Tag Archives: Glynnis O’Donoghue

“Electricidad” Electra-fies!!

Review: Three Bone Theatre’s Electricidad at The Arts Factory

By Perry Tannenbaum

Maybe by now we’re numbed to the truth. You know how it is: 30 dead, 57,000 acres burned, 18,000 homes and buildings burned to the ground, and 200,000 people evacuated. Not enough problems already in California? Let’s call in masked men from ICE and the National Guard!!

The upheavals out West are almost enough to deflect our attention away from the all-important Jeffrey Epstein files. Los Angeles is on fire! And we shrug it off.

From what I’ve seen so far in Three Bone Theatre’s first two installments of The Greek Trilogy by Luis Alfaro, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles last August and Electricidad now, the plan is to keep the flames burning high and out of control from beginning to end. At peak visceral heat.

Alfaro grew up as a queer Chicano in LA and came of age before Rodney King and the infamous 1992 riots. Electricidad was actually the playwright’s first dip into Sophocles in 2003, six years after he won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. So you might expect this youngest Greek modernization to be Alfaro’s angriest, fieriest, and most rebellious.

You would be right, but watch out: so far, Electricidad is also the funniest.

That can be a problem for director Glynnis O’Donoghue and her powerhouse cast at the intimate JCSU Arts Factory on West Trade. When Electricidad, Alfaro’s reincarnation of Sophocles’ Electra, describes her chola quarter of the LA barrio as the recognized pharmacy of the area, I was able to hear the air-quotes that surround the playwright’s text and laughed out loud.

Portraying the title princess, Melissa Lozada seemed a bit surprised and perturbed at the laughter. But her father, the venerated Agamenón (“El Auggie”), whose corpse lies enshrined in the front yard of Electricidad’s home, was the drug lord of the barrio. Her kingdom, which she plans to somehow usurp from her murderous mother, Clemencia, is built on drugs and community “protection.”

Or as one of the gossipy local Greek Chorus members puts it, “We don’t dial the 911 no more.”

More than in last year’s Mojada, the pretensions of our protagonists are repeatedly mocked and deflated. Ifigenia, E’s younger sister, is now a born-again Christian because she discovered that the meals served at her convent are far better than those she got in jail. Having taken over her abusive husband’s kingdom, Clemencia wants to sell rather than rule. She has Century 21 on speed dial and hopes to move to Pasa-fucking-dena.

In place of the ancient Greek gods, we have the modern monoliths: Target, Sears, 7-Eleven, Payless, and Oprah. Agamenón’s grieving mother, Abuela, exemplifies the warrior chola pride handed down through the generations, boasting that she pulled off her first shoplifting exploits from her baby carriage.

Brooding and vengeful, Electricidad stands apart from her family, even in her religiosity. You won’t find her praying to Jesus or the Blessed Virgin. To her, Auggie’s corpse is a sacred object, defiled by Forest Lawn, which would allow her father’s body to lie in state overnight with nobody watching.

She and Abuela whisked the body to the front yard, where she stands vigil, a squatter on her own property. E prays to her father’s spirit and talks to it, occasionally lifting her prayers to the severed head of ancient Aztec daughter Coyolxuahqui, better known as the moon.

No, Electricidad doesn’t think her devoted vigil, her seething rage, or any of her impassioned ravings are funny. Nor is she looking for a good laugh, even if her fanatical love for her father may be more than a little pathological. So Lozada’s glaring, combustible intensity is Electra, whether it’s Sophocles’, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s, Jean Giraudoux’s, Jean Paul Sartre’s, or Eugene O’Neill’s. The laxity and corruption that surround her only increase Electricidad’s saturnine glow.

And a supremely hopeless mourning it is, for the bloody vengeance she is craving is unseemly for a woman – and Electicidad is as faithful to the old cholo ways as she is to her papá.She doesn’t realize that her brother Orestes, after being exiled to Las Vegas, where dear Clemencia ordered a hit on him, is still alive. His mentor, Niño, has thwarted the hit and is carrying on with his mission to toughen the kid up so he can take over the House of Atridas and continue in the king’s footsteps.

Although Jennifer O’Kelly’s lurid set design and projections combine with Madison King’s lighting to give the impression that LA’s el barrio is ablaze 24-7, the Arts Factory space is too limited to back up the idea that Clemencia’s check from Century 21 will be a huge fortune. It is Isabel Gonzalez as Clemencia who makes the House of Atridas formidable in a towering performance to savor every moment she’s onstage.

Even in the opening scene, as the speechless Electricidad dominates our attention sitting next to the shrine she has fashioned from Agamenón’s shrouded remains, Gonzalez lurks restlessly in the shadows in the corner of the room, a dynamo of nervous energy. The arrogance and majesty only emerge later when she paces the front room, caged in her own castle, chain-smoking, and unable to purge the terror squatting in her front yard.

Coming out to confront her sleek, gimlet-eyed daughter, Clemencia has a robust arsenal of tactics, from sweet cajoling and bribery to fierce, defiant, threatening, screaming, thundering rage. What a pair! For in retelling the fall of the House of Atreus, Alfaro has not only resurrected Agamemnon’s sacrificed daughter, Iphigenia, but he has also blotted out Aegisthus – Clytemnestra’s lover, protector, and partner in crime, ruler of Argos while the original Auggie was out of town, winning the Trojan War.

For feminists and progressives, Clemencia is unquestionably the strongest Clytemnestra of all that have been presented onstage since Aeschylus fathered the Greek rep that has survived the ages. When Gonzalez faces off against Lozada, as she did last week at the VIP dress rehearsal, we can also crown Alfaro’s Clemencia as the best of the Clytemnestras conceived for stage or opera (Hofmannsthal’s script became the libretto for Richard Strauss’s Elektra).

She certainly stands on higher moral ground than any of her predecessors, and if you hadn’t recognized Gonzalez as the diva of Hispanic actors in the QC until now, your mind will likely be changed by this hot gem. Lozada’s “Electra-fying” debut will stamp the Venezuelan spitfire no less convincingly as this year’s most exciting QC newcomer. Yes, there is spitting in el barrio.

Just don’t overlook the quieter, nuanced magnificence of Eduardo Sanchez in capturing Orestes’ mix of innocence, steely nobility, and self-doubt – prodded along by Luis Medina’s sometimes proud, sometimes slightly exasperated Niño patiently punching and tattooing his pupil into manhood. Sanchez is more than soft enough when we first encounter him to justify his skepticism about filling his father’s shoes and wearing his crown.

Matricide?!? That’s a terrifying prospect when he returns from Vegas to LA and learns what’s what. Even Mom understands his hesitance, calling him “My most sensitive one.”

O’Donoghue was still tinkering with pacing on the night we attended. Too fast and you can miss Alfaro’s choicest quips, especially with Mariana Corrales, Allison Graham, and Marcella Pansini as the Chicano chorus of street sweepers, not the best players in the lineup. Slow it down, and the comedy threatens to take over.

But when it comes to the key moment, that spark-gap instant when Orestes becomes who he was destined to be, O’Donoghue nails it with hardly a single prompt from Alfaro’s script. It’s a kind of magic, a key superpower Alfaro also preserves from ancient times for his Medea in Mojada.

As Orestes returns to Clemencia’s living room, where mamá is smoking and watching TV, she begins chanting: “Find the courage. Find the rage. Find the darkness.” This chant becomes a background incantation as Celemencia deals with the shocking reunion and Orestes copes with the enormity of his mission.

Until Electricidad screams out. It’s as if the live-wire transformer decreed by Alfaro at the top of his script, humming and crackling in the background all evening long, bursts into flame. As if Electricidad is triggering Orestes’ actions by remote control.

There’s only scant proof for my theory about O’Donoghue’s concept. Aside from The Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” specified by name in the playscript, sound designer Neifert Enrique inserts Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” as a perfect foreshadowing. You did not live the ‘70s if you don’t know it.

The pesky and complaisant sister usually assigned to irritate Electra is most often named Chrysothemis, so Michelle Medina Villalon is drawing a fairly thankless role as Ifigenia. But Alfaro perks her up a bit as Ifi really is iffy to the core, trying to get her elder sister and her mom to make peace, let bygones be bygones, and trying out Christianity as an alternative to whatever kept landing her in jail. Still sporting vivid tattoos from her past, Ifi carries around a little statue of the Blessed Virgin as a security object: to pray to, to purify her living, and maybe to mark her territory if she decides to move back permanently.

Villalon also carries around a distinctively blank and traumatized look about her – maybe a prophecy of what Orestes and Electricidad will soon become. The earth here seems to be so scorched that both the sanitation department and the police stay clear. There’s no more likelihood that the siblings will face legal consequences for their crime than Clemencia faced for hers.

As one of the street sweeper gossips tells us, this is the wild, wild ouest. The only repercussions to assail the Atridas family for all their crimes are inward – the pains of guilt, regret, and that mark that has branded our species since the days of Cain. Drugs? Expelled from the equation.

Abuela remembers the good old days, reminiscing with Niño briefly upon his return before luring him to her place. With Banu Villadares embodying the tough and pragmatic Abuela, who didn’t weep at her son’s funeral because it would mar her makeup, we can understand why she is the only person on the planet who can make Electricidad laugh. Or momentarily rescue her from her own darkness.

You just gotta love her indomitable sass. Especially in a world that’s on fire.

“The Humans” Is More Haunting Than Ever

Review: The Humans @ Armour Street Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

Thanksgiving in Chinatown, in the shadow of the fallen Twin Towers – Stephen Karam’s spooky, mystifying, and hilarious The Humans hands us a world teeming with paradox. For an afternoon in a creaky old two-story apartment, newly rented by Brigid Blake and her boyfriend Richard Saad, her family gathers to celebrate, the whole lot of them nursing open wounds – and their Alzheimer’s-stricken elder, “Momo” – trying to heal from recent setbacks.

First staged in the QC at Knight Theater in a 2018 touring production starring Richard Thomas as family patriarch Erik Blake, Davidson Community Players brings us a downsized reprise in the first locally-produced staging, with the venerable Hank West in the lead.

Haunted by his return to the vicinity of Ground Zero and by his recent misdeeds, tormented by a deadly mix of sleeplessness and nightmares, Erik vies with elder daughter Aimee for which of the Blakes is suffering the most. Since last Thanksgiving, Aimee has come down with ulcerative colitis and taken major hits to her love life and her career as a Philadelphia lawyer – with major surgery looming on the horizon.

Yet Erik fires a wicked one-liner at Brigid, whose gripe, like his wife Deirdre’s, barely hovers above the “suck it up” level compared with his own. “If you’re so miserable,” he asks the health food fanatic, “why are you trying to live forever?” Inside negativity, Karam can be equally trenchant and funny when Aimee philosophizes about her recent breakup: “Maybe loving someone long-term is more about deciding whether to go through life unhappy alone or unhappy with someone else.”

Only Deirdre and Erik have an agenda for the afternoon, subtly suggested in a couple of brief dialogues. We’re mostly watching Karam’s keen observations of family interactions – their bonds, their tensions, their little quirks, and their tectonic divides. These appear all the more chaotic because dialogue often overlaps and action is happening simultaneously upstairs and in the more commodious basement.

Knight Theater probably gave us an oversized impression of Brigid and Richard’s love nest, while DCP’s Armour Street can’t help look both height- and space-challenged. Remarkably, Evan Kinsley’s more cramped set design lessens the struggle of viewing multiple tracks of action and family intrigue. Yet Karam and director Glynnis O’Donoghue are still able to provide enough compelling distraction at a key moment to allow the aged Momo to disappear without our noticing.

Even without two-story height, Kinsley’s set has an alleyway leading to an elevator shaft to accommodate the wheelchair-bound Momo’s transit between the two floors. The slice of set that serves as the upstairs somehow has enough space for the front door, an entrance to a bathroom (Aimee’s frequent retreat), and the only window looking out on the city. When the apartment’s oddities need to impact, Kinsley’s set and Sarah Provencal’s sound design deliver.

The divides between the Blakes will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a family of siblings. Although Brigid would never consider living in Philly, the geographical divide is as important here as the generational difference, for neither of the daughters would ever think of moving back to Scranton, PA – except to a summer home that Erik tells us can move towards construction once there’s a sewer system near their pristine plot.

Those anticipated PA pilgrimages will not bring either of the sibs back into the bosom of the holy church. Nor will it erase the fact that these country folks’ children are irremediably citified, one a lawyer and the other an aspiring composer. Safety, religious, and lifestyle concerns plague the homespun parents. Ahead of their Thanksgiving visit, Deirdre has sent a care package that includes a statue of the Virgin to protect Brigid’s new home. Meanwhile, Aimee can expect an email any time a lesbian commits suicide.

Karam provides plenty for the Blakes to discuss in their near and distant back histories, with a handful of stunning updates. If things get dull, he serves up a choice collection of singularly awkward moments that would instantly embed themselves in family lore ever after, lovingly and mockingly retold at holiday dinners and special celebrations.

There’s even a “pig smash” ritual unique to Blake Thanksgivings, a nice spotlight for Richard. Often the aspiring social worker serves as our ears in his role as outsider, giving the Blakes the chance to explain all that is long-known among themselves.

These moments reverberate warmly within us, but the most haunting vibes, from Erik’s dreams and experiences, touch us all, nonchalantly invoking 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy – specters of terrorism and climate change. Over and over, whether Deirdre wheels Momo around or Aimee summons an Uber with her cell, we hear an eerie, insistent whisper from the playwright emanating from his vivid, painstakingly detailed dream: this is how we live.

On Davidson’s compacted stage at Armour Street, the natural flow of The Humans, the lack of powerhouse confrontations that shake us to the core when we witness such American classics as August: Osage County, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Little Foxes, reminds us of Chekhov’s more placid classics. Rich and funny and touching as all the action is, we will likely struggle to discern a solid plot until Erik’s big reveal.

Inexperienced theatergoers are therefore advised to ignore any FOMO anxieties they may be experiencing and surrender themselves to the many delights, laughs, shocks, and epiphanies that West and his castmates deliver.

On the page, Karam’s script doesn’t pop out at you with the color and verve that O’Donoghue gets from this ensemble. West actually comes onstage with a couple of key advantages over Richard Thomas. We more readily accept West as an ordinary janitor-turned-equipment-manager, and he can bring out a curmudgeonly edge to Erik that I’d never noticed before.

No less surprising is the bubbly, goofball likability that Breanna Suarez brings to Brigid, though she is often the family contrarian and party-pooper in the script. The vibrant energy she exudes somehow turns pure negativity into simple immaturity, emphasizing Brigid’s spoiled qualities. As our genial hostess, Suarez tunes in on Brigid’s side hustle as a bartender, so she’s the life of the party while subtly fueling the true plot, endearingly committing a faux pas for the ages along the way.

Portraying West’s wife for the first time since 2005, when they both earned best actor honors in Coyote Ugly, Anne Lambert makes the wait worthwhile. Although Citizen Trump famously descended his escalator in June 2015, between the time that The Humans opened Off-Broadway and when it reappeared on Broadway with a completely new cast and director, Deirdre likely struck the late-2015 Broadway crowd as a MAGA maniac.

Interestingly, Karam could have taken Hillary Clinton as his model if he had written his tragicomedy 20 years earlier, but Lambert still strikes me as a MAGA nutjob even if that couldn’t have been the playwright’s intent. The religious zeal, the paranoia, and the constant moralizing are almost non-stop, so thanks to Lambert’s implacable disapproval, Deirdre winds up ennobling Erik and humanizing her daughters – just by enduring her. Yet there is an unmistakable sincerity to this steely, troubled soul.

Deirdre’s relatively spurious sufferings also brighten Aimee’s halo. Her woes are certainly the most tangible, so Alyssa Whitting has the freedom to add some hard edges to her performance, aiming her best zingers at Brigid with an assortment of barbs for the rest of the fam. Ascending and descending DCP’s imaginary staircase for extended poops, Whitting makes a pungent impression when she’s with us. She’s the slick urban professional among the Blakes, getting better reception on her cell than Dad and handling all the key calls.

Preoccupied with the cooking, Ryan Miles as Richard is also frequently on-leave from the family flow, but he’s a fine audience surrogate when we need things explained. Without fuss or bravado, Miles keys into the fact that Richard is the most laid-back, financially secure person in the room – the one lifelong New Yorker – in between Brigid’s age and Erik’s, accentuating his unique perspective.

Momo’s lines are annoyingly repetitive and approximately 85% gibberish to my ear, meticulously transcribed by Karam word-by-nonsensical-word. So if Wandy Fernandez is accurately delivering Momo’s babblings as written without considerable improvisation, she has performed one the most prodigious feats of memory in the history of theatre. There is wonderful variety in her performance with a lovely little miracle in the middle, which of course gratifies Erik and Deirdre the most. Words or not, the woman can also throw a fit.

The cryptic ending of The Humans, where the thin thread of Karam’s plot crystallizes, was clearer to me the second time around. Along the way, it’s helpful to note the circular shape of the Blakes’ history, the dream Erik divulges stage by stage, and the explanation Richard offers. Erik’s worries, sadly enough, are suddenly more topical in the Carolinas than ever before. After Sandy, the fact that Chinatown was a Zone A flood zone was fearfully real. Now that Asheville is isolated, adrift from interstate highways until next year, we can legitimately wonder what zone is not a flood zone after all the climate damage humans have done.

Richard says it succinctly, recalling a comic book he loved as a kid: “horror stories for the monsters are all about humans.”