (James Caldwell again), a Polish priest who, after successful missionary work in Japan and India, wound up back in Poland and from there, Auschwitz, for organizing opposition to the Nazis. He offered to die in place of another prisoner, Gajowniczek (Carlo Moss).
As complex as the Saint Vincent piece, the Saint Maximilian section suffers from the worst sound, and while the general outline of the work can be discerned after reading the program, other characters can only be understood after running to the Internet upon returning home.
One example: Sumner LeVeque plays Father Zygmunt Rusczak, who was the camp survivor to relate Saint Maximilian's fate. Erin Brehm's appearance as Maximilian's vision of the Virgin Mary only makes sense after reading the priest's biography (fortunately, in this case, not exploded).
The Saint George section that finishes off the evening is completely abstract in idea and staging; those expecting a dragon have come to the wrong place. It also feels the most inconsequential, and a weak finale to the evening .
Unlike most drama workshop experiences, Mr. Ehn's work with the students of Westmont's Theatre Arts Department actually produces the best performance of the night, and that just may be the best reason to recommend "The Saint Plays."
Nobody says Westmont makes for easy theater, but unless audiences brush up on Shakespeare and crack open their leatherbound "Lives of the Saints," it's definitely difficult going.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Headline-based 'Brown Baby' favors melodrama over characters
TED MILLS, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
February 22, 2006 10:15 AM
An essential part of our state's economy, illegal immigration is the dark shadow that capital casts when laws and regulations are bent or are not enforced. Illegal workers look at Americans and see the life they'd like to lead; Americans look back and see straight through the men and women who do the menial jobs or they see an amassed threat. A porous border, now more dangerous with the inclusion of the dubious "Minutemen" weekend warriors, is all that separates "us" from "them." And both people may be more similar than we think.
Carlos Morton's "Brown Baby" at UCSB Performing Arts Theatre comes professing its timeliness with a story ripped from today's headlines, as they say. Only these headlines have been in the paper for years now -- a situation that seems unlikely to change unless it's going to get worse.
Maria (Victoria Ramos), with daughter Silvia (Aja Naomi King) in tow, has to leave their hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico, when her husband is gunned down by police for having ties to the left-wing opposition party. Pregnant with his child, Maria seeks out the help of the rich Doña Victoria de los Santos (Tiffany Rose Brown). Maria needs passage to America; Doña Victoria can help for a price. Indebted to the price of $3,000, Maria believes that her benefactor will get her work. What we know already is that Doña Victoria is conspiring to keep Maria just south of the San Diego border to sell off her baby in the American black market.

Enter Bill and Lori Sanderson, an upper middle-class couple in their late 30s. Lori wants a child, but is most probably infertile. She's been tested and injected and studied and bled by science, and is now in the position where a fly-by-night agency headed by Will Eaton (Jewels Eubanks) makes a quick adoption sound like the best choice. Never mind that to Bill the organization sounds dodgy, as well as expensive. Lori wants the baby, and if the mother doesn't want the child out of shame, then the couple are giving a child the best chance in life it can get.
But Will Eaton is married to Doña Victoria, who is holding young mothers just like Maria in a hideaway called "the crib." At the end of the first half, Maria has been left in San Diego with Silvia, and Doña Victoria has absconded with the newborn child.
Helping Maria is a Latino INS agent, Perez (Carlos Orlando Peñuela), who may be falling in love with this desperate woman even while he is using her to crack the black market ring.
All this has potential to be compelling drama, and there are a few times when it achieves this, but a lot of Mr. Morton's "Brown Baby" comes across as television movie-of-the-week melodrama, with characters standing in for ideas, then being moved about on a game board.
Maria is both a strong woman and completely gullible, once a part of her husband's class struggle against the rich and powerful, yet willing to turn around and involve herself with the upper class Doña Victoria, who is all Prada and Versace, with designer sunglasses hiding her true motives. When Maria winds up in "the crib," she notices that the other women at the complex are also in their final weeks of pregnancy, but shrugs it off.
Silvia undergoes a similar change -- from a distraught daughter vowing to avenge her father's murder, to an innocent abroad whose discovery of Green Day on a good Samaritan's personal stereo is used for comic relief. Through these and other scenes, America becomes a land where politics doesn't happen, where characters are reborn, only to take on a different set of TV roles.
Bill and Lori present a similar series of problems. Alex Knox, currently one of UCSB's most reliable actors, flounders with a character who is at first (correctly) suspicious of the adoption agency, but then clings to the child when Lori (Lacey Morris) suddenly insists on finding the birth mother. He is also saddled with some embarrassing moments, cooing variations of "La Cucaracha" to their new adopted child. There really isn't a way to make such a thing work.
Victoria Ramos has a force and presence to go with her tragic face -- we immediately believe her as a young widow, but it's awkward to see her duped and uncomfortable to see her in shy romantic scenes with Mr. Peñuela's Perez. Also enjoyable is Shaun Hart's redneck Lt. Hanrahan -- out of the entire cast he seems the most relaxed on stage, even though his character's ignorance marks him as beyond farce.
In the end, Maria is left with a fate that she tells us is inevitable ("I had no choice"), but feels like a major misstep. "Brown Baby" suffers from a similar fate -- it has none of the force of inevitability, but the sense of good intentions marked with bad choices.

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

'Liberal' looks to a satirical future and Bush 3.0
TED MILLS, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
February 22, 2006 12:00 AM
"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." Karl Marx (by way of Hegel) may have been describing the first and second terms of the Bush administration. Or he may have been thinking of Bob Potter's new comedy "The Last Liberal," a sequel of sorts to the much more serious "The Space Between the Stars," now onstage at the Center Stage Theater, a production of Dramatic Women.
Political satire is at turns easy and difficult. Easy because the Bush administration provides weekly fodder of outrage and incompetence for the nation's comedians; difficult because there is so much material that a Harriet Miers joke would already have to be explained a bit to make it work. (Q: Harriet who? A: Exactly).

So Mr. Potter gamely, if not entirely successfully, imagines a United States of America Inc., 2042, still being run by a version of George W. Bush (George W.W.W. 3.0, a clone of a clone of a clone) and a triumvirate of economists, the military and the Church. Justin Stark's Dubya succinctly simulates the faltering English and the deer-in-headlights look, despite having his eyes hidden behind a Bush mask.
Dubya announces that the ultimate goal in his War on Liberalism is now in sight -- the capture and persecution of the Last Liberal, and there's a monetary reward for whoever turns him or her in.
But in fact there are two Last Liberals, Mutt and Jeff (Tiffany Story and Martin Bell), who now roam the streets homeless, bickering still over their failed marriage and who is truly deserving of the title. After all, Jeff the former professor, slept with a grad student, Mutt says, but she can gladly retain her feminist credentials.
The two are soon captured and sent off to America's main gulags: Mutt to Guantanamo Bay, where she is interrogated by main economist Baron Scarpia (Brian Hansen); and Jeff to Abu Ghraib, where he is threatened with torture by military head Condy (Nancy Mendez). But infiltrating both prisons is a dark, mysterious figure known as Wild Card (Joseph Velasco), who appears to want to help both inmates. Or is he really pulling the strings from even higher up?
Gradually, we learn that, along with Robert Riechel's Reverend Tommy, there is a plot being hatched among the triumvirate for a palace coup. Dubya is senile and spends his days mourning for the little lives lost in a terrorist bombing of the Small World attraction at Disneyland. Could the two Liberals make a good scapegoat for a usurpation of power? Will one Liberal turn against the other?
Mr. Potter's play gets in some cutting jokes as well as some truly corny ones, and on paper it plays funnier than it actually turns out to be. As it is, "The Last Liberal" is neither rooted in enough reality to deliver biting satire, nor outrageous enough to work as a farce. Comparisons to "The Space Between the Stars" are a little unfair, as the genre and tone of both are at odds with each other. But "Stars" amplified the dread of early 2004 to truly unnerve. "Liberal" doesn't feel like the release valve it should be because its targets are less logical extensions of administration policy as they are broad editorial cartoons shot through with electricity and venom.
The most uncomfortable moment comes in a re-creation of the Christ-pose torture photo from Abu Ghraib, with Jeff's hooded body tormented by Condy and her riding crop -- the iconic image returns to jolt the audience like Banquo's ghost at Macbeth's dinner. Yet Mutt's scenes at Guantanamo play out instead like the supervillain hideaway in any James Bond film; it's hard to know where Mr. Potter wants us to stand in these two presentations of unmentionable reality. As satire, it feels too safe sometimes.
Still Mr. Potter and director Heather Ondersma have given Dramatic Women and its enthusiastic cast an opportunity to stretch their talents with something original. Neither Ms. Story nor Mr. Bell have taken on stranger roles than these and they find their ranges well tested. (They respond bravely). Of the triumvirate, only Mr. Riechel's Reverend feels menacing. Mr. Hansen's Scarpia is too fatherly and Ms. Mendez's military head Condy is too sexy, though all three act with relish and gusto. Oddly, it's Mr. Stark's Dubya that elicits our sympathy, a lost little lamb being manipulated by wolves. Mr. Velasco does all his work in the background, and is the most fun to watch, manipulating the players with slight of hand and mysterious props.
"The Last Liberal's" ending is a bit weak; it's too easy to suggest a female-run future as a solution to the chaos that has come before. On the other hand, the fact that Mr. Potter can see such a playful outcome to our current situation (and throw in a presidential assassination with nary a blink) suggests that the GOP has already lost the war for the public imagination. What has been won is still to be determined.

Posted by Ted Mills at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)