"Headless," Electric Lodge, Venice, CA
With its pyrotechnic script, some good performances, and a set that should get billed as cast, Lea Floden’s Headless, directed by Dan Bonnell for the Ensemble Studio Theatre – LA at the Electric Lodge darts and disorients like a Wizard of Oz tornado across the scorched psyche of Depression Era America.
Set in a Dust Bowl carnival, it’s a dark drama: arson and immolation; pain and resignation; some grim child rearing and some grimmer courtship.
It’s a love story though it’s anything but romantic; it’s a purgatory of pleas for help though salvation’s not likely to come a-running; and, with Chris Wojcieszyn’s exquisite lighting, it’s a faded Polaroid of obsession and despair.
Frank (Jon Beavers), scion of a prominent family, plunges into sudden and cataclysmic love with Net (Salli Saffioti) the headless woman at a 1930s traveling carnival.
Both have baggage: Frank’s mother kills herself after his grandmother murders his father. Net kills her philandering husband.
Both are edgy, both are unsettled. The difference is that Net has children, loose ties to accountability: Crystal (Lauren Clinton), twelve, and China (Kaylin Stewart), eight. World-weary Crystal looks like a Dorothea Lange pea picker; China is clairvoyant, a cross between Tatum O’Neal and Linda Blair.
The script dissects the bleak existence of the carnies: their requisite paranoia; their constant surveillance of and one-sided negotiations with yard bull cops; and their default existence as outsiders.
The story line is fractured like a black and white movie splotched with acid burns; memory melds with the present, the past informs the future.
Sometimes we’re painfully in the moment, as when a gin-soaked Frank sets himself on fire.
Sometimes we’re kaleidoscopically all-over, as when Man #1 (Tony Pasqualini) narrates present events like a cross between Rod Sterling and Walter Cronkite while Lisa (Natalie Floyd) augurs evil like a Sophoclean weatherwoman and Frank exhorts Net to bite him hard and she relents, he the bitee aroused to suffer, she the biter aroused to inflict.
Laura Fine’s set sets a fine stage: dust-dredged sensuality, a color scheme in a minor key, and an off-some, dreary mood.
The performances don’t so much sizzle as they snake about the ground like waterlogged fireworks that erratically shoot sparks and vomit soot anywhere but up. As that smoldering duo Frank and Net, Beavers and Saffioti could be joined at the hip: he’s gawky and monomaniacal; she broods like a mother hen over her dysfunctional nest; each brings out traits in each other best left latent.
But it’s the adolescents who shine here: Stewart’s China is precocious; Clinton’s Crystal is sagacious; and Floyd’s Lisa is a ghost that floats like smoke through the ashes. You relate to them because the grown ups are beyond hope. At heart this is a generational piece: the Dust Bowlers yielding to the Greatest Generation.
Performances are 8 pm, Thursday – Saturday, 3 pm, Sunday. The play runs until June 24. Tickets are $20-25. The theatre is located at 1416 Electric Avenue, Venice, CA. For more information call (213) 368-9552 or visit www.ensemblestudiotheatrela.org.
