2Cities: barrios, projects, and ballparks

Heather Woodbury. Tale of 2Cities (An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks). Part One: Grifters, Drifters, and Dodgers. UCLA Live. Freud Playhouse. 10/8/06.

I feel like I left at Intermission. The performance consisted of 2 two-and-a-half-hour pieces, and I only saw the first. But I blame UCLA Live (and my own procrastination). The full story is at the bottom of the post, so I don't annoy those who just want to hear about the show. But I will say that after seeing the first part, I would definitely have been glad to see the second part, and it is a piece worth the investment of 5 hours. My partial review is here, but I encourage you to read Charles McNulty's LA Times review or this review in Variety for a take that includes a perspective on the piece as a whole.

I really enjoyed the show. It started off slowly, but it drew me in to the interweaving tales of many interesting characters whose lives intersect in unpredictable ways. Each of the seven actors played multiple roles, frequently peforming across race and gender and each did so with spectacular skill. They managed to craft compelling and complex characters without any change in physical appearance. Despite frequent jumps in location and time period, the production was fascinating and not too obscure. Ostensibly, this was the story of the Dodgers leaving New York in the 1950s and moving to Los Angeles. It's about the distruction of two low-income communities, a Brooklyn united around their baseball team and Chavez Ravine razed and displaced so Dodger Stadium could be built in its place. This a terrible, poigniant story that should be told over and over, and Tale of 2Cities makes some wonderful gestures at telling it, but I would argue that it doesn't exactly succeed, because that isn't really the story this piece wants to be telling any more. As director and dramaturg Dudley Saunders states in his "Dramaturg's Note," "Septemer 11 occured during Ms. Woodbury's original, generating performances" and thus "this play was maimed by history." While Saunders argues that this is appropriate for the piece, in a way I think it was also unfortunate. I would have liked to see what this performance would have been if it weren't a performance about September 11. My reservations aside, it was an excellent demonstration of theatrical craftmanship and I would encourage anyone to see it. It raises and interweaves many fascinating stories and political issues around identity, community, and history. It asks great questions about which ways are appropriate to help those who need help and even how we mourn. A strikingly talented ensemble cast endures two pieces of epic length and scope to tell many great stories.

Tracey A. Leigh was a stand out member of the cast, transforming fluidly from a young puertoriqueña girl in New York to a crazy old hermit in LA as well as several other chorsu roles. She gave each character a distinct voice and a unique personality and really showcased her talent. Michael Ray Escamilla smouldered as a young LA DJ, drawing attention with his burning intensity. Escamilla as Manuel Vasquez was the only character in the play with any sexuality, which I would argue is a problem, but he sold sex and passion and rage in a way that made him a pleasure to watch. When he played NY police officer Chuck, his character was distinct and equally interesting. Winsome Brown, who mainly in this half played Hannah Klug, didn't have much of an opportunity to interact with other characters (she mainly monologued emails to a brother in Korea) and provided more exegesis than action, but she showed signs of being a highly versatile actress. When she played Lavinia Esmeralda, her Spanish accent clearly communicated the character she was playing, even if it was stange to see her do it. Leo Marks and Ed Vassallo had smaller parts in the first half of the show, but both created interesting characters nonetheless. Diane Rodriguez didn't play multiple characters as much as she played the same character at two different points in her life; she played the ghost of Gabriela Hauptmann waiting for her grandson to discover her body and the same Gabriela back in the 1950s growing up in Chavez Ravine. Though Rodriguez is a talented actress, this role felt somehow less genuine than many of the others, making it seem more difficult to play across age than race or gender. This could be attributed to Rodriguez's acting technique not quite meshing with the others' in the piece or it could be a problem with the writing of the role, which is quite possibly the most distant from Woodbury's experience.

Heather Woodbury as Miriam Flieschman played an outsider, a New Yorker who came to LA in the 1950s but eventually moved back to Brooklyn. Her story was the most vibrant and unifying in the production, and was also for me the biggest problem of the piece. The trouble was that A Tale of 2Cities was really only about one city. It was a piece about New York, with Los Angeles as a side-note and a gimmick. Los Angeles was painted as a city of strangers and immigrants, a city without culture and politics. And while the displacement of the inhabitants of Chavez Ravine was an event that happened here, the piece never really captured the locals of La Loma or angelinos in general. It's hard for me to explain how exactly this piece failed to capture the spirit or culture of Los Angeles, but it felt written by an outsider, which I suppose it was, though Woodbury has apparently lived here since 1998. This concern doesn't make Tale of 2Cities any less of a piece of wonderful theater, which it was, but it does make it a piece of New York theater rather than LA theater. Not that that's a bad thing.

I hope those of you in New York go to this show and tell me what you think. I'd be curious to hear if and how it felt more or less NY to you than it felt LA to me.

So here's my rant about UCLA Live. I bought a ticket for the first half because Ticketmaster was practically giving them away (thanks for the tip, Frank's Wild Lunch) for $7.50 in handling fees. I then made every attempt to purchase a ticket for the second half through UCLA Live, where I can usually get student tickets for $15-20. If that had worked out, it would have been an excellent value and a delightful day of marathon theater. But no, UCLA Live wouldn't sell me a student ticket. I don't know if it was a problem with the website or if they were sold out (they only offer a very small number of student tickets in the worst seats in the back of the theater) or what, but I couldn't get a ticket for less than $30 and that made me angry, so I didn't buy it, even though 2 full performances for under $40 would have been perfectly reasonable. They made the user experience unpleasant, and that made me decide they wouldn't get my money. I get angry because they do everything possible to demonstrate that they don't actually *want* students in their audiences.