False Solution by Oren Safdie

Amanda Saunders and Daniel J. Travanti - Photo Cai Dixon

By Joe Straw

You’ve work your whole life for that one defining moment.  As you observe, you hold your head high knowing that you made this, that an idea you crafted is about to be realized, and you laugh as you take pride in the inconceivable imagination that created this marvelous piece of work.    

But in the back of your mind lies a disturbing and lingering thought, that somehow, you’ve missed, you didn’t make the statement you thought you were going to make. And the weight of your past mistakes come back to haunt you.  

Silently, after ideas fall hopelessly like smoldering embers, you pray to the creator, for a sign that an idea, or someone is going to walk through your door and give you what you’ve been searching for these months or years.

And, oddly enough, an inspiration on a pedestal appears.  A very good looking one who is capable and who launches every esoteric idea out to the winds in the hopes they are reachable. But is she the solution or a false solution?

False Solution written and directed by Oren Safdie starring Daniel J. Travanti and Amanda Saunders is now playing the Santa Monica Playhouse through May 11, 2014.

Daniel J. Travanti best know as the character Captain Frank Furillo in Hill Street Blues is on the boards again in this West Coast Premiere, live, in a very intimate setting, just minutes from where you live. 

A cool summer breeze wisps in and around the building of an architecture firm when Linda Johansson (Amanda Saunders) walks in and gives us a brief introduction into the life of an architect, how after architects die, their work lives on for many years, perhaps centuries.  Architects want to be remembered for the defining moments of their working life.  When a structure they have imagined soars to life and lifts the spirits of those who enter.

But Johansson takes a look at the model and, without word, is less than impressed.   She takes a couple of pieces on the table as though she were going to add something to it.  Her backside faces the entryway (an interesting and unusual choice) and waits for the master, Anton Seligman (Daniel J. Travanti), a renowned architect to enter.

She observes the jumbled mess of architraves, spandrels, volute spires, thrusts, and  studies the mock up that Seligman has on his desk of a new Holocaust Museum in Poland.

Walking carefully and slowly down the staircase is Anton Seligman, nicely dressed in a red kerchief, black shirt, brown belt, black pants, and brown shoes carrying a leather man bag on his left side.  All together he presents an impressive figure.  But fighting an unseen foe from an uncertain place and looking as though we has already toiled wearily this day, he takes very little notice of the intern, now standing and watching him.  The weight of the world and gravity is pulling him into his last production as he takes off his jacket and throws the bag under his working desk reliving him of some of his weighted burden.  

Johansson is youth personified. She wears a light brown sweater, a tight fitting white dress, and has brown and tan shoes.  Bubbling, she takes a moment to stare and absorb all that is he.  She is a stunning creature with long blond hair, nicely put together, and her attraction for him is for an entirely different purpose.

Getting down to business Seligman opens a book on a Holocaust museums, explains their structures, the use of light, how people use the building.  They stand so close to each other, a hair strand away, absorbing unfamiliar body heat before they take a moment to separate.

Seligman’s mental block is the model of the museum sitting on his desk and wants to know if Johansson has any ideas. He is inexorable in wanting information from his intern, including her background, for which she is not a willing participant.

“Harvard?”, he asks.   No, “Columbia on a full scholarship.” she beams.

“I wrote a paper on you this semester.” – Linda

So Linda knows all about this man, or at least she thinks she does.  And it takes her a few minutes before she is comfortable enough to convince him that what he is doing needs to be reconsidered, for the sake of the town and the Holocaust survivors. Her background knowledge suggests the town was complicit in their silence and Linda feels the building should reflect their silence.

And so Seligman contemplates the idea, as he contemplates the idea of having her at his side, on this night.  They work on another idea, one that will offer a solution to the town, to them, and to the ones who died, but in doing so both will pay a price.

Oren Safdie, trained as an architect, brings his intellectual awareness of that craft into the written word of the play. And while there were a number of excellent moments, this is the kind of material that would have benefited in having the writer and director not one in the same person.  Because, in reality, I believe there is more to this play than what I saw on this night, another layer, two or three, emotional, physical, and characters who explode with purpose and objective by a movement, a sound, a touch.  Still, the overall work was exceptional in its humanitarian passions. 

But, I have questions and sometimes I need to be hit over the head with the answers. 

My first question is:  Why is Linda there and who sent her?  She is an intern, a second-year graduate student at that, and she is going to change the mind of a world-renowned architect?  How?   Through her sagacious wit, or sententious rhetoric, or her what?  Okay, so I have a lot of questions.  And, that aside, through the course of the play, no one is really searching for the answers, mentally or physically.  There is a lot of verbal foreplay without the culmination of anything resembling an answer to the questions and I believe another eye on the actors would have gotten the play more mileage.

Amanda Saunders and Daniel J. Travanti - Photo Cai Dixon

Amanda Saunders plays the intern Linda Johansson and at first we get the shy, envious, schoolgirl crush on this mentor but that goes away quickly when the character turns beyond the second-year grad student into someone who is worldly and well beyond her years. Certainly there is a fine line, a place to pick your moments, to grow into that confident person who will stop at nothing to complete her objective.  She has a reason, which is to be discovered during the course of the play, but that reason should be evident from the moment she walks onto that stage.  It is the cause of her being, the reason she needs to be there, the thing that will not stop her. Saunders is a delightful actor and there is more to be gained by stepping back and understanding who you are, where you are going, and how you are going to get there.

Daniel J. Travanti does a fine job as Anto Seligman and it is always nice to see an actor come back to the stage and give it his all.  Taking chances and putting yourself out there for the sake of a new play is always a welcome opportunity in my book.  Travanti looks physically fit, someone who does yoga, and it fits with the character that is always staying fit and looking for new female opportunities despite the fact that he has a wife at home.  I did get the thread, the through line, of Seligman’s character.  We get the architect objectives, but why now and why this night?  What is the thing that completes his objective on this day?  That aside, and on the night I was there, Travanti seizes a moment at the end, an emotion deep within him that captures his exquisite brilliance on stage and that is something I’ll take with me for the rest of my days and is well worth the price of admission.

The show was nicely producer by Producer Jacqueline Bridgeman.

Other members of the crew are as follows:

Assistant Director/Dramaturg – Shelagh McFadden

Costume Design – Kate Fry provides costumes for the actors who were immaculately dressed.  http://www.katefry.com

Set Design – Evelyn Ellias makes a wonderful use of the space.

Lighting Design – Rusty Gaidzik

Stage Manager – Cheryl Valice

Publicity – Philip Sokoloff

Run! And take someone who wants to discover the life of an architect. 

RESERVATIONS: (800) 838-3006.

ONLINE TICKETING: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/588251

Premeditation by Evelina Fernández

By Joe Straw

My toenails are unsightly and repulsive.  And in a premeditated overly mundane act of self-preservation and bodily upkeep, I grow careless, clip my skin, and draw blood.  Hobbling my way, toe up, for a Band-Aid, my thoughts slipped to a dream from the prior night.

The Vampires of Silver Lake

My ex-wife has me drop off our girls at a Moroccan restaurant in Silver Lake.  Parking is no easy feat. I park up the hill and walk the girls down to the eatery. The Wiccan ex is there with her eclectic eccentric friends.  Uncomfortable, I make a fast escape and start my journey back to the car.

Just enough time, before the sun goes down (this is Silver Lake) to stop into a quaint clothing shop where the proprietors keep me from leaving while the sun inches its way toward the horizon. I run nimbly to my car passing a Jewish temple. 

Nearby men are dressed in Roman Army battle gear directing traffic into the parking lots. Meanwhile, every moment slips me into another level of gloom and the light creeps into darkness.   

Now, I can’t find my car, which I thought I parked under the eucalyptus tree.  And as I lumber up the street, the street starts sloping, making it harder to ascend. I grab onto a chain-link fence and climb the once horizontal fence, vertically, through a ditch, and under a tunnel, to a level area where there are thugs milling about, vampire biker thugs at that. 

My biker friend has been bitten; he’s okay with that, just one more thing on his road of life.   He hops onto his “hog”,  the kind with the handlebars set way up high, a woman, a succubus hops on, and I take the back seat. (Back seat?)

The biker vampires surround us, they have pearly white teeth, and all I can do is hold my fists up to my neck so they don’t bite.  One vampire looks at me, smells my blood and says, “Not tonight.  But soon.” The hog takes off and the speed gives me a sense of supreme exhilaration, but something happens because my vision and my sense of all realities began to change.  I’ve been bitten.  

All because I clipped my toenails – my imagination races into high gear.  - Narrator

So you can imagine:  What in the world was Evelina Fernández doing when her imagination conjured up her comedy, Premeditation?

The Los Angeles Theatre Center presents Premeditation by Evelina Fernández and directed by José Luis Valenzuela at the Los Angeles Theatre Center through May 18^th, 2014.

Premeditation is probably Evelina Fernández’s finest imaginative work of art. A comedy with exaggerated motions, extracting life images from different time periods that dance in time to the glorious hyperbolic direction of José Luis Valenzuela magnificent staging. 

There are slight eerie sighting of “Blake Edwards” bits and choice collections of film noir moments from the ‘40s and ‘50s and let’s throw in “Rambo” and “The Matrix” as well.  All of this makes for a delightful evening and funny night of theater.

John Zalweski’s Sound Design heightens the visual with dramatic timed sound accompanying the action on stage.  The slow motion lighting of a cigarette and listening to the tobacco slowly burn gives amplification to idea that a premeditated notion is in the works.   

Creating an event, bumping off your husband, in a time when things were easier, doesn’t work that well into today’s non-private environment with cell phones, credit cards, and tracing devices that can trace a person down to his last cheeseburger, onion rings, and a unfinished lip stained smoldering cigarette.

Naytheless, the play starts on a bare stage with the exception of a pile of dirty laundry near a clothes hamper upstage center, and a coat rack far stage right center.  The upstage wall is about 20-25 feet tall with two small doors upstage right and upstage left. Dwarfing the small upstage right door is an enormous door, which will be used later in the play. All of this is wonderfully designed by Francois-Pierre Couture, Scenic Design, and dramatically used during the course of play as the characters pop in and out much to the audience’s glee.  

José Luis Valenzuela, the director, has the actors dancing in the set pieces in the opening number, choreographed by Urbanie Lucero. And as they dance in, we notice the actors are in costumes from another period, late forties by Costume Designer Naila Aladdin Sanders.  My impressions are the characters spinning back to another time, another mindset, which makes the comedy all that more interesting.   

The play starts with two disgruntled housewives, Esmeralda (Evelina Fernández) and Lydia (Lucy Rodriguez). 

Esmeralda looks at the meretricious splendor, she calls “husband,” Fernando (Geoffrey Rivas) a UCLA professor, and complains to him, about the mundane things in life that she cannot get him to do, like picking up his underwear after he takes a shower.  Indeed!

Lydia (Lucy Rodriguez), in a blond wig with four large curls the size of Mount Everest, gets ready to do a load of laundry but complains about her husband Mauricio (Sal Lopez) a hit man, who, by the way, has a heart of gold, and is not working much lately.  Well, his times are tough, what with everyone getting along these days, his cell phone does not ring off the hook.  (In a manner of speaking.)

But finally, Mauricio’s phone does ring.  It’s Esmeralda.  She wants to meet him in the lobby of a downtown hotel, hoping he will come inconspicuously.  But when they meet in the lobby, both are so inconspicuous as to be conspicuous.

No matter, Esmeralda hands Mauricio the key to the room (It’s a key card.) and goes to the room to make her comfortable.

Meanwhile Lydia, doing laundry, finds Esmeralda’s home phone number in Mauricio’s pant’s pocket.  She calls and gets Fernando.  Lydia asks for “Esmeralda.”  Fernando says his wife is not there and politely demands to know who is calling.

Startled, Lydia hangs up.  But Fernando calls her back and asks why she called?  (This would not have happened in the forties.) The eyes get narrower, suspicions are warranted, and the two find out about their partner’s rendezvous in a downtown hotel.  

Meanwhile, at the hotel, there is a knock at Esmeralda’s hotel door.  Mauricio has already lost the keycard.

Evelina Fernández plays Esmeralda, a housewife, with an overly active imagination. And my impression is that Esmeralda has seen way too many film noir movies.  So many that she dresses that way, thinks that way, sees visuals that permeate her brain in that way.  It is Fernández’s way that captures the character.  The cool strident walks and the manner in which she conducts herself leads to a very detail character that will stop at nothing to get someone else to do her dirty work.  

Sal Lopez was very impressive as Mauricio, the hit man with a heart of gold, conscience, or maybe someone who couldn’t afford the bullets. Still, if he’s going to kill anyone, he’s got to have a reason and the underwear on the bathroom floor just ain’t cutting it. Maricio was going to get the answers he needed if he had to kill someone to get it. Lopez’s timing was impeccable on this night.

Geoffrey Rivas is fantastic filling in a couple of supporting roles as well as Fernando, a slightly self-absorbed UCLA professor with little imagination and curiosity.  Fernando is in his own world and does not listen to the maniacal menacing turgidity of his wife’s call for self-improvement.  (Nagging) The idea of his wife’s unhappiness is axiomatic to all with the exception of this self-involved man.  There is hardly an ounce of curiosity or conspiracy in his being. His analysis of the current situation gets him hogtied and in a lot of trouble. Rivas does a tremendous job!

Lucy Rodriguez plays Lydia and other supporting roles as well. Seeing her in other productions, this is by far her finest work. The method in her madness was finely tuned as she channeled characters all into some marvelous action onstage.   Mad, that her husband, is seeing someone else, she sets out to kill him and gets a gun from a collection that would make Rambo jealous.   But when she finds out otherwise, she wants someone else dead and the money.  There is no pleasing this woman and that is what makes the character so delightful. Do not miss Lucy Rodriguez in this play.

The audience had a great time the night I was there.  José Luis Valenzuela is on top of his game with this production. The moments play out exquisitely as the characters take command of the entire stage and give it their all.

But I have some thoughts.  One of the fascinating ideas of the play is that it takes place in different time periods and I say this because of the costumes of a period and the iPhones on stage. And that makes me believe this is Esmeralda’s vision, after all, at the end of the day, she is the winner and dramatically leaves in the manner of her choosing.  So why not add one more element to this delightful play.  Emphatically make this Esmeralda’s vision.  As it is now, she dresses the characters (in her mind), and supplies the necessary ingredients to this soup to fulfill her prophesy.  Make Esmeralda the focal point. Make all the visuals spin around Esmeralda’s idea of what a good life it would be if her worthless husband were, eh hem, eliminated.  

Run!  Run!  Run!  And take someone you suspect is having an affair.  You’ll have a great time on your way home.

Other members of this delightful crew are as follows:

Lighting & Projection Design – Pablo Santiago had extreme close-ups projected on the upstage walls and that added greatly to the visual on stage.

Prop Master – Dean Cameron

Assistant Stage Manager – Ariel Richardson

Production Manager – Rita Lilly

Production Stage Manager – Henry “Heno” Fernandez

Assistant to the Director – Eliza Laytner

Technical Director – Wayne Nakasone

Programming Director/Literary Manager – Chantal Rodriguez, Ph.D.

LATC General Manager – Paul Stuart Graham

RESERVATIONS: (866) 811-4111 (toll-free).

ONLINE TICKETING: www.thelatc.org