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Los Angeles Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: ‘Bacon' treads the line between love and abuse for teenage boys in a Rogue Machine powerhouse
Acting doesn't get more combustible than in Rogue Machine Theatre's explosive production of 'Bacon,' performed upstairs at the Matrix Theatre on the inescapably intimate Henry Murray Stage. When you head back downstairs at the end of this two-hander by British playwright Sophie Swithinbank, you might need a moment to gather yourself. The play, which explores masculinity, bullying, sexuality, internalized homophobia and violence, chronicles the abusive relationship between two wounded adolescent boys who are struggling to understand the adults they're becoming. It's also, in a way, a love story. A destructive one that neither is equipped to handle. Mark (Wesley Guimarães) is a shy and polite newcomer to St. Michael's School. Self-conscious and friendless, he's anxious not to attract the kind of attention that has clearly made him a target of bullying in the past. Darren (Jack Lancaster), who lives with his volatile father in less middle-class circumstances than Mark, is a troublemaker at the school, a regular in detention who smokes where he shouldn't, takes what doesn't belong to him and carries a knife to settle disputes. The play, set in London, moves back and forth between two time periods. When 'Bacon' begins, Mark is working at a café, hiding out from his life in what will eventually be revealed to be a post-traumatic limbo. Darren's entrance into the café prompts Mark to tell his story — their story, actually, an entwined set of narratives that the two characters will take turns delivering. The scene changes to four years earlier, when Mark and Darren meet at St. Michael's School. They are drawn to each other like predator to prey. Darren, a menacing presence, instantly sizes up Mark, who wears his heart on his neatly pressed sleeve. Their backgrounds and temperaments could hardly be more different, yet both sense in each other a missing piece. Neglected and roiling with rage, Darren needs to be loved but can't face his own vulnerability. Mark, who longs to give comfort, doesn't have the self-esteem to protect himself from cruelty when it's mixed up with the promise of connection. Mark is taller and brighter than Darren but infinitely more docile and far less street-smart. There's no question who's in control. Guimarães' reveals Mark's limits — there are certain things he will not tolerate. But the character's terror of social isolation keeps the door open to a friendship that can resemble a hostage situation. Early on, Darren grabs Mark's phone and refuses to give it back, establishing the pattern of violation that Mark rejects but cannot seem to escape. Later, when Darren shows up at Mark's home, the unexpected social call is laden with lethal suspense. Lancaster's Darren is like a coiled snake, ready to spring at the most unexpected moments. As Mark and Darren spend more time alone together, the tension, both sexual and otherwise, rises exponentially. Cut off from the world, they tentatively explore their mutual curiosities. But these private moments create a backlash in Darren that is terrifying to witness. The brutality of his upbringing has made him dangerous. The sight of weakness, a reminder of what he's covering up, compels him to pounce. Swithinbank probes deep beyond the topical surface of her drama. 'Bacon' defies category. It deals with school bullying but doesn't takes refuge in social-issue talking points. This sharply psychological work uses the two-character format to dramatize a dance of fractured identities. The production, directed by Michael Matthews, concentrates intensely on the interplay between Guimarães and Lancaster. The actors, while adopting the English accents of their characters, bring their own individualities to the roles. 'Bacon' is the kind of play that will transform through the particularities of its performers. Unfolding in the tight quarters of the Henry Murray Stage, the actors rearrange a few minimal set pieces to shift the abstract locale from school to home to work and beyond. (Stephen Gifford's production design understands the theatricality of the play and keeps the focus squarely on the actors.) 'Bacon' grapples with trauma — and doesn't flinch from what it uncovers. Guimarães and Lancaster give themselves fearlessly over to a story that is extreme but in a way that is true to the extremity of adolescence. The production, another Rogue Machine powerhouse in a compressed package, is one of the most intense outings I've had in the theater in some time. Acting, playwriting, directing and producing combine into unmissable theater, an experience that could happen nowhere else but the live stage.
Los Angeles Times
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: Will Arbery's ‘Evanston Salt Costs Climbing' combines despair with tender absurdity at Rogue Machine
Will Arbery has a knack for coming up with unmemorable play titles. 'Heroes of the Fourth Turning,' his award-winning drama produced by Rogue Machine Theatre in 2023, has the misleading ring of a generically violent video game. 'Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,' his 2018 drama now receiving its Southern California premiere in a Rogue Machine production at the Matrix Theatre, could be a bullet point in a comptroller's budgetary report. The play, which isn't at all dryly bureaucratic, began as an exercise when Arbery was studying playwriting at Northwestern University. The assignment was to write a short play based on a news article, and Arbery challenged himself to write on the most boring item he could find. 'Evanston Salt Costs Climbing' evolved over many years, but the original newspaper headline stuck. The play, which revolves around two salt truck drivers and an administrator at the city's public works department, is indeed concerned with the rising cost of salt used to de-ice the roads in an Illinois community accustomed to brutal winters. But it's a most delectably weird play, experimental in form and frenetically playful in language. Arbery seems to be inspired by Mac Wellman and the line of neo-American absurdists that followed him. But there's a tender vulnerability to his characters, and the daffy empathy that suffuses the writing is unique to Arbery. 'Evanston Salt Costs Climbing' has little in common with 'Heroes of the Fourth Turning.' For those who appreciated the unusual political vantage point of 'Heroes,' of being eavesdroppers on the private quarrels of young religious conservatives, 'Evanston' will seem like a visit to Mars. The trip is worth it, even if you leave confused. It's OK to be occasionally bewildered in the theater. A temporary cessation in interpretive control can open new cognitive portals. 'Evanston' may be too indulgently idiosyncratic to be considered a major work, but the play's offbeat appeal has a way of creating community out of thin air — or perhaps I should say out of a shared sensibility for wayward human comedy. Arbery's characters can't help betraying their ache for connection, even as they work steadfastly to cover up their need. Guillermo Cienfuegos, who directed Rogue Machine's superb production of 'Heroes of the Fourth Turning,' leans into the strangeness of 'Evanston' without losing sight of the delicate amiability that marks the characters' twisted behavior. Hugo Armstrong plays Basil and Michael Redfield plays Peter, the two salt truck drivers who are struggling to survive the frigid cold of their job and the emptiness of their lives. Both come to know loss, Basil as perpetrator and Peter as victim. But their bond, the way they help anchor each other, helps them face the desolation that seems to rise up from the very roads they clear. Mark Mendelson's scenic design, enhanced by Michelle Hanzelova-Bierbauer's projections, creates a wintry landscape in the middle of Los Angeles. A salt dome, a break room at the depot, the inside cab of one of the trucks and an Evanston living room make up this chilly theatrical cosmos. Basil and Peter's topsy-turvy banter has some of the hallmarks of an old-school comedy duo. Armstrong, who pilots the production with his barreling theatrical energy, adopts an accent that I initially took to be Russian or Eastern European but turns out to be Greek. The far-fetched nature of the persona — Armstrong's Basil might be mistaken for a religious cult leader — doesn't at all undermine the authenticity of the characterization. Basil reveals himself not through his biography but through his concern for others and his basic decency. He doesn't want anyone to succumb to the sadness that's always threatening to pull him under. Redfield's Peter is a blue-collar schlub fighting suicidal despair. His marriage has outrun its emotional validity. When his wife dies in a car accident on an icy road that he and Basil had salted, he's too stunned to feel much of anything, except perhaps guilt that his murderous fantasies had somehow come true. He's not a monster, though monstrous thoughts percolate within him. He cares for his young daughter as best he's able to, even if it means Domino's Pizza several nights a week. When Basil shares with him one of his wacky short stories, Peter always finds something nice to say, no matter how trivial. When Basil worries that his ideas are too out there, Peter reassures him that people are all weird. Lesley Fera, in the production's most endearing performance, plays Jane Maiworm, the public works administrator. Maiworm, as she's called on the job, is unfailingly friendly with Basil and Peter. (It turns out she's having an affair with Basil, but her Midwestern niceness is just part of who she is.) She comes up with a plan to modernize snow-clearing in Evanston, advocating for a new de-icing technology that would render salt trucks a thing of the past. She doesn't want to put Basil and Peter out of work, but the environmental case is too pressing to ignore. A widow, Maiworm is raising her adult stepdaughter, Jane Jr. (Kaia Gerber), whose emotional unsteadiness is a source of great consternation. As a mother, Maiworm has the best intentions, but work dominates her life. When problems arise, her habit is to seek administrative solutions rather than involve herself more personally. Gerber gives quirky life to Jane Jr.'s neurotic sensitivity. As self-dramatizing as she is self-effacing, the character is ill-equipped for everyday life. But her compassion gives her a remarkable lucidity about other people's struggles. Surreal figures crop up in 'Evanston,' including Jane Jacobs, the author of 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' Maiworm worships Jacobs' civic example, but Jacobs (played in burlesque fashion by Armstrong) suggests her acolyte doesn't really understand the lesson of her books, which is that neighborhoods get their vitality from the connections of people, not through best bureaucratic practices. Maiworm is an administrator who truly cares. But like everyone else in the play, she has trouble revealing the jumble of fears and longings locked inside her. Don't let the forbiddingly bureaucratic title fool you. The humanity of 'Evanston Salt Costs Climbing' will warm your heart.
