"How the Other Half Loves" at the Odyssey

After years of frustration of going to plays in the LA area and leaving the experience either elated or angry--only to find out that a critic from one of the local papers had reviewed it feeling the exact opposite from me (or couldn't string a sentence together, or spent the entirety of the review in a plot description/cast list)--I began to think that I might need to set some records straight in my travels and possibly...*possibly*...raise the level of current Los Angeles theatrical journalism a tad. We'll see. But after kicking this idea around for a while I finally find myself booted into action by the show I saw this week. So this, friends of the theater, is how I begin my postings.

No--they will not all be pans, I promise (a few weeks ago I saw a superior production of "Boy Gets Girl" at the Attic Theater, and the "Soda Pop" at the Ark Theater is terrific!! If they're both running--GO!!).

So:

I'm going to assume that anyone reading this blog has an appreciation for the stage, as well as more than a little background in it, and so I won't bore you with lots of details you can simply look up elsewhere. Suffice it to say, Alan Ayckbourn is a wonderfully funny contemporary British writer who has a taste for very creative convention-bending stage concepts. In "How the Other Half Loves" he uses one single room set as the locale for two different couple's homes. Both couples appear on stage at the same time, even though they are in reality miles and even days apart. The couples cross each other's paths, end up doing some of the same things near each other, and so on. Great fun! And when there is the oh-so-British-sex-farce case of mistaken identity involving a liaison, hi-jinx ensue as a third couple come over to both of their houses on two different nights...at the same time in the space on stage.

OK. Now that we got that out of the way, I will say this: director Barry Philips keeps the action moving. Mostly. But he doesn't trust his audience to get the joke. Apart from the occasional, dreadfully obvious "wah-waaaah" music button to let us know something kwazy just happened, he has the two "homes" lit differently, so that when Couple A is talking, it's lit one way, and when Couple B is talking, it's lit a different way. Y'know...in case we couldn't understand that they were two different places, even though they take up the same room. The effect is infuriating, as the whole joke of the concept that Ayckborn is playing with is the use of The Space on stage. He WANTS it to all feel like parallel lives! The two rooms need to get all mooshed together visually and allow us to fill in the blanks. But with this annoying back and forth of the lighting, the director forces the audience to separate the two homes in our heads. Killing the joke. Pity.

Also a pity is the fact that despite the fact that the Odyssey is a big, grown up theater company with income and a budget and three spaces and subscribers and the lot, they still can not seem to find the money to either a) hire actors who can do a goddamn British accent or b) hire a goddamn dialect coach to fix the actors they have. While most of the cast is either super at this need or at least close-enough-that-we-get-it, Scott Roberts and Greg Mullavey (both well-traveled thespians, it seems) turn in accents that can best be described as "fancy American". When will Los Angeles theater producers ever learn that the audience will NOTICE!? Every time these two actors open their mouths, the very British dialog just plops on stage like dirty, wet rags. You can see them focusing on the accent, making their character work poorer for it, and they both become really quite tedious to have on stage throughout, as a result. Which is a real shame as there are otherwise some terrific performances. Tracie Lockwood's working class tinder-box-of-a-mom is hilarious and real, as is Kate Hollinshead's ultra-mousy middle-class Mary Featherstone. (Oh, and here's a point: they pronounce this name "fetha-stown". Am I crazy or should this be "fetha'stun" in a real English accent? I could be wrong.) Everyone else: totally solid performances.

But the critic at Playreviews.com who came to see this accused this lot of having "perfect English accents." It's uninformed comments like this that got me to start this blog. Doubt she's ever heard an English accent. It might seem like a funny thing to harp on, but it just...keeps...happening. On the other extreme, at the same theater, last year's awful "Equinox" featured two British actors who could certainly sound English but couldn't act to save their lives, let alone the play. (Amusingly, it was the one American--the always excellent Caroline Hennessey--who turned in the only great performance as well as a dead-on accent). At least when the Odyssey produced "Among the Thugs" a few years ago, they actually cast some American actors who actually CAN do the accent! And a few different regions, to boot! And they won an award for that show. Hm.... Coincidence?

But back to the Ayckborn. The set was the last piece of "they spent money on that?" It was workable...until you started to think about it. This is supposed to be a place inhabited by two different families from opposite sides of the class spectrum, yet the two sides barely looked different! One is a tidy, large, upper-class home and the other a small, baby-chaos working-class home...but there were virtually no signs on stage that this was the case. It was all...in the middle. The designer just didn't put enough thought into it. She could have really gone to town. That would have been much more use in "separating" the two homes than the useless light shifts.

Bottom line, this was a C+ show. Other than what I mention above, it needed some pacing improvement and someone to kick the director in the head about a few important details. But this is often the case, I'm afraid.

Til next time.
HDSQ