HOW KATRINA PLAYS at WriteAct Repertory

It's very difficult to write a play. It's exceedingly difficult to write a good play. It's even more difficult than that to write a good play based on actual events, because the writer should stick to the reality of what made the story compelling to begin with, but the writer also needs to create a piece of theater that will entertain, as well as -- with any luck -- inform.

In the case of "How Katrina Plays" by Judi Ann Mason -- a mosaic of vignettes about the disaster in New Orleans after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- what you have is none of the above.

The play was developed from the postings of Ms. Mason's brother, B.J. Mason, during the whole debacle. B.J. was a journalist and activist in Louisiana and wanted to let the world know about what the hell was going on down there as the American government's non-response shocked the world. So he collected every story he heard and emailed them to everyone he knew. It seems that in the process of doing this very noble work, B.J. had a heart attack while sitting at his desk. So, to celebrate his life and work, and I guess to remind the theatre world of the tragedy, Judi Ann Mason (an LA -based writer, herself, who has now also passed, sadly) put together a number of these pieces of her brother's and assembled them into something intended to pass as drama.

I have spent too much of my life on this show, already (two-and-a-half-plus eternal hours, thank you), that I really don't want to waste even more of my time pointing out every single problem with this production. Because there is a LIST.

But, in brief and in no order of grievousness: the pace was slow; the directing was "concept"-based, and not actors'-performance-based (read: lots of shouting, empty emoting and other masturbation); and the writing was awful. To be fair, it was awful in a few ways. It was terribly repetitive, for starters. There were times I actually thought the actors had gotten lost and improvised their way back around to the top of the scene...only it just kept happening! (A sample I am paraphrasing only slightly: a character is on her way out of New Orleans to move to Philadelphia, about which she says "I am never going back to New Orleans again! Never! Never, ever, ever! No, not ever! Not ever, ever, ever, ever! Not going back there ever! Not ever!" and so on. Now imagine this kind of writing over several scenes, with people not only saying the same thing over and over, but ideas getting covered over and over again, and never in a new way). Next up: many of her characters were in situations that made no logical sense; for example, the kid and mom who got separated and couldn't find each other (in one of the few arcing stories of the night, making the dialog both repetitive AND redundant) got in their predicament because the mother had sent her son out for milk...even though the town had already started evacuating two days before and there was a hurricane outside. (The only possible explanation was if the mother was supposed to be so strung out she didn't know the difference -- but if that's the case, then that, too, was a failing of the writer and director.) Another questionable story revolved around a couple who was spending their wedding night in their attic...meaning we're to believe that anyone would actually marry them during an evacuation, rather than put it off a few days.

But the worst of the many grievances I have against this production is the simple fact that clearly NO ONE did anything resembling fact-checking, as there any number of glaring errors. So many that my partner in theater-going (a New Orleans native) was furious by the end of the evening. Again, I won't list them all, but here are a few: the name of the bridge over the Mississippi that people unsuccessfully used to try and escape to the next parish was wrong. Yes -- people at the far end did point rifles at the fleeing crowd to keep them from crossing over, but they were not wearing KKK hoods, as this show insisted. One woman refers to where she lives as "on the hill", while Southern Louisiana is completely, utterly flat -- so flat that they built a hill at the New Orleans Zoo for the kids to see what a hill looks like!

On and on the mistakes rolled, making a mockery of both B.J. Mason and the memory of the horror Hurricane Katrina created and the deadly incompetence its response exposed.

This is a subject very much in need of a great play. With its sub-standard directing and acting (although there were a few stand-outs who clearly did their homework), bland-at-best writing, smug air of significance, and lack of both logic and correct information, "How Katrina Plays" isn't it. Not by a long shot.

Til next time!
--HDSQ, Jr.

"Equus" at The Production Company

It's been a long time since I felt the need -- the burning, burning NEED -- to post a new review for this blog, although I've seen a goodly amount of theater in Los Angeles in the last many months. But coming out of the year-old Production Company's production of Peter Shaffer's influential and highly theatrical play "Equus" I knew I had to say something because I could see what was going to be coming from the critics of Los Angeles and I wanted to give another perspective.

In short, this production, has everything it appears the majority of LA critics want to see in a play -- that is, a deep sense of its own importance, some clever gimmickry, and a naked boy (female nudity has never, in my experience, helped the reviews of bad shows here). Not to say that the show doesn't have more substantial things going for it, but to my mind not enough.

Let's start with the positives, assuming you all know the story of the psychiatrist bent on helping a DEEPLY troubled teenager who has blinded some horses. First and foremost, Jim Hanna's Dr. Dysart is superb. It is thoughtful, sensitive, deeply felt and absorbing performance, despite the fact that his fair-at-best English accent waivers consistently (more on this in a moment). There are some small holes that seem more the fault of the director, August Viverito. Why specifically, for example, is the doctor talking to the audience? Are we at a lecture? Are we in his head? Also, the arc of Hanna's character works well up to his final monologue, which feels like a sudden lurch of emotion for no solid reason, despite the "explanation" for it in the script. But, Viverito uses the tiny stage very cleverly much of the time, creating a number of locations simply and smartly.

Now, on to the shameful rest. The accent work varies from the pretty good to the seriously horrible -- this latter being the majority of the cast. Supposedly the cast had a dialect coach, which just makes me wonder what they were like before I saw them. (My biggest issue with this is unrelated to this specific show, but the ongoing problem that the critics of LA wouldn't know a good British accent if it served them tea and scones every fortnight; so, since no one in the theater community is being called out on bad accents, most of the dialect work in LA theatre is simply awful.)

Now, this glaring problem aside, the larger issue of the acting is also a mixed bag: other than Mr. Hanna, most of the cast is serviceable, but some of them are as wooden as the posts that make up the corners of the set pieces that stood in for stable beams. Worse, one of the least tolerable performances in my book was Patrick Stafford, who plays the mentally unstable young Alan Strang, around whom the story unfolds. Mr. Stafford speaks all of his lines in a tinny head-voice that makes him hard to understand, even in a room with only about 40 seats. Not helping this is his impossibly annoying habit of dropping off the last word from almost every sentence he utters. And again, on accents: his father seems to be Cockney, his mother educated London (okay so far), yet for some reason Mr. Stafford sounds like he's from way up North. This is akin to a person having a father from (randomly selected, here) rural Alabama, a mother from Connecticut, but somehow sounding like he's from Canada. In a culture where accents mean everything -- in a way that they just don't, here in the States -- this is a major issue that further adds to the ineffectiveness of the play's second lead. Is it the actor's fault or the show's dialect coach? The long and the short of all this is that since I could find no way to connect with the unbelievable actor, the character of poor Alan Strang seemed less sad and deeply troubled, and instead more merely psychotic and incurable; thus, ruining the stakes for me, the audience.

So, the score so far: this production of "Equus" has very, very mixed acting and terrible accent work, making the dense and wordy script hard to follow or care about.

But then the set spins at the "climax" of Act I, Mr. Stafford gets naked in Act II (yes, this is in the script), and this seems enough to have the LA critics hail it as a great show. And the thing is, I knew that this would be the case when I left the theater -- I could feel it, despite the hole in my stomach that opens up whenever I see less-than-acceptable art.

This production was less an evening of theater to me than it was a devious marvel of critical engineering.

Bottom Line: B-

Till next time!
HDSQ, Jr