They're Acting!
Four comedies delve into thespian hells
By Don Shirley
Among L.A.’s zillion actors and wannabe actors, some can always be found on stage playing characters who are actors.
Tackling these roles might sound therapeutic, as well as narcissistic. Yet such parts often make acting look like the worst possible career choice. Usually, the real-life actors who take on such roles in small theaters are paid virtually nothing, so it’s no great stretch to portray the downside of their chosen profession. It begins to resemble an exercise in masochism.
Still, there’s a consoling irony as well – many of the actors do a great job as they depict their own woes.
Portraits of an actor’s lot don’t get much more hopeless than in Mitch Watson’s satire Klüb, at the Actors’ Gang. But it’s pitched at such an exaggerated level that it might be all too easy for actors in the audience to dismiss it. When the artificially buxom Betty Shaeffer (Evie Peck) whips out a power drill in order to attempt a self-service nose job, any actual Hollywood starlets among the spectators might well tell themselves that at least they’re not that desperate.
Betty is one of nine actors trapped in the titular netherworld, where they face an interminable round of auditions in front of a tyrannical and mostly unseen director. They’re competing not for the chance to be in a show but for the chance to escape. Director Michael Schlitt (who also plays the director in the play) and his designers use every corner of the Ivy Substation to create a much more expansive vision of actor’s hell than was possible in the cramped quarters of the Gang’s original production in 1992. And the cast maintains an irrepressible energy, despite the fact that the play is inherently repetitive.
If Klüb is an actor’s hell, then surely an actor’s heaven is a regular role on a long-running TV series, right? Familiar TV stars – Hal Linden (Barney Miller) and Susan Sullivan (Falcon Crest, Dharma and Greg) – play actors in two comedies currently on L.A. stages. The assumption that such actors have made more than enough money eliminates most of the S&M subtext,
described above.
But it doesn’t mean that they’re slumming. In David Landsberg’s An Act of Love, at the Falcon, Sullivan plays a mostly amateur, seldom-paid actress whose grown children resent a lifetime of neglect. She approaches them with acerbic, sitcom-style quips – until her son (Timothy Hornor) pays her $1,000 to “act” as a loving mother for one brief encounter. Sullivan’s transformation into a sympathetic soul is so masterful that one can see how an actor’s technique can offer practical applications in life outside stage and screen (for Exhibits B and C, consider the political careers of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Linden’s performance as the grumpier of the two old comics in Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys at the Odyssey is awfully convincing, too. But in this case the unexpected results of an obsessive life in showbiz are grim – a lesson already absorbed by his estranged ex-partner (Allan Miller). When we finally see portions of the “doctor sketch” that the two men have honed over a lifetime, the spectacle is depressing enough to qualify as one of the audition pieces in Klüb – which in fact does feature a pair of male vaudevillian comics among the would-be escapees.
If struggling actors truly enjoy wallowing in their sad professional prospects, they might also examine Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential. In a futurist setting, TV soap operas are cast with “actoids” – robots – instead of flesh-and-blood actors. Naturally, flesh-and-blood actors portray the “actoids” in the Group Rep production for what is surely less than the minimum wage.
Charlie Chaplin said it well in a quote reprinted in the Klüb program: “I hate the theater. I also hate the sight of blood, but it’s in my veins.”
Klüb, Actors’ Gang @ Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. (310) 838-4264.
An Act of Love, Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Dr., Burbank. (818) 955-8101.
The Sunshine Boys, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 477-2055.
Comic Potential, Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 700-4878.
For additional comments on these and other productions, see Stage listings.
Published: 04/23/2008
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