BITTER HOMES
AND GARDENS
by Luis Alfaro
directed by Jon Lawrence RiveraMay 5 - July 29, 2001
LA Theatre Centre
What Back Stage West said:
BITTER HOMES AND GARDENS
Critic's Pick
Reviewed By Les Spindle
In director Jon Lawrence Rivera's playbill notes, we're informed that playwright Luis Alfaro made heavy revisions to his startling pitch-black comedy for this West Coast premiere mounting. We can't compare this to previously produced versions, but as in Playwrights' Arena's superb 1999 production of Alfaro's Straight as a Line, the playwright serves up an edgy portrait of family dysfunction in which intense laughter can make a 100-degree flip into deep despair. This later work is a harrowing social satire charting the quest of a Latina mother and daughter to locate the American Dream in suburban Los Angeles, only to discover that the road is paved with crater-sized bumps--both from her own cultural heritage and from the specter of urban blight. There are no white picket fences surrounding this household.
Rivera stages this gripping 80-minute piece (with no intermission) in his customary electric style, and capitalizes on his knack for on-the-money-casting. Especially effective in this brilliant ensemble is Ivonne Coll as Camelia, a 50-year-old housewife whose sheer madness recalls such deluded stage mothers as Mary Tyrone and whose defiant spirit echoes Hedda Gabbler. Camelia's craziness derives from the legacy of a miserable, lonely childhood and the oppression of women in the macho-oriented Latino culture. She panics at venturing outdoors into the dangerous urban jungle, yet satisfies her desperate urge to assert her independence by flashing strangers from her window. Her alcoholic husband Francisco (in an equally strong performance by Winston Jose Rocha-Castillo) restrains her by adding metal bars to the windows, supplementing the psychological chains that already enslave her.
Likewise struggling to assert her identity, daughter Rosie (superbly played by Christina Malpero) studies by correspondence course to be a nurse, while Camelia urges her to become a guitarist instead. Camelia fancifully imagines her daughter as a rebellious bohemian a la Joan Baez. Son Jimmy (the excellent Justin Huen, who alternates with Marcos Padilla), is also a victim of familial pressure about his vocation. After Camelia discourages his desire to be a boxer, he rebels against his stifling convenience store job by killing his boss and being sent to prison. Instances of abrupt violence bordering on amorality a la Jules Feiffer seem intrinsic to this family's dynamics. One such act is presented as a mercy killing. Yet the disturbing acts of emotional and physical abuse are tempered by Alfaro's gorgeously poetic language and an ultimate sense of spiritual resilience.
The sublime design elements match the expected Playwrights' Arena standards. Rachel Hauck's onstage set is stark but effective, and the action also plays out on two alcoves along the sides, one depicting Jimmy's anguished stay in prison, the other a shrine for a Virgin Mary figure (Kathleen Addcox) to whom the characters occasionally deliver eloquent monologues. The lighting design by Robert "Bobby" Fromer is edgy and atmospheric. Bob Blackburn's ambient sound design and Marya Krakowiak's well designed costumes are likewise on target. Courtesy of Alfaro, Rivera, and a gifted company, the maiden Playwrights' Arena effort at LATC bodes well for a happy marriage.
What the LA Weekly said:
Pick of the Week
Playwrights’ Arena hits terra firma with Luis Alfaro’s intelligent, witty and stark comedy. Set in some American suburb, Alfaro’s play introduces us to "the Joneses" -- a troubled clan. In a culture where commercials teach us how to feel, this family struggles with hope and hopelessness until it is left fragmented and disenfranchised from itself and from the aggressive world rushing in on it.
In a bitter examination of the Joneses’ potential, purpose and desires, Alfaro unravels his characters until they are left emotionally naked and shockingly familiar.
Director Jon Lawrence Rivera has assembled an exceptional cast and extracted from them multidimensional performances that sharply define consumerist suburbia in all its minutiae and glory.
Ivonne Coll delivers a dynamic performance as the volatile mother, Camelia; Winston Jose Rocha-Castillo counters it with a soulful Francisco, the father struggling with his family’s emotional instability. Christina Malpero’s shrewd layering of normalcy and unreliability succeeds in cloaking daughter Rosie’s rationale in a shroud of doubt.
Rivera’s invigorating use of space allows the characters to implode slowly without completely melting down.
Rachel Hauck’s set design traps all of this in shag and chenille, a quicksand of nostalgia, while Robert "Bobby" Fromer’s lighting delineates and heightens the skittishness of all the characters’ neuroses.
Alfaro’s play is the latest offering by Playwrights’ Arena, the first in the company’s new home, supporting its mission to discover, nurture and present new works written exclusively by Los Angeles playwrights. This effort sublimely demonstrates the depth of the talent pool in our own back yard.
Playwrights’ Arena at the Los Angeles Theater Center, 514 S. Spring St., dwntwn.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru July 1. (213) 485-1681. (Alison Merkel)
What the LA Times said:
THEATER REVIEW
Rich Characters Inhabiting 'Bitter Homes'Critic's Choice
Luis Alfaro paints a spare, evocative portrait of a suburban Los Angeles family with dark humor.
By DON SHIRLEY, Times Theater Writer
The title "Bitter Homes and Gardens" is so right for Luis Alfaro's slender but evocative new play at Los Angeles Theatre Center's Theatre 2.
Yes, the family he depicts is bitter--although the mother, Camelia, denies it: "Bitter is for those who live in the past. I'm miserable. Miserable is the present."
But as those words and the pun in the title indicate, Alfaro sees the dark humor in his characters, too. This is not a prolonged teeth-gnashing session; it's a spare, intermissionless portrait of a group of characters--in the sense of richly sketched personalities. In Jon Lawrence Rivera's staging for Playwrights' Arena, they inhabit an ostensibly bleak but theatrically stimulating world.
That world is a suburban cul-de-sac east of Los Angeles. The family moved there in a misguided stab at middle-class mobility. But now, Camelia moans about missing the old neighborhood. She and her 25-year-old daughter Rosie feel like virtual prisoners.
Meanwhile, Camelia's son Jimmy is a real prisoner, after he murders one of his supervisors at a convenience store. Her husband, Francisco, does get out of the house--to work two jobs, and to drink.
At least Rosie has plans--she wants to be a nurse. However, she's taking a correspondence course instead of going to a bricks-and-mortar school, so she's usually stuck at home with her mother. But then someone has to watch over Camelia. Although she looks physically strong at age 50, Camelia has a tendency to avoid wearing anything more complicated than a slip, and she enjoys showing off her private parts to strangers.
During most of the play, not much happens in traditional narrative terms, other than the unhappy return of Jimmy from prison. Although the characters feel trapped, Alfaro manages to make their psychological paralysis remarkably stage-worthy, through conversations and monologues that are rife with sly, telling details.
Tall and brisk, Ivonne Coll is a torrent of frustrated energy as the half-cracked Camelia, who believes that her daughter should take up stripping and smoking instead of nursing. It's an irresistibly showy performance. Rosie is a more disciplined woman, but the pressure is intense on her, too, and Christina Malpero's subtly measured performance keeps us guessing about when she might crack.
Winston Jose Rocha-Castillo's Francisco is a sad sack whose attempts to find some meaning in life by reading "Iron John" are comically touching. Justin Huen, filling in for Marcos Padilla as the tightly wound-up Jimmy, spends much of the play in his cell at the side of the theater. Jimmy's the only character without a comic edge; his tale is, almost literally, too woeful for words.
The Virgen (Kathleen Addcox) silently watches from the side of the theater that's opposite Jimmy, sometimes dressing in full religious regalia, but sometimes letting her hair down and filing her nails. The family is aware of her and would like her to help, but she appears powerless to make a difference.
Rachel Hauck designed a tacky but bright living room. Robert Fromer's stark lighting and Bob Blackburn's ominous sound design help lift the experience above mundane realism.
Although Alfaro has worked in L.A. theater for years, this is his first play that's set in the L.A. area to be seen here other than his solo shows. It premiered elsewhere, but it has gone through extensive rewrites--and it's worth the long wait.
* * *
* "Bitter Homes and Gardens," Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 2, 514 S. Spring St., L.A. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends June 24. $15-$20. (213) 485-1681. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
sleepwalk
a new play by Daniel Cariaga
directed by Jon Lawrence RiveraWhat the LA Times said:
THEATER BEAT
Effects of Deceit and Guilt
Come to Life in 'Sleepwalk'By F. KATHLEEN FOLEY
Daniel Cariaga's "Sleepwalk," at [Inside] the Ford, examines the tragic consequences of routine rationalization and persistent deception--the lies told not only to loved ones, but to oneself.
Although married to Lori (Allison Sie), Steve (Rocco Vienhage) craves sex with men, a need he satisfies through secret visits to Loi (Ogie Zulueta), a male prostitute. An up-and-coming business executive, Steve is hand-picked by his heartless boss Miles (Christopher Cass) for a nasty task--firing Steve's fellow executive and friend Jack (Thomas Craig Elliott). The firing goes awry, Jack lands in jail, and Steve perjures himself in a wrongheaded effort to save his own job.
Through it all--the covert sex, the amoral business practices, the constant lies--Steve shoves down his mounting guilt with frantic justifications and denials, adamantly insisting he's not gay.
Cariaga's plot--the double life, the secret shame, the inevitable explosion--is simple to the point of the archetypal. However, Cariaga (who is the son of The Times' music writer Daniel Cariaga) adds a lyrical overlay in a quartet of zombie-like sleepwalkers--metaphors for Steve's unexamined, unconscious life--who wander in and out of the action like zombies, harbingers of something dire.
Cariaga shows great skill at portraying primal emotions. Lori, beautifully realized by Sie, is not some peripheral domestic figure but an estimable woman, noble in her humanity and loss. Often, Cariaga is masterfully subtle, such as in having Jason (Matthew Yee), Steve's son, sense his parents' discord long before they are aware of it themselves. Once or twice, Cariaga rubs our noses in his intentions, as in Jack's monologue about self-torture--a laborious wallow, despite Elliott's keen delivery.
If Cariaga occasionally oversteps himself, director Jon Lawrence Rivera never does, nor does his exceptional cast. Here, the medium--Rivera's staging--is much of the message, an echoing conduit for Cariaga's mature and challenging themes. Robert "Bobby" Fromer's virtuosic lighting is essential to the nightmare ambience of this noteworthy effort.
* * * * "Sleepwalk," [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Dec. 17. $15-$20. (323) 461-3673. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Sundays, 3 p.m.
Thursdays, 8 p.m.
Fridays, 8 p.m.
Saturdays, 8 p.m.Price: $12 to $20
Information: 323-GO1-FORD
What the LA Weekly said:
SLEEPWALK Director Jon Lawrence Rivera’s exquisite staging prevents Daniel Cariaga’s sporadically overwrought poetic drama from slipping into a melodramatic morass.
Rocco Vienhage delivers an elegant performance as Steve, a young executive struggling with profound anxiety. Corporate life becomes even more stressful when the boss (Christopher Cass) forces Steve to fire another employee (Thomas Craig Elliott).
Despite a seemingly ideal family life with wife Lori (Allison Sie) and child (Matthew Yee), Steve is unable to bond with his family or to sleep, finding solace only in suburban sex shops, where he buys blowjobs from a young man named Loi (Ogie Zulueta). Not only do the characters’ names sound similar (Loi — Lori), but the androgynous Zulueta and Sie resemble each other physically.
The play modulates between a fervent hyperrealism that rivets the audience to the interpersonal drama and a lyrical otherworldliness that tries to underscore its philosophical points. These poetic sections disrupt and distract, which is most unfortunate since Cariaga’s storytelling already expresses the themes brilliantly.
The production is also enhanced by John H. Binkley’s mobile minimalist set, Robert "Bobby" Fromer’s masterly lighting and John Zalewski’s evocative sound. (Inside) the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru Dec. 17. (323) 461-3673. (Tom Provenzano)
LEON AND CLARK
By LUCY J. KIM
Directed by DONA GUEVARA-HILLStarring:
Radmar Agana Jao, Marcos Padilla and Christopher PrizziTwo estranged brothers meet after the death of their mother. A visceral new play about the choices we make in life.
MOVING ARTS
1822 Hyperion in SilverlakePreviews June 22 and 23 Opened June 24 Closed July 23
Front | Mission Statement | Who We Are
Where We Are | Playlist | Links