Travis’ Plays of May

Nightmare Alley
Geffen Playhouse

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Mark Taper Forum

See What I Wanna See
Blank Theatre

The Language Archive
South Coast Rep

TICKETHOLDERS

I decided for the first time in my 20-year tenure with ET to do a column featuring several short reviews of shows now running that need attention and might be overlooked if I don’t comment on them soon — especially since I will be away in Las Vegas and New Orleans for most of May.

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Nightmare Alley
Geffen Playhouse

Although many of my colleagues don’t seem to agree with me, for my eclectic tastes, the Geffen Playhouse should have a major hit on its hands with composer/lyricist/playwright Jonathan Brielle’s Nightmare Alley, based on the darkly disturbing 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham and the gritty film noir the followed the next year starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell.

Directed by the Geffen’s producing director Gil Cates, choreographed by Kay Cole, and featuring precision musical direction by Gerald Sternbach, the debut of Brielle’s Nightmare features a world-class cast led by Broadway veterans James Barbour and Mary Gordon Murray, as well as spectacular design work by John Arnone, Daniel Ionazzi, Brian Hsieh and, especially, striking costuming by Christina Haatainen Jones.

Set in a skuzzy down-on-its-luck carnival in the 1930s, the true breakthrough here is Brielle’s richly evocative, darkly evocative score, which is part Sondheim, part Hollmann, and at times feels as though it was created as a tribute to those spooky themes from old Universal horror movies directed by James Whale. Unfortunately, Brielle’s music and lyrics are much better than his soapy and predictable book, which still needs a good professional goose before this becomes the writer’s perfect Nightmare. Still, it’s fascinating as is and features excellent supporting work by Larry Cedar is several roles and Michael McCarty in two—both performances alone worth the price of admission. And to hear Barbour sing in the Geffen, his rich voice almost too amplified for the space? This guy has the range Yma Sumac on steroids.

Nightmare Alley plays through May 23 at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Av., Westwood; for tickets, call 310.208.5454 or visit www.geffenplayhouse.com

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Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Mark Taper Forum 

I was either in a play myself or still recuperating when Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo world premiered at the Kirk Douglas Theatre last season and I'm so pleased that CTG just moved Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize finalist lock, stock, design and cast, to the Taper for another run. Simply, this play is outstanding, superbly augmented by Moises Kaufman’s sharply focused direction and uniformly excellent performances led by Kevin Tighe as the ghost of a tiger killed at the zoo in 2003 when the first Gulf War all but destroyed the facility.

Surviving America’s Scud missile blasts but subsequently murdered by an overzealous U.S. soldier (a knockout turn by Brad Fleischer) as the taunted and starving caged beast chomped down on the hand of his buddy (Glenn Davis), Tighe’s grumpy tiger weaves through the play alongside the spirit of Saddam’s assassinated son Uday (Hrach Titizian, who carries and converses with the severed head of Uday’s brother) while striving to decide if his instincts as a tiger are immoral or normal—of course akin to our species’ need to declare war on others in our own desperate need to be superior to someone.

“Heaven and Hell,” Joseph slyly observes through the medium of the dead tiger’s musings, “are metaphoric constructs that mean hungry and not hungry.” A brilliant play, well deserving of all its universal praise and a notable future.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo plays through May 30 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Av. in the Los Angeles Music Center; for tickets, call 213.628.2772, or visit www.centertheatregroup.org

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See What I Wanna See
Blank Theatre

As many of my regular readers will attest, I'm not a big musical theatre devotee, usually, unless they're somewhat sinister affairs promising to offer no singing nuns or annoying elocution lessons. But hey. With the aforementioned Nightmare Alley and now See What I Wanna See opening at the Blank, what a year for brave new counterculture musicals in El Lay.

The west coast premiere of underrated American genius composer Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See, beautifully staged by director Daniel Henning, is simply magnificent, mainly because of this guy's incredible score which, if you’ll excuse another rather bizarre analogy, is sortakinda like Kurt Weill meets Rudolf Friml—with lyrics by Jim Carroll.

With its two acts offering a pair of unrelated darkly cynical stories performed by the same exceptional cast, both parts of Wanna See begin with a snippet of erotic life in medieval Japan, hinting at the blatantly Roshomon-y nature of LaChiusa’s masterpiece.

The design work is also noteworthy throughout and the cast is golden, particularly Jason Graae as a schnook of a Brooklyn janitor and later as a conflicted priest who has come to understand his life as akin to a “sentence where every word is missing one letter.”

And is it just me or is See What I Wanna See’s breakout Doug Carpenter, the original Skip in the still-running hit Life Could Be a Dream and more recently the dashing Lancelot in Pasadena Playhouse’s swan-song Camelot, becoming the new Kevin Earley around these "parts" in about 10 seconds flat? Hopefully, he’ll be smart enough to Go East, Young Man, before he’s swallowed up in the dry desert sands of our culturally dispossessed city.

See What I Wanna See plays through May 23 at the Blank’s 2nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Bl., Hollywood; for tickets, call 323.661.9827, or visit www.theblank.com

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The Language Archive
South Coast Rep

Sadly, Julia Cho’s breathtaking newest work, The Language Archive, which world premiered here at South Coast Rep before heading next season to the Roundabout in New York, has left the building as of April 25. 

“Time has become very small,” a character tells us in Archive, but not so tiny that, as a grateful audience member, this one stealthily sneaks up on you. The play begins by making us laugh as the outrageously balls-out contemporary comedy it is, but by the end, the production had even this crusty old reviewer a tad misty.

Leo Marks is incredible as always as an introverted linguist trying to save some of the world’s more obscure 6200 languages, half of which, he notes, could disappear in the next century without intervention. While fiercely devoted to his task, however, George is still unable to tell his wife (Betsy Brandt) he loves her, while his devoted assistant (Laura Heisler) suffers the same fate while desperately trying to deal with her own long-festering feelings for her clueless boss.

Tony Amendola and Linda Gehringer are more than along for the ride as several characters each, not the least of which is Reston and Alta, a vaguely Slavic couple brought to George’s lab as the last two speakers of an obscure language called Elloway. Though they arrive shouting at one another in English (there are no words to say “mean, ugly things” in their native tongue, while yelling in English is “perfect for that”), but when it’s discovered that Alton is dying of a strange illness, the pair steadfastly and tenderly comes together again, realizing a world without one another is “unimaginable.”

This is both a brilliant and hilarious play that can play havoc with one’s emotions and has the power to keep haunting your thoughts for a long time after seeing it, made all the more dynamic in its first incarnation by noted director Mark Brokaw and a simply spectacular team of designers. The Language Archive has now closed at SCR, but look for it next year to win all the awards and honors New York has to offer.

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