GRIMLY HANDSOME
★★★
When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 26.
Where: 2525 Michigan Ave., Building T1, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.
Tickets: $20-$25, Sundays are pay-what-you-can, at the door only.
Length: 90 minutes, no intermission.
Suitability: Mature teens and adults.
Information: 310-453-9939, www.citygarage.org.
★★★
When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 26.
Where: 2525 Michigan Ave., Building T1, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.
Tickets: $20-$25, Sundays are pay-what-you-can, at the door only.
Length: 90 minutes, no intermission.
Suitability: Mature teens and adults.
Information: 310-453-9939, www.citygarage.org.
Everyone involved in bringing “Grimly Handsome” to life at Santa Monica’s City Garage has done all the necessary work. Still, the play will feel like a farrago, unless the audience is willing to patiently dig in to sort out the threads.
Julia Jarcho’s script, the 2013 Obie-Award winner, now in its West Coast premiere, is an intermissionless three-parter.
First, on a frigid evening, two men wait for customers at a Christmas tree lot in New York City. They are Gregor (Andrew Loviska) and Alesh (Anthony M. Sannazzaro), each an Eastern European. We find this out when they speak heavily accented and hesitant English, though when they’re speaking in their native tongue, we hear it as flawless English.
Alesh wants to be an American policeman. Gregor, wearing an eye patch, chides him with a reminder of police corruption back home. Or, is “the village” they refer to “The Village?”
A girl, Natalia (Lindsay Plake), looking like Red Riding Hood browses the trees. She’s stunned at the high prices, so Gregor, with apparent sarcasm, gives her a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
When she leaves, Alesh and Gregor role-play picking up women. And then they role-play drugging, raping and killing them.
We next see Natalia curled up on her sofa, the tiny awkward tree on display, as she reads a detective novel. And then she returns to the lot, where she takes a cup of tea from Alesh the way Snow White trustingly took an apple from the queen. Alesh carries her lifeless body away.
So far, so grim. Or, should that be “Grimm”?
Director Frédérique Michel gives this first scene high style and deliberate pacing, so the work feels suspenseful. She then choreographs her use of Josephine Poinsot’s costumes, so Plake quickly re-emerges from backstage to start putting on the bits of costuming Sannazzaro had taken off: cap, flannel shirt, scarf.
Plake’s Natalia thus transforms into Nally, an easily distracted man called in for interrogation by New York Police Department detectives Greggins (Loviska) and Alpert (Sannazzaro) as they investigate a series of Christmas slayings.
Except, under Michel’s hand, it’s not clear that they truly are detectives. The words they say could pass for cop talk, but here, again, they speak with high style and deliberate pacing. Is Natalia dreaming them up? Note the dial phone in the room.
More twists and surprises follow along these lines. Themes of identity and identifying with, interrelatedness, and natural evil waft through the 90-minute work.
But most surprising, and certainly a highlight of the costuming, is the third segment. It seems to leave us with the idea that animals have better ethics than we do, or at least that they learn from their collective unconscious. Ignorance will be our downfall, we are warned.
Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.
Grimly Handsome
Rating: 3 stars.
When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 26.
Where: 2525 Michigan Ave., Building T1, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.
Tickets: $20-$25, Sundays are pay-what-you-can, at the door only.
Length: 90 minutes, no intermission.
Suitability: Mature teens and adults.
Information: 310-453-9939, www.citygarage.org.
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