How Bro Can You Go?

Sure Palestine, New Mexico is a bit of a mess, but what play with that title couldn't be? Currently running at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, PNM is the latest creation of Culture Clash, the brilliant Chicano theater threesome now celebrating their 25th anniversary together. Anybody who has followed Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza over the years knows their ambitions keep growing, as they've moved from outlandish, socially conscious sketch comedy to more observational, interview-based works, to their more recent plays like Chavez Ravine and Water & Power, still full of madcap humor while addressing in more traditional dramatic form what makes Los Angeles Los Angeles (hint: see linguistic root of the town's name). Palestine, New Mexico expands their reach even further, for that red-rocked desert set is at times an Indian reservation and at others Afghanistan, places of all sorts of heat that the play tries to air out.

That said, the play is informed by one of the most infamous cries ever uttered in LA, "Can we all just get along?" Of course, everyone made fun of Rodney King for that and it's easy to bat the seemingly simple-minded plea about with our cynicism sticks--silly fools, of course we can't, we're nasty, self-serving humans. That's why Culture Clash's humor is so important--it makes it clear that they want their message of brotherly and sisterly love while having some fun with it, too. But it means something this play is the first for CC in which they are bit players--the focus is clearly on Kirsten Potter as Capt. Catherine Siler, a soldier desperate to figure out why PFC Birdsong, a man in her platoon, died. She goes to his res (short for reservation) for answers, and ends up finding ones about herself, too, with help from a crazy cast of characters and a tongue-in-cheek over the top peyote dream quest starring a cactus golem, among other hallucinations. Even stalwart Native American activist and actor Russell Means shows up, in his first play, to portray Birdsong's father and the chief of the tribe. Talk about gravity amidst the levity.

I also want to defend the part of the play that seems to shtick in other critics' throats--when the CC trio come out as old VFW geezers and run through a series of jokes you expect to hear rimshots after. First, it is a pretty funny sequence, so you have to give them that--you can feel their joy in trying to put over some old chestnuts. Second, at this point CC are the vets in the play, so to suggest they are just for laughs is relatively pointed self-criticism. Third, the play will end with a coffin and a kaddish (multi-faith division). There's a dead young man who just wanted peace in there. Who are we to judge anything as ridiculous in the face of that.

The March from Justice to Just Us

Want to win me over with your musical, mister? Then come up with a big love song called "All the Wasted Time" that's keyed to the lovely sung line "I never knew anything at all." That's just part of the astute choices that makes Parade, which is currently running at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, such a powerful theatrical experience. Of course, Parade isn't your typical musical. Simply its subject matter sets it apart, as it's based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born, Ivy League educated Jew who marries a southern Jew, moves to Atlanta for what seems like a good job, and ends up in a nightmare. For Frank is accused of a horrendous crime, the murder of a 13 year old girl who works in the pencil factory he helps manage. It isn't a pretty tale, to say the least, and the play pulls few punches.

Which means it only hits harder. Evidently the original Broadway production back in 1999 was conceived as an epic--big cast, big orchestra--not so big a run, a mere 84 performances. For it can seem cold, as Frank is far from a cuddly hero, and even in the new production (with a good 20% changed material, or so said music and lyrics writer Jason Robert Brown in a post-show discussion) T.R. Knight (yes, from Gray's Anatomy) plays him close to the vest. While we feel for him, we don't really feel him--he's all intellectual in a place where that seems to mean nothing, especially when justice turns out to be a sham.

The secret to the new production, as re-thunk originally for the Domar Warehouse in London, is to go small. The Taper, with its classic thrust stage, is perfect for that, and the tripling of roles and the concise orchestra tucked away above the stage out of sight, makes it hard not to feel implicated, to feel the feeling sometimes the characters themselves seem unable to feel. It's not like you have to reach much to find all the amazing strands of themes: north v. south, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, populism gone vigilante crazy. (Tell me the historic Tom Watson, a virulent racist pamphleteer who makes an appearance in the play, not the golfer, isn't simply a century old forbear of Glenn Beck.) So it's better to focus, keep us with the characters (all the fine acting and siging helps, of course), and let the ideas do their work the way ideas do, in amongst the cracks of lives lived.

For it's a damn 'nother play about love, after all, about how Lucille goes from the plaintive and all-too-real "What Am I Waiting For?" to fighting for her man, despite everything she has to hear about him. Despite the wickedly powerful testimony of the shopgirls, singing their catchy creepy song about how Leo was bad, like a musical threesome version of the scary Shining vision twins. Despite Leo himself, who almost doesn't realize what he has until it's too late.

For forget about justice being blind--just think about love. How we can stare it in the face for years and not know. This even gets rhymed by the governor and his wife, both calling each other jack-asses in the tenderest way imaginable. You can do the right thing and still be damned, and still be in love, the play insists. The parade of history, even with its vicious lynchings, is a parade of love.

An Empty Room and the Right Kind of People

Artie Shaughnessy is caught between Bunny and Bananas, and that might be the least of his problems. The protagonist of John Guare's early play The House of Blue Leaves, which is currently being revived as the first production at the also recently revived Mark Taper Forum in LA, Artie works at the Central Park Zoo but wants to be Rogers and Hart, or at the least, Bob Merrill. We get to hear him sing some of his songs, in particular the ditty "Where Is the Devil in Evelyn" (why yes in Angela's eyes), but what's more, we hear him wish a billion wishes, none greater than to make it in Hollywood. He might even have a leg up--and it's not talent, it's childhood friend, now famous filmmaker, Billy Einhorn. (That Einhorn, when he shows up, is played by Diedrich Bader of Drew Carey Show and Office Space fame might be a hint he's not all Artie hopes--not that Bader's a bad actor it's that he specializes in the un-deep, you might say.) What's more, Artie's day job at the zoo does little to prepare him for Act II, a madcap farce shot through with utmost tragedy (and not just the first tragedy that's sort of played for laughs) and featuring an AWOL son, three celeb-struck nuns, three bottles of beer, two grenades, one malfunctioning hearing aid, a funny farm attendant, an MP, a Pope at Yankee Stadium on just a black-and-white TV, an eggplant casserole, and a dear deaf starlet.

House of Blue Leaves is one of those plays where everything AND the kitchen sink gets thrown in, as the set is a depressing apartment complete with kitchen in Sunnyside, Queens, 1965. Tonally it's all over, literally riotous, as anything with battling nuns in habits can be, totally touching, too, especially when Artie's wife Bananas, who is a bit off her rocker but also, of course, the sanest one in the play (when not pretending to be a dog), explains to the audience (yes, we get direct audience address, even to the point of alluding to ticket prices) how she got to where she is.

The only way a play like this works is through determined acting and this production has that down. Kate Burton's Bananas never quite loses her attractiveness--you can completely tell why Artie married her--but also never pulls completely out of her dreaminess, even when zinging Artie by pointing out one of his favorite creations is actually a rip-off of "White Christmas." (Ever looking at the bright side of life, Artie replies, "But you can sing mine year round.") Bunny, Artie's lover, is played brashly by Jane Kaczmarek (yep, the mom from Malcolm in the Middle) as a dynamic climber, hoping for the best for Artie as that will mean the best for her, too. This Bunny is no dummy--sure she puts out, but she won't cook for Artie. She knows she's a bad lay, so getting that out of the way doesn't mean much, but while she doesn't simmer in bed, she can cook in the kitchen, so she refuses to make him food, leaving something for that honeymoon. If only they can get Bananas out of the way.

That's where the House of Blue Leaves comes in, for it's Artie's artful way to jazz up the asylum where he hopes to be able to ship Bananas. This scene is emblematic of how good John Pankow is in the role--for as often despicable as Artie is, he's impossible to hate. He does want to be loved by everyone. He tells of visiting the asylum and seeing a shimmering tree of blue leaves that turns out to be birds. It's hard to tell if we should like him as he's trying to make the place sound so nice, or to hate him--he's trying to make a mad house (in 1965, so don't think of the pampering rest places we have today) sound poetic so he can leave his wife there and run off with another woman. It's "the asylum is half full" world Artie, and the songs Artie loves, wants to sell.

And lord knows we buy. Even the nuns are celeb-obsessed, at first for the Pope, which makes some sense, but then also for Corrina Stroller, a mere starlet. For a play from 1971 Guare really nails our ever-growing desires to be famous, or infamous, or at the least near the famous. While all the cast features faces known from theater and TV--that's the Mark Taper way--it's clever of this production to end up with the two most known actors together (sorry for that bit of a spoiler). Fame finds itself. The regular Joes (and Arties) of the rest of us are left to scrabble out our days knowing if we didn't exist, there'd be no famous folks--someone has to do the looking, the applauding.

Which came first, the audience or the play? I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure we all have our private houses of blue leaves in which we reside.