The production, directed by Randall Arney, benefits from good actors: Jennifer Mudge, Rebecca Henderson, Nate Corddry, Keith Powell, and Lucas Near-Verbrugge. The fourth wall setting designed by Anthony T. Fanning is impeccably realistic, and authentically Silver Lake Los Angeles, I’m told.

Realistic sets have their drawbacks, of course. This one looked like a television sitcom set, which reinforced the sense that the play was indeed written in the sitcom sensibility. The playwright, Alena Smith, is an accomplished television writer, with credits on Showtime and HBO.

The story

The protagonist, an indecisive Abigail, is desperate to find someone to end her indecision and doubt about having a child. She consults both hard science (the internet version) and the occult (a friend’s Tarot deck), she considers the odd experiences and advice of three eccentric friends, and she comes to understand her real want (baby! yes!) just before the final curtain.

Climate change

As a factor in Abigail’s indecision, and as a box office draw for younger audiences, climate change is certainly timely, but while a useful metaphor for human relationships, climate change is not a serious theme in Icebergs. The audience is lectured on the seriousness of climate change in a few set-piece rants that say more about the hysterical Abigail (she throws herself on the couch) than about Earth. Even the visiting paleontologist specializing in the catastrophic Ice Age climate change shrugs his shoulders about impending doom. It is what it is.

Yes, most American couples when contemplating having children probably haven’t thought much about this at all. The moral and practical concerns are probably far stronger in Syria and Afghanistan and Mozambique and Venezuela — add others if you wish.

Career issues

Abigail and her husband Calder are young film industry insiders who approach their career futures with ambitions rather than fears. They are economically comfortable, and so Abigail’s indecision is not complicated by the prospective loss of one income or by the high cost of raising a child.

The moral implications of being a parent are always with us, in theory, but we keep having babies, lots of babies and even more babies. Icebergs would have been a far different, a far less comforting and far more provocative play, had its central couple decided against parenting, even temporarily. Instead, they choose what nearly every couple chooses or falls into, and half of the couple — the husband — never expresses any doubt at all.

Plays are about difficult questions, not answers

I expected one of the five characters to present, almost successfully, the moral case against having children, but the character most against parenting (the paleontologist) speaks against it because he would rather party than parent. His happy ending — each character has one — is abandoning nostalgia for bachelorhood and fully embracing the pleasures of fatherhood, as he facetimes with his toddler in Missouri.

The characters mention warm November weather, extended drought, earthquakes — these phenomena might reinforce a fear of climate change, and thus a fear of having children. But Abigail’s worry over climate change never seems to be serious, just one of those rationalizations that we humans conjure up to explain and cover up an emotion or indecision or fear.

Some structural issues

The script of Icebergs seems to have several elements not fully woven in thematically: we experience a 3.0 earthquake that is soon forgotten, the African-American character monologues about the dangers of being black in America and then that topic is forgotten, and the Tarot-reading Molly readily offers her beloved cat — a symbolic child, as she has no children — to a stranger.

Abigail’s husband is the least quirky character on stage, a stable and supportive (thus boring) husband. Calder is not the protagonist, so his objective, obstacles and choices are less fraught than Abigail’s.

The stakes are low enough for him anyway. His is not a Hobson’s Choice: Calder either allows a celebrity to be cast in his upcoming film, thus dramatically accelerating his career prospects, or he casts his supremely talented but unknown wife Abigail in the lead role, which reduces the box office and buzz, but still advances his career and helps his marriage as well.

You know what he chooses, and you would, too, I hope.

Calder’s impending film is based on a real story with a tragic ending, but his agent reports studio pressure to change to a happy ending. Alena Smith does comes up with a neat solution for Calder, letting his film script — and her Icebergs — have a happy, crowd-pleasing ending: Abigail suggests a happy film ending tweak that isn’t too far from the source material. Problem solved!

Other, more positive opinions

My opinion is not universal, as usual.

Margaret Gray, in The Los Angeles Times, writes that “Randall Arney directs his excellent cast with playful warmth and a keen sensitivity to the generosity and complexity of Smith’s characterizations. The performances feel authentic and lived, and the characters’ rapports convey the richness and surprise of real-life interactions while deepening the play’s themes.”

Reviewing Icebergs for broadwayworld.com, Shari Barrett is effusive. She writes that “This love letter to L.A. will no doubt enchant audiences in the City of the Angels before it moves to appreciative audiences elsewhere who envy our year-round, warm weather lifestyle.”

During the performance I attended, the frequent references to Los Angeles and the Hollywood film industry seemed designed to draw laughs, and often did. Reference to weather, traffic, the Waze traffic app, and even the mere mention of Glendale drew chuckles. I have seen the same phenomenon in New York, and more than once have wondered if theatre audiences also perform, announcing to nearby people that they get the joke. I’m not so convinced that audiences otside of Los Angeles will be enchanted.

God of Carnage might have been aptly entitled A Delicate Balance, if Edward Albee had not already used that for another play with a similar thematic interest.

Albee’s play uneasily reveals the fragile, delicate balance of human relationships. In Albee’s world, maintaining a modest level of unhappiness requires vigilance, sacrifice, restraint, humility — and sometimes humiliation. Albee’s characters seem to have a greater capacity for suffering than Reza’s, for suffering deeper than the sting of being contradicted or having one’s hypocrisies noted.

God of Carnage also calls our attention to the delicate balance of human relationships, both the intimacies of marriage and the one-off transactions among strangers. But Yasmina Reza takes audiences to another level, using these domestic and casual relationships to ask her audience to consider the delicate balance within human nature between our savagery and our civility.

The play suggests that the veneer of civility is thin indeed, and is all too easily abandoned when our egos are threatened. Four parents who initially defend their children soon enough throw the little darlings to the wolves, metaphorically speaking. The last ditch to be defended is the self.

Most audience members, being human too, might not want to think very hard about this. Americans prefer sitcom assurances of our own superiority to an evening spent touring the abyss with Samuel Becket.

Most Americans want to enjoy other people’s wretchedness, not nurse our own, especially at today’s ticket prices. Political AM radio programs did not build vast audiences by calling for introspection and self-criticism.

Our national preference for entertainment over understanding probably explains much that is wrong with today’s theatre, television, and movies. If we are open to dark observations at all, it is mostly through comedy.

The director of the Napa Playhouse production, June Alane Reif, decided to shape her production of God of Carnage more as comedy than drama. The script easily allows this, as it also allows the darker interpretation of Roman Polanski’s 2011 film adaptation, Carnage.

Roman Polanski ultimately softened his theme by using visuals under the ending titles to assure audiences that everything turned out just fine after all, with civility restored — the hamster alive and healthy, and the two boys back to playing together nicely.  June Alane Reif’s production ends with the playscript’s unsettling lack of clear closure and comforting resolution.

Having decided to emphasize comedy, June Alane Reif directed beautifully, keeping the pace up and assuring purposeful stage movement. She was the casting director, too, and the actors she selected were wonderful at comedy, too: Christine Julian, Nathan Day, Linda Howard, and Zachary Stockton. I hope to see this combination again.

The plays themselves are very weak and very dated. They lack effective central themes, relying instead on the novelty (a century ago) of a slice-of-life look at unlikely stage characters, rough and tumble sailors who quarrel and drink too much. A press release suggests that The Early Plays “explores themes of longing and eternity,” but press releases are known to be generous.

“Mr. Maxwell himself was unsure if they deserved staging,” according to one report, “since he felt the plays sounded as if they were by a writer finding his voice.”

In trying to replicate the cadences and dialects of sailors from around the world, O’Neill created a casting nightmare. This language problem apparently stymied even the estimable Elizabeth LeCompte of The Wooster Group, who had wanted (for some reason) to do the plays for years but finally decided that only Richard Maxwell could solve the problems.

The New York Times reported that Elizabeth LeCompte said “I didn’t know how to deal with the dialect of the play without it becoming cliché, so I figured Richard, a writer of real rigor, could figure it out.”

And he did. Or at least he decided to eliminate the problem of accents. “When we read through with everyone trying the accents, it just wasn’t working,” Maxwell told Gothamist. “Happily, we found a way to satisfy the requirements of the text without doing accents, and it’s dialect. There’s a distinction between dialect and accent. If you say the lines as they’re written, that’s satisfying the dialect without worrying about, well what’s the accent going to be.”

Sounds reasonable. It also helps to get around  Eugene O’Neill’s efforts, an embarrassment even at the time, to recreate black dialect in some of his plays.

“I feel like once we did that,” Maxwell said about eliminating accent,  “it became easier for us to attack the text. It made it easier for us to get it across in its pure form.”

Unfortunately, the pure form loses its musicality when delivered by an actor following the director’s flat, minimalist delivery style. In fact, parts of this production sounded less like a live production than like actors “running their lines” when they are learning their parts.

That New York Times article characterizes Maxwell’s directorial style as “a process of purification, focusing on stripping away artifice, cutting away excess interpretation and aiming for lines delivered neutrally.”

I have no quarrel with that minimalist style, when it is appropriate to the text, but early O’Neill isn’t early Pinter. Nevertheless it is churlish to criticize a contemporary director who so respects scripts.

Because O’Neill’s early scripts are truly weak, I was eager to see what New York City Players and The Wooster Group would do to bring them alive to a 2012 audience. Perhaps I missed a great triumph of production over material, but I suspect instead that the inherent problems Richard Maxwell acknowledged while developing the production are beyond anyone’s abilities, even The Wooster Group and New York City Players.

The young Eugene O’Neill was not only looking for his voice (never to find it in the cacophony of sailors’ voices), he was looking too for the playwriting principles that bring theater alive. He was looking too for tragic characters and compelling stories, not the vignettes and sketches that comprise these early plays.

[Edit Feb. 24, 2012] Ben Brantley of The New York Times just reviewed The Early Plays and came to a similar conclusion: “The style is stripped-down, straightforward and somnolent in the classic Maxwell manner, but without — I’m sorry to report — the usual Maxwell impact.” My thinking is that the fault lies primarily with the young Eugene O’Neill, who wrote these one-cats while still learning playwriting. He was so enamored with language that he had not yet learned the power of silences. Of course, few playwrights before the 1950s understood that.

John Hurt in the Gate production of Krapp’s Last Tape Photo Anthony Woods

Michael Colgan directed and James McConnell designed the light. While my guess is that an actor probably needs greater skill to play Lear or Hamlet than Krapp, John Hurt’s performance seems so great as to be inimitable. After this experience, my next trip to Dublin will certainly include the Gate Theatre, just as my trips to London usually include Donmar Warehouse productions.

Krapp’s Last Tape presents a dismal, fatalistic world view, but Beckett’s comedy, moving between clownishness and irony, provides a workable happy ending of sorts. If we cannot finally deny the grim realities about life and ourselves that we try hard to ignore most of our lives, at least we can join Beckett in getting past a narcissistic reaction. Using Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, Krapp ends in the depression stage, tipping perhaps into acceptance, but Beckett reached acceptance long ago. Beckett is Ecclesiastes with a sense of humor.

Disillusionment, where is thy sting! It’s hard to be upset about mortality, loss, waste, and personal failure when theatre is this good!

Beckett’s script is so tight and perfect as to seem impervious to tinkering. Every director doing Shakespeare seems to cut out or rearrange scenes, but who could do that with Krapp’s Last Tape? Good sense would forbid it, even if Beckett and now his estate did not strictly forbid deviation from his scripts.

The brevity of Krapp’s Last Tape is utterly appropriate to its theme, both vast and simple, about the brevity of life and our isolation in the present moment. This performance opens with a remarkably long part in which Krapp sits motionless, a minimalist, painterly coup de theatre that simultaneously creates suspenseful anticipation and embodies the suspended animation of life in which Beckett’s characters so often wait.

Beckett remains a master of theatrical effect whose gestic and temporal devices make text secondary. The timing in this production seems perfect, perhaps paradoxically since most of Krapp’s actions seem casual. One impulsive sweep of Krapp’s right hand conveys a staggering moment of recognition for Krapp, and perhaps for the audience.

The very best theatre is not comforting entertainment. It fulfills the classic role of Greek tragedy by bringing a community together to confront home truths about themselves and their society, not just about characters on stage. American theatre today too often does the opposite, pandering to our need for reassurance, our desire to feel superior to others, and our wish to splash happily in the shallow end of the emotional and political pool. In evidence, I offer Love, Loss and What I Wore.

John Gardner once asserted that although Beckett’s audiences should “cry out with tragic recognition,” they instead merely laugh, while sensing no further connection than that they, too, once felt as miserable as Beckett’s characters, but snapped out of it.

Perhaps. One cannot actually know how individuals in an audience absorb and are changed by what they see on stage, but everyone who goes to serious theatre has been profoundly moved there once in a while. We can hope that most in an audience are moved towards deeper understanding. At theatre prices today, why waste the opportunity?

To the extent that we do glimpse reality and then fall back into denial, we emulate many of Beckett’s characters. To the extent that we muster the courage to experience our own recognition scenes, we acknowledge Beckett’s greatness.

I enjoyed this production immensely, because its successful moments were solid and its weaker aspects, as I see them, are both consonant with the director’s apparent intentions and interesting to those of us who want to learn something about theatre from every production.

Charles Isherwood rightly calls the production “operatic” and “relentlessly turbulent” in his New York Times Review. Director Lucy Bailey and William Dudley, the set and video designer, do not leave the gathering and clashing armies to our imaginations.

William Dudley’s videos, especially looped crowd scenes and Roman cityscapes engulfed in flames, are constant, effective reminders that the characters are small and the world outside is large. This seems very effective at supporting the director’s political emphasis, suggesting that the most fearsome potency lies in barely controllable Roman mobs, not in the characters.

This production rivals Broadway for sheer scale, elaborate setting, large cast, and emphasis on spectacle. In short, for cost. Whatever quibbles an audience member might have about aspects of this production, we are comforted by the idea that all of the cost went to support a worthy script, not Spiderman.

Expensive productions even by The Royal Shakespeare Company might end soon, as the UK dramatically cuts arts and other spending. The UK is moving away from the European model of serious state arts support to the American model, far more dependent on box-office sales and the frugality of  two-character scripts and monodramas.

Most great and affecting theatre is about the uneasy interplay of character, ideology, and events. Ideology might be too strong a word, but central characters have belief systems that are essential to their functioning and are often agents of their destruction, like Willy Loman’s notions of fairness and dignity.

For the Greeks, those external events are more often matters of fate and the gods’ poking sticks about, and for Shakespeare those external events are usually about political power. Either way, theater at its best considers who we are and what we believe, and why much of that is illusory.

This threesome of character, belief, and events lacks the stability of a three-legged stool, and is instead as inherently unstable as a three toddler play date.

That instability, the vulnerability of character and belief when stuff happens, underlies the greatest plays ever written. Its faint, etiolated shadow can usually be sensed even in the most trivial television sitcoms.

The costumes of the early scenes in this production puzzled me, and seemed too effeminate for the play, but by the end of the play that made sense. By the end of the play all of the characters were in brutish combat gear, looking nearly black with filth and sporting mismatched leather belts and pads. The descent from political debate to large scale physical savagery was emphasized.

Similarly I was at first a little discomforted by the fact that the actors were not physically imposing and seemed to lack gravitas, even Brutus. Caesar made his fatal decision to go to the senate with more camp affect than seemed appropriate. No one but Mark Anthony looked ready for a bar fight, let alone a military campaign.

But those effects properly underscore the play’s suggestion that events are big, men are small.  The most thoughtlessly dangerous conspirator, Casca, was wonderfully cast: Oliver Ryan demonstrated the frenetic danger of a physically slight and intellectually uninterested man who is eager for violence, underscoring the production’s apparent point.

Seeing and hearing this production while America’s debt ceiling theatre farce was playing its closing scenes in Washington, I looked hard for parallels. I found parallels not in the bad acting and bad lines of dueling politicians, but elsewhere in America, in gun rights advocates’ posturing call for resistance and the Tea Party’s vainglorious recital of Thomas Jefferson’s “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots.”

Small minds with no sense of unintended consequences and with noble intentions, like the conspirators in Julius Caesar, can bring ruin. The Royal Shakespeare Company has done well to bring us theatre with ideas in the production as well as in the text, and New York was lucky to have them with us.

The conceit of the play is that a few years after her acquittal for the infamous hatchet murders of her father and her step-mother, and after suffering the gossip and shunning of her townspeople, Lizzie Borden agrees to finally tell all for a Fall River Historical Society fund-raiser. She will identify the real murderer.

That makes the audience for this monodrama enact the roles of the people of Fall River, including presumably some who had wanted her hanged. During the course of her monolog, Lizzie calls the room about that, but she never loses her composure. At least not until the end. At times she notices in the back of the audience some particular persons involved in her case, including the judge, and she names them. She is cordial to them but we know that she is holding back.

From the very beginning, Lizzie Borden proclaims her innocence and most of her monolog demolishes the case against her like an Agatha Christie detective finally revealing everything in the drawing room.

Lizzie Borden takes pains to show how she could not possibly have committed the murder. In her interwoven account of family relations, every now and then a little stinkbomb of resentment and anger appears quietly to enrich her logical analysis.

This production is marvelous. Ellen Barry is a fine Lizzie Borden. Her remarkable stage presence is enough to maintain audience attention even during relatively long passages of exposition made necessary by the premise, and even though monodramas as long as this one are not easy to sustain. She is especially strong when the end of the play requires a delicate balance of emotions and hints of matters left unsaid. Mitch Giannunzio has insured that her monolog becomes increasingly intense as the play progresses.

The ending rises in intensity as Lizzie, perhaps overly refreshed with some elderberry wine and wearied by too much civility, starts to go off the edge.  She identifies the person she thinks did the murders. Suddenly we wonder if she is not indeed maniacal enough to have crushed the victims’ skulls, and perhaps too a few audience skulls. This unsettling ending is especially shocking as the opening of her monolog is comforting and reassuring about her innocence, with few undercurrents to weaken our credulity and our sympathy.

Mitch Giannunzio’s script is spare and visually evocative, providing rich mise en scene for the mind’s eye, to compensate for the absence of multiple actors and complex stage business. The few props have been chosen well.

Kenneth Tigar has directed the production astutely to achieve a crisp pace on a small stage. His own successful experiences as an actor in monodramas serve him well here.

Ellen Barry, Mitch Giannunzio, and Kenneth Tigar have worked together before, and based on this performance I hope they find occasions to work together again.

This was a fine, engaging production. The simple lighting, bare stage, and street clothing allowed the language and acting to dominate.

Logue’s work retells in free verse the stories from books I and II of the 24-book Iliad by Homer. Logue has offered “an account” or retelling (not a translation) of other books of the Iliad in War Music, Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls, all fine poems that can be profitably read alongside a traditional translation, such as the justly acclaimed version by Robert Fagles and the unjustly neglected translation by Stanley Lombardo. Lombardo’s version in fact was made to be performed.

What has offended some reviewers of Christopher Logue’s retellings, that they are not faithful translations, delights the rest of us. He brings his characters and their situations alive in part with startling anachronisms, unexpected humor, and the fluidity afforded by free verse: sudden short lines, imagistic fragments, and cinematic jumps.

One inherent limitation facing Jim Milton in adapting Logue’s work to become this play is the limited scope of its story. While Achilles’ conflict with Agamemnon is the announced subject of the Iliad, a conflict whose resolution determines the outcome of the war and the fate of Troy, the first two books of the Iliad, Logue’s retelling of them, and therefore Kings: The Siege of Troy present only the initial events. Jim Milton has apparently added a few snippets from other Logue retellings.

The primitive conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, raw male ego rivalry, is not resolved in the play, but is put aside when Zeus sends a dream to trick Agamemnon into a hasty assault on Troy meant to  destroy the Greek effort. The play ends on the eve of that battle, the personal conflict forgotten.

Some audience members might be left puzzled and dissatisfied by Kings: The Siege of Troy. This being America (where pop culture references are inescapable and classical references all but forgotten), some in the audience might not know the Iliad, and thus struggle to understand the play’s storyline and to differentiate among the gods. But they would have neglected to read the notes in the program, hardly the fault of the production company.

Audiences expecting traditional dramatic unity and resolution might be confused by the incompletion of the storyline, and the long digressive account (Homer’s only comic relief) of the insubordination and punishment of Thersites. That comic element is thematically valuable as a foil to Achilles’ own insubordination, although this structural connection might be lost to anyone in the audience encountering the story for the first time.

However formidable these problems might be, the actual production and performances were suasive and pleasing. The pace was brisk, true to Logue’s account, and the stage movement was purposeful and clarifying.

The production employed two fine actors, Dana Watkins and J. Eric Cook. They moved fluidly from character to character, alternating between giving narrative and enacting events, and back again, each playing multiple characters. My intuition before seeing the production was that a stage adaptation would need three actors, but two were adequate. Three still might be better, but Jim Milton knows what he is doing.

Directing his own adaptation, Jim Milton staged a consistent stylized production, the actors now and then pausing convincingly in tableaus familiar to us from urns and friezes, or at least harmonious with our imagined memories of Greek figures in urns and friezes. The lighting designer, Heather Sparling, helped clarify and shape the play’s  rapid changes of place and mood.

An aside: I have come to believe that even very good actors sometimes speak subordinate clauses more rapidly and less expressively than wording in the same sentence that they think more important. Poets as skilled as Logue are not likely to think of any of their words as annoying speedbumps on the road to important language.

But theatre performance and poetry reading are separate experiences, and I defer to theatre professionals on this. The ones who have presented this Kings: The Siege of Troy have done well.

This script is not as far as I know available. Logue’s Kings is available as part of War Music.

Ives said that he had thought a lot about what David Mamet wrote in an article in The New York Times: “All drama is about lies. When the lie is exposed, the play is over.” Mamet went on to argue that ordinary plays might ask what is true, but that the best plays deal instead with the lies that we cannot easily face, the lies we repress.

Ives told his audience that he believed instead that all plays are about self-knowledge: when the central character achieves some self-knowledge, the play is over. That certainly works for tragedy, whose recognition scenes are the most intense emotionally. We all enjoy seeing other people confront unpleasantries about themselves, but of course we do not like to do that ourselves.

Mass entertainment in America makes its profit by reinforcing the lies we tell ourselves. We want films and TV shows that reassure us that we are fine as we are, as individuals and as a nation, and that everything will turn out all right in the end. We are allowed to imagine ourselves as valiant heroes and persuasive lovers, and encouraged to identify with rebels, adventurers and avengers. The bad people in popular entertainment are not like us at all. They are serial killers, the arrogant rich scheming for more, moronic street criminals and swarthy terrorists. We empathize with the always attractive and always successful forces for good. A screenwriter once wisely observed that all popular movies are about the fantasy life of the viewer.

David Ives understandably admires plays whose central characters gain self-knowledge. I would go one step further, and perhaps he would, too. I believe that while the characters in a play gain self-knowledge, however painfully, the audience should gain self-knowledge, too. I have long felt that at one point or another in the best plays, everyone in the audience says to herself or himself some variation of “Oh, hell, they are talking about me, and they aren’t saying anything nice.”

The prospect of increased self-knowledge in individuals and cultures won’t sell many tickets, but it restores to theatre one of its traditional social and personal functions. We will not often find this in television, the Hollywood blockbuster, or Broadway shows. We reward the entertainment industry for reassuring us, even with illusions, not for discomforting us with unpleasant facts. As American theaters become increasingly dependent upon ticket sales, this grim waste of opportunity will only get worse.