"Long Beach Poppin' Play Festival (Saturday)"
By James Scarborough
GRUNION GAZETTE

The four productions that comprise the Saturday portion (there’s a Thursday and a Friday playlist as well), of The Alive Theatre’s Poppin’ Play Festival are not the stuff of community playhouses with a chiseled demographic or theatre companies with large spaces. Nor do they invite lavish stagecraft. They are for young companies like the Alive with a lot of energy, a willingness to take chances, and an assumption that the audience doesn’t just want to be entertained, they want to be challenged and stimulated. Since the Alive chose these pieces, produced them, gave them their premieres, it makes sense that the evening felt tight and integrated, homegrown and organic.

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"ONE MAN’S WANDER THROUGH A NIGHT OF NEW PLAYS
AT THE ALIVE THEATRE—ENDS SEPT. 11"
By Greggory Moore
GREATER LONG BEACH

—Arrival—

What are we to make of the concept of a festival of new plays? Are we meant to understand these as A) finished works making their world debuts, or B) should we (and the artists involved) imbibe the experience as grounds for experimentation, a halfway house between workshopping and full-scale production?

It seems to me that the correct answer, if there is (only) one in a given case, depends on the intent of the producers (of the festival as a whole and of the specific works presented). And since Night #2 of Alive Theatre’s Poppin’ Play Festival opened with Andrew Eiden, our master of ceremonies, making a specific point to the audience about how the works we were about to test their wings for the first time out here in the big world, I have to think that at least some of B was in play; and so I hope any criticism found here is taken in that spirit.

One way in which the festival is clearly not workshoppy is in the polish of the performances. None of the actors are searching for their lines, blocking, motivations, etc.; this stuff is all worked out. This is not amateur hour.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with the show.

What We Can by Craig Abernathy (Dir. Turner Munch)
Every night of the festival opens with a production What We Can (each time with a new director and cast), a meta-theatrical meditation on what we (a royal auctorial “we”) can do on stage in five minutes. If you grok the convention (if you hate meta-theatre to the point of needing to pronounce judgment, you might be inclined to say “gimmick,” but then you’re a fuddy-duddy traditionalist or pretentious postmodernist), there’s a degree of predictability in the thought-turns in the script, but Abernathy executes the maneuvers with enough proficiency to keep us engaged. Helping matters greatly here is Jared Crossman, who injects a certain characterological personality into dialog that is otherwise (and by design) using the three characters as mouthpieces for the author. We see the fun once he comes on stage—although all three actors (with Dave Honigman and Nicole Steadman) deliver with a polished confidence that lasts right up through a nice tableau vivant of a finale.

The Elephant by Alice Pencavel (Dir. Olivia Trevino)
Honigman and Steadman are back, this time as Lawrence and Diane, a Connecticut couple who have just lost a baby to still-birth. Enter Amir Levy as a dubious doctor who explains that the hospital offers elephants to families experiencing this sort of tragedy, and we’re off—with at least some idea where we’re going as soon as Lawrence proposes that he and Diane can ignore the elephant (played by Shawn-Kathryn Kane) that is literally in the room.

Like What We Can, The Elephant flirts with taking a path that is too predictable for its own good, only to stay sufficiently clever to keep you from wandering off into the overgrowth. I would go so far as to say that the idiosyncrasy in the situational humor is strong enough that the play is at its best when the elephant is not functioning as a symbol but just as a pachyderm who wants some attention from her new companions. Kane is fantastic here, earning both big laughs and little awwwws for her hopeful and gently disconsolate reactions to being intentionally overlooked by her housemates—so much so that we forgive the choice for her to use her hands instead of only her trunk.

The play temporarily recovers from what feels like a wrong turn into a half-polemic on the plight of elephants being stolen from the wild and gets to what you think is a very touching ending, as Diane’s and her elephant’s worlds have merged so they are a pair of co-surrogates, Diane singing her baby to sleep. It’s a nice trick.

But then the spell is broken, and the play continues. And continues. And continues for about a full two-and-a-half scenes too long. It’s not that there’s not some nice material in there, some cleverness and good laughs (anything that gives Levy more stage time in this role can’t be all bad), but a play that could have closed with a lovely aesthetic arc strongly grounded at each end instead becomes not quite so sound structurally. All the pieces are here; there just seems to be an overall conceptual problem. As it is you come away with some extra material and laughs, but not the sense of aesthetic completeness that was right there for the taking.

—Intermission—

A piece of quasi-guerrilla theatre etiquette (because, for better and for worse, doing theatre in the Dome Room ain’t like doing it at the Performing Arts Center): If you’re the fool who screws up the not-foolproof system of propping the bathroom door open with a brick so that the person following you isn’t locked out of relieving him-/herself, and someone in line politely points out to you your screw-up and asks that you kindly go inform someone with the theatre company of your screw-up and that a key is needed so that those in line can do their business, please don’t be a selfish jackoff and ignore the request. You damn well wouldn’t like it if some fool did that while you were the one waiting in line to pee. Dude.

Jinxed by Alexa K. Mavromatis (Dir. Dion Chang)
This time it’s Levy who’s back, sharing the stage with Fayna Sanchez as the last man and woman on Earth—Stringbean and Meatloaf, as they sometimes call themselves—who in one way or another are mostly interested in food, which, you know, can get a bit hard to come by when there are only two of you left. Conversation on the subject results in a game of jinx, which Meatloaf takes very seriously, having acquired a doctorate on the topic (her master’s being in punch buggy). There’s a cuteness here, but Jinxed is all about the personality that the actors bring to the table. And with Levy and Sanchez, that’s fine.
What King Kong Dreamt by (deep breath) Aaron Van Geem, Dave Van Patten, Zach Lovitch, Ellen Warkentine, Eloise DeLuca, and Jasper Oliver (Dir. Jasper Oliver)
Put the title out of your mind; it’s not going to help you make sense out of something that is nonsensical. Making sense out of What King Kong Dreamt is beside the point, anyway: this is just good old-fashioned Dadaism. And when’s the last time you had yourself a slice o’ that?

Dada, it should be noted, doesn’t necessarily imply lack of method or concept—and it definitely doesn’t mean that here. Rather, we get an opening bit of phantasmagoric expressionism (both visually and aurally, with Warkentine heading a band that delivers nicely all night when called upon) that can be breathtaking when they get the lighting just right. This is tight.

Next we move to a peas-and-carrots kind of roundtable babble by men in top hats (funny) that is interrupted first by a curious sort of rain (really funny), then by the appearance of an ape-like alien presence (King Kong? It doesn’t appear much like King Kong. The title might have been a jumping-off point, but in the end result it seems more of a needless distraction) with a bag of presents. You don’t know if you’re supposed to be looking for symbolism here, but really, you don’t much care, because you’re just having some real fun.

This gives way to a hieratic musical transformation circle presided over by Van Geem that works despite a partial disjointedness from what’s come before. But then, as with The Elephant, the proceedings seem to run long, and the music meanders into a generically silly pop dance number that probably goes on too long even were it to work. A quick coda ends the piece, though not with enough authority for anyone in the audience to be sure they are applauding in the appropriate place. Cut out the dance number and go directly from the end of the music circle to the coda, and What King Kong Dreamt is probably exactly what Oliver and company hope for it to be.

—Departure—

Alive Theatre has never been afraid to take chances. That willingness to put themselves out there makes them the type of folk who can successfully mount a new-play festival in the unsteadier sense (i.e., B). That’s just about as alive as theatre can get. If the spirit of the artists involved is willing and the flesh is not weak, that makes for theatre that gives us a compelling and intimate take on the creative process. We’re getting that from Alive right now. And it’s nice to have.

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"Long Beach Poppin' Play Festival"
By Mayank Keshaviah
LA WEEKLY

For the third consecutive year, CSULB alums present four to five courses of theater per night, divided into three different prix-fixe menus. The appetizer common to all three nights, "What Can We" by Craig Abernathy, is a five-minute exploration of making theater. The concept is interesting, but the flavors don't quite gel, so the meal gets off to a shaky start. The meat-and-potatoes main course is Nathaniel Kressen's "Jumper's With the Gypsy," a tale of two lost souls in the city that never sleeps. From the start, it's hard to invest in either character, and outside of a couple of good lines, the scenario seems contrived in its attempts at being deep. Lloyd Noonan's "An Agreement Between Father and Son" is a dark comedy in which a father and son make a pact to deal with pain-in-the-ass Grandpa. It is dark all right, relentlessly, so that darkness seems its only purpose. Finally, "Eddie, A Musical About Failure" by R. Edward and Ellen Warkentine provides the sweet ending to the evening. Unfortunately it's less a chocolate soufflé and more a bowl of vanilla ice cream. The generic score consists of a series of character songs that, while amusing and fun, don't tell much of a story. In fact, the entire meal is perfectly encapsulated in a line from one of its songs: "I know it's light on consequence and plot, but it's what I've got."

Lafayette Ballroom, 528 E. Broadway Ave., Long Beach; Thurs.-Sat., 8: p.m.; through Sept. 11.
(562) 818-7364. alivetheatre.org An Alive Theatre production.