‘Deathwatch’ With an All-Woman Cast

An all-female cast puts a whole new slant on Jean Genet’s prison drama “Deathwatch” in an adaptation titled “Deathwatch: Haute Surveillance,” just opened at the Powerhouse Theatre.

“The play was written for men--now it will be a woman’s (piece),” French director Rene Migliaccio said in heavily accented English. “That doesn’t mean I change the psychology. The elements stay the same. But I wanted to see if it can rejoin the atmosphere that we see in the Greek tragedy, like ‘Antigone.’ By putting women onstage, I tried to keep the soul of Genet. Genet says somewhere that the soul is represented by the physical. I think that he considered himself a feminine soul.

“So I try to give concreteness to this abstract imagination. It’s like the physical of the woman can translate the soul of Genet: by the gesture, the look, the way they handle the character. When women play this, it’s more revealing. When I read (the original), I didn’t find for myself the right answers. I understood that Genet was trying to write about his own life, the tragedy inside himself. But when I change it to a woman, (the result) is bringing something of myself. The woman is a bond between me and Genet.”

The director, who’s utilized his method of “expressionistic realism” in the piece, is proud of the results. “When I made this change, I discovered it is correct,” he said. “I think that for purist people who don’t want to disturb the rules, it may be a little like heretic movement. (But if audiences) come and be open, they’ll see a different light of it. I think it’s going to have a physical masculinity and a feminine grace. That doesn’t mean the women are acting like men.”

Featured in the cast are Taylor Donovan, Wendy Jewell, Shawna Casey and Lisa Zebro.

A gay love triangle sets the stage for Michael Thomas Tower’s “Fall Season,” opening Friday at the Celebration Theatre. “It deals with the effect alcohol has on relationships,” explained director Ric Montejano. “Obviously, it’s usually a bad effect--but like everything else in life, there’s hope.”

Though AIDS has naturally figured prominently in the bulk of recent gay plays, “This is another disease in our community,” he said. “And it’s equally destructive when it goes unchecked.” The characters are Ken, a practicing alcoholic; James, a co-alcoholic (dependent on an alcoholic), and Daniel, a recovering alcoholic. “It’s a look at the way the three interrelate. Of course, alcohol blurs and distorts, so you never get a true picture.”

Although Montejano hopes to attract both gay and straight audiences, there’s one segment of the population he’s sure the play will appeal to: people with alcohol problems in their own lives. Even in his own cast, “Everyone has had a relationship with an alcoholic--either a family member or a ‘significant other,’ ” he said. “Me too.”

LATE CUES: The Back Alley Theatre presents a concert performance of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s seldom-heard score, “One Touch of Venus” (1943), in a dinner benefit June 11. Linda Purl will be featured as Venus; she’s backed by a barbershop quartet. For further information, call (818) 780-2240. . . . Playwright Edward Sakamoto and Dr. Andrew K. Wong will receive city proclamations at East West Players’ annual fund-raising dinner June 18. For information, call (213) 660-0366.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: The comedy team of Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney has taken the town by storm in “The Kathy and Mo Show: Parallel Lives” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Said Lawrence Christon in The Times: “Like Lily Tomlin, Najimy and Gaffney have a talent for absorbing the tempos, images, phrases and topical concerns of contemporary life and turning them out with an uncanny sense of the symbolic detail.”

From F. Kathleen Foley in Drama-Logue: “Switching characters and moods as effortlessly as clotheshorses try on new outfits, Najimy and Gaffney present a rich range of characters, capturing not only the humor of their flawed, funny, very human creations, but a rare, more poignant side as well.”

Said the Herald-Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “Their timing is at its finest when they’re portraying feminist poets reading in a Women’s Cafe--’a chemical-, hostile-free, male-free environment.’ The ‘Big Sister Show’ consists of lines like ‘We are birth. We are fetal. We are afterbirth.’ ”

From the Daily News’ Tom Jacobs: “Perhaps surprisingly for two women who promote themselves as feminist performers, there isn’t much anger to their work. They don’t ridicule people, and they don’t preach. Rather, they stick closely to characters and institutions they basically approve of and gently, lovingly satirize them.”

In the L.A. Weekly, Bill Raden found that “At its best, the two-woman show of comic sketches is a thoughtful, clever and funny feminist assault against the contradictions of a hostile, homophobic and male-oriented world. At its less than best, the show’s self-indulgent strain of sentimental pathos occasionally carries its 13 vignettes into unwelcome tedium.”