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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Another act of vandalism in downtown L.A. as Robert O'Hara defaces ‘Hamlet' at the Taper
Playwright and director Robert O'Hara has turned his puckish attention to 'Hamlet,' treating Shakespeare's tragedy not as an august cultural treasure that has held the world's attention for more than 400 years but as a squeaky plaything that can be exploited for eccentric fun and games. It goes without saying that his new adaptation of 'Hamlet,' which had its premiere Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum, isn't for purists. But Shakespeare's drama can withstand even the most brazen attack. Oh, the crazy stagings I've seen! None more so than the 1999 New York production by performance theorist and director Richard Schechner that turned the play into a pop-cultural hallucination, featuring a weed-smoking Hamlet with a Jamaican lilt, ghostly reminders of Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple and a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern costumed as rats. By this standard, O'Hara is proceeding quite tamely. Some might be startled that his Hamlet (Patrick Ball from Max's 'The Pitt') goes from pleasuring a lusty Ophelia (a gritty Coral Peña) in public to getting hot and heavy with his visiting college buddy Horatio (Jakeem Powell). But O'Hara's film noir approach has precedent in none other than Laurence Olivier's Academy Award-winning 1948 movie, still the most prestigious screen adaptation of the play, no matter how dated it might seem to us today. To set the mood, the adaptation begins with a roll of cinematic credits. A grand staircase dominates Clint Ramos' set. The clean, gleaming surfaces leave an impression of what Elsinore castle might be like as a coastal McMansion on one of the 'Real Housewives' series. Footage of the sea serves as a lyrical backdrop. The setting is more California than Denmark, but location is dealt with subjectively in a first act that closely follows Hamlet's perspective. Projection designer Yee Eun Nam shifts the mood as Hamlet meets the ghost of his father on screen (Joe Chrest) and then spirals into a mania that's accompanied by surreal visual flourishes that seem indebted to the Netflix series 'Stranger Things.' The production, which runs two hours, is performed without intermission. O'Hara's audacious antics are stimulating at first, but there's not enough dramatic interest to sustain such a grueling journey. The first two-thirds of the adaptation offer a quick run-through of tragic events. The actors at times seem to be speed-reading their lines, rushing through the notoriously long play to get to the good bits. O'Hara simplifies vocabulary, reassigns lines and excises parts that don't interest him, but otherwise sticks to Shakespeare's template. The revisions in language, done for reasons of accessibility, diminish the poetry. Shakespeare can be ridiculously obscure to modern audiences but tweaking such a well-known play is like changing lyrics in a revival of 'Oklahoma!' The word substitutions prove jarring even when they're not veering off into raunchy slang. (I'll forgo mentioning the choice verbiage O'Hara employs when Hamlet, confronting his mother in her chamber, becomes enraged by the sight of her unsavory marital bed.) The clumsy use of voice-overs is more embarrassing still. But these are superficial distractions in a production that hasn't figured out why it's revisiting Shakespeare's play. O'Hara is in a riffing mode. Outrageousness is an integral part of his sensibility, as his plays 'Barbecue' and 'Bootycandy' have made unabashedly clear. As a director, he enjoys boldly iconoclastic strokes whether staging new work, such as Jeremy O. Harris' 'Slave Play,' or classic drama, such as Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' But in 'Hamlet' he seems content to toy around with Shakespeare's tale without probing its miraculous depths. In the final third of this 'Hamlet,' O'Hara takes the playwriting reins from Shakespeare and invents a novel character, Detective Fortinbras, a gumshoe fixer in a trench coat, who comes in to investigate the tragedy's spree of fatalities. Brought in by the board to shield the Elsinore Picture Corp. from damaging publicity, he sets out to determine what really happened, only to concoct a plausible narrative that won't get the company canceled. Hamlet, it is explained after his death, was an overage film student pursuing 'an over-budget period film noir piece of crap.' And all the talk about succession and the throne seems to have been about corporate control within a cartoonishly messed-up family. Who knew? I won't spoil all the humorous details, but the intermittent amusement can't conceal the fundamental incoherence of O'Hara's project. The level of artistic self-indulgence on display is impressive. 'Hamlet' will survive as will O'Hara, but I'm less confident about the Taper. What pleasures there are to be obtained from this ill-conceived 'Hamlet' are fleeting. The actors supply most of them. Ball, prancing handsomely around the stage in a leather jacket and see-through club shirt, leaves a stylish impression when in motion. But he seems completely adrift when speaking his lines. He inflects Hamlet's glorious speeches with modern color but little meaning. The text becomes a straitjacket for a princely son who doesn't seem accustomed to Shakespearean rigors. Gina Torres' Gertrude has no such trouble. She commands the stage with rhetorical finesse, making it all the more disappointing that her character isn't more complexly deployed by O'Hara. Peña's formidable Ophelia might be the production's saving grace. Fiercely independent, she answers to no one's morality but her own. I was delighted that she was granted a prominent place in the adaptation's second act, but it's a shame that, like all the characters, she becomes a pawn in O'Hara's prankish plot. If this description seems harsh, perhaps I should mention the cocaine revel Claudius (Ariel Shafir) instigates with the First Player (Jamie Lincoln Smith), Polonius (Ramiz Monsef) and a version of Rosencrantz (Ty Molbak) and Guildenstern (Danny Zuhlke) who would be right at home in a 'Dumb and Dumber' movie. These nimble performers gamely rise to the occasion, but the comic adrenaline at this point has a numbing effect. If you're going to do 'Hamlet,' at least probe some of the play's moral and psychological mysteries. O'Hara is more drawn to the plot puzzles that have encouraged interpreters to weigh in with their own crackpot notions. He would have been better advised to do what James Ijames did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play 'Fat Ham' — respond to Shakespeare's classic through a completely autonomous work of art. Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' provokes endless fascination precisely because of its unresolved nature. T.S. Eliot famously called Shakespeare's tragedy 'the 'Mona Lisa' of literature.' O'Hara does little more than graffiti a mustache on this inexhaustible theatrical canvas.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
From 'The Pitt' to 'Hamlet': Patrick Ball and a twisty take on Shakespeare come to the L.A. stage
To be or not to be a crazed murderer, that is the question at the bloody heart of the world premiere adaptation of "Hamlet" opening Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum with Patrick Ball in the central role, fresh off his star-making turn as Dr. Frank Langdon in the Max hit series "The Pitt." Co-starring Gina Torres from "Suits," this adaptation from director Robert O'Hara spins one of theater's most famous plays into a modern-day world of decaying Hollywood glamour. There is a mansion on the coast and the remnants of a 1930s soundstage. Hamlet's family runs a movie studio. The Danish prince is Hollywood royalty, and rather than being a tragic hero, his sanity and motive for murder are interrogated "CSI"-style in a bracing second act that flips the script on the first 90 minutes, which are viewed entirely from Hamlet's perspective. There are added scenes and plenty of salty language, with dialogue that shifts from classical to 21st century vernacular. To be in this position at all — with his face on billboards, bus benches and streetlight banners across the city — is a "miracle," Ball says. He was a relative unknown before scoring a starring role on the zeitgeisty medical drama "The Pitt," which premiered in January and averaged more than 10 million viewers per episode, becoming one of Max's top five original series premieres of all time. Prior to that his only screen experience was a single episode of "Law & Order." He had, however, spent a decade "grinding," he says, "auditioning for film and TV, getting close but never happening." He also spent four years traveling for regional theater, performing in shows including "Romeo & Juliet," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "The Lover" in places like Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Boston and San Diego. "I had settled upon the fact that that was going to be it for me. And I was happy with that," Ball says. "And the dream of Hollywood was something that I had let go of, and I made peace with the fact that that wasn't going to be my life." Then all of a sudden "The Pitt" happened — and it felt like kismet. The North Carolina native's mother is an emergency room nurse and his father is a paramedic. The stories told on the Noah Wyle-led drama resonated with him. His parents read through the pilot episode and said, "This checks out. This is real medicine," Ball says, recalling how excited they were for him. To be able to tell stories that are meaningful to the community he grew up in, he says, feels like a blessing. So does working with seasoned pros like O'Hara and Torres. O'Hara, who is also an established playwright, received a Tony nomination in 2020 for directing Jeremy O. Harris' critically acclaimed "Slave Play," which set a box-office record during its West Coast premiere at the Taper, grossing $1.4 million in five weeks. Ball says that after seeing the show in New York, he spent the next four hours straight discussing it with the friend he went with. Read more: ADUs made of shipping containers and robot-built bungalows are a growing trend as L.A. rebuilds post-fire O'Hara is obsessed with true-crime shows like "48 Hours," in which culprits stick to their stories of innocence even when faced with video replays of their guilt, so he built the second act of his production in a moody, film-noir, flashback style, with a detective questioning characters after the play's end-of-show massacre. Think David Lynch meets Alfred Hitchcock with a Salvador Dali-painted set. "I think that the audience watching will go: 'Wait a second, really, you put poison in his ear? Who puts poison in an ear?" O'Hara says during an interview after rehearsal, while Ball and Torres sit laughing beside him. "And where are you guys getting all this poison? Poison in the glass, poison on the sword. This is something I didn't make up, but somehow Claudius has a stash of poison." And what about that ghost? Shakespeare's Hamlet sees a ghost who tells him that his uncle Claudius murdered his father; O'Hara's Hamlet may or may not have seen a ghost. He might just be a crazy person pretending to act extra crazy in order to get away with murder. In the highly stylized universe of Hollywood noir, glamour and mental illness walk hand-in-hand; entitlement and privilege run amok. Shakespeare rarely writes about common people, O'Hara notes. "Which goes back to the L.A.-ness of it all," Ball chimes in. "My title is 'prince,' right? And what's the American equivalent of that? It's celebrity. The Elsinore of America is Hollywood. So to be able to tell this story, in that way, in this town, is a very cool opportunity." To Ball's surprise, O'Hara hadn't seen "The Pitt" when he decided to cast Ball as Hamlet. O'Hara, rather, reacted to the strength of Ball's audition, which Ball self-taped on his phone in a frenetic style that Ball later felt was "insane." "You have to have confidence, you have to have the audacity to believe that you are going to do Hamlet — and that you can do Hamlet," O'Hara says. "Because if I had to deal with someone who I had to pump up, or I had to make him believe that he can do it, it would be a whole different process." O'Hara knew one thing for sure: He wanted Torres to play Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. He loved her in "The Matrix" sequels and also as the formidable lawyer Jessica Pearson on "Suits." He was so certain that he didn't even ask her to audition. Torres, however, had reservations. "My first thought was, 'I don't know if my peri-menopausal brain can do this,'" she says, laughing. But then she read O'Hara's script and she was sold. "I was so seduced by the idea that we get to see a Gertrude that we've never seen before." Torres' screen resume is miles long but her stage credits, not so much. Which is funny, she says, because as a New York native, her only goal was to be a Broadway star. But she got cast in a recurring role on a soap opera, and then a pilot and away she went. "Talk to any New York actor, and they're like, 'I'm just doing enough TV so that I can go back home and do theater.' I hear it all the time. And then eight years go by," she says. Read more: Trump fires Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet There is an electric moment between the time a stage manager calls "places" and the curtain rises, Torres says. That's the feeling actors live for. "We just fly," she says. "And we're chasing that sense of flight and connecting on stage, and if something goes wrong, we're using it. We're not starting over, we're not gonna stop. There's no safety net." That feeling is something O'Hara sought to harness with his adaptation. He doesn't ask for more than one run-through a day. He wants to keep things fresh, with the possibility of freedom and breakthroughs. The cast, he says, must have room to find the play. "I don't want it to be drilled in," he says. "I want there to be a little bit of titillating and vibration going on." Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
From ‘The Pitt' to ‘Hamlet': Patrick Ball and a twisty take on Shakespeare come to the L.A. stage
To be or not to be a crazed murderer, that is the question at the bloody heart of the world premiere adaptation of 'Hamlet' opening Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum with Patrick Ball in the central role, fresh off his star-making turn as Dr. Frank Langdon in the Max hit series 'The Pitt.' Co-starring Gina Torres from 'Suits,' this adaptation from director Robert O'Hara spins one of theater's most famous plays into a modern-day world of decaying Hollywood glamour. There is a mansion on the coast and the remnants of a 1930s soundstage. Hamlet's family runs a movie studio. The Danish prince is Hollywood royalty, and rather than being a tragic hero, his sanity and motive for murder are interrogated 'CSI'-style in a bracing second act that flips the script on the first 90 minutes, which are viewed entirely from Hamlet's perspective. There are added scenes and plenty of salty language, with dialogue that shifts from classical to 21st century vernacular. To be in this position at all — with his face on billboards, bus benches and streetlight banners across the city — is a 'miracle,' Ball says. He was a relative unknown before scoring a starring role on the zeitgeisty medical drama 'The Pitt,' which premiered in January and averaged more than 10 million viewers per episode, becoming one of Max's top five original series premieres of all time. Prior to that his only screen experience was a single episode of 'Law & Order.' He had, however, spent a decade 'grinding,' he says, 'auditioning for film and TV, getting close but never happening.' He also spent four years traveling for regional theater, performing in shows including 'Romeo & Juliet,' 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' and 'The Lover' in places like Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Boston and San Diego. 'I had settled upon the fact that that was going to be it for me. And I was happy with that,' Ball says. 'And the dream of Hollywood was something that I had let go of, and I made peace with the fact that that wasn't going to be my life.' Then all of a sudden 'The Pitt' happened — and it felt like kismet. The North Carolina native's mother is an emergency room nurse and his father is a paramedic. The stories told on the Noah Wyle-led drama resonated with him. His parents read through the pilot episode and said, 'This checks out. This is real medicine,' Ball says, recalling how excited they were for him. To be able to tell stories that are meaningful to the community he grew up in, he says, feels like a blessing. So does working with seasoned pros like O'Hara and Torres. O'Hara, who is also an established playwright, received a Tony nomination in 2020 for directing Jeremy O. Harris' critically acclaimed 'Slave Play,' which set a box-office record during its West Coast premiere at the Taper, grossing $1.4 million in five weeks. Ball says that after seeing the show in New York, he spent the next four hours straight discussing it with the friend he went with. O'Hara is obsessed with true-crime shows like '48 Hours,' in which culprits stick to their stories of innocence even when faced with video replays of their guilt, so he built the second act of his production in a moody, film-noir, flashback style, with a detective questioning characters after the play's end-of-show massacre. Think David Lynch meets Alfred Hitchcock with a Salvador Dali-painted set. 'I think that the audience watching will go: 'Wait a second, really, you put poison in his ear? Who puts poison in an ear?' O'Hara says during an interview after rehearsal, while Ball and Torres sit laughing beside him. 'And where are you guys getting all this poison? Poison in the glass, poison on the sword. This is something I didn't make up, but somehow Claudius has a stash of poison.' And what about that ghost? Shakespeare's Hamlet sees a ghost who tells him that his uncle Claudius murdered his father; O'Hara's Hamlet may or may not have seen a ghost. He might just be a crazy person pretending to act extra crazy in order to get away with murder. In the highly stylized universe of Hollywood noir, glamour and mental illness walk hand-in-hand; entitlement and privilege run amok. Shakespeare rarely writes about common people, O'Hara notes. 'Which goes back to the L.A.-ness of it all,' Ball chimes in. 'My title is 'prince,' right? And what's the American equivalent of that? It's celebrity. The Elsinore of America is Hollywood. So to be able to tell this story, in that way, in this town, is a very cool opportunity.' To Ball's surprise, O'Hara hadn't seen 'The Pitt' when he decided to cast Ball as Hamlet. O'Hara, rather, reacted to the strength of Ball's audition, which Ball self-taped on his phone in a frenetic style that Ball later felt was 'insane.' 'You have to have confidence, you have to have the audacity to believe that you are going to do Hamlet — and that you can do Hamlet,' O'Hara says. 'Because if I had to deal with someone who I had to pump up, or I had to make him believe that he can do it, it would be a whole different process.' O'Hara knew one thing for sure: He wanted Torres to play Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. He loved her in 'The Matrix' sequels and also as the formidable lawyer Jessica Pearson on 'Suits.' He was so certain that he didn't even ask her to audition. Torres, however, had reservations. 'My first thought was, 'I don't know if my peri-menopausal brain can do this,'' she says, laughing. But then she read O'Hara's script and she was sold. 'I was so seduced by the idea that we get to see a Gertrude that we've never seen before.' Torres' screen resume is miles long but her stage credits, not so much. Which is funny, she says, because as a New York native, her only goal was to be a Broadway star. But she got cast in a recurring role on a soap opera, and then a pilot and away she went. 'Talk to any New York actor, and they're like, 'I'm just doing enough TV so that I can go back home and do theater.' I hear it all the time. And then eight years go by,' she says. There is an electric moment between the time a stage manager calls 'places' and the curtain rises, Torres says. That's the feeling actors live for. 'We just fly,' she says. 'And we're chasing that sense of flight and connecting on stage, and if something goes wrong, we're using it. We're not starting over, we're not gonna stop. There's no safety net.' That feeling is something O'Hara sought to harness with his adaptation. He doesn't ask for more than one run-through a day. He wants to keep things fresh, with the possibility of freedom and breakthroughs. The cast, he says, must have room to find the play. 'I don't want it to be drilled in,' he says. 'I want there to be a little bit of titillating and vibration going on.'
Los Angeles Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Sian Barbara Allen, actor known for ‘The Waltons' and ‘You'll Like My Mother,' dies at 78
Sian Barbara Allen, a Golden Globe-nominated actor who appeared in dozens of TV series including 'The Waltons' from the 1970s to the '90s and also was known for her work in the 1972 film 'You'll Like My Mother,' has died. Allen died Monday in Chapel Hill, N.C., of Alzheimer's disease, her family announced in an online obituary. The actor's loved ones said Allen was best known for portraying characters who 'showed great vulnerability and uncommon empathy, which won her a legion of fans all over the world.' She was 78. Throughout her career, Allen garnered dozens of credits ranging from hit series 'Columbo,' 'Kojack' and 'Hawaii Five-O' to films 'Billy Two Hats' and 'You'll Like My Mother.' Allen also appeared in several TV movies, including 'Scream, Pretty Peggy' and 'The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case,' notably sharing the screen with Bette Davis and Anthony Hopkins, among others. Allen was born in Reading, Penn., on July 12, 1946, and was raised by her mother and grandmother. Before her screen debut in 'O'Hara, U.S. Treasury' in 1971, she accepted a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse. She studied under Peggy Feury through the Journeyman program at the Mark Taper Forum, according to her obituary. The first couple of years of Allen's television career were defined by minor roles in series including Westerns 'Gunsmoke' and 'Bonanza' and TV movies 'The Scarecrow' and 'The Family Rico.' In 1972, she tried her hand at film, portraying a mentally challenged young woman in 'You'll Like My Mother' opposite Patty Duke, Rosemary Murphy and Richard Thomas. For Allen, 'You'll Like My Mother' was more than just another acting credit under her belt. The film earned her a new star of the year nomination at the 1973 Golden Globes (Diana Ross won the prize for her starring role in 'Lady Sings the Blues') and marked the beginning of her partnership with Thomas. They had a brief romance before Allen married (and later divorced) Peter Gelblum in 1979. After their time on 'You'll Like My Mother,' Allen and Thomas reunited in 1972 for the CBS drama 'The Waltons.' Allen briefly portrayed Jenny Pendleton, the love interest of Thomas' John-Boy Walton. Throughout the '70s, Allen had a steady stream of minor roles in shows including 'Marcus Welby, M.D.,' 'Ironside,' 'Baretta' and 'The Incredible Hulk.' Allen's screen career began to taper off in the '80s and her final acting credit was in 1990 for a single episode of 'L.A. Law,' according to IMDb. Allen, who also enjoyed a theater career, withdrew from the public eye in 1990 and focused on local politics, including supporting Cesar Chavez's United Farmer Workers labor movement. Allen received the key to the city of her hometown and was also a poet, music enthusiast and lover of 'mac and cheese, root beer floats, and bacon cheeseburgers (no lettuce or tomato),' her family said. She is survived by her ex-husband, Peter, their daughter, Emily (whom she named after her 'Our Town' character Emily Webb), sisters Hannah Davie and Meg Pokrass, nephew Miles Bond, several cousins and grandson Arlo Fonseca.
Los Angeles Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: Larissa FastHorse's ‘Fake It Until You Make It' has its historic premiere at the Taper
Timing is everything in comedy, and one wonders how much funnier Larissa FastHorse's 'Fake It Until You Make It' might have been had it been produced at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023 when it was originally scheduled. The world has shifted off its axis since that relatively halcyon time when identity politics, the subject of FastHorse's farce, could be debated, mocked, ranted over and defended without fear of governmental reprisal. An emboldened Donald Trump has returned to the White House on a vendetta against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, setting in motion a new version of the Red Scare, except the target color scheme now is anything nonwhite. As nonprofit agencies across the land are scrambling to figure out how to respond to anti-DEI policies and threats from the new administration, the delayed premiere of 'Fake It Until You Make It' presents a satirical war between two rival nonprofit groups working on behalf of Native American causes. Good intentions are no guarantee of good behavior. In 'The Thanksgiving Play,' FastHorse skewered with merciless hilarity white woke hypocrisy. Here, she examines the way virtue signaling and moral one-upmanship have warped the nonprofit field, turning public service into a competitive sport and corrupting even those who have dedicated themselves to lifting up their own communities. 'Fake It Until You Make It' doesn't anticipate the dire situation unfolding in 2025. But it does, helpfully, move beyond the rigid partisan categories that have clouded our thinking and made shared enlightenment seem completely out of reach. The cleverly constructed play, a co-production with Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, is freighted with historical significance of its own. It's the first time a Native American playwright has been featured on the Mark Taper Forum's marquee stage — and it almost didn't happen. (In a candid interview with Times reporter Ashley Lee, FastHorse revealed that had Arena Stage not stepped in after CTG faltered, there 'would have been a lot of hurt and unhealed pain, which would have made this process difficult.') When the play begins, River (Julie Bowen of 'Modern Family' fame), a white woman who runs Indigenous Nations Soaring, has taken out a restraining order to prevent anyone from messing with her cat. Wynona (Tonantzin Carmelo), a proudly identified Native woman who leads N.O.B.U.S.H., an organization seeking the removal of invasive plants, is the main target of River's ire. The two women work in the same office complex and are bitter enemies. Wynona has designs on River's cat, and River keeps planting a botanical species on workplace grounds that Wynona is on a fanatical mission to wipe out. Battle lines are drawn and immediately transgressed in a play that takes farce out of the bedroom and into administrative corridors and cubicles. The doors that slam, as farcical doors are built to do, open to work spaces, where a good deal of time is spent scheming and counter-scheming. Mistaken identity is a central conceit of the genre, and FastHorse takes this charade to another intellectual level. While reveling in the silly masquerade, 'Fake It Until You Make It' interrogates the meaning of racial identity and authenticity, leaving no dogmatic position unscathed by irony. FastHorse's nonprofit universe includes a range of characters of varied ideological commitments and tactical approaches. Theo (Noah Bean), Wynona's partner, is an eco-activist who returns from clearing thousands of acres of English ivy from California wilderness to find himself conscripted into Wynona's war against River. Theo, who's white, wants to marry Wynona, but her conscience won't let her start a family with a non-Native. She dangles, however, the reward of being his common-law wife if he pretends to be a Native applicant for a job at River's organization. She wants him to tank a big grant application to better her chances of being selected. Theo has misgivings, but his passion for Wynona overrides his scruples. Two other nonprofit leaders have their headquarters in this suite of offices. Grace (Dakota Ray Hebert), an advocate for race-shifting, has launched an organization to help people transition their identities 'ethically and safely.' A Native woman eager to try on other selves, she provides costume designer E.B. Brooks the opportunity to create a pageant of flamboyant international garb, designed to lay unmistakable claim to new cultural identities. Krys (Brandon Delsid), who identifies as gender-fluid, heads an organization that advocates for the Two Spirit community. When Mark (Eric Stanton Betts), the native applicant Theo impersonates, shows up at the office to apologize for missing the interview with River, Krys runs interference for Wynona. But Mark, a fellow Two Spirit soul with a lot of sex appeal, erotically complicates Krys' loyalties. The farcical math is elegantly worked out by FastHorse, who maps out the ensuing chaos with elan. The production, directed by Michael John Garcés, quickly reaches cruising speed on a vivid set by Sara Ryung Clement that is full of Native color and craft. But much as I admired the playwright's ingenious examination of identity politics through the looking glass of farce, I never quite succumbed to the comedy's demented logic. My resistance wasn't just a function of the radically changed political landscape that has made DEI concerns no laughing matter. There's a cynicism at the heart of 'Fake It Until You Make It' that distances us from the characters. FastHorse, to her credit, doesn't write schematic plays. She refuses to treat her Native protagonist as a hero. But in making Wynona so belligerently flawed and River so narcissistically self-serving, FastHorse diminishes our concern for the outcome of their battle. A pox on both their houses, I found myself indifferently concluding. Grace, who refuses to be confined by demographic category, is in many ways the most outrageously polemical of the characters. Yet she gains the upper hand in the debate over identity politics with a perspective that is as compassionate and cogent as it is controversial. Unfortunately, the way she's deployed as a sight gag makes it hard to take her seriously when it counts. Perhaps the real hero of the play is the playwright, who panders to no quarter. But a touch more emotional reasonableness in Wynona might have paid theatrical dividends. In farce, we expect to see characters, overwhelmed by situations of their own making, behaving at their clumsy worst. But we need to care about them sufficiently to stay attentive, and for that to happen we must believe that they are capable of self-awareness, if not growth. Farce is a notoriously cruel genre, as critic Eric Bentley has noted. It allows us, as he writes in 'The Life of the Drama,' to work out our 'psychic violence' through laughter. We know the brutality isn't really happening, so we go along with the vicious high jinks. But a corner must be preserved for affection, and FastHorse spares not even River's cat from unnatural abuse. Krys and Mark arrive at a moment of tender connection. The panting lust that allows them to override the lies that brought them together isn't enough farcical compensation, but Delsid and Betts have a sweet, daffy chemistry. Bowen's River and Carmelo's Wynona play their characters' shortcomings to the hilt. There's no danger of a saccharine ending. Amy Brenneman takes over the role from a fearlessly funny Bowen when 'Fake It' moves to Arena Stage in April. Carmelo, who could incorporate a moment or two of introspective reflection in her uncompromisingly ferocious portrayal, will travel with the rest of the cast to Washington, D.C. Bean's Tom bristles at the way Wynona plays the race card. ('You can't just say 'blood money' to win every argument,' he tells her.) But he's carnal putty in her hands, leaving the impression of a good guy with a big id and no spine. The play ends with a joke that made me wonder if Center Theatre Group has it in for cats. (I had hoped to expunge the memory of the dramatized feline murder that took place in 'Our Dear Dead Drug Lord' at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.) We could all use a good laugh right now in these disturbing political times, but I left the Taper with a wince.
