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review Currently at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills is the 9th Annual One-Act Festival, "Fortyworks", running Tuesdays through Sundays in two alternating, separate programs. I caught one of the programs, five short plays collectively called "Entertainers", last Friday night. Two strong incentives flogged me onward through the full two-hour crawl up the 405 from South Laguna. One, these are all original one-acts by local writers. Two, these local writers are products of Theatre 40's writing workshop. Being a workshop product myself, I was curious to see what others are doing. I got a mixed bag with the five offerings. In ascending order, Hindi Brooks' "Supposing Moses" is a flat, dopey piece about two actors waiting to audition for the role of Moses. One dupes the other with amazing speed and ease into believing he is the real Moses come back to advise this incredibly gullible chump on how to get the part. It's a dull, pedestrian build to a lame punch line. "Howard Hughes In Hell" plays much like the famous footage of the Spruce Goose's one flight: interminable taxi, brief moment of flight, and then...plunk! gravity reclaims it. Unfortunately, Grant Gottschall's text achieves its brief flight right at the top. The opening image of the wildly disheveled, diaper-clad Hughes blubbering along word-for-word with the end of "Ice Station Zebra" in stark blue cathode-tube glare is a striking beginning. But despite David St. James' sharp, spirited performance as Hughes, gravity reclaims this play quickly and it plows on unremarkably to its finish. "Proof Sheets" has good ideas but never quite gels. Stacey Stone's play brings us an L.A. portrait photographer and several of his clients, all minor players on the outer edges of the acting spotlight, and all convinced that a new set of head shots is the missing link that will make their dreams come true. It's a fresh, intriguing idea, but Stone has given only one of her characters the sense of urgency they all need. Shirley is an older actress forced at last to update her photo resume because no one recognizes her any longer from her old portfolio. Shirley's vignette, played with poignant restraint by Lorraine Michaels, had the depth I wished had been present throughout. But overall, the play seems awkward and ill at ease with itself, a symptom compounded by the odd choice of having the photographer played by Jeffrey Winner employ a different dialect with each client. Winner is very adept at doing so (the acting ensemble throughout is uniformly superb) but I was left to wonder...why? "Praying With Silverman" benefits greatly from Thom Koutsoukos' subtly shaded turn as Jacob, a dying old man in a convalescent home who embraces life more fully than his uptight, fearful son who comes to visit him. Playwright Harvey Landa manages an admirable mix of Jacob's colorful reminisces (his recounting of immigrant Hungarian Jews cast as Native American extras in a silent Tom Mix oater is both hilarious and a telling piece of Americana) and a thoughtful reflection of living life in the lengthening shadow of imminent death. The highlight of the evening was Frank Farmer's "...Not To Be..." Taut, sinister and sharply-honed from the moment the lights come up on it, Farmer's play throws an unsuspecting auditioning actor (Jonathan Fuller) to the producer-director wolves (David Hunt Stafford and Jennifer Williams, respectively) of a mysterious, unnamed play. Fuller is alternately humiliated, encouraged, berated and cajoled as he attempts to complete even one sentence of his audition piece. Director Bernard Selling draws disconcertingly conspiratorial performances from Stafford and Williams. Stafford is especially intense and unnerving, scampering spider-like across the stage at one point to hover inches from the increasingly agitated and baffled Fuller, urging him to "smile more" during the actor's constantly aborted attempt to recite Hamlet's most famous soliloquy. Farmer has crafted what must be the ultimate actor's nightmare. His is a striking play, maintaining a constant balance between the humorous and the unsettling. |