"Love Loves a Pornographer" at Circle X

I'm not sure what is more offensive to me as an active theatre-goer in Los Angeles: the fact that this play is intolerable tripe or the fact that it is *exactly* the specific kind of pseudo-intellectual crap that LA critics adore.

But let's start from the top: as produced at the lovely Inside the Ford space, it is a show that is lovely to look at. From the moment you walk in there are literally wall-to-wall reproductions of 19th-Century paintings all over the house -- both the one where the audience sits and the one as created on stage: a lovely old English manse of that era. It is a lovely touch, and the set with its details and a scrim for a back wall, enabling you to look out onto the upstage drop of an expansive lawn, are impressive. Or at least expensive-looking. So upon entering you think "OK--good production values. Good start."

But then the play begins...and basically if you have a respectable college education you're screwed. "Love Loves a Pornographer" by Circle-X regular Jeff Goode is set in the 19th century in the home of (what else do weak writers write about?) a writer-- here, receiving his neighbors as guests--but the writer has a proposition for his guest, a highly-placed literary critic. What follows is roughly 45 minutes of sheer boredom as Mr. Goode rolls out a painfully tedious and woefully over-written exposition, which is finally broken by the arrival of the rest of the cast. Which is as good a time as any to mention that I actually really enjoyed the performances in this piece, with the exception of Jim Azide as the uptight LONDON TIMES critic Reverend Miles Monger, whose shrill, one-note queen-on-a-bitchfest performance felt incredibly out of place as the (straight) sexual aggressor he ends up to be.

And this really gets to the heart of my problem with this play, at least as directed by Jillian Armenante: on the surface everything seems pretty and well-accomplished, but once the surface is just barely scratched you realize quickly that very little here makes sense. There's lots of oh-so-witty banter in an Oscar Wilde fashion, but Mr Goode seems to demand we see how witty it is by adding ENDLESS, cloying alliteration whenever possible. From every character. In just about every scene. Also, there are a few words I noticed that he used incorrectly. At one point, for example, the youngest character refers to something as "frippery", offending the others, causing her to repeat it over and over in order to cause more offense, the implication being that it is a word she chose because of its indecency. Go look up the word, meaning "a shallow display, especially in dress" and you'll see that it is not--nor has it ever been--an offensive word. Not even in the Victorian Era.

Further, the writer throws in a lot of jokes he clearly felt were very smart. The cast wisely flying through some of them as to make sure we didn't really notice how poor they were, landing on the few that work and were deserving of a laugh in this "comedy" of manners (incorrectly called by some critics a "parody of drawing-room comedies"). All in all I just felt Mr Goode must have written this play in a state of pique after someone called him "a dummy", desperate to prove Them wrong. Sadly, I think they might have been more on the mark than he would prefer, if this play is an example.

Moving on, there's much ado made of the daughter's American fiance having brought some home-land tobacco to the house, which they all dig into with relish, claiming that it is something new and exciting. Only on planet Earth, it isn't -- the British had been importing the stuff for close to 200 years at the time this play is set. All you need to do is look at a few Hogarth prints from 100 years before to know that it wasn't "new" to the English. Likewise, there's a lot of needless blocking around the lighting of the electric table lamps as the day -- and the play -- moves on. No dialog -- just blocking. Which then begs the question: was it in the script? And this question: was the electric lamp this common in a household at this time (I believe it was not until several decades later)? And THIS question: as this rigmarole with the lights begins after tea time (always 4p, as is the tradition) late in a play performed in real-time, and everyone is dressed for Spring (as the backdrop also tells us it is), why is the freaking sun going down so early in a country so far north of the equator?????

This might seem like needless nit-picking on my part, but it is not: in a piece in which the time and place are clearly so crucial it goes to show an utter lack of respect for the audience. The poor word-choices, the poor research -- it all says that the director and possibly the writer are claiming "none of this matters -- it's just a play!" But in doing so, it is nothing short of a slap in the face of an educated audience.

The rest of it, in which we are lead to see that porn is harmless, prurient fun--especially when compared to real-life, hypocritical manipulation of human feelings--made me feel that that was a WHOLE lot of time spent to tell me that the world is round. Or in other words: a lot of frippery.

Bottom line: C for effort.

Til next time,
--HDSQ, Jr