The Blackest Shore Catastrophic Theatre brings the work of New York-based up-and-coming playwright Mark Schulz to us twice this season. Closing out the year is Schultz’s play Everything Will Be Different: A Brief History of Helen of Troy, a show about teen girl anguish. On offer now is the premiere of The Blackest Shore, a play ostensibly about male teenage trauma and coping. The teen in this case is Stuart, and he’s making a violent movie that’s part zombie thriller, part gothic vampire tale and part Lord of the Rings with a healthy dash of porn thrown in for good measure. Stuart’s dad has done something horrible and therefore isn’t around, and his mom is about to invite her boyfriend (Josh Morrison), whom Stuart can’t stand, into their home to live with them. Schultz’s play starts off moody enough with projections of tumultuous black and white ocean tides on four parallelogram-shaped video screens covering the back wall of the stage. A disembodied voice reads a poem about blackness and shorelines, evoking feelings of dread or at least depression. But just when we think we’re in for an evening of angst, Schultz switches the mood and gives us comedy. Stuart (an energetically natural Gabriel Regojo) pitches his slasher/hero movie to the AV club with the excitement over movie violence that only a hormonally hopped-up teen can muster. He riffs off all the gore he plans on depicting while making sure to add that it’s also a love story in the realm of a porno. It’s a clever chuckle that sets up this seesaw script that has a hard time deciding what it wants to be and what it’s trying to say. On the one hand, we learn fairly early that the reason Stuart’s dad isn’t around is that he molested him at a young age. On the other hand, Stuart doesn’t seem all that bothered by his history with his dad and instead desperately wants to go live with him. It’s the premise of the transparently metaphoric movie he’s trying to make. A dark overlord is lonely and comes to rescue his son from those who don’t realize how special he is. Obviously, Stuart has some issues. The hulking Regojo does a nifty job playing him as an in-your-face, smart-mouthed, funny kid. One whom no one seems to really care about. Certainly not his mom (Elizabeth Marshall Black), whom Schultz makes unnecessarily unlikable and in her own way as abusive as the father. Not Trisha (Candice D’Meza), his New Agey therapist who comically asks him to find his “inner animal.” Certainly not his father, Dallas (John Gremillion), who may go down as one of the most shallowly written and narratively awkward pedophiles onstage. Like the scenic tone seesaw at the start of the play, Schultz plays flip-flop with Dallas, making him a meek and weirdly sympathetic child abuser one moment and then a drunken and comedic character in another. We aren’t laughing in a dark-humor kind of fashion; the comedy is just for straight laughs, but for what purpose? We don’t know, and as a result, the character and his effect on Stuart seem throwaway at best and even perhaps insulting at worst. Where The Blackest Shore really does excite, however, is in the complex relationship between Stuart and his new gay wallflower friend, George (the superlative Zachary Leonard). It’s here that Schultz’s writing shows tender insight into the emotional ravages eating away at Stuart. Stuart may not be able to articulate to George what ails him or what caused it, but in the way teenage boys say a lot by what they don’t say, we finally get a window into Stuart’s damaged places and how that damage begets more sorrow. Director Jason Nodler runs the show with clear stage management that at times manages to shrug off what just isn’t on the page, but too often he falls victim to the script’s schizophrenia. A rushed final insightful scene saps what little meaning we may glean from the script. Tim Thompson’s video designs are thankfully not so enamoured of themselves that they need to steal the show. Whether they depict oversize alarm clocks in bedroom scenes, piecemeal lockers at school or a live cafe scene when Stuart and his father first reunite, the effect is surreally inviting and greatly adds to the minimalist set design. Schultz certainly has something to say about how abuse affects a young man’s life. He even has a different and disturbing take on how a victim reacts to that abuse. But exactly what he wants us to take away from his work gets terribly muddied by a play that doesn’t know which stylistic direction it wants to go or how the supporting characters serve the message. There’s nothing wrong with injecting comedy into a tragic story or asking us to consider repugnant characters, but Schultz does so without context or irony, causing the tropes to topple in on themselves despite the engaging performances by his two teen male characters. Through March 7. Catastrophic Theatre, 1119 East Freeway, catastrophictheatre.com. — JG
The Skin of Our Teeth How much poorer would the American theater be without the riches of Thornton Wilder? A world without Our Town or The Matchmaker is unthinkable. A place without The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) would be darker still. Wilder called Skin — the flip side to his bleak masterpiece Our Town — a “fantastic comedy,” and it’s nothing less than the history of mankind done up as vaudeville, sketch comedy, theater of the absurd and heartbreaking family drama. Wonderfully goofy and beautifully enlightening, it switches mood within a sentence, turning dark and brooding, then comically silly, ultimately inspiring and uplifting. Skin catches you up with brilliant theatrical strokes as it breaks the fourth wall, never letting us forget we’re watching something artificial, but then Wilder’s somewhat one-dimensional characters suddenly become the voice of all of us struggling to make sense of the world, and tears well up in our eyes. It’s a Wilderean tour de force, a magnificent, intimate epic. This play is everything a play should be. At its premiere, it befuddled and angered some audience members and most critics with its quirky, anachronistic, time-bending allegory, but had a healthy run of almost 400 performances. The star marquee names of Frederic March and Tallulah Bankhead, as George Antrobus and sexy maid Sabina, certainly helped boost sales. Skin won Wilder his third Pulitzer. Wilder said the play, a touchstone of American drama, was the most difficult to write of anything he created, but it flows like a symphony, repeating themes and then exploding into starbursts of variations, all while showing us distinctly which instruments carry the melody. It’s a tune we can all hum. We’re in Excelsior, New Jersey, at the home of George and Maggie Antrobus (Wade Gonsoulin and Carol Davis). The house is in an uproar awaiting Dad’s arrival, while outside the ice age approaches ominously, threatening the known world. Sassy maid Sabina (Autumn Woods) has let the fire go out, but she, turning to address us, says she hates this play and doesn’t understand what is going on. Children Henry and Gladys (Giovanni Sandoval and Annabelle Dragas Xanthos), like children everywhere, are rebellious and somewhat dangerous — Henry is too quick with his slingshot and Gladys continually pulls her dress up, much to the chagrin of proper mom Maggie, who’s attempting to keep up appearances even though the walls of her house are pushed in by the encroaching wall of ice. The wind howls and wails of torment are heard from the people pleading for warmth and shelter as they stick to the sidewalk outside. George arrives from work with his new invention, the wheel, another contraption much like his alphabet and multiplication tables from earlier, which doesn’t seem to have any use right now. He brings with him Moses and Homer and the Three Muses, and everybody, including the family pets, a dinosaur and a woolly mammoth (deliciously daft), sits around the dwindling fire. The mammoth moves his trunk close to the hearth to keep warm. Sabina has had enough of this struggle for survival; she’s giving her two-week notice, but we know she’s done this before and isn’t going anywhere. Act II brings the Great Flood while the family attends the annual Atlantic City convention of the Fraternal Order of Mammals. Sabina, in her other guise as life force, attempts to seduce George once and for all, but the weather takes a very nasty turn. Herding animals onto a nearby boat in the harbor, the family flees another catastrophe. Act III, darker and chillingly surreal, brings The Great War and its aftermath to the struggling family. Gladys has had a baby, and Henry, more lost and nihilistic than ever, has fought for the enemy. His confrontation with George is the play’s most engrossing sequence, full of scalding personal family drama the likes of which hearken to the greatest in O’Neill and forward to Arthur Miller. But the Antrobus family — like all of us, Wilder implies — carries on; it’s all the human race can do; it’s the only thing they can do. Director Kathy Drum begins the play on a frenetic high with blasting sound effects, characters screaming to be heard and frantic activity all over the stage. It’s an inauspicious introduction, and we fear poor Wilder will be run down before the ice floes get him, but the actors take over quickly, smooth out the rough spots and allow Wilder to take center stage. Gonsoulin and Davis give the Antrobuses a warm embrace; he, harried and anxious to move on; she, patient but never quite running out of steam. They make an inviting Man and Woman, Husband and Wife, or Adam and Eve. Sandoval and Xanthos are exceptional as the kids, especially Sandoval in his Act III breakdown and repentance scene. He’s on fire. As eternal temptress Sabina, Woods, with cascading auburn locks and figure to entice, smolders impressively and certainly looks the part of a Biblical Lilith, ready to pounce in any era. Her exasperated comic asides to the audience, usually raking the author over the coals for his obtuseness, are true highlights in a play filled with so many others. For those who know Wilder only from his gentle but ebon-tinged Our Town, Skin will be mind-blowing. It’s like nothing in the rep: a real original and one-of-a-kind. Written during the opening months of WW II, when no one knew what the outcome would be, The Skin of Our Teeth is a glorious psalm to the abiding perseverance of man. He’s not always good or noble, or even smart, but there’s something intrinsic in him to keep going forward, no matter what horrors befall him. It’s that constant momentum, Wilder trumpets, that will ultimately save humanity from itself. Go, see mankind triumph. Theatre Southwest supplies some heavenly music. Through March 14. Theatre Southwest, 8944-A Clarkcrest, 713-661-9505. — DLG
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2015.
