One of the great pleasures of going to the theatre in Los Angeles is becoming reacquainted with wonderful character actors you grew up watching on TV and subsequently forgot about.
A few years ago I saw my friend Aram Saroyan’s play “At the Beach House,” which I knew starred Orson Bean. And it was a treat seeing Mr. Bean — er, not that Mr. Bean — onstage. The surprise was coming across Dena Dietrich in one of the other roles. Yes, she had a career on stage and television, but my generation remembers her more for this:
She was utterly delightful in Aram’s play.
Tonight I went to see a couple of other friends in the appropriately titled “My Old Friends” at the Victory Theatre in Burbank. Appearing in one of the roles was the terrific character actor Malachi Throne. Name not ring a bell? Mr. Throne played Robert Wagner’s boss on “It Takes a Thief,” which debuted in 1968, and, along with what IMDB pegs at 100 other television roles, played Commodore Mendez on the “Star Trek” two-parter “The Menagerie.” Here’s a picture.
Throne has a deep, rich, unforgettable voice. His performance tonight as a man who realizes he’s built nothing in his life was simple, touching, and true. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him on stage again, but I was glad to luck into him tonight, and told him so afterward.
Just so we don’t lose our humor in the face of the ongoing Bush disintegration (er, administration), as well as all the aiding and abeting our Democratic friends are doing, I share this brief video, which a friend sent me yesterday. Sometimes a little crude humor goes a long way.
Painter William Wray is opening his latest showing this Saturday night at a gallery in Monrovia, here in Southern California. Here’s information on the gallery and its friendly and knowledgeable owner, Laura Segil, and here’s info on the artist, and above is one of his paintings.
Some of us are more familiar with some other William Wray art. It’s the art he signs as Bill Wray, and includes animation and print work on Hellboy, Batman, and Ren & Stimpy. Here’s that Wray’s site, and here’s a representative illustration. (Although when he does, say, Bugs Bunny, it’s with a gentler touch.)
So I ask you: Which is the serious art?
The answer is: both.
I like that William Wray is both a fine-art painter and a commercial/comic illustrator. I like that my friend Gerald Locklin writes accessible poems that are also packed with meaning. I write marketing copy as well as plays, and I enjoy them both (although in different ways). Shakespeare wrote for the masses, but somehow wound up being artistic. Samuel Beckett, the doyen of litterateurs, loved detective thrillers (and I’m sure if he could have written one, would have).
We have this false notion that there is “low” art and “high” art. I don’t think so. I think there’s “good” art and “bad” art, and there’s art that’s more accessible (because the references are more easily understood by more people) and there’s art that’s less accessible. Moreover, I often wonder if the advocates of “high art” aren’t a little too interested in keeping more people from scaling their towers and gaining access.
Recently a colleague from USC came to see one of my plays and told me afterward how glad he was to see so many people laughing. (Intentionally: It’s a comedy.) For decades, he’s suffered the slings and arrows of a certain slice of the academy, where lighter material is frowned upon, and to be funny isn’t to be any good. (And we wonder what happened to the audience for poetry.)
So I celebrate William Wray and his alter ego Bill Wray. And early this Saturday evening I may drive out to Monrovia to meet them.
Congratulations to my friend (and former student) EM (Ellen) Lewis on winning the Primus Prize for her play “Heads.” This is a significant award, and I couldn’t be prouder of Ellen, and for being there at the birth. (The play was written in my workshop.) She’s an enormously talented writer, and also a wonderful human being.
No idea if we get the Planet Green channel at my house (last time I really checked such things, the TV had a top dial that went up to 12, and then U, after which we you had to turn to the bottom dial, which went up to 83).
But if we don’t get Planet Green I guess I’ll see if I can add these episodes to my Netflix cue, because this piece on Slate has me very interested in seeing the new “reality” show starring Ed Begley, Jr. To wit:
If Alter Eco is Planet Green’s Entourage, Living With Ed, which first aired on HGTV, is its Curb Your Enthusiasm. Actor Ed Begley Jr., who boasts of having owned an electric car as early as the 1970s, is the cranky head of household; his wife, Rachelle, is the spouse battered by her own embarrassment. The show would have us believe that a typical morning at the Begley home sees Ed riding a stationary bike for two hours to generate the energy to make toast. Rachelle scoffs at this and then tosses her Los Angeles Times in the garbage can, and then Ed scolds her and heads up to the roof to spend time with his solar panels. Living With Ed is clearly the most phony and least enlightening show yet devised about the home lives of celebrities, and I include Keeping Up With the Kardashians in that count.
I’ve met many a “cranky” environmentalist myself, and would offer all of them this advice: You might do a better job of achieving your mission if you’d come down off your high horse once in a while to meet all of the rest of us, who are equally concerned about the planet as you but don’t have all your time, or money, or desperate need to seem superior.
I’m very happy with how my one-act play, “About the Deep Woods Killer,” has turned out in the 2008 Moving Arts Premiere One-Act Festival. It’s a tribute to the cast, to everyone involved in the production, and especially to the director, Mark Kinsey Stephenson. Mark really understands the undercurrents in the play and has worked with the actors to express them. If you’ve never had a bad or mediocre production (and I have), you can’t fully understand how invaluable it is to have a director who understands your play and, in Mark’s case, your overall body of work — and who also has the talents to bring that vision to the stage. I’m grateful. Mark and I have been doing theatre together for 15 years; he’s directed my plays before, has acted in my plays, and I’ve directed him several times, as well as producing plays he’s been in. We’re a good match. If I’m lucky we’ll be doing theatre together for another 15 years, and beyond.
In the same festival, I think Terence Anthony’s play “Tangled” is a standout (and is a play I’m going to blog about later today or this weekend, when I have a chance), and I’m quite taken with “Compression of a Casualty,” which marries an Ionesco-esque device with contemporary CNN coverage of the death of a U.S. soldier in Iraq, to great effect and, to my immense thrill, into an indictment of the timid and celebrity-obsessed mainstream media. I’m glad we’re doing that play, and I’m delighted to see the inestimably talented Michael Shutt prove, yet again, that he’s among the most versatile theatre artists I know.
The festival runs three more weeks. Here’s more info, including ticket information.
Slate has a brief but valuable piece on Werner Herzog’s forthcoming documentary, which you can read by clicking here. The film’s called “Encounters at the End of the World” — but it seems to me that that could have been the title of almost all the Herzog films. To wit:
“Aguirre, Wrath of God” — in which would-be conquistadors run up against the savagery of the undeveloped new world (a nice riposte to the quaint green notion that nature is bucolic and enriching, when those of us who grew up in it know that when it’s not boring it’s deadly)
“Grizzly Man” — in which an intrepid naturalist deep in the wild finds himself literally consumed by his passion
“Lessons of Darkness,” which blends CNN footage and Herzog-shot footage of the burning oil wells of Kuwait into a science-fictional vision of the rapacities of humankind and the destructive force of a wounded environment
“Even Dwarfs Started Small” — which features a group of deranged dwarfs evidently far cut off from civilizing forces convene chaos onto their benighted habitat
“Fitzcarraldo” — in which a mad visionary is ultimately defeated in his quest by the unrelenting realities of the Amazonian jungle and a treacherously independent river
I could easily go on. The Herzog films that don’t star an extreme exterior location are concerned with an extremely bizarre interior condition; par example: the two films featuring Bruno S., an odd and mentally limited man whose ineffable motivations perfectly match with Herzog’s interests. Bruno is either a very bad actor, an idiot savant who is utterly convincing in his stunted abilities, or simultaneously both; he is also eminently watchable in “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” where he is perfectly cast as a strange man released into polite society with utterly no suitable training for the experience.
According to Slate, here’s the narrative of the new Herzog film, which I await with relish:
It’s a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month “austral summer” of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted—all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn’t involve penguins. What he returned with is a lyrical group portrait of McMurdo’s motley crew of scientists, technicians, and lifelong travelers—men and women whom one local labels “professional dreamers” and whom those of us who live on more populated continents might affectionately call “crackpots.”
You see the recurrent theme: extreme environment is met by crackpot theorists.
For those who care about these things and will be lucky enough to be in Los Angeles next February, Herzog will be speaking (as well as performing a concert of some sort) as part of the UCLA Live spoken word series. Here’s the link. I will be there.
You’re invited to join me (but you’ll have to get tickets):
1. On Wednesday evening I’m attending the opening of “Pippin” at East West Players with terrific playwright friend Dorinne Kondo. As regular readers of this blog know, I’m not much for musicals (even though I did see four in one month recently), but EWP routinely does some of the best theatre in town, and this piece in today’s LA Times further whetted my appetite.
2. On Thursday night I’ll be slinging my axe, virtually, in Koreatown when I take on “Guitar Hero” as part of Moving Arts’ one-act festival fundraiser. Ten bucks gets you pizza, snacks, a drink, and all the humiliation you can take. Here’s the Evite; hope you can make it and hope it’s a full Rock Band set-up (guitar, keyboards, drums, vocals) because I sing a mean “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
3. On Friday night I’m seeing “Trying” at the Colony. This is a show I’m dearly anticipating. I missed it last year during its first run; now it’s back for two weeks only. Here’s the press release. The play stars Alan Mandell, an actor I dearly love and one I’ve seen I don’t know how many times on stage and on screen. There are two reasons I’ve seen him so often on stage: He is a legendary actor of Beckett’s plays (and my mission, upon arriving in Los Angeles 20 years ago, was to see as many plays by Beckett, Pinter, Albee, and Ionesco as possible, because their availability in southern New Jersey was scant), a personal friend and collaborator of the playwright and a co-founder of the San Quentin Drama Workshop (in 1958!). And he’s performed countless times with some of the most inventive small-theatre practitioners in town. On screen, he pops up in “Shortbus” (where he’s The Mayor, a character clearly, um, influenced by Ed Koch) He’s a wonderful actor and seemingly tireless at age 80; but, given that 80 is indeed 80, now is the time to see him. (And below, you can see him appear in a trash can as Nagg in Beckett’s “Endgame.”)
4. No tickets needed for this one. On Saturday I’m emceeing a political event for area Democrats. Here’s the link for more information. The press release reads (and you’ll note we’ll be doing voter registration, so this provides another opportunity to test Frank Rich’s theory):
Come hear the candidates and gobble some BBQ!
This year the Burbank Democrats’ annual family picnic joins up with the Glendale and Northeast L.A. Dems for a pre-June 3 primary event with politicos from the tri-club area.
Currently confirmed to speak and take questions are U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff of the 29th, and Democratic challenger Russ Warner of the 26th; retiring state Sen. Jack Scott of the 21st District and Carol Liu, contending to replace him; former Assembly Majority Leader Dario Frommer; and Assembly members Paul Krekorian (43rd) and Anthony Portantino (44th). Judicial and central committee candidates will also be in the mix. Not confirmed yet are U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (27th), State Assembly Member Kevin deLeon (45th) and state Sen. Gilbert Cedillo (22nd)… or the chance of a surprise or two.
Keynoter will be Rick Jacobs of Courage Campaign; Burbank founding president/Truman Award winner Lee Wochner will emcee. Voter registration before the May 19 cut-off will be available.
Please note! Meat and side dishes are provided, but please bring your favorite salad or desserts as pot-luck.
5. On Sunday I’ll be running 3 miles in Santa Monica, testing out the $250-worth of running and hydration gear guaranteed to make me run better. I don’t expect to see you there. And don’t expect to see me here immediately afterward.
