Mayhem
Evidence Theatre March 20-April 19th
By: Kelly Stuart
Directed by: Bart DeLorenzo
MAYHEM is a domestic political comedy with many twists and turns. Its August 2000. The Taliban still dominates Afghanistan. Civil War still rages in Sudan. And the Los Angeles Democratic National Convention is meeting amid protests and riots. But just down the street, in a Chinatown apartment, a woman has her own problems to deal with. How do you engage in political activity when your husband wont watch the baby? Stuarts timely comedy provides a sharp portrait of the pre-9/11 American psyche, captured on the threshold of its transformation, slouching toward consciousness.
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Cast |
| Jason Adams, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, Cheryl White |
|
Crew |
| Designers: Ann Closs-Farley, Martin McClendon, Rand Ryan, John Zalewski |
A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review
A
CurtainUp Los Angeles
Review
Mayhem
By
Laura Hitchcock
When he scheduled Mayhem at The Evidence Room, director Bart
DeLorenzo had no idea what a synchronicitous occasion it would be. The
audience reeled away from television's 24/7 coverage of the invasion
of Iraq into Kelly Stuart's fascinating, blistering, luridly funny
coverage of international and domestic conflicts.
The time is August, 2000, one month before 9/11. There's genocide in
Africa. The Taliban reigns in Afghanistan and oppresses its women.
Riots clog the streets around the Democratic National Convention in
Los Angeles. And down the hill in Chinatown a young couple with a baby
form their own battlefield.
Susan (Megan Mullally) knows nothing about politics and cares less.
It's about getting out of the house when she lets herself be bullied
into attending a convention on Art and Genocide by shrill insistent
Claire (Cheryl White), who fills the caves and pitfalls in her life
with political activism. Susan's husband David (Nick Offerman), a
recovering alcoholic, despises Claire and insults Susan. "When you get
sad, you get cruel," she retorts. She's ripe for the attentions of
fierce foreign correspondent Wesley (Jason Adams), who is fascinated
by her tale of witnessing a shooting in her neighborhood.
As he drives her home, the play cuts back and forth between Wesley and
Susan in the car to a disappointed Claire in a bar, bitterly
bolstering up her self-worth with Martinis. Wesley gives Susan a
camera that belonged to his late friend, photographer Kevin Carter,
who committed suicide shortly after winning a Pulitzer for his
devastating battlefield pictures. Over dinner David accuses Wesley of
trying to make love to Susan. Though Wesley insists he gave her the
camera because of the clarity of her vision, David's guess is pretty
much on target. Susan and Wesley are lovers and he wants her to come
with him to Afghanistan but Claire conceals this. Whether she does it
out of desire for Wesley, principles or wanting to keep Susan around
is irrelevant. It's a Claire thing.
Stuart's play is rich in material, so much so that it comes painfully
close to tales simply aching to be told. The Kevin Carter story, which
is true, could be a sub-plot in itself but doesn't seem to have much
relevance to the characters until the final scene when David breaks
down and admits he's been doing drugs for six months and Susan hasn't
noticed. Susan's suspicions about David's whereabouts the night of the
shooting point in yet another direction.
Director Bart DeLorenzo manages to keep all these threads taut,
raising the short scenes to edge-of-the-seat suspense, and giving the
characters every chance to display Stuart's nuances and humor. One of
the play's funniest scenes shows the women putting on burkhas and
trying to sip coffee beneath them.
Mullally is the play's true center as Susan, in a crystalline
performance of great simplicity and honesty. She's balanced by White's
Claire, a bothersome character, an aspiring heart, duplicitous, and
maddening as a mosquito's whine. She does comic relief with impeccable
delicacy. Offerman's David is early Ernest Borgnine with more smarts
and sophistication. Stuart gives him a love scene with Susan in which
he has to meow like a pussycat and Offerman runs with it, giving a
whole new dimension to David and where this love began. Adams' Wesley
is reckless and bitter, a man who sleeps with danger.
Martin McClendon's tiny clever set has a real sense of the shabby
poverty of Susan's world. Last but far from least are Adam Kurtzman's
unique amazing puppets. Only one of many elements in "Mayhem"
of which you want to see more -- lots more.
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MAYHEM Cast: Megan Mullally (Susan), Nick Offerman (David), Cheryl White
(Claire), Jason Adams (Wesley), Jose Mercado (Waiter).
Hitchcock, Laura. "A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review ". CurtainUpTM March 22, 2003: http://www.curtainup.com/mayhem.html. |
On Saturday, March 22nd, 2003, Evidence Room presents the world premiere of MAYHEM by Los Angeles playwright Kelly Stuart. The production stars award-winning actress Megan Mullally in her long-awaited return to the stage. The production is directed by ER artistic director Bart DeLorenzo.
MAYHEM is a domestic political comedy with many twists and turns. Itıs August 2000. The Taliban still dominates Afghanistan. Civil War still rages in Sudan. And the Los Angeles Democratic National Convention is meeting amid protests and riots. But just down the street, in a Chinatown apartment, a woman has her own problems to deal with. How do you engage in political activity when your husband wonıt watch the baby? Stuartıs timely comedy provides a sharp portrait of the pre-9/11 American psyche, captured on the threshold of its transformation, slouching toward consciousness.
Kelly Stuart has written over a dozen plays that have been presented all over the world. Demonology, winner of the New American Play Award, was produced at the Padua Playwrights Festival, Playwrights Horizons in New York, the Mark Taper Forum and at theaters across the country. Stuartıs other work includes The Square Root of Terrible (Taper P.L.A.Y.), The Interpreter of Horror, A Shoe Is Not a Question, and The Woman Who Tried to Shout Underwater (Taper New Work Festival), and The Peacock Screams When the Lights Go Out and Furious Blood (Sledgehammer). Many of her plays were also performed and developed at the Padua Playwrights Festival. She currently teaches playwriting on the faculty at Columbia University.
Mayhem will premiere at the Evidence Room on March 1st after the closing of the long-running Hollywood Storiesı repertory. These three comedies by LA playwrights Michael Sargent, Justin Tanner, and Peter J. Nieves have played throughout the fall in rotating repertory and will be remounted for a limited run in January and February. Mayhem, originally scheduled in the 2003 Taper Too season at the Ivy Substation, was originally commissioned by ASK Theater Projects and received developmental workshops at their 2000 Spring Retreat, and later at the 2002 Ojai Playwrights Festival and at the 2002 Taper New Work Festival. Mayhem was a finalist for the 2001/02 Susan Smith Blackburn prize.
Mayhem is directed and produced by Evidence Room Artistic Director Bart DeLorenzo, winner of the 1999 LA Weekly Theater Award for Direction. Mayhem features Evidence Room resident designers: set designer and ER Executive Director Jason Adams, 2000 LA Weekly Award winner (The Berlin Circle); multi-award-winning costume designer Ann Closs-Farley; esteemed lighting designer Rand Ryan; and the record-breaking-award-winning sound designer John Zalewski, a recently selected NEA/TCG Design Fellow, the first sound designer awarded this grant.
The leading role will be played by Emmy-award-winning actress Megan Mullally, returning to the Evidence Room after her LA Weekly and Garland Award-winning performance in The Berlin Circle. Although best known for her portrayal of Karen Walker on NBCıs Will & Grace, Mullally also recently starred in Lifetimeıs critically-acclaimed drama The Pact and feature films Stealing Harvard and Anywhere But Here. Before her television success, she had a long New York stage career, which included Broadway appearances in How to Succeed in Business and Grease. Her latest CD Big as a Berry was released in September.
Evidence Room is a not-for-profit theater company comprised of actors, directors, and designers who have been working together for seven years. The company has received numerous awards during its short existence, producing work in two locations in Culver City and since May 2000 at its new performance facility, a 6,000 sq ft converted warehouse in the Temple-Beverly area of Los Angeles.
Recent productions include David Edgarıs Pentecost; Charles L. Meeıs The Berlin Circle (2000 LA Weekly Production of the Year award), an award-winning revival of Edward Bondıs Saved, the LA premiere of Richard Greenbergıs Three Days of Rain, a new adaptation of Friedrich Schillerıs Don Carlos, Charles L. Meeıs The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem, the world premiere of Gordon Dahlquistıs award-winning Delirium Palace and the American premiere of Dog Mouth, written and directed by John Steppling.
The Evidence Room is located at 2220 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90057, between Virgil and Alvarado, just off the Alvarado exit to the Hollywood Freeway (101), the 3rd Street West exit to the 110, or the Hoover exit to 10 Freeway. Free parking is available, adjacent to the building.
Tickets
and Schedule
MAYHEM opens March 22nd. The production will play Thursday
through Saturday nights at 8pm with an additional matinee on Saturdays
at 3pm through April 19th. Ticket prices are $20-25 (Thursday nights
and Saturday matinees are $20, Friday and Saturday nights are $25).
Previews are March 14, 15 20 and 21 at 8pm, and cost $10.00.
For further information or to order tickets please call 213-381-7188 or visit their homepage: Evidence Room
COPYRIGHT 2002-2003 "EVIDENCE ROOM"
Meet John and Jane Doe: The year of living famously
By Steven Mikulan Thursday, April 10, 2003 - 12:00 am
LA Weekly Stage - http://www.laweekly.com/stage/theater/meet-john-and-jane-doe/2965/
continued...........As a defining moment, the 2000 Democratic Convention was pretty low-definition an authoritarian control freak's dream in which the anger of young protesters fizzled out against the riot shields of the LAPD. In Mayhem the event appropriately floats in the background like cobwebs in the Echo Park home of the play's housewife protagonist. Susan (Megan Mullally) lives with her recovered-junkie husband, David (Nick Offerman), as both a baby and the convention occasionally rage offstage. A more invasive presence is Susan's pal Claire (Cheryl White), a cause-du-jour kibitzer who is always dropping in to remind Susan of her unrealized potential and waning social consciousness.
The play begins with Claire trying to hustle Susan away from her housework and off to a merry little conference on "art and genocide." The plan also seems, somewhat covertly, a way to give Susan a break from David, whose obsessive AA attendance is driving her crazy. The morose husband doesn't want Susan to go to the conference, paranoiacally predicting that it will be followed by drinks and a rapturous introduction to some Casanova journalist. She goes anyway, and David's prophecy comes true Susan meets and reluctantly falls for a famous war scribe named Wesley (Jason Adams), who's stopping in L.A. en route to cover his next train wreck, Afghanistan.
"We who do this," says Wesley of his profession, "have the smell of death in our nostrils." We who hear this, of course, get a whiff of something more bovine, though Susan is sufficiently entranced to risk her marriage for this smooth talker. Before long, Wesley has bestowed a camera and the duty of recording history on Susan, whose only artistic endeavor has been publishing a kids' pop-up book.
For all its meticulous attention to the details of middle-aged, post-bohemian life east of Alvarado, not a lot happens in Mayhem. There's some shtick involving Claire's hopeless infatuation for Wesley and a bit of mystery about David's trips to MacArthur Park, but little is really articulated here either about the moral decisions someone in Susan's place must make or about the political smog generated by the convention unfolding at Staples Center. Even Susan's recurring account of a local gang murder fails to cohere or resonate, and we're left feeling that the principal charm of Stuart's play is a heroine (of sorts) who ineptly tells lies for no cause greater than her own pleas
Unfortunately, that kind of charm dissipates pretty fast, and by play's end we realize the story has a hollow center. Stuart's script might have worked had it remained as vague about the day-to-day existence of its characters as it is on plot development, but because all the small details of Mayhem's lives are explained, the story, with its overlay of one-liners, plays out like an episode of Friends. The fact that the plights of Afghan women and East Timorese separatists are vented by a woman who wears pink-satin pantsuits and who, as Claire says, plans to write a book about "freeing ourselves from clutter," only relegates these subjects to the status of punch lines.
It's not all slapstick, however. There is a silent moment of Chaplinesque delight, when Susan and Claire, in preparation for a women's march against the convention, bring home a pair of black burkas and carefully put them on, encountering both the garments' frailty and their impracticality. The scene is a striptease in reverse, and director Bart DeLorenzo allows it to play out with comic solemnness. His lead actress, Mullally, is similarly restrained, a self-beaten character in glasses and dowdy clothes who seems able to spend every day of her unremarkable life folding laundry.
Offerman, as David, though, brings the play to its feet whenever he opens his sarcastic mouth; his failed, aging rocker still speaks with punk candor, but now he lives in a time of corrosive dishonesty. Adams further lends credible support, as the smarmy reporter who breaks hearts and marriages along his career path. Yet White isn't merely over the top, she's fallen overboard from the deck of an entirely different play. Because of this, she doesn't really act as a foil for Susan or even as a lightning rod for the audience's presumed disdain of all things P.C.
White's volcanic performance is DeLorenzo's only miscalculation, for if she were toned down just a bit, we might be able to recognize in her misplaced activism something of ourselves, and the comedy would bite instead of swallowing us whole. DeLorenzo, as usual, is ably assisted by his Evidence Room technical staff. Martin McClendon's homey set mostly depicts a kitchen protected by window bars and accented by such familiar items as a Dustbuster, coffeemaker and Quaker Oats box, while Rand Ryan's dreary lighting plot dimly illuminates the kind of worn-out marriage that only lies can save.
MAYHEM | By KELLY STUART | At
EVIDENCE ROOM,
2220 Beverly Blvd. | Through April 19
