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review Just in case there is any lingering doubt amongst any of you out there that I am a guy who can be trusted, I have chosen as the first play to be reviewed on this "OC-centric" site a play currently running in...L.A. county. I have reasons. The play is Garrett H. Omata's "Mystery Play" at the new Actors' Playhouse in Long Beach. I went to this play as a "civilian", actually. A fellow playwright whose talent I greatly admire and whose taste I inherently trust recommended Omata's play to me last year and AP's is the first production I've seen come along since being tipped off. Simply put, if you are within striking distance of Long Beach, see this play. This solid, detailed and finely-tuned production by the Asian ensemble Deep Yellow more than does justice to Omata's probing text, maintaining a consistent buoyancy and humor while exploring some of the deepest issues that can be explored by human beings buried in this life as we know it. There was only one thing wrong with this picture: I saw the play on a Friday night. The weather was clear and dry. The temperature was well above freezing. And there was a total of eight (I counted us. Twice. Included myself) people in the audience. 8. Four actors on stage. Eight people in the audience. Not a good ratio, folks. This production, these actors, this new theatre, deserves better. See this play. "Mystery Play" is a play of questions. Questions that pose more questions which in turn prompt more. Most central is, what happens to us when an event occurs that shakes the very foundation of what we believe in? Of what our entire existence is based upon? Playwright Omata frames this question and many others with some well-trod components of the American domestic drama: the dysfunctional family (and whose family isn't) reuniting after ten years at the father's funeral. Old wounds are pried open in the classic Miller tradition. But "Mystery Play" uses this familiar foundation, complete with returning prodigal child -- in this case, daughter -- to launch an exploration aimed at the very core of our spiritual existence. What could have become easily mired in common domestic bickering soars instead into an examination of the basis of faith, this essential template we use to navigate this mortal coil (or is it toil?). The family patriarch, a respected man of the cloth killed in rather apocalyptic fashion by an exploding gas main, remains a mystery to his widow, Ruth (Dian Kobayashi) and three children. Following the funeral which opens the play, daughter Gerry (Jeanne Sakata alternating with Kim Montelibano) begins to unravel the mystery of her father's final months amidst the alternating collusion and derision of her brothers Jonathan (Shaun Shimoda) and Malcolm (Marvin Bang alternating with Victor Ho). Ruth, who has found an angry and uneasy solace in her own faith, would rather the past stay buried with her husband. But the facts Gerry begins unearthing seem increasingly at odds with Ruth's blithe explanations and recollections. "Facts are not the same as truths!" Ruth informs Gerry during one heated exchange. Indeed, truths are absolutes legitimized by faith and clung to in the cold pitching sea of our mortal toil (or is it coil?). Facts are troublesome little gremlins best painted over or locked away in desk drawers. It is the contents of one such drawer of the father's life that sends us into the ever-deepening mystery of the play. Omata distributes clues expertly in classic whodunit fashion, each new clue building upon the last, none too obvious, none insignificant as we learn the cause and the consequences of the family patriarch's disturbingly exhilarating life-changing epiphany. Omata demonstrates shimmers of brilliance in the shifting dynamics of his four characters. Jonathan, the eldest son, is outwardly accepting of his father's mantle, yet longs desperately to be "blessed to suffer" as his father had been. His pious torment balances expertly with youngest son Malcolm, sullen and slouching and missing nothing as he expouses his bleak belief that "nothing in the universe exists but us and we're disgusting." Each member of this fine cast dances with nary a misstep under Darrell Kunitomi's compact and fluid direction to Omata's seamless choreography of ever-changing familial alliances and betrayals. "Mystery Play" is a play of questions, and all the richer for not imposing answers. "God is the writer of all mysteries," Gerry observes early in the play. Playwright Omata, a suicide last year at 29, may have solved his own mystery. For the rest of us, it goes on, ever-deepening as we gather clues from the dark chaos about us and fashion our own little beacons of faith, beacons that flicker a bit brighter from what "Mystery Play" has given us. See this play. |