THE WICKED STAGE

by Rob Kendt

A trio of great L.A. actors--Emily Kuroda, Page Leong, and J. Sakata--will close this weekend in Singapore Rep's production of Red, Chay Yew's 1998 play, which puts the Beijing Opera in the cross-hairs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Though Yew is an L.A.-based, Taper-employed writer, the play--which has already played Long Wharf and Manhattan Theatre Club--won't have its local premiere until September, opening East West Players' new season. Unannounced are the credits for the EWP production--the Seattle Rep world premiere featured company mainstay Sab Shimono (so witty and moving in the recent Yankee Dawg You Die) and direction by Taper artist Lisa Peterson. Too many worthy local artists for one project is a good problem to have, right? Except when this glut seems to get them mainly non-local productions.

Even East Coast darlings go begging. Consider playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (last week's L.A. Times Calendar cover girl), who teaches in Cal Arts' theatre department and lives in Venice, probably a few minutes from Pacific Resident Theatre, but who's had just one local production. Or Richard Foreman, the avant-garde auteur who developed a new piece called Bad Behavior last year with Cal Arts students--then promptly went back to New York to work it with his Ontological Hysteric Theatre. Until UCLA Performing Arts brings the inevitable Foreman tour, there's hope in Son of Semele, a new theatre troupe readying a West Coast premiere of Foreman's Lava for the fall, possibly at the Lillian Theatre.

SOUR NOTES: Last summer witnessed two L.A. 99-Seat productions of Alan Ball's modest Southern-fried chick play Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, and while previous mountings (one at the Odyssey in the mid-'90s, I recall) were reviewed relatively warmly, both of these new Women were exposed to a different, not altogether flattering light by comparison to a slightly more high-profile Ball writing credit (you may have heard of a movie called American Beauty). Flash to summer 2001: Another bunch of actors has fallen in love with the play's generous character writing and has a production cast, rehearsed, ready to open in early August at a small venue in Hollywood--only they just got word back from Dramatists Play Service that performance rights come with a "no publicity, no reviews" clause. Ouch. I've heard of this once before, when the rights to Shanley's The Dreamer Examines His Pillow were granted with the same caveat to a Valley troupe.

And East beats up on West: Williamstown Theatre Festival's new production of Arthur Miller's The Man Who Had All the Luck is billed as this pre-Death of a Salesman opus' "first major revival." Excuse us for recalling last year's ecstatically received, held-over production at Ivy Substation starring Paul Gutrecht and Kellie Waymire, directed by Dan Fields.

SAVORY FINDS: I've been transported by three recent revivals of plays so rarely performed, and rendered so convincingly anew, that they feel like premieres. Classical theatre companies mulling yet another slog through Midsummer, take note: Antaeus Company's delightful, fleet-footed Mercadet, in Dakin Matthews' adaptation of the Balzac original, hit home with screwball comic force (and I felt lucky to catch the brilliant, sweat-drenched Michael McShane, a late replacement for Matthews in the lead); Pacific Resident Theatre's ripping-good-yarn rendition of Percy MacKaye's soulful The Scarecrow boasts a mesmerizing title performance by Tom Wood, and, towering at the top of recent productions, Don Carlos, in John Rafter Lee's sharp distillation of Schiller's play, graces evidEnce Room with a meaty mixture of Jacobean plotting and political portent, and with performances--by Nick Offerman, Tom Fitzpatrick, Mandy Freund, Alyce LaTourelle, and above all star-in-the-making Christian Leffler--that sear and soar. It's just been extended through month's end.

Diverting but less successful were two recent tweaks of the Bard: Michael O'Brien's Mad Boy Chronicle, at 24th Street Theatre, dresses the Hamlet story half-seriously in Viking drag, positing a Christian-vs.-pagan dynamic that seems intriguing but proves labored, and Amy Freed's The Beard of Avon, at South Coast Rep, handled the Shakespeare authorship debate with a wobbly cocktail of anachronism, allusion, and imaginative license--not unlike the film Shakespeare in Love, but with less snap. Memorable from these Bard benders were Mark Harelik, as a drama-queen deVere in Beard, and Terra Shelman, hard-edged yet sympathetic in Mad Boy's Gertrude role. There are always performances to savor, whatever the flavor of the main dish.