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Saviors and Suspects: Evening Blue
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Mansour skeptical of Henson's new religion.
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By Michael Frym
Moving Arts' Fifth Annual One Act Festival, presented under the umbrella title of Saviors and Suspects, is broken into two
evenings playing alternate weekends. "Evening Blue's" bill of four plays, running a little over two hours, offers audiences an
uneven evening's entertainment. While it may be expected that some plays would be stronger than others, in this case, the lack
of parity manifests in each play; each has strengths and challenges, but none shine.
Robert Kolsby's "Harry's Faith" demonstrates the clearest and most provocative concept. Harry (Brad Henson) enters,
long overdue from work, to find his distraught wife, Mimi (Mona Mansour) numbed by a phone call from the police requesting she come
to the morgue to identify her husband's body. Obviously not dead, Harry tells Mimi that God told him to give up his worldly
possessions, among them the car, try to redeem his wife's faith, and sacrifice their infant son (ala Abraham and Isaac.)
Director Lee Wochner paces the work well, in spite of some pedantic scripting. Henson's natural congeniality shines through
his wooden presence, while Mansour's Mimi shows a complexity far beyond the limits of the strident shrew found in the text.
"In One Slit Head", playwright Trey Nichols has two police officers (Rideaux Baldwin and Robin Johnson) performing a drug bust on
(Liesel Kopp.) The basis for their concern is a patch of opium-producing poppies in the front yard. If they turn up one slit
head - the method for extracting the opiates - the spacey Z goes to jail. Nothing is found, and Z triumphs as the loving
flower child that she is. That's it. Kopp is a delight in her transcendental tranquility, but Baldwin is one-note and
bellowing. Obviously, this is to drive home the difference between the potentially psychotic, paranoid police and the sedate, passive
mediator, but Nichol's script and Chopper Bernet's "go-for-it" direction give Baldwin the freedom to shout rather than act.
Johnson is much more successful as the seasoned captain.
"Beauty Beast" by Irmgard Lake, directed by Michael Cooper, has three Gen X wannabe models who didn't make it (Amy
Zasadny, Liesel Kopp, and Samuel Narvell) performing a communal suicide. For the next twenty minutes, the audience is subjected to a
relentless whining over lost dreams, second thoughts, and, of course, dying. They should have used a quicker poison.
Finally, in "Contact", playwright Doug Grissom brings us an intriguing view of a man (D. G. Bannon), alone in a spaceship, with little or no
hope for rescue. When he makes contact with a "city in space," he has a short time in which to change his course, or be lost forever.
Paranoia sets in, and the time passes. If director Julie Brigs had sat on Bannon, making him build his character on valleys and peaks, the
piece might not have been so bombastically tedious.
Performing at the Moving Arts
1822 Hyperion Avenue, Los Angeles.
(323) 665-8961.
Thurs-Sat at 8, Sun at 2, on alternate weekends
with Evening Red. Closes Nov. 22. $14
Closes Dec. 6. $38-47.
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