‘Out There On Fried Meat Ridge Road’ is so entertaining that I’ve seen it not once…but twice.
This is a funny, touching play, written by Keith Stevenson, who also stars in it.
Keith plays JD, a seemingly innocent/naive man, who lives in a small, dirty, rundown motel room somewhere in West Virginia.
One day, JD decides he’d like to expand his circle of friends, so he advertises for a roommate and…
Mitchell (Neil McGowan) a man with sweaty palms and a broken heart, shows up at his door.
Mitchell assumes he was answering an ad to share an apartment…not a dive motel room. Well in all fairness, there are two beds. Of course, one of them is covered in clothing that smells from deer pee.
Anyway, Mitchell, having no where else to go, sticks around and very soon, he is greeted by several damaged, endearing characters that have more to them than meets the eye…Well, almost…
There’s Marlene (Kendrah McKay) an artist, meth addict who’s hopelessly in lover with her cheating boyfriend, Tommy (Jason Huber).
Tommy is a pseudo poet who hails from New Jersey. Yes,he does cheat on his girl friend, but only with women named…Marlene…(even if they way 500 lbs) Tommy’s afraid he’ll forget their name.
Lastly, there’s Flip (Michael Prichard) the owner of this not so fine establishment…..Flip is a quasi racist with a heart of gold. He’s been looking after JD since his mother died.
This is a play that will have you laughing non stop. It will also touch your heart, because in the end…’Out There On Fried Meat Ridge’ is about human connection…Something everyone, wants and needs…even if you’re too screwed up to know it.
Guillermo Cienfuegos did an excellent job of directing these fine actors.
The play runs just a little over one hour.
Tickets are $20.00. Call 310-822-8392 or go to www.PacificResidentTheatre.com to purchase them.
Dan Cole, Wendy Johnson, Kevin Quinn and Terrance Elton star in Pacific Resident Theatre’s production of “Concealing Judy Holliday” by Wendy Johnson and directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos.
Wendy Johnson, the writer of “Concealing Judy Holliday”, also happens to be playing the role of Holliday in her name play. Ms. Holliday, as you may realize, is the heroine of her own story, a young actress who possibly got too much too soon, or didn’t get enough early enough, or maybe jumped ship before the boat left the harbor. Holliday was the hard-luck girl/woman who made it at a young age, then didn’t, for whatever reason, follow her early success with more success. In Johnson’s play, Holliday is dying in bed, of a virulent and murderous cancer. The time is the era of the Senate Hearings during the cold war, when it was supposed that the Communists were coming out of the woodwork, maybe just because of some casual acquaintance with The Revuers, a rag-tag gathering of musicians and story tellers who were believed to have been funded by the American Communist Party. (Not true, but who cares when such a threat may have just as well been true as not, regardless of truth or lies, the consequences were the same – no work, no references, no peace). Holliday was obviously a-political, but The Committee was looking to lay blame, and cared not on whom it fell. She was hounded by the Committee until she fell ill with cancer. Pals rallied around: Tallulah Bankhead (a saucy Sarah Zinsser), Betty Comden and Adam Green (Melinda Doyle and Terrance Elton), Laurette Taylor (Marilyn Fox), Ezio Pinza and Bob Hope (Terrance Elton), Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf and others of similar caliber and innocence, at least in that particular area. The ‘Names’ are ridiculous, but reputations were shattered, jobs and even lives were lost in the frantic name-calling that ruined many careers.
Outstanding in the production are Kevin Quinn as Gerry Mulligan and Senator Richard Arens, Dan Cole as Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, and Louella Parsons. And More. The ridiculousness of suspicion falling on all these famous heads made the whole program a huge farce, but the naming was not ever amusing. Famous names, dignified people, coming up rumpled by association, true or not.
Marilyn Fox as Judy’s hysterical old mother is a standout in her quivering runs to the oven where she intends to gas herself each time her daughter is threatened by the stern tones of the Senator at the hearings. A familiar and much honored presence at her theatre and at awards ceremonies, Ms. Fox outdoes herself here.
The action of the play is mainly in the mind of the dying girl, mixed with her own sense of not having made the most of her opportunities, although the fiercest foe is the threat of political and social extinction whatever the cause.
There’s a lot of laughter here in the face of tragedy, and a sour reminder that hurt can come without cause or concern. And, surprisingly, a lot of fun in the face of possible tragedy…more than real in the final death of the promising young woman, who no longer had the strength to withstand her mental and physical trials.
Ms. Johnson seized the moment of those terrible trials, duly refreshing a terrible memory with adept and still terrifying reality. Wow.
Scenic and lighting design by Norman Scott, sound by Edan Norman Freiberger and John
Masline, costumes by Sarah Zinsser, musical direction and original compositions by Edan Norman Freiberger; directed by Guillermo Ciuenfuegos.
Pacific Resident Theatre, 705-1/2 Venice Boulevard, Venice.
Thursday through Saturday at 8:00pm, Sunday at
3:00pm through May 27 at 3:00pm.
(310)822-8392 or
www.PacificResidentTheatre.com.
In a small West Virginia town, Mitchell (Neil McGowan) has just lost his job at the local spork factory, not to mention his car, his girlfriend and his apartment. He finds a newspaper ad for an affordable, extended-stay hotel room with a beer-bellied hillbilly with a heart of gold named JD (Keith Stevenson, who also wrote the play) … The ensemble of hotel neighbors — which includes gangster Tommy (Jason Huber), his hysterical girlfriend, Marlene (Kendrah McKay), and their decidedly un-PC landlord, Flip (Michael Prichard) — make the most of the comedy. Stevenson’s writing and fantastically funny performance exudes sympathy for these characters, who are hilarious Southern stereotypes as well as everyday philosophers and artists in their own way. Guillermo Cienfuegos’ sitcomlike direction propels the hourlong one-act, and Norman Scott’s hotel room set is commendable for its kitschy, lived-in detail. Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through May 20. (310) 822-8392,pacificresidenttheatre.com. (Sarah Taylor Ellis)
“It’s a tragedy with comic elements.” responds July Holliday (playwright Wendy Johnson) when second husband Gery Mulligan asks, “What’s your story?” The description is equally apt for this memory play about the Oscar-winning comedic actress that has Holliday bedridden with cancer, reliving her life in fits and starts. Her hallucinations, emceed by Tallulah Bankhead (a spunky Sarah Zinsser), include episodes from her professional career and more personal ones with her husbands, her lover and her mother, Helen Tuvin (Marilyn Fox, whose “pill-poppomg” scene is memorably funny). The cost compelling of the recollections, however, is the hearing run by Sen. Richard Arens (Kevin Quinn, who also plays Mulligan) to investigate Holliday’s potential communist leanings. Johnson, with her Lucille Ball looks and chirpy timbre, sounds just like Holliday and plays her with wide-eyed innocence. Director Guillermo Cienfuegos innovatively stages the action.
The late actress Judy Holliday (nee Tuvim) died of breast cancer in 1965, just short of her 44th birthday. She was a Broadway star who was given a surprise Oscar gift in 1951 for her starring role (opposite William Holden) in “Born Yesterday,” as Billy Dawn, the template for the “dumb blonde.” Her death was prolonged and saddening to those of us who loved her work.
Now, after a gestation period of some years, actress/writer Wendy Johnson has produced a semi-surreal biographical drama about this remarkable actor. Opening as Holliday is in her final days/hours of painful death. Ms. Johnson allows her to dream/ fantasize about her life: her over-bearing mother, her husbands, female lover, career, etc. The play weaves skillfully in and around her history. She has included the famous actress/personality, Tallulah Bankhead, as well as the dark days when she was hauled up in front of the corrupt House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which famously destroyed or maimed artists’ careers for belonging to the then-legal Communist Party. Advised by her friends to act out for them the dumb-blonde role she had perfected on stage, she was not harmed as much as others had been, but was blacklisted on television and on radio. but
not in films or on stage.
Director Guillermo Cienfuegos has cleverly staged this small and intimate drama in the tiny black-box theatre of Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice by putting the deathbed center stage and placing all the action around it. Norman Scott’s scenic and lighting designs support his vision, as do Sarah Zinsser’s costumes.
But it is in the casting that this play rises to its highest-possible level: starting with Wendy Johnson herself as Judy Holliday, with varied levels of her emotional involvement with Ms. Holliday’s life startlingly true and funny when needed: she gets Ms. Holliday’s giggle and voice patterns, along with big eyes which reflect the action amazingly. Marilyn Fox’s Helen Tuvim (and briefly as the great Laurette Taylor in “The Glass Menagerie” – in a biographical play Ms. Holliday was too ill to complete) plays up the Jewish-mother guilt without caricature, indeed observing the mother’s great dependency on her famous daughter with quiet accuracy. Sarah Zinsser’s Bankhead also captures a famous image without the over-the-top quality of the lady herself – a fine characterization. Melody Doyle, Terrance Elton and Dan Cole are extraordinary in their wide variety of characters, famous and otherwise.
This is a special show that undoubtedly has a longer life ahead of itself. See this while you can – it’s fun, informative and sad. Great theatre, in fact.
“Concealing Judy Holliday” plays through May 27th, 2012, at the Pacific Resident Theatre, 705 1/2 Venice Blvd (west of Lincoln Blvd), Venice. Tickets: 310.822.8392 or at www.PacificResidentTheatre.com.
Dan Cole, Kevin Quinn and Terrence Elton in “Concealing Judy Holliday”
Wendy Johnson may not be an exact double of the late stage and screen star Judy Holliday, but she channels the same quixotic mix of deft comedic timing and deeply earnest artistry.
Over lunch in a booth at Los Feliz’s retro-eclectic House of Pies, Johnson offers up a spot-on Billie Dawn, the Born Yesterday role Holliday originated on Broadway before trumping both Bette Davis’ Margo Channing and Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond for the Best Actress Oscar in the 1950 film version. Last year Nina Arianda earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of Billie in the 2011 Broadway revival.
Wendy Johnson
Johnson is equally adept at conjuring the voices of other ditzy but life-savvy dames such as Guys and Dolls‘ Miss Adelaide, Oklahoma’s Ado Annie or Audrey, the Little Shop of Horrors’ Skid Row flower shop girl. But it is Holliday, a woman with a 172 IQ who felt trapped by the roles studio bosses and Broadway producers wanted her to play, with whom Johnson most feels a personal kinship.
Johnson spent the last decade writing and workshopping a “funny and poignant” play calledConcealing Judy Holliday that now features seven actors playing various roles with her as the titular lead. It premieres April 21 at Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos and featuring PRT artistic director Marilyn Fox. Other cast members include Dan Cole, Melody Doyle, Terrance Elton, Kevin Quinn and Sarah Zinsser.
“Judy said, ‘I just need to remember to be smart when I’m at home and dumb when I’m outside’,” Johnson explains about Holliday. “That’s the concealing – ‘I have to squelch my intelligence in certain situations. I can only really be me in private.’ Even walking out on the street or when she was on What’s My Line?”
Judy Holliday on “What’s My Line” on July 5, 1953
Each week the What’s My Line? TV show’s panelists were blindfolded for its famed celebrity mystery guest segment, during which stars gamely attempted to camouflage their voices. Bennett Cerf quickly surmised Holliday’s identity despite her husky cover-up. He then asked if she would speak like Billie Dawn, as his wife had been trying to duplicate it for weeks.
“You can see the expression on her face when he says, ‘Would you do that Born Yesterdayvoice?” Johnson elaborates. “She kind of looks down and she’s like, ‘Here we go again.’ She had a love-hate relationship with the character. Anybody who has been just extraordinary in a part runs a risk of that becoming all anybody ever wants to see.”
A Forgotten Holiday
Judy Holliday was born Judy Tuvim [which suggests a Hebrew/Yiddish phrase for a holiday greeting] in New York in 1921. She landed her first theater-related job in 1938 as a switchboard operator at Orson Welles’ legendary Mercury Theatre. She also joined the Revuers, a new cabaret act featuring Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Alvin Hammer and John Frank, which got its start at Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard. Better supper clubs, an NBC radio show, and stints at Radio City Music Hall ensued over the next five years. In 1943, the group minus Frank accepted a Hollywood film offer that fell apart upon arrival. Ultimately the studios wanted Holliday but not the group. Out of loyalty, she refused to sign but relented under pressure from the others. Twentieth Century Fox cast her in small parts includingWinged Victory, directed by George Cukor, but released her in late 1944.
Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford in “Born Yesterday”
Back in New York, Comden and Green were penning what would become On the Town, and introduced her to director Herman Shulmin who cast Holliday in 1945’s Kiss Them for Me, which earned her the Clarence Derwent Award. In 1946, Garson Kanin’s new play Born Yesterdaywas in trouble because of its high-strung and unhappy star Jean Arthur who finally dropped out. Six other actresses refused the role, and Kanin sought out Holliday on a tip from a wardrobe designer.
After he convinced producer Max Gordon, Holliday stepped in with just four days to learn the part in time for the show’s out-of-town Philadelphia tryout. The critics loved her and the show opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in February 4, 1946. It ran for 1642 performances and remains the Lyceum’s biggest hit and longest run. Columbia Pictures paid $1 million for the film rights and proceeded to test 35 actresses despite Holliday’s stardom in the role. Studio head Harry Cohn didn’t think she had what he wanted.
Cukor signed on to direct the film version but was concurrently at work on Adam’s Rib,starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and written by Kanin with wife Ruth Gordon. The group conspired to write Holliday a supporting role in the film that would prove she had screen presence. It worked. Billie Dawn, the ex-chorus girl, went on to upset Davis and Swanson at Oscar time.
In 1952, Holliday was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to address rumors she was a communist and had lent her name to communist organizations. She named no one but became blacklisted when leaked transcripts revealed she had utilized her Billie Dawn persona to circumvent the answers. It kept her off television for three years and forced the cancellation of her I Love Lucy-type show in the pipeline. She continued to work in films until the furor died down.
Judy Holliday singing “I’m Going Back” from “Bells Are Ringing” on the Ed Sullivan show
Holliday appeared in Cukor-directed films likeThe Marrying Kind and It Could Happen to You, plus The Solid Gold Cadillac. In 1956,she returned to Broadway in Comden and Green’sBells Are Ringing and took home a Tony Award. She introduced the song “The Party’s Over,” which was written especially for her. In 1960, she appeared in the film version opposite Dean Martin.
Holliday had planned to play her idol Laurette Taylor in a new drama called Laurette until she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which ultimately led to her death at age 43 in 1965.
Jumping Off the Empire State Building
That Johnson should come to play Holliday was not a linear progression. The daughter of a Unitarian minister, she was born in Cleveland but moved to Northern California’s Marin County in second grade when her dad transferred to a church in Terra Linda. She adapted Judy Blume’s young adult novel Deenie into a play that he helped type up.
“It’s about a girl who’s got scoliosis and she has to wear a brace,” Johnson explains. “She’s very popular at school and it’s about how her friends deal with it. She’s very funny. When people ask her, ‘what happened to you’ she goes, ‘I jumped off the Empire State Building.’ I thought that was really funny as a kid. So when I fell off the bars and had to get stitches, people said, ‘what happened?’ and I said, ‘I jumped off the Empire State Building’ thinking that it was just the funniest thing.”
Wendy Johnson
When she was in fourth grade, Johnson starred in an outdoor production of Heidi. “I just had in my skull from an early age that I wanted to be in a play.” She soon started studying with noted Bay Area teacher Marilyn Izdebski whose musical theater workshops for kids 8-18 are still going strong at The Playhouse in San Anselmo. Johnson wanted to be in Fiddler on the Roof and took the bus at age 11 from Fairfax to Corte Madera just to be in the chorus.
“I did Adelaide in Guys and Dolls,” she grins, then sings a few verses of Adelaide’s Lament. “That was the beginning of funny voices. The boys were really short but really good. It was a good class with really talented kids. I was in ninth grade. I think that was my last show for Marilyn.”
It wasn’t until high school that Johnson got cast in her first dramatic role — as Karen in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. “I’d been griping a little bit about musicals. I wouldn’t always get a good part because I was good at the character thing like Adelaide. But I wasn’t really a trained singer. When I did Children’s Hour, it was like, ‘Oh, this is what I can really do.’ My mom said that to me, too. She said, ‘I know you like the singing and dancing, too, but this is really something.”
Johnson says she comes from a very creative family and that creativity is held in high regard. Her younger sister is a teacher and a published poet. Her older sister is a writer and a former textbook editor.
“My dad is also a very wonderful poet,” adds Johnson. “I’ve written poetry, then I’ve also written a lot of sketch comedy. Kind of like Judy, which is partly why I can identify with her in a way – very, very funny but then also a very deep person. There’s a poem in my play calledTwilight and Snow that she wrote in the ninth grade, and it’s a really startling poem for someone that young to have written, I think. So she definitely covered both spectrums in her life.”
In high school, Johnson went from playing the doctor in Agnes of God to Ado Annie in Oklahoma. She studied at the Marin Academy under Sharon Boucher and performed in shows like Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon as Junie before heading off to NYU and Circle in the Square. She joined a sketch comedy group called The Sterile Yak started by award-winning children’s book writer Mo Willems. She did a show at La MaMa called Collateral Damage that needed a few NYU students to be cheerleaders in a staging of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Whom Bomb.Vanessa Redgrave was featured in another.
“We were in ridiculous little outfits and we did the poem and I got to meet Allen Ginsberg,” Johnson recalls. “It was like a series of different poems or pieces. So Vanessa Redgrave was totally different from ours. I remember seeing her offstage and said, “I’m in this ridiculous little skimpy outfit.” And she goes, “Ridiculously brilliant” and put us right at ease.”
A Relentless Pursuit of Judy
After college, Johnson appeared in several NYC shows including Elevator Repair Service’s infamous 1994 Language Instruction: Love Family vs. Andy Kaufman at the Here Theater in SoHo. She also did odd jobs including a telemarketing gig that evoked shades of Holliday’s answering service character Ella in Bells Are Ringing. “I tried to mimic the voice of whoever answered the phone to make the job more fun for me.”
Wendy Johnson and Melody Doyle; Photo by Norman Scott
She married actor Terrance Elton and decided to move to LA, but a bout with Graves disease delayed her diving right in. But when fellow NYU grad and Relentless Theatre Company co-founder Olivia Honegger asked Johnson what play she wanted to do, Johnson replied The Crackwalker by Judith Thompson. The critically acclaimed production helmed by Honegger introduced Johnson to futureJudy Holliday Concealed director Cienfuegos, who was acting in it.
Johnson credits good friend actor/critic Travis Michael Holder for opening the door to Judy. “He had come see some Relentless productions and actually it’s kind of his fault that this play was born. He came to review And Baby Makes Seven and wrote, “Judy Holliday clone Wendy Johnson.” I thought, “What?” That kind of gave me the push to start finding out who she was.”
She found the extensive Judy Holliday Research Center website, read both biographies of the star as well as countless articles and documents including FBI files, which were created when Holliday was suspected of being a communist.
“The FBI files alone were over 100 pages,” explains Johnson, who printed them out. “I wanted to know everything. So I just had to read, read, read, watch, watch, watch, listen, listen, listen and then I had all this information. I started the research in like 2001, but what would happen is I would get in a play and so I’d put it on the shelf. Then I’d come back to do it. So when I say I started you know, over 10 years ago, it’s not that I was working on it every day. It’s only in the last five years that I’ve really been honing it.”
Some of the plays that distracted her include Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and Small Craft Warnings at the Evidence Room; Out Of Time with nom de guerre; Sideways Stories At The Wayside School at South Coast Rep; plus They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?and Jose Rivera’s Sonnets For An Old Century at Greenway Court Theatre.
Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford and William Holden in “Born Yesterday”
Learning about Holliday was one thing, doing something with that information was another. While Honegger suggested she consider doing a one-woman show, Johnson wanted to work with other actors. When asked what surprised her in investigating Holliday’s history or the catalyst that drew her in, Johnson admits, “It’s been so long, she’s such a part of me now.”
“I think the initial kind of draw was someone so smart, so funny and so very talented,” she offers. “I was intrigued by that and then the fact that she really wanted to be taken as seriously as an actress. Some unfulfilled dreams in her life struck a chord with me. Unrealized potential. Her personal life had a string of bad relationships and poor choices. She’s kind of been forgotten, and her career was very hurt by the hearings even though she didn’t name any names. She wasn’t blacklisted but at the time on television, the sponsors didn’t want their product associated with anybody who had appeared before the Senate subcommittee.”
According to Johnson, PR man Robert Green was the one to advise Holliday to give the senators what they saw in her screen roles, not the genius I.Q. reported in the media. “He said, ‘Just play that dumb blonde’ and she did. That’s what was so fascinating about reading the FBI files because she answers questions, but in such an intelligent way. Intelligently playing dumb.”
Judy Holliday
Examples include:
Question:Are you sure Betty Comden and Adolph Green do not have Communist records? Answer: “I am as sure of that as I can be of anybody who isn’t me.”
Question: What about the Communist-front records of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein? Answer:“I am sure that they got into it the same way I did, because I am sure none of them are Communists. I mean if you are a Communist, why go to a Communist-front? Why not be a Communist? Whatever you are, be it.”
“She got hurt when the transcripts were leaked because people were able to read what she said. The headlines were along the lines of ‘Evil Genius Outwits Honorable Committee.’ The tragedy of her life was interesting to me but also the amount of joy that she was able to convey at the same time. How hard it was to be an super-intelligent woman in Hollywood in that day and age, and having to conceal it.”
A Trip to Venice
Johnson says she had no interest in doing a biopic on stage with a linear story line. What caught her attention were the last 12 days of Holliday’s life, where the actress drifted in and out of consciousness.
Wendy Johnson and Sarah Zinsser; Photo by Norman Scott
“What are the things a person might be thinking about?” Johnson asked. “Remembering or regretting? So I thought that kind of a swirling collage could be the format. That’s what initially helped, but because she was a very private person I needed to flush it out and read between the lines, too.”
After multiple readings with friends and numerous drafts, she did a public workshop in November 2008 at Greenway Court Theatre by invitation of co-founder Pierson Blaetz. The show had a vaudeville format then but was missing elements of Holliday’s personal life. During a subsequent reading a few years later, she asked Guillermo Cienfuegos, who had since helmed critically acclaimed productions of Vincent Melocchi’s Julia and Lions at Pacific Resident Theatre, if he would direct the piece.
They held a reading a PRT’s Co-op space featuring PRT founding member Sarah Zinsser as Tallulah Bankhead and PRT artistic director Fox playing Holliday’s mother and Laurette Taylor. Fox had been cajoled into joining the cast after seeing a previous reading and became a champion of the piece. A last-minute cancellation opened up a three-week workshop opportunity last October. The response encouraged the group to move forward into production this spring.
Marilyn Fox and Wendy Johnson
“We developed this synergy between all of us, and Marilyn really got the piece,” adds Johnson. “Judy’s mother was very neurotic, but very funny and very sweet. A complicated woman, and Marilyn’s got the kind of comic timing you cannot teach. She told me I needed a ‘rosebud’ moment in the play and that’s when I added the Laurette Taylor part. Not being allowed to play her after the cancer set in was the biggest regret of Judy’s life.”
In Concealing Judy Holliday, Johnson never leaves the stage as vignettes from the actress’s life play out in kaleidoscopic fashion, ranging from meeting her musician husband David Oppenheim to appearing before the Senate subcommittees, doing radio sketches with Tallulah Bankhead on The Big Show to writing songs with last beau Gerry Mulligan. And dealing with her mother. “So it’s funny in spots as anyone’s life is, you know? It’s very funny and sad and all over the place, just like someone’s mind would be as they lay there on morphine.”
Johnson hopes the play will spur people to revisit or learn more about Holliday. “It’s really kind of incredible as a writer to just see this baby being born. I mean it’s an extraordinary thing to see it come to life, and not just with rinky-dink people slapping it together, but with artists who are committed and passionate. They bring me to tears,” she admits, tearing up. “It’s really – I still can’t believe I’ve been so lucky.”
Concealing Judy Holliday, presented by Pacific Resident Theatre. Opens April 21. Plays Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun 3 pm. Through May 27. Tickets: $20-28. Pacific Resident Theatre, 705½ Venice Boulevard, Venice. www.PacificResidentTheatre.com. 310-822-8392.
***All Concealing Judy Holliday production photos by Keith Stevenson, except where noted
REVEALING JUDY HOLLIDAY If you really never cared about Judy Holliday, because you only know her from grating performances in unsophisticated 50’s movies, you’re not alone. (Turns out she may have hated them more than 1.) And I was warned that Concealing Judy Holliday is built upon the somewhat familiar premise of a deathbed fever dream in which the actress’s life and career are given a travelogue going-over. So I confess that my motivation to see this play was prompted largely by my editor’s insistence and by its proximity to my house. But now that I have received the benefit of Wendy Johnson’s tine writing and performance, under Guillermo Cienfuegos’s inspired direction, I care a lot about both this production and this company. As this is the fourth show of Pacific Resident Theatre’s 25th Anniversary season, one may say that, not for the first time, I have come late to the good party.
Theatricality is not its own reward, but it is the nature of good theater. PRT here delivers a sensationally moving interpretation of some historical moments that deserve celebration. This story in pastiche of a genius whose career was derailed by injustice, of a woman whose romances were unlike fairy tales, of an artist disallowed from achieving her potential, needs telling and seeing, PRT has done the telling; the rest is up to you.
In her writing of this potentially melodramatic material. Ms Johnson consistently avoids the maudlin unless she can find humor in it (with one exception, noted below). She is unafraid of the horrifying, the absurd. and the deadly sober, and she can play all these as well as she has written them. In playing the title role, she never leaves the stage; one is grateful for her presence and afraid she will go. Her Judy Holliday impression is spot-on, but she finds a beguiling and tragic humanity in this deep character, and the series of well-chosen biographical details she has written plays to her strengths as an actor and a dramatist: an awkward first date: a humiliating and hilarious Red-baiting Senate hearing; a series of hideous scenes with her neurotic mother, a breathtaking and desperately sad morphine nightmare. These moments play very nicely, but the structure always draws us back to the actress’s bedside deathwatch, and around the onehour mark the writing makes an unfortunate veer into superficial sentimentality (“1 was never enough!”). But this side trip only lasts a few minutes, and the show is back on its feet, literally, almost before the lag begins to tell on one’s patience.
Mr Cienfuegos works exactly along the lines of the writing, creating an eerie expressionistic mindscape that invests the play with even more of the same brand of magic. He moves the action in delicious curves, utilizing Elizabeth McKenzie’s choreography so deftly that it flows easily from the infectious kinetic energy onstage. His stage pictures encourage the eye to rove while maintaining focus on the important action, and he makes of this narrow, deep playing space (and Norman Scott’s brilliant, flexible, but essentially one-room set) a whole world. with freezing poles, sweaty tropics, and uneasy but very funny temperate zones. Mr Scott’s lighting per fectly serves this vision, and Sarah Zinsser’s quirky costumes add tonality to a monochromatic visual universe.
The ensemble players, many of whom play multiple parts, deserve more than passing mention. Every one of these players is a seasoned veteran whose energy and passion carry a quick, dense story to its inevitable and compelling end. Marilyn Fox displays a stunning breadth of ability, delighting with her kooky yet harrowing take on Holliday’s mother Helen before assuming the role of Holliday’s idol, actress I.aurette Taylor, and suddenly freezing the marrow of the house. Similarly, the difference between Kevin Quinn’s easily sympathetic Gerry and his vicious doofus Senator Arens is a very big difference indeed. ‘l’errance Elton’s impressive array of roles includes Bob Hope and Holliday’s not-quite-smart-enough husband David, while Dan Cole plays, among others, Groucho Marx and an old grandmother in a babushka: all credibly. Sarah Zinsser’s Tallulah Bankhead (functioning as a kind of narcissistic Greek chorus, or warped commentator) literally stops the show with a surprise scene-steal, equal parts risk-taking writing and all-theway acting. Melody Doyle, as Holliday’s nurse and as her policewoman lover Yetta, is natural and believable.
Imagine what might happen if you crossed a screwball comedy clan like the one George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart created in You Can’t Take It With You with the Greekly tragic family Arthur Miller wrote about in Death Of A Salesman. What you’d end up with would doubtless be something quite like Jennifer W. Rowland’s highly original and thoroughly entertaining tragicomedy The Indians Are Coming To Dinner, now getting its World Premiere at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre.
We first meet family patriarch Harold Blackburn (Michael Rothhaar) in full Maharajah regalia as he proudly announces to us the imminent arrival chez the Blackburns of his Indian friend Anil Desai (Kevin Vavasseur) and accompanying family members for the (guess who’s coming to) dinner we’ve come to enjoy. The year is 1984, and after thirty-four years of running a business he doesn’t particularly care for, Harold has learned that recently reelected President Reagan will soon be needing a new ambassador to India, a country still reeling from the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Our host is hoping that a tasty vegetarian curry dinner will curry sufficient favor with the influential Anil for the overseas post Harold has long dreamed of to become a reality. All Harold needs now is some cooperation from his family—a feat that’s easier hoped for than realized.
Wife Lynn (Sara Newman) is the ditzy sort—the kind played by Billie Burke in Topper and Father Of The Bride—who insists on letting the phone keep ringing because this newfangled contraption called the Answering Machine will pick up for her if she just waits long enough. As further evidence of her ditz, Lynn cares not a whit that the chick peas needed for tonight’s main course must be soaked a full forty-eight hours. After all, what’s the difference between two days in water and a quick rinse? As for appetizers, well there’s certainly nothing wrong with sushi, since everyone knows that Indian vegetarians eat raw fish, right?
Conveniently for Harold, his eighteen-year-old college student daughter Alexandra (Thea Rubley) has shown up unexpectedly on the family doorstep, a visit her father assumes is to help him make a good impression on his Indian guests, though in reality it is because tonight is the final round of Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition and Alexandra is one of ten gifted finalists.
At least fourteen-year-old Christopher (Justin Preston) doesn’t have other plans for the evening, though the frisky teen would probably rather spend it smoking pot in his upstairs bedroom than entertaining Indians.
Completing the Blackburn household is Chinese houseboy Woo (Peter Chen), whose comic butchering of the English language is thrown in for laughs, though not perhaps of the most culturally sensitive sort.
We soon learn that despite a whole lot of talking going on in the Rowland household, there’s not a whole lot of communication between family members, as for example when Sara plows blithely ahead with her dinner preparations regardless of admonitions about chick peas and sushi to hilarious effect. At other times, as when Harold’s hopes and dreams blind him to just how important tonight’s once-in-a-lifetime competition is to Alexandra, the results have considerable dramatic payoff.
That playwright Rowland somehow manages to juggle two very different genres and make The Indians Are Coming To Dinner’s gradual darkening seem an entirely logical outcome of its initial lightheartedness is a tribute to her writing, to Julia Fletcher’s intelligent direction, and to an all-around splendid cast.
Newman is delightfully droll as madcap matriarch Lynn, beneath whose seemingly bird-sized brain lies considerable heart and emotional smarts. Preston, whose work as a 16-year-old English schoolboy in PRT’s The Browning Version won him an Outstanding Featured Actor Scenie, demonstrates versatility and spunk in a role which gives him his very own “Biff moment” opposite stage vet Rothhaar, with whom the talented young performer more than holds his own. Recent USC grad Rubley’s luminous performance as Alexandra reveals a talent to be reckoned with (and a soprano that comes out of left field and dazzles). Vavasseur and Rikin Vasani do subtly nuanced work as Anil and his son Deepok, while Chen gives Woo dignity despite the indignity of having to play a racial/linguistic stereotype for laughs.
Finally, topping them all with a performance of fire and depth is the absolutely sensational Rothhaar, who starts out a more educated, successful version of Ralph Kramden and ends up first cousin to Willy Loman. Even if The Indians Are Coming To Dinner weren’t the intelligent, amusing, crowd-pleaser it is, it would be worth seeing simply to watch Rothhaar originate a role that every patriarchal character actor across the country will be dying to play.
Scenic designer Tom Buderwitz manages miraculously to squeeze the two-story Blackburn home (living room, dining room, study, and three upstairs bedrooms) onto the relatively small PRT stage. Leigh Allen lights Buderwitz’s detailed work with her accustomed finesse. Audrey Eisner’s costumes are an all-around splendid bunch, from Harold’s Maharajah garb to Lynn’s shoulder-padded ‘80s wear to Alexandra’s black-sequined opera recital gown. Keith Stevenson’s imaginatively varied sound design features Peter Erskine’s lively original compositions, bits of Rigoletto, and assorted effects.
The Indians Are Coming To Dinner is produced by Sara Newman-Martins and Greg Paul. Vitor Martins and John Dittrick are associate producers and Marilyn Fox executive producers. Angela Fong is stage manager.
A string of positive reviews and the support of loyal season ticket holders are likely to guarantee The Indians Are Coming To Dinner a lengthy, successful Westside run. With a few tweaks, Rowland’s highly original look at one American family’s life in the ‘80s ought to have a long regional theater life, though future productions will have a hard time topping the one now onstage at Pacific Resident Theatre.
Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd, Venice, Through March 25. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 3:00. Reservations: 310 822-8392.
www.PacificResidentTheatre.com
There is a feminist saying that “the personal is political,” and playwright Jennifer Rowland does a skillful job interweaving private lives with public service in The Indians Are Coming To Dinner.
Rowland’s tragicomedy is set during the Reagan era, wherein stage and big and little screen veteran Michael Rothhaar plays Harold Blackburn, an archetypal WASPy upper class Republican. Harold laments having been pushed as a young man by his domineering late father (whose portrait dominates Tom Buderwitz’s set and which lighting designer Leigh Allen highlights throughout the action) to abandon an alluring State Department career to go into the family business. After years of running this reasonably prosperous if dull company, Harold receives intimations that the reelected Ronald Reagan is considering tapping Harold to become Our Man in India. Following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, it’s believed that the Reagan regime requires an extremely talented diplomat to represent Washington at New Delhi.
Harold gets it into his head that he’s just the man for the job, and his youthful dreams of diplomacy and a life abroad in the Foreign Service return and reanimate him. So being a Reaganite, Harold sets out to secure his overseas sinecure by, naturally, politicking, and schemes to make a good impression on his old friend Anil (Kevin Vavasseur), who is visiting the States with his family. Harold believes this distant relation of the Gandhis is extremely influential in India, and a kingmaker vis-à-vis vetting Harold for the post he’s now yearning for.
He coerces dutiful Nora-like wife Lynn (Sara Newman-Martins) and faithful servant Woo (the droll Peter Chen) into concocting cuisine with an Indian flare in order to literally curry favor. Hippy dippy son Christopher (Justin Preston), a high (and I mean high) school student who has been, shall we say, Bogarting that joint, my friends, is imposed upon to attend the repast.
So is daughter Alexandra (the gifted Thea Rubley), who has flown home to San Francisco from her college to pursue her dream of becoming an opera singer by trying out at a hard to get into audition, which could lead to going to Italy and the launching of her singing career. Operatic music is a recurring theme in Indians; Harold is a big fan of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, the first opera Harold shared with Alexandra when she was a little
girl.
Rowland has written a clever, resonant, sly script. The stuff that dreams are made of!
Julia Fletcher ably directs this world premiere production that deserves life beyond the excellent PRT production. Burderwitz’s split-level set is imaginative as it divides the spatial and emotional spaces of the play up.
Rubley is a real standout; not only is the recent USC grad a fine actress with promise, but she has the lovely singing voice her character requires… As Harold, Rothhaar convincingly portrays a man who is a needy, bundle of contradictions, who with youthful dreams thwarted grasps once more for that elusive brass ring as old age approaches. Rothhaar’s Harold has an air not unlike that other salesman, Arthur Miller’s immortal, yet all too human, Willy Loman. Alas, as Harold seeks to have attention paid to him, Harold Blackburn is the low man on these Indians totem pole.
But he should not despair: If New Delhi eludes him, there will always be a role for Harold as one of Reagan’s mass murderers in his Central American Contra war. Beside, as we see in this comedy drama about foiled fantasies of what one could have been had he/she remained true unto his/her own self, there are more ways to kill sopranos than with bullets.
The Pacific Resident Theatre is proudly presenting the world premiere of a play, The Indians Are Coming to Dinner by Jennifer W. Rowland, the third show of their 25th season. The time is November, 1984, the place, the Blackburn home in San Francisco. Ronald Reagan has just won a landslide election; Indira Ghandi has just been assassinated by her bodyguards, and this comedy is about family relationships and politics. Rowland focuses on East-West relationships, as well, in this well-written play performed by a superb cast under the direction of Julia Fletcher
Harold Blackburn, the patriarch of the family (Michael Rothhar) opens the play dressed as a Maharajah revealing the reason for his attire. Harold is a successful businessman, but dreams of attaining something more to further his ego. At this time, he is hoping to be appointed as the next Ambassador to India. This sets the plot for why The Indians Are Coming to Dinner.
Tonight Henry and his wife Lynn (the perky Sara Newman) are expecting guests for dinner in the form of government official Anil Desai (Kevin Vavasseur) and his son Deepok (Rikin Vasani). Frivolous Lynn is desperately trying to plan an authentic Indian dinner with the help of Woo (delightful Peter Chen), the family’s longtime cook.
Meanwhile, 18-year-old daughter Alexandra (charming Thea Rubley) has arrived home from college. She has a dream of her own to become an opera star and is scheduled to compete that same night in a competition that could earn her a position with an Italian Opera Company. However, Harold, expecting, and counting on, the entire family to be present when the Indians come for dinner, is under the impression that Alexandra has come for just that. Unfortunately Harold and the flippant Lynn are oblivious to their daughter’s wish to be come an opera singer, and when Harold discovers that she does not intend to be at the dinner, he becomes incensed and insists that she be there. Alexandra looks to her younger brother Christopher (Justin Preston) for solace as if he hasn’t his own problems with Mother and Father who seem to be unmindful of both of their children as they go about their own daily lives. Hilarious scenes occur when the Indians finally arrive for their dinner with the Blackburns. Rubley has a chance to perform during the play displaying a beautiful operatic voice.
Tom Buderwitz has created a well-appointed two-level set representing the home of the Blackburns in the form of a downstairs family room, a dining room, a kitchen (not seen off of the dining room), and three bedrooms upstairs.
The Indians Are Coming to Dinner continues at the Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd. in Venice, playing Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 PM, Sundays at 3 PM, through March 25. For tickets, call (310) 822-8392 or go online at www.PacificResidentTheatre.com. Recommended.
By Joan Alperin Schwartz
Dan Cole, Wendy Johnson, Kevin Quinn and Terrance Elton star in Pacific Resident Theatre’s production of “Concealing Judy Holliday” by Wendy Johnson and directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos.
In a small West Virginia town, Mitchell (Neil McGowan) has just lost his job at the local spork factory, not to mention his car, his girlfriend and his apartment. He finds a newspaper ad for an affordable, extended-stay hotel room with a beer-bellied hillbilly with a heart of gold named JD (Keith Stevenson, who also wrote the play) … The ensemble of hotel neighbors — which includes gangster Tommy (Jason Huber), his hysterical girlfriend, Marlene (Kendrah McKay), and their decidedly un-PC landlord, Flip (Michael Prichard) — make the most of the comedy. Stevenson’s writing and fantastically funny performance exudes sympathy for these characters, who are hilarious Southern stereotypes as well as everyday philosophers and artists in their own way. Guillermo Cienfuegos’ sitcomlike direction propels the hourlong one-act, and Norman Scott’s hotel room set is commendable for its kitschy, lived-in detail. Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through May 20. (310) 822-8392,
The late actress Judy Holliday (nee Tuvim) died of breast cancer in 1965, just short of her 44th birthday. She was a Broadway star who was given a surprise Oscar gift in 1951 for her starring role (opposite William Holden) in “Born Yesterday,” as Billy Dawn, the template for the “dumb blonde.” Her death was prolonged and saddening to those of us who loved her work.
Wendy Johnson
it (with one exception, noted below). She is unafraid of the horrifying, the absurd. and the deadly sober, and she can play all these as well as she has written them. In playing the title role, she never leaves the stage; one is grateful for her presence and afraid she will go. Her Judy Holliday impression is spot-on, but she finds a beguiling and tragic humanity in this deep character, and the series of well-chosen biographical details she has written plays to her strengths as an actor and a dramatist: an awkward first date: a humiliating and hilarious Red-baiting Senate hearing; a series of hideous scenes with her neurotic mother, a breathtaking and desperately sad morphine nightmare. These moments play very nicely, but the structure always draws us back to the actress’s bedside deathwatch, and around the onehour mark the writing makes an unfortunate veer into superficial sentimentality (“1 was never enough!”). But this side trip only lasts a few minutes, and the show is back on its feet, literally, almost before the lag begins to tell on one’s patience.
Mr Cienfuegos works exactly along the lines of the writing, creating an eerie expressionistic mindscape that invests the play with even more of the same brand of magic. He moves the action in delicious curves, utilizing Elizabeth McKenzie’s choreography so deftly that it flows easily from the infectious kinetic energy onstage. His stage pictures encourage the eye to rove while maintaining focus on the important action, and he makes of this narrow, deep playing space (and Norman Scott’s brilliant, flexible, but essentially one-room set) a whole world. with freezing poles, sweaty tropics, and uneasy but very funny temperate zones. Mr Scott’s lighting per fectly serves this vision, and Sarah Zinsser’s quirky costumes add tonality to a monochromatic visual universe.
The ensemble players, many of whom play multiple parts, deserve more than passing mention. Every one of these players is a seasoned veteran whose energy and passion carry a quick, dense story to its inevitable and compelling end. Marilyn Fox displays a stunning breadth of ability, delighting with her kooky yet harrowing take on Holliday’s mother Helen before assuming the role of Holliday’s idol, actress I.aurette Taylor, and suddenly freezing the marrow of the house. Similarly, the difference between Kevin Quinn’s easily sympathetic Gerry and his vicious doofus Senator Arens is a very big difference indeed. ‘l’errance Elton’s impressive array of roles includes Bob Hope and Holliday’s not-quite-smart-enough husband David, while Dan Cole plays, among others, Groucho Marx and an old grandmother in a babushka: all credibly. Sarah Zinsser’s Tallulah Bankhead (functioning as a kind of narcissistic Greek chorus, or warped commentator) literally stops the show with a surprise scene-steal, equal parts risk-taking writing and all-theway acting. Melody Doyle, as Holliday’s nurse and as her policewoman lover Yetta, is natural and believable.
At least fourteen-year-old Christopher (Justin Preston) doesn’t have other plans for the evening, though the frisky teen would probably rather spend it smoking pot in his upstairs bedroom than entertaining Indians.
man is delightfully droll as madcap matriarch Lynn, beneath whose seemingly bird-sized brain lies considerable heart and emotional smarts. Preston, whose work as a 16-year-old English schoolboy in PRT’s The Browning Version won him an Outstanding Featured Actor Scenie, demonstrates versatility and spunk in a role which gives him his very own “Biff moment” opposite stage vet Rothhaar, with whom the talented young performer more than holds his own. Recent USC grad Rubley’s luminous performance as Alexandra reveals a talent to be reckoned with (and a soprano that comes out of left field and dazzles). Vavasseur and Rikin Vasani do subtly nuanced work as Anil and his son Deepok, while Chen gives Woo dignity despite the indignity of having to play a racial/linguistic stereotype for laughs.