alivepoppinplay Okay, we’re not going in order here,  because Alive Theatre is running its three-session Long Beach Poppin’ Play Festival with Session 1 on Friday and Sessions 2 and 3 on Saturday—and since each session is about three hours, six to seven hours of theatre was about all I could do on opening weekend. Go here  for a review of Session 1 (plus a proper intro to the festival itself), watch this space next week for a review of Session 2, and keep reading for a review of Session 3.

 Bring on the Dancing Girls by Susan C. Hunter (Dir. Ricci Dedola)

A nurse drinks urine. A bearded dude in a bridal gown plays the recollected love of an addled man’s life. A TV broadcasts a band enthusiastically playing finger-snapping instrumentals.

This lightweight bit of absurdist fare is a take on Alzheimer’s or dementia in the aged, playing off the idea of the confusion inherent to that sort of loss. I don’t know if the audience was ever touched, but they did laugh a decent amount. I wish I could say I was with them. But all I could think about was Warning #16 in the Good Absurdist’s Handbook: Silly dancing/talking does not automatically equal funny.

But I’m not the arbiter of what’s funny. Are pairings of character names (in the program, anyway; they don’t get used in the play itself) such as “Woman Who Thinks She’s Fat” and “Hag Who Thinks She’s All That” funny? You get to decide.

And I suppose pith is where you find it. But as much as there might be something worth seeing in the basic idea here, I see only a glimpse at this stage.

 Rotations by Bryan Madigan (Dir. Ashley Allen)

I’m not saying it’s necessarily the case that if you’ve had some experience of conceits and artistic statements like the one driving Rotations you’ll be saying to yourself, “Been there, done that,” but this play did feel to me very much like an literary exercise with a thin layer of meaning (in this case, a light meditation on the essence and properties of shape).

But as such, it’s executed pretty well on the page (even if its cleverness quotient would have been higher had it ended just at the beginning of the second “rotation” when the dialog short-circuited itself into Tom Stoppardland). However, Rotations is worth seeing because of how well Paul Knox, Maribella Magana, and Craig Johnson perform under Allen’s direction—all four are sharp. Flub a line or a movement in this and it would show mightily, but on that count it’s, “Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.”

Like I said, on the page I’d've finished off things sooner; but for the path Madigan’s taken, his cast and director have nailed it. This is a finished work.

 Dracula, based on a story by Abhay Khosta (Dir. Robert Edward)

This shit is just funny. There’s not a shred of substance here—and you won’t care.

Scott Lennard, Joe Howells, and Jocelyn Jolley are a vampire-hunting firm, and we are flies on the wall as they lounge about in their office musing on more colorful ways to kill Dracula and what his big cock looks like. Things start out silly and get sillier in this overgrown comedy sketch that quite simply works. It probably doesn’t come off if these three can’t work it, but they really, really do. A little steam is lost toward the end, but this is good, clean fun (except it’s pretty dirty).

 Return to Lightning Mountain by Jasper Oliver (Dir. Turner Munch)

Despite the jumble of narrative that emanates from the stage, the idea at the center of this play is clear: an inexplicable force—call it muse, be it sacred or demonic—compels humans to absurd extremes of creation.

Oliver gives us all sorts of loose-hanging threads as examples, from the real-life Stonehenge and the Stonehenge-inspired Carhenge to pieces of would-be fireside tales concerning Martians in the Black Rock Desert in the year 3013 and such like. Meant to act as the unifying weft is the tale of Chief Lightning Mountain Thunder, inspired over the course of 37 years continually to work on some sort of grand monument(s) to his ancestors.

Whether that story and idea are worthy of a play is one question; but whatever its answer, Return to Lightning Mountain easily could be—should be—shorter by at least half

Unfortunately, there’s another problem, equal in extent: the play is haunted—or possessed, perhaps—by the imitative fallacy.

(Okay, ever heard of the imitative fallacy? If yes, skip the rest of this parenthetical. If not: The imitative fallacy (TIF) is when a problem in the writing begs pardon for its sins by seeming to use its subject as an excuse for its behavior. Example: A novel about Ivan’s boring, static life in the gulag is static and boring to read. “But it’s boring in the gulag,” the writer seems to say between the lines, “so what the fuck do you expect?” That’s TIF for ya.)

TIF is speaking in tongues here, saying: “We are inspired to grandiose and absurd, even random lengths in our creations—and hey, Return to Lightning Mountain is a creation in that tradition, so….”

But Fallacy is TIF’s family name. If a play is over-long, or gives you the shallowest of character or plot arc, or takes a simple idea and bludgeons you senseless with it, it doesn’t matter why.

+++++

The Long Beach Poppin’ Play Festival is—by design, I think—the sort of new-play fest that lives on the “workshop” side of the street. And it’s over here that the risk of failure is greatest, for both artist and audience. So if sometimes there are failures, we should hardly be surprised.

We still might wonder at the magnitude, though. But let’s just think some silly thoughts about Dracula instead, as we drift away from here.

 LONG BEACH POPPIN’ PLAY FESTIVAL ALIVE THEATRE • THE DOME ROOM @ THELAFAYETTE:528 E BROADWAY AVE •LONG BEACH 90802 • 552.818.7364 ALIVETHEATRE.ORG • FRI 8PM, SAT 6PM & 9PM  • $18; $15 FOR STUDENTS. GROUP AND MULTI-NIGHT PACKAGE DEALS AVAILABLE • THROUGH NOV 19