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review Were you in New York during the early 1970s? If you were, and if you loved theatre, you probably had the experience of venturing up into a loft or gallery space and seeing some questionable, self-indulgent mess masquerading as a play, including some impolite attempt to involve the audience. After 20 bullshit minutes, you and your date would shake your heads and sneak out in search of a bar or a Woody Allen movie. For what it’s worth, you can now have this same experience in contemporary Pasadena. It’s brought to you by the Pasadena Underground, a new and purportedly exciting theatre company operating in Old Town. If you’re compelled to invest $8 in their future, I hope you have a better time than the one I had at "The Hellfire Café". The Pasadena Underground is the product of two local auteurs who readily introduce themselves: one Mark Adam Kaplan, who holds an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the American Film Institute, and Aimee Machado, the producer of 89.3 KPCC-FM’s Talk of the City. It’s a case of good credentials, bad execution. "The Hellfire Café" is advertised as "an evening of three short plays," and first up is a stage adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1899 feminist horror story, "The Yellow Wallpaper". It’s a famous story; if you haven’t read it, suffice it to say it’s about postpartum depression, and its impact on a young mother. "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been adapted many times for theatre; this is the work of two recent CSULB graduates, actress Stephanie Marie Valsamides and director Michele Zovak. Valsamides gets into the narrator’s mania very effectively; she’s somewhat handcuffed by the low-budget nature of this upstairs gallery space, and by Zovak’s lack of care in framing the story’s chilling last sentence. After a brief intermission, we watch Kaplan’s own play "Marriage in Venice", which concerns a marriage in Renaissance Venice. A silly and labored cuckold’s comedy, it falls far short of its obvious influences -– Moliere and Goldoni. The play opens with three consecutive monologues, in which the three characters successively beg the audience for a word to describe their genitals. Sunday night’s words were "flower," "inch," and "fettucini." The play runs at least 20 minutes. An hour had passed. Apparently, it was time for a second play of Kaplan’s … "The Hellfire Café". And then something totally unexpected occurred -– or at least no one in the audience expected it. Machado, who had been casually emceeing before each play, walked onstage. "Are you having a good time?" she asked the two dozen-odd people present. Kaplan simultaneously lowered a homemade sign emblazoned with paper flames reading, "The Hellfire Café". Machado then said: "Turn around, and look at the people around you. The people close to you. Are there secrets among you?" There were no actors before us. No set pieces onstage. What was going on? Machado continued. "Welcome to ‘The Hellfire Café’. This is about you. It’s your time to say what’s on your mind. To tell us about yourself. So we invite you to come up and talk about what you want to talk about. C’mon. Who wants to go first?" After about ten seconds of stunned silence, a youth came up to the stage and told the audience he was from Louisiana. He said his name was Shane, and he didn’t like Los Angeles. He'd been here for eight months, and he didn’t know what to do. Well, I knew what the hell to do: I got up and left. I took the big hike in absolute disgust. I didn’t pay my $8 to go to an A.A. meeting, or a de facto therapy session. According to the printed program, we were supposed to be watching a play with eight actors. Since plausible bios of the eight actors were printed in the program, and since Shane’s unfocused, mumbling "sharing" definitely indicated a lack of comfort and complete surprise, I could only conclude that Kaplan’s play had been abandoned for whatever reason and supplanted with an unbilled talk show. (I hung around at the back of the room for a minute more to make sure that this was no cleverly disguised "happening," but when Shane’s companion succeeded him onstage in a similarly lackluster fashion, my fears were realized.) The fucking nerve. We pay $8 to see theatre, and they ask us to supply half the entertainment? Forget it. How about performing three plays instead? "The Hellfire Café",
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