"Godislav" at Miles Memorial Playhouse

I want to tell you everything I can about this. But I'll try to be brief, and I think you'll thank me for it. It's taken me a week to get the stink of this play out of my hair and only now can I bare to conjure up the memory of this abortion of a piece of theater.

Highlights: a small fistful of competent actors. The female lead NOT one of them (one "Lily Sauvage". Must be her real name, no?). A really interesting space in Santa Monica, where the set was placed on the floor of the house rather than on the stage. Good use of that space (despite being able to hear the people in the park outside)! Some good music cues at the top and bottom of the acts.

Lowlights. I don't have time nor energy to list them all. For starters, this "script" by one Nancy Beverly was a complete insult to an audience. In brief: young film maker sets his life and career on making a documentary about a man he has been lead to believe is a Chechen doctor who lived through the atrocities of their war with Russia. The mans ends up to be a fraud and in the process of dealing with this the film maker gets his life back on track. The first act (an hour, which should have run about 40 minutes...the time added on by the aforementioned Ms. Sauvage's need...to...pause...and...sigh...a...lot) was mostly in flashback as the characters try to find out why the young film maker has disappeared mysteriously. Act II: oh...he had hit his head while swimming. He's fine. Seriously--you dragged us through an hour with flashbacks to tell us it was NOTHING?! HOW DARE YOU????!!

Next: the script really ends up dealing with the "relationship" between the film maker and his girlfriend, who was so desperate to find him in Act I. Yet the title is the name of the non-Chechen our film maker wastes his time on--the most interesting part of this train wreck, to be sure. It's accidentally a perfect title for this play, as we have been conned into thinking that this play is going to be about something real and substantial, like war in Chechnya. Instead, it's all a fake and we have to settle for over 2 hours about these people whom we could care less about. Why don't we care about them? For starters, we can not buy them as a couple for two seconds. The actress spent more time on her fashionable hair than the role, it seemed, and comes off like a just-over-the-hill goth. The guy--"West Wing"'s really quite good Peter James Smith--comes off really effeminate. On top of the fact that they behave, as a result, more like room mates than lovers, they *never once* in this less-than-two-year relationship of theirs actually utter the phrase "I love you". Or anything close to it. Forgive me my life experience, but my memory is such that into only two years if you aren't still using terms of affection you ain't together no mo'. Yet here we are being told we need to care about this couple's love even though they clearly don't, and inform us of this in every moment on stage. in this I blame the writer for being clueless, the director, Susan Lee, for not forcing the issue, and the actors for not knowing better. Ugh.

Next: everyone in this play talks exactly the same. No one has a unique voice. And it's all on-the-nose and dry and deadly.

Next: the Chechen sounded Irish.

Last: there were four themes in the play. FOUR. Any one of them you could have written an engaging play about: parents and children, lovers who lie or hide, the war in Chechnya, refinding your dreams. Sadly, Mz. Beverly tried to cram them all into one script. Actually, considering how dully any of these was handled in "Godislav", maybe it's just as well. I have seen other work from the producing group of Playwright 6--it's why I came. They're usually quite good. But after this I'm crossing them off my to-do list. I want my two hours back. With interest, if possible, for mental cruelty. F.

Til next time!
--HDSQ, Jr.