Mayhem

Evidence Theatre March 20-April 19th
 By: Kelly Stuart Directed by: Bart DeLorenzo

MAYHEM is a domestic political comedy with many twists and turns. It’s August 2000. The Taliban still dominates Afghanistan. Civil War still rages in Sudan. And the Los Angeles Democratic National Convention is meeting amid protests and riots. But just down the street, in a Chinatown apartment, a woman has her own problems to deal with. How do you engage in political activity when your husband won’t watch the baby? Stuart’s timely comedy provides a sharp portrait of the pre-9/11 American psyche, captured on the threshold of its transformation, slouching toward consciousness.

Cast
Jason Adams, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, Cheryl White
Crew
Designers: Ann Closs-Farley, Martin McClendon, Rand Ryan, John Zalewski

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A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review
Mayhem
By Laura Hitchcock

When he scheduled Mayhem at The Evidence Room, director Bart DeLorenzo had no idea what a synchronicitous occasion it would be. The audience reeled away from television's 24/7 coverage of the invasion of Iraq into Kelly Stuart's fascinating, blistering, luridly funny coverage of international and domestic conflicts.

The time is August, 2000, one month before 9/11. There's genocide in Africa. The Taliban reigns in Afghanistan and oppresses its women. Riots clog the streets around the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. And down the hill in Chinatown a young couple with a baby form their own battlefield.

Susan (Megan Mullally) knows nothing about politics and cares less. It's about getting out of the house when she lets herself be bullied into attending a convention on Art and Genocide by shrill insistent Claire (Cheryl White), who fills the caves and pitfalls in her life with political activism. Susan's husband David (Nick Offerman), a recovering alcoholic, despises Claire and insults Susan. "When you get sad, you get cruel," she retorts. She's ripe for the attentions of fierce foreign correspondent Wesley (Jason Adams), who is fascinated by her tale of witnessing a shooting in her neighborhood.

As he drives her home, the play cuts back and forth between Wesley and Susan in the car to a disappointed Claire in a bar, bitterly bolstering up her self-worth with Martinis. Wesley gives Susan a camera that belonged to his late friend, photographer Kevin Carter, who committed suicide shortly after winning a Pulitzer for his devastating battlefield pictures. Over dinner David accuses Wesley of trying to make love to Susan. Though Wesley insists he gave her the camera because of the clarity of her vision, David's guess is pretty much on target. Susan and Wesley are lovers and he wants her to come with him to Afghanistan but Claire conceals this. Whether she does it out of desire for Wesley, principles or wanting to keep Susan around is irrelevant. It's a Claire thing.

Stuart's play is rich in material, so much so that it comes painfully close to tales simply aching to be told. The Kevin Carter story, which is true, could be a sub-plot in itself but doesn't seem to have much relevance to the characters until the final scene when David breaks down and admits he's been doing drugs for six months and Susan hasn't noticed. Susan's suspicions about David's whereabouts the night of the shooting point in yet another direction.

Director Bart DeLorenzo manages to keep all these threads taut, raising the short scenes to edge-of-the-seat suspense, and giving the characters every chance to display Stuart's nuances and humor. One of the play's funniest scenes shows the women putting on burkhas and trying to sip coffee beneath them.

Mullally is the play's true center as Susan, in a crystalline performance of great simplicity and honesty. She's balanced by White's Claire, a bothersome character, an aspiring heart, duplicitous, and maddening as a mosquito's whine. She does comic relief with impeccable delicacy. Offerman's David is early Ernest Borgnine with more smarts and sophistication. Stuart gives him a love scene with Susan in which he has to meow like a pussycat and Offerman runs with it, giving a whole new dimension to David and where this love began. Adams' Wesley is reckless and bitter, a man who sleeps with danger.

Martin McClendon's tiny clever set has a real sense of the shabby poverty of Susan's world. Last but far from least are Adam Kurtzman's unique amazing puppets. Only one of many elements in "Mayhem" of which you want to see more -- lots more.

 

COPYRIGHT 2002-2003 "EVIDENCE ROOM"

continued...........As a defining moment, the 2000 Democratic Convention was pretty low-definition — an authoritarian control freak's dream in which the anger of young protesters fizzled out against the riot shields of the LAPD. In Mayhem the event appropriately floats in the background — like cobwebs in the Echo Park home of the play's housewife protagonist. Susan (Megan Mullally) lives with her recovered-junkie husband, David (Nick Offerman), as both a baby and the convention occasionally rage offstage. A more invasive presence is Susan's pal Claire (Cheryl White), a cause-du-jour kibitzer who is always dropping in to remind Susan of her unrealized potential and waning social consciousness.

The play begins with Claire trying to hustle Susan away from her housework and off to a merry little conference on "art and genocide." The plan also seems, somewhat covertly, a way to give Susan a break from David, whose obsessive AA attendance is driving her crazy. The morose husband doesn't want Susan to go to the conference, paranoiacally predicting that it will be followed by drinks and a rapturous introduction to some Casanova journalist. She goes anyway, and David's prophecy comes true — Susan meets and reluctantly falls for a famous war scribe named Wesley (Jason Adams), who's stopping in L.A. en route to cover his next train wreck, Afghanistan.

"We who do this," says Wesley of his profession, "have the smell of death in our nostrils." We who hear this, of course, get a whiff of something more bovine, though Susan is sufficiently entranced to risk her marriage for this smooth talker. Before long, Wesley has bestowed a camera and the duty of recording history on Susan, whose only artistic endeavor has been publishing a kids' pop-up book.

For all its meticulous attention to the details of middle-aged, post-bohemian life east of Alvarado, not a lot happens in Mayhem. There's some shtick involving Claire's hopeless infatuation for Wesley and a bit of mystery about David's trips to MacArthur Park, but little is really articulated here — either about the moral decisions someone in Susan's place must make or about the political smog generated by the convention unfolding at Staples Center. Even Susan's recurring account of a local gang murder fails to cohere or resonate, and we're left feeling that the principal charm of Stuart's play is a heroine (of sorts) who ineptly tells lies for no cause greater than her own pleas

Unfortunately, that kind of charm dissipates pretty fast, and by play's end we realize the story has a hollow center. Stuart's script might have worked had it remained as vague about the day-to-day existence of its characters as it is on plot development, but because all the small details of Mayhem's lives are explained, the story, with its overlay of one-liners, plays out like an episode of Friends. The fact that the plights of Afghan women and East Timorese separatists are vented by a woman who wears pink-satin pantsuits and who, as Claire says, plans to write a book about "freeing ourselves from clutter," only relegates these subjects to the status of punch lines.

It's not all slapstick, however. There is a silent moment of Chaplinesque delight, when Susan and Claire, in preparation for a women's march against the convention, bring home a pair of black burkas and carefully put them on, encountering both the garments' frailty and their impracticality. The scene is a striptease in reverse, and director Bart DeLorenzo allows it to play out with comic solemnness. His lead actress, Mullally, is similarly restrained, a self-beaten character in glasses and dowdy clothes who seems able to spend every day of her unremarkable life folding laundry.

Offerman, as David, though, brings the play to its feet whenever he opens his sarcastic mouth; his failed, aging rocker still speaks with punk candor, but now he lives in a time of corrosive dishonesty. Adams further lends credible support, as the smarmy reporter who breaks hearts and marriages along his career path. Yet White isn't merely over the top, she's fallen overboard from the deck of an entirely different play. Because of this, she doesn't really act as a foil for Susan or even as a lightning rod for the audience's presumed disdain of all things P.C.

White's volcanic performance is DeLorenzo's only miscalculation, for if she were toned down just a bit, we might be able to recognize in her misplaced activism something of ourselves, and the comedy would bite instead of swallowing us whole. DeLorenzo, as usual, is ably assisted by his Evidence Room technical staff. Martin McClendon's homey set mostly depicts a kitchen protected by window bars and accented by such familiar items as a Dustbuster, coffeemaker and Quaker Oats box, while Rand Ryan's dreary lighting plot dimly illuminates the kind of worn-out marriage that only lies can save.

MAYHEM | By KELLY STUART | At EVIDENCE ROOM,
2220 Beverly Blvd. | Through April 19