Page’s ‘Golden Girls’ on the Right Track

A different set of “Golden Girls” sprints into action this week, as the newest offering by Louise Page (“Salonika”) opens Friday on South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage.

“It’s about a British women’s track team,” said actress Margaret Marx, who plays one of the runners. “They’ve been running freely, without corporate sponsorship. Then they get the sponsorship-- which doesn’t corrupt their integrity, but it does influence it. Now they have to adhere to a rating regimen, break down everything they eat, wear certain clothes, use a certain shampoo. Everything becomes not theirs anymore. And they’re also feeling pressure because of the (steroid) drug scene.”

To help get into shape for their roles, Marx and the other “runners” (Gail Grate, Michele Lamar Richards and Suzanne Stone) spent time at UC Irvine working out with the track coach, learning the basic sprinting drills, and watching Olympic champions Edwin Moses and Daley Thompson train. “They’re like zephyrs,” the actress said in amazement. “It’s a beautiful devotion. But they were in awe of us too--to see us work, take our roles so seriously.”

David Chambers directs.

Performance art takes to Barnsdall Park in “New Terrain: A Performance Series,” playing at the Park’s Gallery Theatre Friday and Saturday (local artist Donald Krieger and the Baltimore-based musical trio Lambs Eat Ivy) and June 17 and 18 (musicians Dark Bob and Linda Albertano).

Krieger’s “The Happy Birthday Show” “is a rewrite of something I did a long time ago,” he noted. “I still had the slides, but oddly enough, I couldn’t find the script. So I was forced into writing a new one, which has turned this into a whole new piece. I took the original visual ideas of what goes on at a birthday party--getting blindfolded and spun around, being spanked, the pinata , baking cakes, blowing out candles, opening presents--and used them as containers for metaphors. The new script is very much about rites of passage, time, getting older, age--things like that.”

The piece also marks a return to the stage for Krieger (“A Boy’s Life,” “Rocket”), who’s spent less time performing lately and more time writing. One of those works is his tribute to inventor Nikola Tesla, “The Tesla Project,” which opens June 17 at LACE. As for the dual roles: “With ‘The Happy Birthday Show,’ I’m basically the performer/director. With ‘Tesla,’ I’m more the coordinator/art director/writer. I’m close to it, but not intimately involved every minute. I just drop in and out of rehearsals and wave at people.”

Twenty-five songs make up Michael Champagne and Elliot Weiss’ “Bittersuite: Songs of Experience,” opening Monday at the Back Alley.

“The show is about adults coming to grips with their childhood dreams,” said Rick Roemer, who performed in the original 1984 Off Broadway production and is wearing multiple hats here (as actor/director/producer). “Sometimes those dreams don’t turn out for you. Like when I was 6, I wanted to be a fireman; there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t be. But as I grew up there were reasons, walls society puts in front of you. So you readjust your life, readjust your values and (your) dreams--and go on.”

Don’t expect any of these experiences to be represented in dialogue. “There’s no plot, no costumes, just us and the material,” Roemer said of the five-person piece. “But every song is like a play you can act. It’s not just ‘step/turn/smile.’ The show works best when the cast wears its heart on its sleeve.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: A series of vignettes satirize racial stereotypes in George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” currently playing at the Mark Taper Forum.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “This is a show that takes contradiction and runs with it, usually with humor, often with anger, never with self-hate.”

From Tom Jacobs of the Daily News: “The theme that runs through most of these sketches is a simple one: You deny your past only at your own peril. That may have special resonance for blacks, but it surely applies to everyone.”

Drama-Logue’s David Galligan approached the play “ready for another tirade, expecting the anger that has erupted in latter-day black dramas. But this ‘Museum’ has something else on its mind. It wants to dust off the cartoon, hold it up for examination and show us the ridiculousness of it all.”

Tom O’Connor, in the Orange County Register, noted that “Wolfe isn’t afraid to snap at hands that have fed him, skewering black theater stereotypes into hammy domestic dramas (‘Mama-on-the-Couch plays,’ he calls them) and hand-clapping gospel musicals.”

Said the Herald-Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “Blackout? Black in should be the word after Wolfe’s satire. He cleverly extinguishes the cultural cliches of 1960s Black Power/Black Pride phraseology, but with a sly purpose: To ignite and resurrect their truths.”

Last, from Duane Byrge in the Hollywood Reporter: “ ‘The Colored Museum’ is a sobering and insightful glimpse into black identity. No mere socio-historical delineation of black oppression, however, ‘Museum’ is a red-hot, social skewer, both complex and raw.”