What the Butler Saw

"Antigone," Long Beach City College, Long Beach, CA by James Scarborough

Putting a new spin on the song, He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, The Long Beach City College Department of Theatre’s riveting production of Sophocles’s psychological drama, Antigone, directed by caryn desai, makes you wonder to whom you should pledge your allegiance.

Consolidating his hold on Thebes after the death of Oedipus, Creon (Rideaux Baldwin) decrees that the body of his traitorous nephew Polyneices shall remain unburied while the body of his heroic nephew Eteocles shall be given a proper burial.

Citing a moral authority higher than that of the state, Antigone (Lindsay Blackwell) pooh-poohs the edict and buries her brother. For her effort she’s condemned to death.

After the noble oration of his son – and Antigone’s fiancé - Haemon (Alberto Mendoza), the visit of the seer Teiresias (Jayarre Cox), who heaps doom and gloom on the ruler, and the exhortations of the Chorus, Creon changes his mind.

It’s too late. Antigone, Haemon, and his wife Eurydice have killed themselves.

It's what we don't see that makes the dead-simple set vivid and memorable. We don’t see Antigone’s sepulcher and so we don’t see the dying Haemon hugging her hanging corpse; we don’t see the blood he’s coughed up on her tasteful contemporary outfit.

We also don’t see the buried body of Polyneices and so we don’t reflect on the irony of Antigone’s buried alive body and his unburied dead body.

Masterful casting makes this a top-notch sleeper. The pairing of Blackwell as the tragic Antigone and Baldwin as the tragic and then some Creon intrigues me. It makes me think of a gumbo set in the Old South, a cross between the nobility and insouciance of Gone With The Wind, the smoldering passion and indifference of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, and the murky undercurrents of Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood.

On one hand you’ve got this fiddle-dee-dee Scarlett O’Hara Antigone except that she’s not doing much fiddle-dee-deeing. Blackwell's register is perfect; the breathless and twittery resignation in her voice makes her sound as if she’s already half way to Hades.

Mr. Baldwin’s Creon swaggers with imperiousness. Dressed in a military uniform on which medals jangle like scalps, he reeks of hubris for which the gods wrack him. The haughtiness of his posture, his booming voice, and his military carriage mark him as the incarnation of the tragic soul who foolishly keeps his own counsel, sons, sages and citizens be damned.

With Blackwell’s Antigone and Baldwin’s Creon you’ve got an irresistible force running into an unmovable object. Think Scarlett butting heads with General Patton. The only winners are the members of the audience who experience a catharsis (Thanks, Aristotle, nice theory) as we witness the deflation of martial arrogance. Not that there’s a parallel to our current era. Heavens no.

Performances are Thu. - Sat., 8 PM, Sun., 2 PM. The show runs until March 4. Tickets are $7-10. The Auditorium is located at the City College campus at Clark and Harvey Way. For more information call 938-4563 or visit www.lbcc.edu/tdf.

"The Full Monty," Musical Theatre West, Long Beach, CA

Beauty is skin deep, right?

Wrong!

In The Musical Theatre West’s production of the musical The Full Monty, written by Terrance McNally, with music and lyrics by David Yazbeck, and directed by Steven Glaudini, beauty is soul deep, a state of mensch-dom, a condition that responds to and shines through adversity.

For all its obvious fanfare, the script’s not superficial. The show may twitter about the adulation of flesh, lots of it: man-junk galore. That we see in the Chippendale guy, Keno (John J. Todd) and the maenad wives’s responses to him. We see it in the blatant references to sex appeal. And we see it in the hilarious, anti-climactic finale when, you got it, the full monty.

But it’s also about self-image, male or female, straight or gay. The six guys have low self-esteem, the Chippendale guy doesn’t. The guys have to question their sensuality, their fatherhood, and their ability to provide for their families. Mr. Chippendale just has to smirk, strut, and hip-thrust. The women-folk, they have it, in buckets. They have their jobs; they have their sex drives. It’s not a battle of the sexes, it’s a question of feeling good about yourself.

Glaudini’s production makes us feel good about the guys feeling good about themselves. That full monty moment was nothing to write home about. If you’re looking for some magic, aha, show-stopping, show-ending moment, you’re not going to get it. But that's not the point, is it?

Instead, Laudini’s crafts a sensitive tableau of guys getting hammered by life. Dave Bukatinsky (John Massey, Jr.) must deal with his obesity and his low sex drive; he must endure the bathroom mockery of his wife, Pam (Caroline Timm). Jerry Lukowski (John Bisom) must contend with keeping the respect and custody of his son Nathan (Quintan Craig) while his wife Georgie (Tami Tappan /Damiano) harps on his arrears. Harold Nichols (David Engel) must keep wife Vick (Tracy Lore) in accustomed luxury though he’s been secretly unemployed for six months.

Having set up the grimness of each man’s situation to better contrast what’s to come, Glaudini then pops the cork and let’s things rip. Jeanette Burmeister (Mary Jo Catlett) is a delight with her references to long-ago show business. Ethan Girard (James Leo Ryan) has a hilarious running – literally – gag of trying to pull a Donald O’Connor flip off the wall. Horse T. Simmons (Eugene Barry-Hill) is a delight as he navigates between the swagger of virility and the puniness of stage fright.

It’s a resplendent show, hope-raising, spine-tingling, with spirited performances, especially Damiano and Lore’s. Each is full of life, of brio; each is the thing their husband and estranged husband aren’t. I liked Engel’s Nichols: I kept waiting for him to duck into a phone booth to turn into Superman. Bisom’s pain was our pain and his final triumph as full monty point man was heroic.

Performances are Thu. – Sat., 8 PM, Sun., 2 PM. The show runs until Mar.11. Tickets are $25-52. The Performing Arts Center is located at 6200 Atherton St. For more information call 856-1999, ext 4, or visit www.musical.org.

"Each Day Dies With Sleep," Garage Theatre, Long Beach, CA

Archetypical and dark, Jose Rivera’s compelling surrealist soap opera “Each Day Dies With Sleep,” directed by Kristal Greenlea for the Garage Theatre, reminds us that clean slates still have smudges.

Greenlea pulls out the stops in this mix of Luis Bunel and All in the Family. She doesn't so much condemn child abuse or bad parenting as much as offer a taxonomy of dreams good, bad, and ugly.

It’s the story of the good Nelly (Karla Leticia Saldana Dominguez Suarez), who yearns to escape the ugly parenting of her father Augie (Adam Soriano).

Problem is, she’s not exactly well-equipped to strike out on her own.

She spends a good part of the story on her knees, a marvelous symbol of the devolution of her humanity from upright to prostrate. Though she’s a sweetly-drawn character - early twenties, attractive, the middle child of 21 (21!) siblings, has mismatched eyes, and can predict the future - she bears an unimaginable load. She must fight off the advances of an incestuous father who can’t remember her name and so the prick calls her “Pinhead.”

Enter sort-of salvation in the person of the bad Johnny (Jerry James). A suave Lothario, a kisser and a teller to boot, he’s bedded her older sisters, quipping, “What can I say? I love this family?” Nelly, without a better offer, runs off with him to Los Angeles where, with money from a lottery win – nice touch, a dream story fueled by random numbers – they head off to Los Angeles to open a garage in which Johnny, true to form, gives new meaning to full service.

The past, though, like a subconscious demon, burbles to the surface. Soon Nelly finds herself the base of a lover’s triangle. Augie takes up residence in the Nelly/Johnny love nest, except this time he’s the one not upright. An automobile accident, which Nelly predicted, paralyzes and then confines him to a wheelchair. Acting out a creepy revenge motive that only Dr. Phil or Freud could define, he vows to get rid of Johnny.

I like the sparse set, with foam thingamajigs that hover over the stage like contrails or ghosts. I like James’s Johnny: pure animal. I like Suarez’s Nelly: part animal, part conscience. And I adore Soriano’s Augie: pure Sophoclean cauldron of desire.

It’s wicked entertainment, well-acted, well-staged: a story that should be creepy but isn’t because we know (we hope) it’s a dream. Though the title suggests that all dreams suck, the production forces us to distinguish between Nelly’s therapeutic dreams - escaping a sordid past, finding a Prince Charming – and those nightmares that won’t let go.

The production requires a tension between these healthy dreams and not-so-healthy dreams, a tension that Greenlea supplies in spades. The production hops: we hope that Nelly can move on as we wonder what’s going on in our own basements.

Performances are Thu. – Sat., 8 PM. The show runs until Mar. 24. The Theatre is located at 251 E. 7th St. Tickets are $12-15. For more information, call 433-8337 or visit www.thegaragetheatre.org.

"Black Tie Informal," Sharon Ben-Tal, Bandini Art, Culver City, CA

Call them gallery magpies. I do. Those who dash into an art space, sometimes on the phone, sometimes taking photos on the sly, who glom onto aspects sparkly, lewd, and garish of the work on display, and then dart off to do the same and the same and the same. Aerobic culture: it's like walking in a mall on a snowy day.

I call this propensity to dash the ADD-ization of art: the tendency to not take the time to mind a fiddler's fart about what the artist tries to express, to communicate, to do. Take a moment to reflect? As if! The only reflecting that goes on is when pseudo-mavens try to identify people standing behind them in the reflection off the glass that covers the work. It's like zipping through a catalogue, folding over the corners of the shirt you simply must- and will - have. Now. Commerce-wise, it's the equivalent of the Buy it now icon on eBay.

Though not in a katrillion years would she acknowledge it as the latent content of her work, Black Tie Informal, Sharon Ben-Tal's startling show at the Bandini Gallery, spoofs with brilliance the ADD-ization of the art world. In a show in which she's put gravity back into gravitas, she's created exquisite objects that convene the perfect circumstance for empathy; whose value resides in what the viewer gleans and retrieves out of the artist's labors. Lyricism in, lyricism out.

Let there be no doubt that these 13 pieces aren't lyrical. With a neat deconstruction of the process of drawing (graphite powder is one of the ingredients; graphite as in pencil as in drawing), she unleashes oodles of squiggles of line (including 262 repetitions of her signature; like shadows of signatures) and jiggles of glitter that bring you to and hold you on to the surface, mesmerized.

Lyrical and austere. The gallery tenor is Brooks Brothers austere, black, white, grey, and one piece colored like a Prom rose. As the title of one piece suggests, the mood is Adagio/Andante. The show declaims old not new money; it's prim not garish. It's a perfect environment for contemplation. Just try to move on. Or out.

What's the matter, here? Literally. While the surface is butterfly-dancy, the implied and actual space is magmatic and dense. Dense as is dozens and dozens and dozens of layers of paint dense. In a couple of the pieces the built-up surface is thicker than the support. Hers is a process of accretion, of refining, of squiggle-placement embeddedness.

The pictorial space is anything but pellucid. These built-up pieces may capture but they don't reflect light. They seem massive. If you look at them from across the room, they look too heavy for the wall to bear; yet they sparkle like stars in the desert.

A sweet though unintended installation touch can describe this thick, non-refracting surface. On one of the walls, between two pieces, is an opening that opens out, five feet in, onto a black wall. The black wall stands in a dark room, so there's the shadowy depth of the five feet of unlit space plus the wall. The space is both pictorial and literal. It's like looking at the reverse of a Rothko painting from eternity to Echo Park.

And it's this black hole density that broaches the distinction between mortal and geological time. At one level, the work references the here-and-now: fingerprints (a work-in-progress that will result in 3,000 smudges, the average amount of touches a dollar bill receives), allusions to currency (clever caricatures of a twenty and a one dollar bill; an even more clever piece made of gold leaf powder), and geopolitics (reconfigured maps of U.S. territories).

At another level the work references broader expanses of time: the process of metallurgy, the legend of the Philosopher's Stone, and millions-of-years-to-move-a-continent-an-inch plate tectonics. Musically, the conflation of the two, the fleeting and the not, would sound like a fanfare played on a French Horn.

Held together with a formal and speculative vigor that balances and then weaves the lyrical/austere, surface/depth, movement/stasis, and ephemeral/eternal into a Rainbow Connection for lovers, and dreamers, and me, Sharon Ben-Tal has the good manners to share with us a body of work that makes us ponder, with time, with effort, with reward, the significance of the passing moment.

The show runs until February 24. The gallery is located at 2635 S. Fairfax Avenue, Culver City, CA. For more information call (310) 837-6230 or visit www.bandiniart.com.

"Play On!," Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage Theatre, Long Beach, CA

What does Felix the Cat cartoon and Play On!, Rick Abbot’s hilarious comedy directed by Carl Da Silva for the Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage Theatre, have in common?

They could share the same theme song.

“You’ll laugh so much your sides will ache, your heart will go pitter-pat.”

With a script that goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, pauses, and then pushes beyond into the surreal, and with a perfectly-chosen, well-meshed cast, DaSilva gives us a reality show, behind the scenes, look at what occurs at dress rehearsals and the build up to opening night.

It’s a rollicking look that verges on mayhem that the cast pulls off with panache and brio. The usual stuff happens, it’s credible, and it keeps us riveted to our seats. We’re flies on the wall. It makes for some great comic moments: tech glitches, overzealous playwrights, actors either not prepared or not inspired, a frazzled director trying to hold things together, the dreaded “good luck” being wished upon the cast instead of “break a leg.”

These are problems of the creative, technical, and personality variety but they won’t torpedo the production, correct?

We take all this in stride because surely everything will be perfect on opening night.

It will, right?

Enter Opening Night. A funnier Act you will never see. We expect to see that the problems have been resolved. But no. Because of jitters, a couple of the actors get drunk. Very drunk. The dithering playwright has not given her last second changes to all the actors. A safe in a wall has not been installed. Cues are missed, exits are misdirected. And a track of sound effects – gun shots, helicopter whirrings, ring tones – all play at once at the end.

It got funnier and funnier and it was hard to tell if the actors were about to lose it because they were in character and their production had tanked or if they were enjoying the play within a play as much as we were, to the point of delirium.

God knows the audience kept losing it that memorable second Act.

Top notch acting prevailed. Timing was key. The trick was to be both the actor playing the actor trying to be serious and then getting indignant – or more hapless - as things unraveled. The prize for indignation goes to Kate Felton whose Violet watched things devolve from the side. Ditto for Lauren Mitchell’s Smitty, who took the disaster in stride. Skip Blas made Henry an impresario of the slow simmer.

At the other end of the indignant-to-hapless spectrum we have Jason Palmer’s Billy, who got drunker and funnier, Dee Shandera’s Louise, and Lewis P. Leighton’s Saul. And maintaining the middle ground of despair and resignation was Yvonne Robertson’s Gerry the director, Terra Taylor’s Polly, and Cort Huckabone’s Augie.

Performances are Fri. & Sat. 8 PM, Sun., 2 PM. The show runs until Mar. 24. Tickets are $20-22. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim St. For more information call 494-1014 or visit www.lbph.com.

"Pseudodocumentation" David DiMichele at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Ah, yes, art’s cannibalistic side. That’s the truest thing you can say about art. That devours its young, its young, its contemporaries, sometimes even itself; and then becomes something new. In so doing it extends the boundaries of what constitutes the grist of art. Think Gauguin, the aesthetic cannibal extraordinaire. Think Juan Gris, picking up and reconfiguring the pieces of Braque and Picasso’s analysis. And think Pseudodocumentation, David DiMichele’s photography show at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, The triumph of the Viral over the Sensual and the Intellectual. Descartes who? Now it's log-on, ergo sum.

It’s an attractive show, formally; well-crafted and engaging. These six large photographs compel the viewer with their taut compositions and intriguing narratives that ostensibly document the conditions for an aesthetic experience. Whatever other content these art world dioramas broach – and they do, tons - visually these pieces at heart are studies in black and white, just as was Whistler’s Mother, just as was certain photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Visually offer are a treat, a trove, a trip.

We feast on their process of construction. DiMichele fabricates miniature galleries for which he creates art, populates it, lights it, and then documents it The effect is seamless; it testifies to the ability of the artist to create trompe-l’oiel environments that brim and resonate with ideas, not least of which has to be every art student’s wet dream, the artist-as-god: create the space, create the art, create the installation, create the viewers. The only thing to which he doesn’t refer is the commercial and critical reception, but that’s not within the ambit of this god-dom. Nuts.

DiMichele wants us to experience the exclusion of the viewer from the work. This he does on a number of levels that attests both to the work’s formal keenness as well as its intellectual depth.

At first glance, it’s a comic show. Through discrepancies of scale, DiMichele mocks the tendency of the tropes of modern art – monumentality, danger, spectacle, organic versus geometry, man-made objects versus natural landscape – to remove the figures from the main drama of the narrative.

What each piece has in common is that each figure must navigate some manner of art that, if not life-threatening, then at least constitutes a nuisance to the experience of its viewing.

One piece shows figures in a room dwarfed by stacked ice cubes that allude to a Frigidaire Stonehenge. Another gallery shows glass shards capable, think Richard Serra, of maim and mayhem. Another gallery shows a man and a woman at opposite ends of an empty gallery with geometric lines with the expectation of a spectacle. Another gallery shows vines that contrast nicely with the Brian Doherty-esque geometric White Cube of the enclosure. Another shows people almost engulfed like ants in an ant farm. And another shows three man-made domes set close to the ground inside a people-less space whose picture windows show desert landscape.

But what gives the work its particular relevance is the contribution it makes to current debates on simulation. Not the beta egghead version simulation broached by French philosophers twenty years ago but the sort that computer simulation has enabled and made, via computer games and simulated environments, a household phenomena. Especially in the incarnation of Second Life, a 3-D virtual world in which users (as of this writing, almost 4 million, worldwide) create an online, digital civilization supported by market forces and enhanced by creative forces.

Forget that the figures in DiMichele’s work resemble some of the avatars in Second Life. That some of the compositions are both melodramatic and indifferent. Important here to note is that his work epitomizes, in its exclusion of the viewer from the experience of art, a new iteration of the shifting dichotomies of modernist culture. Man on one side of the coin, nature on the other side. Then it was man and nature on one side of the coin, art on the other side. Now it’s man, nature, and art on one side of the coin, and simulation on the other. The new dichotomy is the Living and the Viral. Not of the Frankenstein variety, but you get the idea.

With it’s sophisticated, timely, and legible spoof on modern art’s tendency to broach an Us and Them sensibility (Sound familiar? It should. It’s our current foreign policy), and our culture’s parallel universe of virtual reality, DiMichele’s work presents a neat solution to art’s ongoing question: What’s for dinner?

The show runs until March 10. The Gallery is located at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. For more information call (323) 937-0765 or visit www.paulkopeikingallery.com.

"Song of Singapore," International City Theatre, Long Beach, CA

Spoofing wartime movies and musicals with great success, the International City Theatre’s production of the musical farce Song of Singapore, directed by Jules Aaron at the Center Theatre, also alludes to the insanity of war.

With music and lyrics by Erik Frandsen, Michael Garin, Robert Hipkens, and Paula Lockheart, the production holds on for dear life to a dramatic conflict that’s not really a conflict but a zingy scaffolding on which to drape boisterous music, riveting dance numbers, a snazzy jazz band, and a bunch of wisecracking barflies.

The time is 1941. Freddy S. Lyme (as in slime) – Jeffrey Rockwell – runs a cafe called Song of Singapore. It sports a fabulous house band and a lively crowd that includes Chai Li (Kalthleen Chen). Through her relationship with crooked Inspector Marvin Kurland (Andrew Ross Wynn), she becomes the proprietress because Freddy’s strong suit is not mercantile.

The barflies need to shoo because war beckons; but they have no money, no plane, and no pilot. Enter a dead body, a jewel-encrusted fish, a plane, and, coincidentally, a world renowned aviator. So they need to solve the murder, i.e., find the fish, and they can get the passports that Kurland the scoundrel holds as collateral.

Bennett’s voice, her comic skills, her dancing were brilliant. Rockwell’s Lyme has to be seen to be believed. David Holladay made his Hans van der Last a cross between Peter Lorre and a Muppet: excellent!

Aaron wants us to laugh and laugh we do. We laugh at the outrageous songs. We savor “Inexpensive Tango,” that features a ukulele.

We laugh at the hilarious premise that Rose (Dina Bennett) has forgotten her name and back story, funny in itself when you realize that 1941 Singapore was a place, literally, to forget all your cares (one song notes that the day ends at sunrise); but a dozen times more funny when you realize how she lost her memory; that she’s really (should I divulge?), nah, see it for that revelation alone.

We laugh at a blind man who leads a conga line with murderous aplomb as he wends his way through the front of the stage littered with cocktail tables and peopled with actual theatre patrons.

And while the laughs are of the bellyaching variety – you don’t stop – I think Mr. Aaron has something else in mind. Japan poises itself to invade the city. The city sits poised on the brink of disaster. But do the denizens of this bar care? Deep down they do but they treat it with a farcical indifference that war deserves.

Sound familiar? Think Iran, think M.A.S.H. Song of Singapore is a potent potable in these times of war. Song, dance, mayhem, jokes, and whimsy. Serve me up a Singapore Sling, please. No, make that a double.

Performances are Thu – Sat, 8 pm, Sun, 2 pm. The show runs until March 11. Tickets are $35-$45. The Theatre is located at the Performing Arts Center, 200 W. Ocean Blvd. For more information call 436-4610 or visit www.ictlongbeach.org.

Jian Wang, Two Decades In America, Library Gallery, California State University, Sacramento, CA

Preface

My first impression of Jian Wang’s paintings is the one I currently hold. His work’s accessible and sophisticated, fleeting and monumental; it reminds us that art and empathy can go hand-in-hand.

I was attracted by – and am still attracted by - his sinuous lines and melting candle colors, by his compositions that are more taut than the rapid brushstroke and loosely-placed figures would lead you to believe. I couldn’t help but be drawn into his landscapes and portraits. I’m still there.

His work affects me on three levels. First he offers a painterly fireworks show: his oh-wow handling of paint, his flourishes which are lovely to look at in isolation, his daring color schemes, the direction in which his paint flows. He creates shorelines with brushstrokes that look like wind-blown sand, skies with whorls of the brush which move like columns of geese, a facial expression captured with two daubs of paint.

Second his work expresses feelings of wonder and maturity. Feelings of eagerness and anticipation. Of fleeting moments and timeless things.

Any viewer can engage with the work at these first two levels, which deal more with initial takes and walkaway impressions than with ideas; this requires no special knowledge of the practice and history of art.

Third his work addresses art history and aesthetics. This is the level at which operates composition, pictorial space, and historical precedents.

Compositionally, the fluid figures look like they’re about to slide off the canvas. Same with the landscapes, especially when he paints water. The water seems to defy gravity because it wants to float up. Nothing looks tethered.

His paint handling is loose; his pictorial space is accommodating: why not just climb in over the frame and join one of the figures on the beach or else stroll up a mountain?

But his accommodation and grace of his pictorial elements just belie his rigorous compositions. Like Cezanne, Jian conceives of his landscapes as geometric forms. Especially in his still lifes. His geometrical scaffolding gives the work an unexpected structure and monumentality: the brushstroke suggests our mortality while his compositions suggest our place in the scheme of things.

He offers us a nice message, a lovely message. Rendered with verve, with wonder, and with a style that reminds us of our limited time on earth, Jian’s work encourages us to enjoy, visually at least, each and every single moment.