A ‘Wedding’ of Conflict and Rebirth

Milcha Sanchez-Scott, whose “Roosters” played earlier this season at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, returns Friday with “Stone Wedding,” a piece created in collaboration with LATC’s Latino Theatre Lab.

“They wanted the actors and playwright to bring it along together,” Sanchez-Scott said of the Ford Foundation, which funded the project. “So really, it’s the actors’ plays in many ways. They decided what it would be about: their parents going through the Korean War.” For the playwright, that theme of war and loss also yielded a story about the opportunity for rebirth and healing.

“Although the stories are theirs, there’s a lot of me in there too,” Sanchez-Scott said. “Sometimes it felt like I was wandering into someone else’s dream, trying to influence it. It was always a push/pull with them--because actors, in order to act, need linear logic: ‘What’s my motivation?’ And the playwright is trying to get the overview picture, what the full meaning is. So their job is to ground me, and my job is to try to get up.”

Jose Luis Valenzuela directs E.J. Castillo, Evelina Fernandez, Marcos Loya (who also wrote the show’s musical score), Julio Medina, Angela Moya, Lupe Ontiveros, Susan Powell, Marco Rodriguez and Valente Rodriguez.

An “Equus”-type confessional between psychiatrist and patient is the setting for Tom Cole’s “Medal of Honor Rag,” newly opened at Theatre 40. “When the play was originally produced in 1976, it was ahead of its time,” said director David Charles Keaton. “People just didn’t want to think about Vietnam then--or deal with the way they had treated the vets.”

Cole’s work was inspired by a 1971 New York Times article about Sgt. Dwight Johnson, one of only 73 black Americans awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “D.J. won the Medal for killing (more than 20) people in Vietnam,” Keaton noted. “Everyone in his company was killed; when he saw it, he went nuts and started shooting people. Now he’s carrying around a tremendous burden of grief. The message? No more war.”

And speaking of no more war: Arthur Kopit’s rarely performed dark comedy, “The End of the World” (1984), opens Friday at the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana. Joel Cotter directs.

“The character at the center is a playwright, who’s commissioned by an eccentric millionaire to write a play about nuclear disarmament,” said Cotter. “The playwright (acts like) a detective and pursues the commission as if he were Philip Marlowe--interviewing generals, two war-gamers, a university professor. They all have interesting viewpoints about what nuclear arsenals mean in terms of our safety.

“Their wordy monologues show how ridiculous the whole situation is,” Cotter added. “I think the theme of the play is what the playwright finds out: that there is no solution to the nuclear question. The only solution is to disarm. Yes, it’s definitely an anti-war piece. It’s also about what happens when you find something out, how that need-to-know affects your acceptance of responsibility. Once you know, you have to try to do something.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: It’s humor of the lavatory kind in Robin Schiff’s “Ladies’ Room” at the Tiffany Theatre. Kim Friedman directs.

Said The Times’ Sylvie Drake: “Friedman has picked a strong company who know how to navigate this sort of broad, unabashedly commercial sitcomedy. And while the text never rises much about the toilet bowel waterline, it is good-humored enough to remain relatively inoffensive.”

From Dick Lochte in Los Angeles Magazine: “Schiff endows (the actresses) with terrific comedy material, from bitchy dishing to loony philosophizing. Friedman has them psyched up and superbly timed. The only character to be shortchanged in both lines and execution is the token male.”

Grumped the Daily News’ Jody Leader: “With bathroom humor, even the funniest jokes get tiresome after awhile. . . . The play opens and ends with a waitress sitting on the toilet. This is glorified situation comedy, with a rehash of stereotyped characters thrown in for easy laughs.”

Another thumbs-down came from Alison Sloane in the Los Angeles Reader: “While this witless assault on womanhood might have been an amusing short sketch, it becomes an annoyingly juvenile piece of theater. The offensive material quickly loses its shock value.”

Said Polly Warfield in Drama-Logue: “Half a century after Clare Booth Luce shocked the ‘30s with her frank depiction of man-hungry females in ‘The Women,’ despite all the women’s lib hullabaloo, Schiff’s play devastatingly makes its subtle point with humor. Things haven’t changed that much.”

From the L.A. Weekly’s Tom Provenzano: “If situation comedy can be considered an art form, this production is the pinnacle of the genre. Schiff has taken her simple Groundlings sketch far beyond the typically funny-but-flawed theater piece into an expertly crafted, fully realized play.”