BACK STAGE WEST
January 09, 2003
at the Next
Stage
The differences
between stage and film are wide and deep, but I think an argument can be made
that L.A.'s intimate theatres have done a lot to blur that distinction--we're
so close to the actors in some of these spaces that they don't often have to
project their voices, and "close-ups" happen naturally when you're a
few yards from their faces. What will never change about the theatre is its
sense of real, rather than edited, time: A stage production, no matter how intimate
or off-the-cuff, still has the basic job of giving a live event enough momentum
to sustain our interest over its running time, whereas a film's postproduction
can nip and tuck any distractions or longeurs, compress time, even improve
performances.
Director Seth
Wiley's staging of Steven Soderbergh's 1989 breakthrough film fails this basic
test, though the deck is stacked against him, from the venue--the Next Stage
boasts six dinky lighting instruments and a narrow stage--to a little matter of
short-staffing: no stagehand, let alone stage manager, to help the actors
change scenery or position, and not always in a blackout. This is most
pronounced in the transitions that need to be quick; Wiley is using
Soderbergh's screenplay as it appears on film, and he doesn't seem to grasp the
humor and force that editing juxtapositions can have--or, at least, has come up
with no stage equivalent. When repressed housewife Ann (Amanda Bauman) segues
from a conversation with her therapist (Emily Williams) to a related chat with
her loose-living bartender sister Cynthia (Shauna Slade), she just gets up and
crosses the stage, leaving her therapist in mid-conversation; Williams then
finds a relatively unobtrusive moment to leave the stage during the sisters'
conversation. Worse, there's the moment when Cynthia, having just made a hot
confessional video for the enigmatic voyeur Graham (Justin Christenson), calls
her lover John (Jack Sundmacher) to get some immediate relief; the decorous,
stage-changing lag between the two scenes saps the joke, and only Slade's horny
ardor reminds us that there's supposed to be a joke there.
Indeed, the
actors do their best here, but they don't escape the memory of the film's
performances or shade them with much more than a few colors. Each has a good
moment or two, but given the shapeless quality of the staging and blocking, we
might as well be watching an acting-class exercise; I half expected the actors
to emerge at the end not for a curtain call but for a talk with the class and
the instructor about their work. It must be said that the tall, lumbering
Christenson, in the role James Spader made indelible, doesn't begin to suggest
the reserves of pain, brains, and feeling that Spader brought to the role, and
he ought to work on his diction--but he does have something, a star-like
instinct in the way he plays to an audience. A climactic scene, in which
Graham's camcorder is turned on him and the results are shown live on a TV
centerstage, gives the game away: Christenson is a camera actor, hands down.
One point of Soderbergh's fable about sexual awakening is that we like to
watch; but it's a problem in the theatre when the most watchable moment is on a
screen.
"Sex, lies, and videotape," presented by and at the Next Stage, 1523 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. Fri. 8 p.m. Dec. 13-Jan. 17. $10. (323) 850-7827.