THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

I had a minor epiphany a few years back while singing "Billie Jean" with my erstwhile rock band at a Santa Monica club, when I suddenly realized, to my horror, that I really had to perform the song--otherwise why cover "Billie Jean" at all? I'll spare you more details, except that I gave my all and it seemed to go over well, but the lesson I learned felt like a key insight into the performer's living art: Only by willing to make a fool of myself was I able not to feel foolish. To hold back in that situation would be more embarrassing than to go for it.

I remembered this revelation last weekend as I caught the final spurts of "Burglar-Palooza," the three-show repertory festival by those geek-chic pranksters Burglars of Hamm at Actor's Lab. The six members of this troupe have made it their express mission to humiliate themselves, and in their new Party Show, the fest's unruly centerpiece, the Burglars' take-no-prisoners foolery reached the kind of heights you can get to only by going as low as you can go and hitting bottom--incidentally one of the show's more resonant themes. This was clearly a high-stakes double-dare of mounting absurdity: Bad rapping leads to audience baiting, makeout session turns into sex war, beer gives way to heroin, hunger escalates to--what else?--cannibalism. The pass-around writing approach made the piece seem more scattershot than its previous Resa Fantastiskt Mystisk, with the Burglars just slamming the big tonal shifts into place rather than trying to sew them together. My favorite moment along these lines came when Jon Beauregard reeled from pain after apparently injecting drugs into his eye, while the other Burglars rose from their places in the previous scene to do a deadpan bit of knee-slapping hip-hop choreography, under Jon Klein's suddenly sepulchral lighting. Eerie, dude. And Victor Ortado and Sean Isroelit's 3-D video animation is worthy of Terry Gilliam's old Python stuff. Indeed, poised queasily between sketch comedy and theatre of cruelty, Burglars may be the closest thing L.A. has to the Pythons, though I wouldn't want to push the comparison.

Also employing incongruous choreography as a distancing effect is Laural Meade's Leopold and Loeb: A Goddamn Laff Riot, at NoHo Actors' Studio through next weekend. It's no exaggeration to say that Meade's short-run 1999 Harry Thaw Hates Everybody was a high watermark of the decade in local theatre, pulling off the fourth-wall-dropping, genre-bending, trial-as-vaudeville, fragmentary docu-romp thing better than anything I've ever seen (though the work of Tracy Young has often come close). Meade's Leopold/Loeb piece is a letdown by that high standard, though she has a mesmerizing emcee in Erik Patterson (the playwright who gave us Yellow Flesh/Alabaster Rose) and an athletic cast of cross-gendered doppelgangers tearing it up as the two Jazz Age thrill-killers with Nietzsche on the brain. The script is a devilishly clever pastiche--perhaps too clever, too eager to divert--and Meade's direction retains the bold strokes, the controlled chaos refracted with a laser focus, that marks her unique theatrical genius. It may finally be that the subject matter--the senseless violence of heedless youth in a rootless, violent time--defies as much as fascinates her, and brings out a lachrymose, moralizing tone amid the ruckus. (The choreography, by the way, is recognizably the work of Ken Roht, whose new dance/theatre piece He Pounces I've yet to catch.)

I had heard only good things about As I Lay Dying at Open Fist, and I loved director Stefan Novinski's mounting of Fen there in 2001. But while Novinski's stagecraft in Dying is impressive, often breathtaking--that rickety wagon rolling across Donna Marquet's distressed burlap roadway, with Heather Henson's spectral vultures whirling behind the scrim--he lets this bumpy ride get away from him at times. Edward Kemp's adaptation of Faulkner's quasi-operatic Southern fable comes off here as half language play, half East of Eden-style Freudian soaper. Tish Hicks' dead glare as Addie had me on the edge of my seat--she's practically a horror movie figure, a corroded, dissipated Maggie the Cat--and Joe Hulser's relentlessly surly Cash looks like he was cut from a slab of Burt Lancaster. But the tone gets stuck in a weepy groove too often; a certain provocative tension can build when we feel ourselves wanting to laugh at characters who bring unbelievable tragedy upon themselves, but it can wear us out if it's not released now and then. Maybe I missed the cues.

Hitting its cues a little too neatly, but effectively, was Boy Gets Girl, Rebecca Gilman's convincingly creepy, if unconvincingly talky drama about stalking, at the Geffen. Director Randall Arney's greatest assets were Andrew Jackness' deep, multi-planed set, the recesses of which began to seem alive with threat, and Nancy Travis' masterful lead turn. It's easy to dismiss such woman-in-jeopardy roles and the performers who nail them, but Travis is a smart cookie; a sweet-faced, TV-friendly ex-ingénue, she didn't cash her easy sympathy chips until the play's ultimate moment of desolation, which got me.

After that last show, critic Dany Margolies introduced me to veteran thesp Mimi Cozzens, on her night off from International City Theater's Agnes of God. Cozzens--who said she's been in showbiz since she was a John Powers model at age 2 1/2--has a trunk full of theatre stories and a beguiling, actressy glamor women half her age would kill for, but she wears both lightly, without a trace of the diva. It makes sense, then, that she's a new member of NoHo's beloved Interact Theatre, where so many actor's actors seem to end up. Cozzens sheepishly pressed on me a schedule for the company's next Interactivity play-reading fundraiser thingy, which kicks off this week with some Beth Henley, Bogosian, O'Neill, and Shakespeare. Next week there's a marathon trilogy of Mourning Becomes Electra and the following week, in a bit of news I eagerly snapped up, a brand-new play by Ellen McLaughlin, whose Tongue of a Bird, so earthbound in the Taper's star-studded premiere, soared in the hands of Oregon Shakespeare Fest's well-oiled actor's company--a good argument for the value of standing ensembles, of which Interact is one of our more sturdy and reliable.

• The Knightsbridge Theatre, now occupying the beloved old Colony space on Riverside, is still the only theatre that's walking distance from my home. Years ago I eagerly ambled to see the Colony's definitive Putting It Together, and a few weeks ago I made the stroll again to see another Sondheim: Knightsbridge's daffily winning Company, with flawless design by director Dana Moran Williams and strong music direction by Michael Collum. I was later shocked to learn that it's an openly non-union production (it advertised as such on BackStage.com in February), though it has several union actors in it (a few of them active Equity members). Producer Joseph Stachura explained that the budget for such a large-cast show would have been prohibitive under the standard Equity 99-Seat Plan, in which actors get a measly $7-15 per performance. Knightsbridge will leave its original Pasadena space in June, and not a day too soon, according to Stachura, who said that producing five shows simultaneously at two venues is taking its toll. Indeed, he admitted, this hit run of Company--extended through June 29--is the only thing keeping his doors open. My God, man! No one forced you to produce more shows than you can handle. And while some L.A. companies quietly skirt the rules of the 99-Seat Plan, they don't openly flout it. Sorry, Joe, but next time I trek from my home to the little theatre that could, I'm going to look for the union label.