by Geoff Hoff~

bash: latterday plays, now being presented by Coeurage Theatre Company at the Actors Circle Theatre, is a frustrating play. Actually, it is three related plays, all a bit frustrating in their own way, each dealing with Mormons and Mormonism (although the third one only peripherally so), and each echoing tragic Greek myths (although the second one only peripherally so.) The three plays are also all monologues (the middle one actually two interweaving monologues describing the same evening from two different perspectives), and each puts on display just how horrible people can be, all the while being calm and straightforward (except the final play, in which the horror is truly heartfelt.)

That frustration I experience with them stems in part from the calmness that every day evil is presented with. This is part of the point of the piece, in fact probably the entire motivation for it having been written, and it leaves a disquieting sense that, because we are all both guilty of our own sins and victims of the sins of others, it is quite normal and even practical to just move forward despite them.  Even in the final piece, where the horror is so visceral, the sense that it is all justifiable in some twisted way and presented so rationally, frustrates my own instinct to recoil from the evil, no matter how every day it is.

Each play has a moment of revelation where the exact nature of the horror is given, but in each one, this revelation doesn’t happen until very late, so it is very difficult to review them in any meaningful way without diminishing the audience’s appreciation of them. I will, however, attempt to do so.

The theme of the plays seems to be that people are generally bad, even the seemingly good ones, and that Mormon people are even more so. Indeed, when latterday plays was first produced, the writer, Neil LaBute, was excommunicated from the Mormon Church. There are casual (and not so casual) references to pedophilia, infanticide, homophobia, latent homosexuality, emotional revenge, intolerance and unconscionable dedication to a status quo. For the most part, except in the third piece, these things are almost blithely touched upon, blithely revealed.

In the first play, Iphigenia in Orem, a businessman on a sales trip, staying in a hotel in Las Vegas, invites another man, properly inebriated, up to his room for conversation. The conversation ends up being an examination of a “night your whole life changes forever”, then a very calculated confession of a very calculated crime. He chose the listener because of his level of inebriation, figuring he could unburden himself and the man would never remember a word of it.

This is the weakest of the three plays, partly because of the script itself (it doesn’t make much sense that a man, no matter how drunk, would go up to a stranger’s hotel room and sit quietly to listen to this particular story unless there was a lot more reward in store than free bourbon), and partly because of the performance of Robert Hardin, who plays the businessman. Mr. Hardin is appropriately clean-cut, the very image of a young Mormon man, but that is part of the problem. He seems entirely too young to have experienced what he has experienced and done what this man has done as long ago as he seems to have done it. These events from so long ago do not sit in his bones, do not permeate his air as they should.

References to things that happened in the eighties, even the late seventies, such as the movie Kramer vs. Kramer, are doubly jarring. There is no indication that this is a “period” piece, but for this man to have experienced those thing, he would have to be much older than he is. This is not Mr. Hardin’s fault, of course, it is an error in casting. However, he plays the businessman with an incongruously sardonic and sly demeanor that doesn’t change much in the course of his tale. I never once really believed that, 1) he was actually talking to anyone, 2) he was a married man who had spent much of his life on the road for his job, or 3) that he truly suffered any real pangs of guilt, or even much dismay, at what he had done. The only real thing I believed was the sense of irony at the aftermath of a practical joke once played on him by a co-worker.

The middle play is A Gaggle of Saints. This one seems to encapsulate the title of the evening, bash, more than the other two for many reasons. The most obvious is that it describe a bash put on for young Mormon adults in New York City, an evening that several college students from Boston attend. Two of them, John and Sue, are engaged, have been for some time, but are quite innocent. Their virginity makes them seem even younger then they are.

The two young people each tell their own version of the evening, their recollections intertwining, but they don’t ever interact with each other. Through most of the tale, the recollections of both of them are in sync, until the moment when the women decided to go up to the room for a quick nap and the men go to stroll in central park.

John, played by Peter Weidman, is a man who has gone through his short life doing what was proper, what was expected of a young Mormon man, and doing it quite willingly, without any examination. He does not seem to have any inner conflict about his life or his future prospects until he observes, by chance, a middle aged gay couple in Central Park on the way to the bash. Sue is sweet, bubbly, energetic, a little empty and shallow, the perfect match for John, even though she has a strange fascination, a titillation even, at the sight of blood. She almost seems to equate it with masculinity, with masculine sexuality. Ultimately, the divergence in the two stories becomes superficial, and, although Sue never will know what transpired while she was napping up in the hotel room, the violence of it, the energy of it, will probably make her ultimate union with John all that more powerful and permanent.

Sara Lorraine Perry plays Sue and she is a delight. A regular in the Coeurage company, I have seen Ms. Perry before and she always surprises me. She has a wonder, a joy, to what she brings to the stage and infuses this fairly empty woman with a profound humanity. Behind the smiles, the giggles and the coquettish excitements, there is a living, breathing human being. We suspect intelligence unacknowledged, unexamined and unneeded for the life she is planning on living. There isn’t an ounce of cliche in the performance.  Mr. Weidman, another Coeurage regular, is also fine as John. He brings a simple reality to the retelling of a very unreal event. We are both repulsed and fascinated by his continued innocence.

Unlike in the other two plays, it is unclear who these two are talking to, why they are telling the story of this fateful night, but the events of it, the casual violence and casual aftermath of that violence, is chilling and powerful.

The third play, Medea Redux, is the most powerful for many reasons. A woman, played by Jessica Anna Blair, is seated at a table, talking to a detective that she can’t see, and into a tape recorder, as she relates the events that lead up to the crime she is there to discuss. Her tale starts a bit randomly, she has to approach the point of it slowly or she won’t be able to do it. She early reveals that, at the age of thirteen, she was seduced by one of her teachers, which is the beginning of her tragic ride to the current moment.

This piece deals with love and lust, innocence and what can happen when that is stripped from someone, pain, loyalty, resignation to the twists and turns of life, and ultimately revenge. Of the three plays of the evening, this is the one that comes together the best. It is the most clearly written, the motivations, although monstrous, are the most logical and the sense of a past and the inevitable consequences of that past the most real and visceral.

Although Ms. Blair again seems a bit too young for this role, she brings to it a passion, an anger, a defiance that is memorable. She is the epitome of a woman forced in her life to become “poor white trash.” She is the slightly haggard result of a very hard life. There is no shame in who she has become, or what she has done. There is a pride and a determination that almost, but not quite, excuses what has happened in her life. Ms. Blair performs this woman without judgement, without editorializing. She simply is this woman who has done these things and has had these things happen to her and is to be commended for a brave, simple and powerful performance.

bash: latterday plays was directed by Meredith Hinckley Schmidt. The set, uncredited in the program, is clean and simple. It is obviously consciously simple rather than simple because no care was put into it. The simplicity is, indeed, part of the point. The lighting, by Michelle Stann, was also simple, but it was also masterful.

The costumes, by Debbie Dufour, were quite good, although the party dress Ms. Perry was wearing doesn’t much match the one the characters describe. Sound design was by Joe Calacro. As usual with the Coeurage Theatre Company, the production is simple but top notch.

bash: latterday plays is performed Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 7 pm through May 15^th, 2011.

The Actors Circle Theatre is located at 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, 90046, between Fairfax and La Brea.

Tickets: Pay-What-You-Can

Reservations online at http://www.coeurage.org.