TWO PLAYS FOR THE KIDS

Jan 25th, 2007 0 Comment

TWO PLAYS FOR THE KIDS

CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS: KRAPP’S LAST TAPE AND THE ZOO STORY AT DEAF WEST THEATRE

Each time Deaf West announces a new project, it’s difficult not to wonder if they’ve finally bitten off more than they can chew this time ‘round.  This is again an understandable reaction when the courageously limitless company, on hiatus for four years from their own NoHo Arts District space (where I got to “play” in the meantime with The Company Rep in Dürrenmatt’s Play Strindberg and the Thorin Alexander/Max Kinberg’s musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol) while their enormously successful mounting of Big River toured internationally, made known it would mark its return by attempting to undertake two already notoriously difficult Beckett and Albee one-acts.

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Under the pristine but resourceful direction of Jevon Whetter, Deaf West veteran Troy Katsur is mesmerizing in ol’ Sam’s one-person Krapp’s Last Tape, a piece often rendered lethal in performance thanks to the playwright’s compelling but merciless drone of disenchantment with the human condition.  Krapp’s can only saved from drowning in its own woebegone and cynical rhetoric by an exceptional actor and inspired staging, and here in this glorious rechristening of the Deaf West Theatre, it couldn’t be realized with more entrancing results as Katsur effortlessly brings a lager-than-life and decidedly risky Buster Keaton-like, almost pantomimed quality to the title role.  The spooling and respooling of the infamous Tape 5 from Box 3 takes on curious new life as a video projected behind Krapp flutters by in grainy black and white as he watches himself 30 years younger, letting the sorrow of his battered and disillusioned advanced years form a sad counterpart to his own youthful enthusiasm captured on VHS tape.

It’s a fresh and fascinating approach to the familiar material that’s even more pronounced with Albee’s early career-maker The Zoo Story.  Brilliantly directed by Coy Middlebrook, who has craftily chosen to play the piece out on two adjacent Central Park benches, the dynamic and highly physical Tyrone Giordono (Big River’s far more wide-eyed and enormously less jaded Huck Finn) and Katsur, equally to be commended here for his subtly as he is for his intentionally overplayed Krapp, respectively interpret that scary urban monster Jerry and the quietly respectable businessman Peter, two strangers who share one of the most beguiling and often unnerving two-character encounters in contemporary theatre.  On the less prominent bench sit Greg Bryan and Jeff Alan-Lee, who have a challenging task they ace with great success: playing alternately amused and terrified observing bystanders while still finding the perfect emotional tone to simultaneously voice Peter and Jerry’s dialogue to us less evolved audience members who don’t know ASL. 

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Karyl Newman’s sparsely effective set designs for both pieces are also an asset, with Krapp’s dismal lone room, complete with the obligatory single suspended raw lightbulb, brilliantly crafted to illuminate the videofeed and alternately show Krapp moving around in ever-expanding and shrinking shadows behind it.  This innovatively gives way after act break to equally claustrophobic but glorious huge photographic tapestries of Central Park (ironically and eerily for me taken just around the corner from my New York flat) looming grandly above a stage strewn with real fall-colored leaves.  Jeremy Pivnik’s evocative lighting and John Zalewski’s barely perceptible sound plot also immeasurably help the production to celebrate this pair of groundbreaking contemporary classics.

Deaf West’s indelible take on

and The Zoo Story is a great way to bring the company home, instantly showing that uniquely inspired mid-century avant-garde theatre and this uniquely inspired troupe belong together, as the heightened physicality of the actors and the heightened theatricality of the plays prove a splendid match indeed.  

Deaf West Theatre is located at 5112 Lankershim Bl., NoHo; for tickets, call (818) 272-2773 or use (818) 508-8389 for TTY.
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TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER teaches acting and theatre/film history at the New York Film Academy’s west coast campus at Universal Studios. He has been writing about LA theatre since 1987, including 12 years for BackStage, a 23-year tenure as Theatre Editor for Entertainment Today, and currently for ArtsInLA.com. As an actor, he received the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Best Actor Award as Kenneth Halliwell in the west coast premiere of Nasty Little Secrets at Theatre/Theater and he has also been honored with a Drama-Logue Award as Lennie in Of Mice and Men at the Egyptian Arena, four Maddy Awards, a ReviewPlays.com Award, both NAACP and GLAAD Award nominations, and six acting nominations from LA Weekly. Regionally, he won the Inland Theatre League Award as Ken Talley in Fifth of July; three awards for his direction and performance as Dr. Dysart in Equus; was up for Washington, DC’s Helen Hayes honors as Oscar Wilde in the world premiere of Oscar & Speranza; toured as Amos “Mr. Cellophane” Hart in Chicago; and he has traveled three times to New Orleans for the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, opening the fest in 2003 as Williams himself in Lament for the Moths and since returning to appear in An Ode to Tennessee and opposite Karen Kondazian as A Witch and a Bitch. Never one to suffer from typecasting, Travis’ most recent LA performance, as Rodney in The Katrina Comedy Fest, netted the cast a Best Ensemble Sage Award from ArtsInLA. He has also been seen as Wynchell in the world premiere of Moby Pomerance’s The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder and Frank in Charles Mee’s Summertime at The Boston Court Performing Arts Center, Giuseppe “The Florist” Givola in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for Classical Theatre Lab, Ftatateeta in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra at the Lillian, Cheswick in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Rubicon in Ventura, Pete Dye in the world premiere of Stranger at the Bootleg (LA Weekly Award nomination), Shelly Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Egyptian Arena, the Witch of Capri in Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore at the Fountain, and Dr. Van Helsing in The House of Besarab at the Hollywood American Legion Theatre. As a writer, he has also been a frequent contributor to several national magazines and five of his plays have been produced in LA. His first, Surprise Surprise, for which he wrote the screenplay with director Jerry Turner, became a feature film with Travis playing opposite John Brotherton, Luke Eberl, Deborah Shelton and Mary Jo Catlett. His first novel, Waiting for Walk, was completed in 2005, put in a desk drawer, and the ever-slothful, ever-deluded, ever-entitled Travis can’t figure out why no one has magically found it yet and published the goddam thing. www.travismichaelholder.com

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