MORE GOOD L.A. THEATER AROUND THAN ONE IMAGINES
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Click here for The Rubicon Theatre's revival of LA RAZON BLINDADA
MORE GOOD LA THEATER AROUND THAN ONE IMAGINES
By Harvey Perr on November 21, 2010 StageAndCinema.com
There is so much theater activity in Los Angeles that there is bound to be a lot of good theater. But I have been so burned out by the extraordinary amount of bad theater I’ve had to sit through that I’ve seriously considered taking a vacation from reviewing. There has been entirely too much actor-driven work, in which the actors seem less interested in playing the play than in auditioning for television. I have grown impatient with most of the local reviewers who insist on pimping for Los Angeles theater even when it is not so good, in order to keep the theater thriving and alive, when, in fact, that sort of criticism does more harm than good in the long run. Too many theater companies get a free pass; nobody should expect any company to hit a home run every time they are up at bat. And the big theaters seem to look everywhere but their own home town for the work they produce – say what you will about Gordon Davidson, he was genuinely interested in developing new playwrights – and something has been irretrievably lost in the process. Whatever happened to New Theater For Now, for example? And why did we let UCLALive fall by the wayside?
So why does it suddenly feel, amidst a sudden spurt of real honest-to-goodness desperation to do the right thing, as if Los Angeles may actually become a true theater town after all? This may be a passing thing - a fountain of possibilities in an otherwise theatrical desert – but it needs to be paid attention to. Something exciting is going on. Mind you, it isn’t all the paradise some of us may have been waiting for, but, for now, it is more than good enough.
Take La Razón Blindada (Armored Reason) which, fortunately, has been extended to December 11 (it’s been running a long while, and I declare a Mea Culpa in not getting to see it sooner); this is a dazzling achievement. Attempting to create a Spanish-language theater that is dedicated to the intellectual potential of its targeted audience – and providing subtitles to include an English-speaking audience – is, in itself, admirable enough, but the work produced is as staggering in its execution as it is praiseworthy in its intentions. In the 1980s, the Argentine dictatorship placed its artists and dissidents into prisons and Aristídes Vargas, who wrote and directed the play, has imagined what it would be like if the prisoners and their visitors (who came every Sunday) engaged in story-telling to pass their time together. The stories they tell are, in effect, the picaresque saga of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as filtered through a Kafkaesque prism, with the prisoner becoming the man of La AristiMancha and his visitor becoming Panza who, in turn, takes on the personae of many other characters including literature’s most famous horse, Rosinante. What is truly remarkable is how vibrantly reflexive the actors - Jesús Castaños-Chima and Tony Duran – are, as they travel through the world Vargas has not merely staged but has ingeniously choreographed. The subtitles are dense, but, if they detract from watching the actors, I suggest concentrating on the actors, for their body language is truly universal and, in the best sense, extravagantly theatrical.
Click here for 24th ST's latest show
Click here for The Rubicon Theatre's revival of LA RAZON BLINDADA