THEATER REVIEW: THE INDIANS ARE COMING

Woo (Peter Chen) in The Indians are Coming.

Rowland out the punches

By Ed Rampell

There is a saying that “the personal is political,” and playwright Jennifer Rowland does a skillful job interweaving private lives with public service in The Indians Are Coming To Dinner. The Indians in the title refers to people from India, not America’s indigenous people.

Rowland’s tragicomedy is set during the Reagan era, wherein stage and big and little screen veteran Michael Rothhaar plays Harold Blackburn, an archetypal WASPy upper class Republican. Harold laments having been pushed as a young man by his domineering late father (whose portrait dominates Tom Buderwitz’s set and which lighting designer Leigh Allen highlights throughout the action) to abandoned an alluring State Department career to go into the family business. After years of running this reasonably prosperous if dull company, Harold receives intimations that the reelected Ronald Reagan is considering tapping Harold to become Our Man in India. Following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, it’s believed that the Reagan regime requires an extremely talented diplomat to represent Washington at New Delhi.

Harold gets it into his head that he’s just the man for the job, and his youthful dreams of diplomacy and a life abroad in the Foreign Service return and reanimate him. So being a Reaganite, Harold sets out to secure his overseas sinecure by, naturally, politicking, and schemes to make a good impression on his old friend Anil (Kevin Vavasseur), who is visiting the States with his family. Harold believes this distant relation of the Gandhis is extremely influential in India, and a kingmaker vis-avis vetting Harold for the post he’s now yearning for.

To make his ambassadorial aspirations come true, the whiskered, rotund Harold buffoonishly garbs himself in an outrageous outfit befitting a maharajah, conjured up by costume designer by whimsical Audrey Eisner. The man who would be ambassador impresses his family and servant into service in order to create a feast designed to impress Anil. Of course, this would-be banquet provides the play’s comic pratfalls. Along the way, Harold – who prides himself on being considered not just a good, but “a great guy” – reveals his true stripes as a petty tyrant. He coerces dutiful Nora-like wife Lynn (Sara Newman-Martins) and faithful servant Woo (the droll Peter Chen) into concocting cuisine with an Indian flare in order to literally curry favor. Hippy dippy son Christopher (Justin Preston), a high school student who has been, shall we say, Bogarting that joint, my friends, is imposed upon to attend the repast.

So is daughter Alexandra (the gifted Thea Rubley), who has flown home to San Francisco from her college to pursue her dream of becoming an opera singer by trying out at a hard to get into audition, which could lead to going to Italy and the launching of her singing career. Operatic music is a recurring theme in Indians; Harold is a big fan of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, the first opera Harold shared with Alexandra when she was a little girl.

But the monomaniacal Harold selfishly believes that his daughter has crossed the continent solely to partake of the all important dinner aimed at buttering Anil up so that he’ll give the nod to Reagan to send the Blackburns globetrotting off to India. Does Harold subvert Alexandra’s dreams, just as his patriarch had done to him? Does Harold do to Alexandra what the hunchbacked Rigoletto inadvertently did to his daughter, Gilda?

Rowland has written a clever, resonant, sly script. When Harold finally gets down to brass tacks and confronts Anil about the ambassadorial endorsement he’s seeking, Anil’s reaction is a plot twist this reviewer didn’t see coming. The stuff that dreams are made of!

Julia Fletcher ably directs this world premiere production that deserves life beyond a small Venice playhouse. Burderwitz’s split level set is imaginative as it divides the spatial – and emotional – spaces of the play up. Chen subtly spoofs “Oriental” screen and stage stereotypes, just as Vavasseur and Rikin Vasani (as Anil’s son Deepok) provide some instant comic karma by poking fun at the “enlightened” spirituality of Eastern religion. When, like Ibsen’s Nora, Newman-Martins at long last has her Doll’s House moment, she too shakes off the caricature of the long suffering wife who silently suffers as a mere extension of her husband. There’s more to Lynn, after all, than being mere comic relief.    

Rubley is a real standout; not only is the recent USC grad a fine actress with promise, but she has the lovely singing voice her character requires in order to convey the role’s authenticity. As Harold, Rothhaar convincingly portrays a man who is a needy, bundle of contradictions, who -- with youthful dreams thwarted -- grasps once more for that elusive brass ring as old age approaches. Rothhaar’s Harold has an air not unlike that other salesman, Arthur Miller’s immortal, yet all too human, Willy Loman. Alas, as Harold seeks to have attention paid to him, Harold is the low man on these Indians’ totem pole. But he should not despair: If New Delhi eludes him, there will always be a role for Harold as one of Reagan’s mass murderers in his Central American Contra war. Beside, as we see in this comedy drama about foiled fantasies of what one could have been had he/she remained true unto his/her own self, there are more ways to kill sopranos than with bullets.


The Indians Are Coming To Dinner runs through March 25 at Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291. For info: call (310)822-8392 or see www.PacificResidentTheatre.com.

FILM REVIEW: MY PERESTROIKA

Olga Durikova in My Perestroika.

Cold war and pieces

By John Esther

During my undergraduate studies as a Russian and Soviet Studies major I had the opportunity to witness the tumultuous transitions of the latter days of that experiment known as the Soviet Union. From the comfort zone of a university campus in Tucson, Arizona to ground zeroes in major Soviet cities, I witnessed the "evil empire" as it openly embraced perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness).

As anger, frustration and hope mounted in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), friends and strangers spoke openly with westerners during those days. Those English-Russian conversations over vodka, bread, butter and caviar were some of the concise I ever took part in. The Russians of that generation often had a gift for being direct and to the point when they spoke (or drank) -- whether it came to the necessary dismantling of the brutal Soviet Union political system, U.S. President Ronald Reagen's doublespeak about the USSR or personal friendship.

After years of failed Party propaganda and populace hardships these Russians could see the inevitable turning of the tyrannical tide and how hard it would be for the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev to push against entrenched interests in order to create a new Soviet Union. They also viewed the boisterous speeches of Reagen (and subsequent U.S. President George H.W. Bush) at once counterproductive, because it fed the Soviet Union hardliners who wanted the friction that kept the people afraid and them in power, as well as disingenuous brouhaha because the United States government needed the bear in the east as an enemy to justify its military industrial complex (which had given the US a clear superiority in arms) just as much as those right-wingers back here in the USSR.

Regarding friendship, Russians did not play games when it came to camaraderie. It was very serious and very endearing. It was also something Americans needed to mind. If an American said to another American, "We should do lunch sometime," it remained open ended. If you said this to a Russian, it was an invitation to be taken up immediately -- the next day if they knew where you were staying. Accordingly, late sleepers did not dare to casually suggest meeting for breakfast. 

(I occasionally wonder how Russians treat friendship these days. I have not been back for many years and no Russian films I am aware of have really explored the subject.)

It is some of that generation, alive and dwelling today, which is captured quite impressively in Robin Hessman's documentary, My Perestroika.

Today Borya Meyerson and his wife, Lyuba, are now history teachers with a son; single-mom Olga Durikova sells pool tables (and seems to chain smoke); and single-dad Ruslan performs in public places for money. Scraping by to buy into capitalist Russia, none of them would be any poorer under Soviet communism (America, on the other hand…). A little luckier is Andrei Yevgrafov, who owns a successful men's clothing boutique and lives in a nice condominium. These five Muscovites were among the last generation to wear the anti-riotous red scarf of the Pioneers and leave the Komsomol for the stampede into the western promise. Their insights offer a microcosm of a nation that moved from totalitarianism to kleptocracy – sometimes unsure which was or is the bigger evil.

Some of the more precious observations in the documentary are when Durikova laments the hard work for insufficient wages and the fact she will probably work long past the Soviet retirement of 60 or when Borya quite accurately damns the jingoistic rule of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Without effort or consciousness they are honest. They have that gift. On another hand, when Yevgrafov disdains the popular risings of 1991 as a wave of insecurity about food rather than a demand for change, among the other reasons he did not participate in them, is laughably incredulous. 

Engulfed in a bittersweet symphony of getting what one wants and losing what one once had, the documentary's personal conversations manifest themselves into something greater than a few Russians weighing in on current affairs. That My Perestroika takes a view of history from the autobiographical testimony of ordinary people and splices it with greater mass-ive historical events such as a 1977 event saluting the new Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev (the first in his position to open up trade with the United States and the one who started the eventually disastrous invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s), seems to be, albeit less grand in scope, something in the tradition of, perhaps a response to, Leo Tolstoy's War Peace, especially Book III, Part One.

Running a smooth 87 minutes, the interviews of My Perestroika remind me of my perestroika. For others the documentary offers a basic, insightful and sound introduction to life in modern Moscow. And for Americans who lived during the cold war, the similarities between living here and there hits home.

THEATER REVIEW: BURN THIS

Flame on

By Ed Rampell 

A Tony and Pulitzer Prize Award winning playwright, Lanford Wilson’s Burn This had its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in 1987. When that prestigious Downtown L.A. venue launched its revival of the play on March 23, an unfunny thing happened on the way to the Forum: Wilson, alas, died of pneumonia the day after Burn This’ return engagement began.

Burn This is quintessential Wilson, who often depicted damaged souls struggling to find love and their way in our complicated, troubled world. This Wilsonian dramedy evinces empathy for suffering humanity and is set during the Reagan era, although it remains very contemporary. Burn This opens hard on the heels of a tragedy that has befallen a household in a lower Manhattan loft that had been composed of two gay males and one straight female. After Anna’s (Zabryna Guevara) initial hesitancy, she allows Burton (Ken Barnett), a preppy sci fi screenwriter, to enter, and he awkwardly tries to comfort her.

Their on again, off again, in again, out again relationship remains unclear throughout the play. Apparently, they have been lovers (of sorts), but the indeterminate nature of their union is deliberate. It’s fuzzy not only the audience, but for the characters, too. Especially Anna, a dancer who has hung up the ballet shoes and leotards in order to become a choreographer. According to the dialogue, Anna has lived a pretty sheltered life, which has never really been pierced by Cupid’s arrow. This hetero woman shares a New York loft with two gay men, including the humorous ad man Larry (Brooks Ashmanskas). There may be a loving platonic bond between them, but Anna’s sexuality remains unfulfilled, if not thwarted, by the domestic arrangement’s back story. Aim inhibited, unrequited love, and all that Freudian razzmatazz.

From out of the blue, enter Pale (Adam Rothenberg) into this emotional, if not physical, ménage a trois. As his nickname implies, this character is beyond the Pale; sexually charged, he has a yen for Anna, and becomes a hunk-a hunk-a burn this love. The relationship that develops between Pale and Anna reminded me, both comically and dramatically, of the affair between the star crossed lovers portrayed by Cher and Nicolas Cage in John Patrick Shanley’s 1987 Moonstruck. The play turns on which suitor Anna will choose: rich, shallow Burton or intensely emotional Pale. Interestingly, playing against type, Burton is an artiste (although there a few good lines of dialogue deriding the artistic pretensions of movies, which the L.A. aud got a kick out of), while Pale is a restauranteur. Ashmanskas’ Larry, however, doesn’t play against type. His is a mincing, campy, portly homosexual with a snappy comeback line and zinger for (almost) every occasion. When called an opera queen, Larry denies the appellation and accusation, quipping that, at most, he’s “an opera lady-in-waiting.” Larry adds comic relief to the smoldering Burn, although the playwright -- who wrote moving gay-themed works such as 1964’s one-act, The Madness of Lady Bright, and 1973’s off-Broadway hit, Hot l Baltimore, which featured an early same sex couple and became a short-lived Norman Lear TV sitcom -- never loses sight of the fact that the all-too-human Larry has needs of his own, and is not merely a figure of ridicule.

Nicholas Martin deftly directs the ensemble cast, which delivers skillful, truthful performances that mostly ring true. Scenic designer Ralph Funicello’s realistically rendered set -- where all of the onstage action takes place -- is spot on, absolutely loft-y. Its New York backdrop enhances and imbues the play with what Billy Joel called that “New York state of mind.” Although as mentioned this story could take place nowadays, it’s also a period piece, so the use of terms like “crackerjack” (as in “superb”) can be forgiven.

However, a couple of things raised my critics’ eyebrows. When Pale reveals his actual relationship status to Anna after they make love, this is little if at all commented upon, and I doubt this would be the case in real life. I’m not sure what the ethnic background of Zabryna Guevara (she previously played an Iraqi-Assyrian Texan character in the play Lidless, and for all I know, she’s the granddaughter of Argentine Che Guevara) is, but she’s not Caucasian. The only possible mention of her ethnicity comes in fleeting lines regarding Anna’s hair, which are not necessarily racial references. The fact is that in the New York of the Mayor Koch era race was a major issue, and it’s highly unlikely that interracial romances would not have at least been commented upon. In the playbill photo of Anna’s understudy, Emily Sandack appears to be white, so I suspect that Lanford the humanist did not write an ethnic specific character. Elementary, my Dear Wilson.

Wilson’s work reminds me of that of other scriber of soul-troubled folks, Tennessee Williams. But unlike the characters in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (currently being presented in repertory by A Noise Within at Glendale), the dramatis personae of Burn This have the possibility of being redeemed by love. Perhaps Lanford was less damaged goods than Tennessee?

I asked New York actor Danton Stone, whom I grew up with, about the dearly departed playwright, who had written roles for Stone, as in Angels Fall. In the 1980s I saw Stone star in the Circle Repertory Company, John Malkovich-directed production of the Drama Desk award winning play, Balm in Gilead, with Gary Sinise and Laurie Metcalfe, and on Broadway in Fifth of July with Chris Reeves. Stone, who co-stars with Judd Hirsh in an upcoming production of Art by Yasmina Reza (who also wrote of God of Carnage, just opening at the Ahmanson Theatre) remembered Wilson well. 

“Ah, Lanford. He was the best artist I ever knew, he was a mentor, an ‘art-father’ to me and to a generation of other writers, actors, designers, and directors," said Stone. "He led by example, in that he did his work -- which was to create imaginary communities where the life force, and the need to connect and be loved was the most powerful thing in it -- with dedication. And yes, he was a hilarious and serious writer, who had compassion for the best and the brightest, but also for the dumb, the uneducated, the poor and the addicted. He gave honest voice to the lonely souls in any room, and he made each person’s private imagination sing with poetry and humor. He truly loved actors, and he wrote his people for specific actors to play, which is a very rare thing. And he generously gave his plays to all of us, to perform, forever, to see, and to read from. His plays are his gift to the whole world, [to] Humanity. Most of all, Lanford Wilson was the greatest humanist playwright of our time.”

Burn This runs through May 1 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown Los Angeles. For more information: 213/628-2772 ; www.centertheatregroup.org 

FILM FEATURE: A KING'S SPEECH

A  demonstration supporting the Hollywood Ten. Photo credit: The Ed Rampell Collection.

Doomed to repeat history

By Ed Rampell

Representative Peter King’s (R-NY) congressional inquisition of the purported “radicalization” of U.S. Muslims is scheduled for the same month as the 60th anniversary of another all-American witchhunt. The hearings invoked by King, the Homeland Security Committee’s Chairman, is reminiscent of another House committee and of something Ronald Reagan famously said during a debate: “There you go again.” Reagan should know. As Eugene Jarecki’s new HBO documentary reveals, the former Screen Actors Guild president was an FBI informant during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings investigating the so-called Red Menace in Tinseltown.

The Hollywood Blacklist began in 1947 with a probe of alleged subversion in the motion picture industry that began when talents, including Reagan, testified before HUAC. Ten filmmakers refused to cooperate with the congressional committee, declining to confess they were Communists or to inform on others suspected of being radicals. Charged with contempt of Congress the Hollywood Ten were ultimately fined and imprisoned. With Reagan’s connivance, movie studios refused to hire suspected “subversives” but “friendly witnesses” who “named names” could keep making movies.

Once the Cold War and Red Scare intensified the worst was yet to come from 1951 to 1953. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund noted in The Inquisition in Hollywood: “As severe as it was, the fate of the Hollywood Ten turned out to be only a small foretaste of the political, professional, and human destruction that was to occur in Hollywood shortly thereafter.” This second wave of purges began March 21, 1951, when Larry Parks -- Oscar nominated for his portrayal of Al Jolson in a 1946 biopic -- testified in Washington. The former Communist Party member pleaded with HUAC’s anti-heresy zealots coercing him to confess and finger suspected “commies”:

“I don’t think this is American justice to make me… crawl through the mud… This is what I beg you not to do…I am no longer fighting for myself, because I tell you frankly that I am probably the most completely ruined man that you have ever seen," said Parks.

Parks -- whose acting career was destroyed, even though he eventually informed on others -- was the first of around 110 Hollywood artists subpoenaed to testify before HUAC in 1951, including: actors John Garfield, Will Geer, Jose Ferrer, Sterling Hayden, Howard Da Silva and Gale Sondergaard; screenwriters Budd Schulberg, Waldo Salt, Paul Jarrico, Richard Collins, Martin Berkeley and Robert Lees; and director Edward Dmytryk. In 1952 Elia Kazan, Edward G. Robinson, Clifford Odets, Abe Burrows and Lillian Hellman testified. In 1953 Jerome Robbins, Lee J. Cobb and Lionel Stander appeared before the Committee.

Since the colonial era Salem Witch Trials, reactionaries here have periodically pursued, purged and persecuted those different from them and guilty of being “out of the mainstream.” After World War I the Palmer Raids rounded up and deported radicals such as anarchist Emma Goldman, just as La-La-Land leftists and Communists were targeted during the HUAC/McCarthy Era. During the 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO covert eavesdropping and agent provocateur operation was aimed against anti-war, minority rights and other activists, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

That other King, Peter, is in the not-so-grand tradition of grand inquisitors such as Torquemada, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Sen. Joe McCarthy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, etc. The Islamophobic 10-term congressman sits on the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and is one of the Beltway’s biggest blustery, bellicose buffoons and bullies. King, who voted for the disasterous Iraq invasion, bashes the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” and WikiLeaks, claiming that website’s release of classified information was “worse even than a physical attack on Americans… worse than a military attack.” King called for designating WikiLeaks “a terrorist organization,” and supported “efforts to fully prosecute WikiLeaks and [Julian Assange] for violating the Espionage Act.”

Regarding Peter King’s congressional jihad on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response,” Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, said: “it is worthwhile to find out what turns somebody from a normal citizen into a violent radical, but to say that we’re only going to do it against this community and we’re about to change the debate to vilify this community is very scary and clearly has McCarthyistic implications.”

Rep. King’s auto-da-fe is scheduled to start today in the Cannon House Office Building, where State Department official Alger Hiss, a suspected Soviet spy, was interrogated by HUAC in 1948 and where Larry Parks was crucified 60 years ago. Will Rep. King and his fellow cross examiners ask their witnesses: “Are you now or have you ever been Islamic?”

There was something inherently stage-like about HUAC’s hearings; Ceplair and Englund wrote they “dramatized the Committee’s theatrical genius.” The HUAC show trials in 1947 that resumed March 21, 1951 have an inherently dramatic, Greek tragedy-like quality, and launched the national political careers of future presidents Reagan and Richard Nixon (the latter resigning in shame).

As the King’s leech attaches itself to the body politic, who knows what that grandstanding grand inquisitor, the not-so-gentleman from Long Island, really wants from his crusade against the latest incarnation of the bogeyman and “un-American”? A 2012 U.S. Senate seat? In any case I’d bet a King’s ransom there’s an Iran-Contra or Watergate scandal lurking in this demagogue’s past that could cause him to abdicate.

It’s worth remembering what Larry Parks (whose widow, actress Betty Garrett, died Feb. 12) told his HUAC tormentors: “I do feel that this Committee is doing a really dreadful thing that I don’t believe the American people will look kindly on… as honest, just and in the spirit of fair play.” As Rep. King prepares for his close-up and political theatre of the absurd, to quote philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember history are doomed to repeat it.”