10 SECTION TWO
Larchmont Chronicle
MARCH 2024
Two high-octane plays are comedies? Twain still scrutinized by
Louis Fantasia female playwrights who have earned national cachet for their high-octane writing. Both plays are directed by women (Jennifer Chambers on POTUS; Jenna Worsham for Arrowhead) who have, again, a high-octane, take-no-prisoners approach to their respective farces, as characters stumble onto scenes they shouldn’t see and confessions they shouldn’t hear. Both plays feature female ensembles (all women in POTUS, nearly so in Arrowhead),
What to watch for The Fountain Theatre presents the world premiere of “Fatherland,” the true story of a son testifying against his father’s involvement on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol; through March 30; 323-663-1525; FountainTheatre.com. A Noise Within runs August Wilson’s “King Hedley II,” showing the tragic realities experienced by Black men on account of Reagan Administration economics in the 1980s; March 31 through April 28; 626-356-3100; anoisewithin.org. "Into the Breeches!" a comedy about women producing Shakespeare’s “Henry” plays while their husbands are fighting in WWII, plays at Theatre 40, directed by the Chronicle’s Louis Fantasia; in repertory with the world premiere of “Power and Light,” about the rivalry between Tesla and Edison; March 21 through April 28; 310-3640535; Theatre40.org as farce requires, but also managing to find enough moments of real humanity and intimacy to keep their characters, political and sexual, from sliding completely into clichés. Both plays are very funny (even if POTUS does wear a bit thin in the second act, and Arrowhead slips into melodrama by the end). While both plays are well worth seeing, both left me troubled. Each play assumes an audience that agrees with the politics of its author. Would it hurt to have had a character — gay or straight — who thought abortion wrong? Would the feminist West Wing romp have been as funny if the women were based on Kari Lake or Marjorie Taylor Green? My point is that if we want our politicians to cross the aisle, we had better start doing so in the theater. Otherwise, they will never learn. Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” stands as the antithesis to the two plays above. Written by an old, white male about a young, white male, the book problematically uses the N-word 219 times. It has been under scrutiny since it was published in 1884 and continues to be challenged, contested and even banned. Once a staple of school curricula, it is taught with “trigger warnings” in edited texts, if taught at all. Which makes Robert Alan Beuth’s one-man staging of the novel, directed by Peter Van Norden, all the more remarkable (Moving Arts Theater in Atwater Village through March 3; huckfinn.
ludus.com/index.php). Mr. Beuth, bald, portly and engaging, plays Huck, Twain and all the other characters in the novel, using a collection of brilliantly executed masks and puppets, against an olio backdrop of life along the Mississippi. The satire is gentle, genial and all encompassing, as Twain intended. No one escapes the author’s quill, tempered by the actor’s warmth. The N-word is never spoken, replaced by “slave,” as in most modern editions. Given the language the women use in the first two plays, it would be a shame if the history of that one word kept audiences and readers from Twain’s — and Beuth’s — humanity.
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in which the women, in the former, rescue an unseen president (a combination of Clinton, Bush 2 and a certain reality TV star) from his own ineptitude before nearly killing him by accident; and, in the latter, where the women navigate the consequences of a committed lesbian getting pregnant by her hunky workmate, who happens to be the brother of one of her best friends. As I said, these are comedies! Both sets are excellent: POTUS’s White House shifts walls like an origami gone mad; Arrowhead features a tasteful (save the wall-less toilet), upscale rental by the lake with seemingly endless bedrooms. Both casts are first-rate, not only keeping both shows throttling forward
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Nothing in my study of Aristotle, the French Neo-Classicists or even Bertolt Brecht quite prepared me for not one, but two, plays featuring actors playing lactating women using breast pumps on stage! Nor for those plays opening with, in one case, a four-letter word, unprintable in a family paper, for the female organ; or, in the other, an abortion in a bathroom without walls, supported by friends. And these are comedies! Selina Fillinger’s POTUS, which was at the Geffen (through Feb. 25), and Catya McMullen’s Arrowhead, at the Atwater Village Theatre through March 4 (iamatheatre.com), have enough in common to warrant a bit of comparative reviewing. Both plays are by young