West of Lenin

Past

The Plague Master General-A Bubonic Comedy, Profound and Tragically Amusing

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Yes, Minister and Monty Python humor, Serious subject

Friday night, I had the great honor to review the first performance of the world premiere of The Plague Master General-a Bubonic Comedy, which promises to be an award-winning script and production. This thoroughly entertaining, enlightening production was written and directed by Greg LoProto, produced by Blue Hour Theatre, with an ensemble of astoundingly talented actors at West of Lenin. It was one of the highlights of my 14 years of reviewing.

Past

Veils

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To Veil or not to Veil, that is the Question.

Is the topic of the play Veils, which opened at West of Lenin produced by Macha Theatre Works. Written byTom Coash, a former professor at the American University of Cairo, where the play takes place just prior to the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011. It has multiple layers of conflict, focused around whether Muslim women should wear the traditional to veil or not; and almost all the complex nuances of this issue.

Past

Big Rock Rolls into Fremont’s West of Lenin

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Local playwright Sonya Schneider receives a red carpet treatment from the West of Lenin troupe for her premiere of Big Rock. Under the direction of Laurel Pilar Garcia, local actors Meg McLynn, Todd Jefferson Moore and Evan Whitfield do outstanding work bringing Schneider’s script to life. The unique setting of a small island somewhere in the Puget Sound is deftly represented by designer Julia Hayes Welch and beautifully lit by Jessica Trundy. Alas the actual play falls short of living up to the expert care it has been given by the actors and crew.

Past

Crime and Punishment-Full of Rewards not Punishment

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Crime and Punishment-Not Punishing but Highly Rewarding

Seattle’s highly acclaimed and inventive theatre troupe, Akropolis Performance Lab has just executed a herculean task, which for lovers of Russian literature is the ultimate wet-dream. APL presented an magnificent stage adaptation of Crime and Punishment, the most famous of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s four long 19th Century Russian novels, at West of Lenin Theatre in Fremont.

Past

The Wild Hearted (A Parley Workshop Production)

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The Wild Hearted, Parley’s 33rd workshop since 2014, played before a capacity audience 0f about 90 people at West of Lenin Monday evening. Four millenials plan a party to celebrate history in the making on Election Night, 2016. Spoiler alert: the history they witnessed unfolding was not the one they had gathered to celebrate. The roller-coaster electoral college results of this election night rip and tear at the thin affections these acquaintances hold for one another. The lines are funny and consistently land. With just 5 weeks of walk-throughs and scripts in hand, minimal props and a few deft sound cues, the play came fully to life. All the actors put emotion and movement into their performances.

Past

Like Penelope, MAIDEN VOYAGE Waits for Greatness

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In the world of adapting ancient stories, inventing “the history behind the myth” is the order of the day. From Wolfgang Peterson’s film Troy to Esther Friesner’s young adult novel Nobody’s Princess, modern artists are bringing us “believable” versions of Homer’s epics, devoid of gods and monsters, and Parley Productions’ Maiden Voyage falls squarely within this trend.
True to its subtitle, “A Feminist Reimagining of The Odyssey,” Maiden Voyage weaves us a history behind the myth in which Penelope, the true author of The Odyssey, spins tales of her absent husband’s encounters with gods and monsters in order to raise a son longing for a father he has never known.

Past

Possum—A Workshop Performance

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Former firebrand radical Lucinda Celeste (Macall Gordon) is on the lam, which is like playing possum, in a primitive log cabin deep in the woods. Her devoted protector and supporter and ever hopeful to-be lover, Rex Eaglejeep (Asa Sholdez) is convinced that the State has revived the search for Lucinda. Lucinda is much less worried. Note to readers: it’s not paranoia if they are out to get you.

The pair’s non-stop haggling about security and safety is interrupted by Otto (Connor Kinzer). Otto claims to be Lucinda’s adult son

Past

Really Really

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“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” Socrates (469 -399 BC)

What is usually called the older generation, always says a variant of the above quote about every younger generation. For the baby boomer generation, we had Christopher Lasch’s punditry. It seems today, we are actually a little bit more enlightened by science about the plight of youth; given the advances in brain science. Physiologically , the most sophisticated part of the human brain, the frontal lobe, where judgment is processed, does not fully develop until age 26, so that is why youth behaves irresponsibly, without reflection and sometimes highly immorally.

And in my experience, it is always the people who were the most irresponsible and most self-destructive in their youth, who are in turn the most judgmental of the growing pains of the under 30’s. The play Really, Really, by Paul Down Coliazzo, produced by Touch Productions, currently running at West of Lenin, was a treatise about the biggest defect of being young, their selfishness.

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