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Upon the recommendation of a fellow Cornellian at a recent alumni gathering, I put 5 small Los Angeles theaters on my list. “See their shows,” that list. I’ve seen about a dozen productions in the smaller theaters around LA, and they always have glaring weaknesses, but I will keep exploring, I promised, with this new list of 5.

First up, The Road Theatre Company. Last night I saw their current production, The Unseen, written and directed by Craig Wright. (I wish he had been there: I’d like to see if I remind him of Peter Krause. But that’s another story.)

My review is short and simple: “This is good theater.” The 3 actors are very good. Nice work, Douglas Dickerman, Matt Kirkwood and Darin Singleton. The direction is tight and compelling, the tech solid. The play itself — intense, dark, disturbing, horribly brutal at one point, but oh so intelligent in most places, particular in the dialog of Wallace — left me sitting there saying only a quiet “Whoa.” But the non-stunned part of me shouts, I found it! I found high-quality theater in Los Angeles. Glory be!

(My only complaint: the special effects are on the loud side a couple of times. Good writing, acting and directing provide the best jolts.)

Congratulations to the Road and their fine team. Congratulations and thank you.

“If there is any point to [this play], it is totally obscured by this disastrous production during which actors jabber meaningless dialogue at each other instead of actually communicating.”

Saw this on Backstage.com. I didn’t read more than that and I just had to post it here. Please, critic, tell us how you really feel.

Just saw Pope Joan, a new musical, at the Stella Adler Theater in Hollywood. An unholy trinity of Catholicism, Dark Ages history and sex, and my limited familiarity with said trinity, left me a little lost in tonight’s viewing. But my friend Whitney Avalon plays the title role, and it was a pleasure to see her perform. Two other leads really stood out, so even if the story and the storytelling were mysterious to me, I enjoyed those performances.

The show is a mix of Rafiki from The Lion King, silly monks from Spamalot, Che and Evita from Evita, the masses from Les Misèrables, and a sentence of Sondheim, too. All very serious, except for the parade of dancing monks. So while the show was all over the map, at least there was Whitney. She and I were in a show once upon a time, and I helped her prepare the music to audition for this show. Many congratulations to you, Ms. Avalon!

On Saturday night I attended Missionary Position by Steven Fales at the Celebration Theater. It’s a small theater, maybe 60 seats, and it was mostly full. There were 3 women there. I attended with an old friend and his partner. It wasn’t that long ago (May 2007) that I saw Confessions of a Mormon Boy, Mr. Fales’s other production, in Boston with my friend Amy who describes herself as a “recovering Mormon.” The demographics there were skewed, too, but less so. Now, I can recall only once in my life having seen a show with notably different audience demographics that was a strong show, period: Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Huntington in Boston. Such shows are often strong for that demographic only. Not that your typical theater-going audience owns artistic excellence, not that seeing different audiences in theaters isn’t something I relish, it’s just that when everybody’s gay or black or this or that, and they love the show but said show doesn’t take off and receive general acclaim … well, that’s all I’m saying.

Anyway, the short review of Missionary Position is this: Confessions was better.

Mr. Fales has interesting comments to make if you’re gay or Mormon or ex-Mormon or intellectually curious about such matters. In context, it’s quite lovely to hear about the phone call he had with his father wherein his dad told him he didn’t have to go on his mission. All the straight-forward earnest moments, and most of the coyly presented ones, are quite great, and are the reason I attended. But he’s also a little too in love with himself, his flights of fancy, and his body. The physical struck me as gratuitous in both shows. Furthermore, he’s not quite strong enough of an actor for his own work. Along those lines, some lines and transitions were a little bumpy — but that’s not a big deal and not really what I mean when I criticize his acting, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it had it been opening weekend.

But here’s the big difference between the two shows. His first show would be eye-opening and mind-opening to lots of Mormons. Maybe he crossed a line to the conservative ones with the grisly details about his gay-prostitute exploits, but I still say those conservative ones are the ones who most needed to see it. Missionary Position, on the other hand, would offend pretty much every Mormon I know. Worse, it did so in an exploitative fashion that was artistically weak. Even the guy who had no Mormon history in our group agreed it was exploitative. Mr. Fales is pissed about Prop 8, and rightly so. But this artistic outlet isn’t helping. He puts on the Mormon temple clothes and takes off his other clothes. It’s shocking but quickly becomes more about his prancing around in a way where you wonder if you’ll catch of glimpse of this former member’s member. (You don’t.) Regarding Prop 8, this tacked-on part of the show is simply petty revenge, doing the one thing Mormons don’t want you to do.

Though I’ve changed a lot, I would still hate for Mormons to go to this show not knowing about its contents. To be fair, he “warns” such people up front that this show might not be for them by (a) the title and (b) undue swearing. The big swears. Oooh. How naughty. But he’s not very good at swearing. (On this account I empathize, and further note that many actors who grew up swearing don’t cuss well on stage.) Late in his show, he points out that the temple ceremony allows people to back out at a point where no one really would. Similarly, those sitting there, $25 ticket in hand, probably aren’t going to leave when he screams the word f*ck repeatedly in the first minute, but some might if they knew that at the end — where it makes no sense in the story line! — he will put on all the temple clothing. When I read The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, I searched high and low for anything that might merit the rage behind the fatwa ordering his death. I didn’t find it. Those unfamiliar with Mormonism will probably feel the same way, so I provide this notice mostly for those with Mormon history.

Okay. This review is half-baked. At a minimum, it needs a better ending. Mr. Fales found a good ending for his show, imagining a moment where he takes his children to Portugal, his field of service as a Mormon missionary, and tells them this is where he “grew up.” While this review needs a good ending, too, I gots things to do today! I’ll check in with an update later.

My first encounter with Doubt was reading John Patrick Shanley’s fine, fine play in a park in Worcester, Mass. I was on breaks from full-time rehearsals at Foothills Theatre there. What a read! Powerful, wonderful, beyond good. I knew I wanted to select a monologue, eventually settled on some lines from the scene where Father Flynn and Sister James talk in the courtyard.

Then, just a few months later, I worked on the set of Brotherhood with Brian O’Bryne, the talented actor who originated the role of Father Flynn. In our brief conversations, I mentioned that scene to him and he told me of shifting his approach to it, ending up with something much less strident or aggressive than during first rehearsals. He also told me that his girlfriend was the actor who portrayed Sister James — that’s how they met. Other discussions were about his more-recent work in The Coast of Utopia so I never got around to asking him what he and Shanley decided on as back story for Father Flynn’s guilt. Sure wish I’d asked that!

Fast forward a year, and a solid production of Doubt in Gloucester was the last piece of theater I saw in Massachusetts before leaving for California. I knew all four of the actors, and I saw there one of my favorite Boston performances of 2008. Originally, I thought I might be jealous of my friend Lewis, who was portraying Father Flynn, but his strong performance and my impending departure and a million other factors resulted in me just absorbing, appreciating, being moved and grateful.

Now here’s the thing. All three of these experiences were stronger and better experiences than watching Doubt in a movie theater on New Year’s Day. It’s a good movie, but these other things were beyond good. Streep, Hoffman, Adams, Davis, others — all are great actors whose work I enjoyed and learned from. (Loved Amy Adams so much, just as I loved Melissa Baroni’s performance in Gloucester. It’s a great role.) But there are key differences that matter so much!

In the play, the very first thing is Father Flynn’s sermon on doubt, directed to the audience. You attend the play, you attend his sermon. That is key. Conversely, the film opens with families getting ready for church, altar boys preparing, street scenes for a sense of time and place (1964, the Bronx) and then after a while you observe Flynn’s sermon — observe rather than experience. The same difference applies to reading the play, versus seeing the movie. When reading that sermon, it spoke to me personally. And I’m not at all Cathloic! The movie, while good, is simply more removed.

As the plot unfolds without us seeing any of the children, the play allows for an amazing journey in the mind. Reading the play, working on monologues from it, seeing a strong production — all allowed for me to have rewarding, extraordinary meditation. The movie, to be sure, is very worthy of post-popcorn contemplation, and I’m happy for that. I’m sure that this good mental thing happens much more after this movie than after, say, The Dark Knight. But the movie “takes us from the realm of philosophical meditation to one of evidentiary fact-finding, where every expression is scrutinized for incriminating information.”¹ And this is why it’s not as good as the play. The film’s realism makes it smaller. No more meditation, just facts. Remember: it’s supposed to be about doubt.

Somewhere in the above, probably more than in Hoffman’s acting work, lies the reason that the movie’s Father Flynn seemed to me more arbitrary in his reactions. More ambiguous for the sake of ambiguity. More like an exercise in writing. Not for a second did I have such heretical thoughts before seeing the movie. Some play-going audience members see him as guilty, some as not guilty; all see their opinion as clearly the only right one. In that sense, you can think what you want about Flynn. But don’t you want to think, “He did it” or “He didn’t do it,” instead of “I don’t get it”? (Or maybe the movie set him up as clearly guilty, while the play is more wonderfully ambiguous, and I don’t want him to be a pedophile.)

Maybe if you haven’t been exposed to Doubt before seeing the movie, none of my ramblings will make sense. If you know the piece beforehand, however, you may feel like I did, that you are seeing a good, but distracting, production — just like the snot you see running down Viola Davis’s face as she pleads with Sister Aloysius. Is it bad? No, how can it be? It’s real, it’s honest, it shows great work from a creative artist. But it’s distracting as hell.