THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

SHOCK AND AWE: I went under protest, you might say, to the protest-event staging of Lysistrata at the Wilshire Ebell on Mar. 3, organized chiefly by local theatre makers Tracy Hudak and Gleason Bauer with the help of many staunch creative and logistical partners. Could Aristophanes' millennia-old play about a no-nooky anti-war strategy speak to our current terrible historical moment? And wouldn't such an event simply be preaching to the choir, as Christine Lahti admitted may be the case with the Venice reading she participated in? The answer to the first question is no, not really--no one proposes that a sex strike could stop this war, though one pre-show speaker, the eminent Stanley Sheinbaum, suggested that withholding campaign financing might have a properly punitive effect--but that misses the point, which is that this Lysistrata rousingly, definitively, bravely crystallized the scrappy, unstoppable life force of certain L.A. theatre artists, who miraculously respond to the feeling of being under siege (typically by indifference, though just as often by the sheer grind of keeping their own steam going minus funding, minus respect, minus real support) with joy, with fervor, with their fierce imagination and irrefutable presence (the line "they smile when they are low" comes to mind unbidden).

The answer to the second question flows from that: No, in an important sense they were not preaching to the converted. The audience was certainly on board for the anti-war agenda (one yahoo in front of me found every opportunity, amid the dispiriting pre-show parade of speakers and "performers," to yowl "Impeach Bush!"), but not necessarily on board for a big fat Greek play, crammed with puns and harangues and mile-high hard-ons. I felt what I can only call pride in my local theatre community--such companies as Circle X, Zoo District, Theatre of NOTE, Company of Angels, and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence I recognized, while the lyrical choreo-slapstick of Teatro Tatalejos, the winking precision of Nevertheless Radio, and the sumptuous diversity of Crip Chics were new to me--that it pulled off this ungainly, challenging blend of entertainment and provocation with such flair and irresistible high spirits. This was a one-of-a-kind L.A. happening that transcended place and time, and above all our world's current precarious state, to touch the theatre's eternal human pulse. Indeed it may have been the closest I've felt to what I imagine the theatre experience might have been for the Greeks--the ritual sense of gathering and sharing the space with artists doing their ancient art, breaking the ice of a tense, fraught environment by facing the tension head-on.

In short, I had a really good time, which astonished me and gave me pause, as when I think about it I find the proto-feminist cosmology of Lysistrata--all war was made by men, women just wanna have peace--retrograde and demeaning, and when push comes to shove I'm not anti-war about Saddam Hussein (any stagings of Lysistrata in Iraq? Didn't think so). But for a moment--a moment, in that glorious old Ebell, that pierced time--it did feel like theatre could change the world. There's no business like show business, indeed.

• A good show by Cornerstone Theater Company can give a similar high, as the troupe's mandate is to redefine the theatre community on both sides of the footlights, and with it the meaning and purpose of theatre. Body of Faith (at the Gay and Lesbian Center's Renberg Theatre through this weekend) is a great Cornerstone show, and--with all due respect to last year's breathtaking picaresque Crossings--easily the best and deepest so far in the company's "faith" cycle, investigating religious and spiritual experience. Perhaps it's because in telling the fascinating, often heartbreaking, more often heart-mending stories of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender "people of faith," author Luis Alfaro, director Christopher Liam Moore, and a cast of 19 hit upon an unspeakably profound metaphor for the way religion can make sense of our broken, compromised lives--that is, after it's seemingly done its best to do much of the breaking and compromising. I was particularly struck by the unearthly poise of a deadpan monologue by a geisha-clad Bennett Schneider (one of the aforementioned Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence), about finding God in sex, drugs, and disco; by a movement sequence in which Pierre L. Chambers scatted and actors paired off in roleplays of seduction and submission; by a whispered scene of two evangelical-raised gays sharing their wounds (with the Motels' ineffably sad "Only the Lonely" playing quietly behind them); by the tentative, beatific transgender journey of Peter James Smith, and above all by the juxtaposition of a scene between Peter Howard and Loraine Shields, standing under umbrellas and wondering at the dubious lessons of suffering and death, with the following scene, Adina Porter's cri de couer of "Where is my story?" as she tears up a holy book. This resonated not just on the obvious level--the pain and rage of feeling excluded, obliterated, by traditional religious narratives--but as a shatteringly fundamental existential question: Where is the story, the narrative that gives shape and meaning to the apparently random vagaries of our time here on earth? Where am I written in the Book of Life? As her onstage colleagues helped Porter piece together a scripture here, a testimony there, gradually binding themselves together into a collective body of support, it became clear, in the most theatrical way imaginable: Spirituality may ultimately be a solo flight, but a body of faith has many inseparable parts.

• A rueful farewell to Chris Wells, Lancaster boy made good as a bona fide theatrical force of nature, first with the Actors' Gang and then on his own, more or less, most recently with Liberty!, a glancingly topical romp through Wells' tragicomic imagination that fiercely divided critics and audiences. (I loved it, others walked out.) He's off to New York, to greener pastures, one hopes, but he'll be sorely missed on the local scene. I will cherish memories of his peerless hauteur as Stanford White in Laural Meade's mercurial Harry Thaw Hates Everybody; his silly, sadistic moment as one of the Brothers Grimm in A Fairy Tale; his giggling severity in a few episodes of the Evidence Room's The Strip; his inexhaustible puppy-dog charm in a workshop of Meade's And the Wide Ocean Ate Aimee Semple McPherson Whole. . .; his silken-voiced, mostly unironic cabaret act at the Gardenia; his taut direction of Jessica Wallenfels' Soul Geek, and above all the time he hosted our very own Garland Awards. He opened our 1999 show at the Geffen by asking everyone in the theatre--including all of us backstage--to stand and sing "Over the Rainbow" with him. It was no Lysistrata, but it was a moment of unlikely communion that I count on my short list of spiritual epiphanies in the theatre. There's a land that I dream of, Chris, and you're there. All the best.