‘End of World’ Is at Hand

It’s bombs away for Arthur Kopit’s rarely performed dark comedy, “The End of the World” (sometimes subtitled “With Symposium to Follow”), which opened last week 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. 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.”

“Two Alone,” a pair of one-man one-acts by Ralph Hunt, opens Friday at Stages, under the direction of Guy Giarrizzo.

“The pieces are thematically related,” said Giarrizzo, who was recently appointed artistic director at First Stage. “Two very different men are at a crossroads in their lives--deciding if they want to live or die. ‘L 305’ is about a poetry professor. One fateful day, the poetry he’s reciting in class begins to act as a catalyst: revealing his inner soul, informing on his life. And he begins to slowly unravel.

“The second one, ‘Siamese Twin Kills Brother for Bad Breath,” is about an urban lowlife, a hustler. For him, television acts as the catalyst. Quite literally, his own image appears to him on the screen--and the television image becomes another aspect of the live actor. Both characters have avoided taking responsibility for their own lives; now they’re forced to confront themselves. Both pieces are about the nature of truth: What is illusion and what is reality.”

“Faithful, Joyful and Triumphant: Holiday Voices of AIDS,” James Carroll Pickett’s compilation of letters dramatizing the AIDS crisis (by people with AIDS or ARC--and their significant others) opens tonight at the Chapel of St. Francis and St. Mary of the Angels, performed by Michael Kearns and Dale Raoul. Throughout the month, the piece will travel to other area venues. Information: (213) 250-4187.

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: “The Model Apartment,” Donald Margulies’ dark comedy about the after-effects of the Holocaust on a couple of survivors and their schizophrenic adult daughter, is playing at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Roberta Levitow directs Zero Hubbard, Milton Selzer, Chloe Webb and Erica Yohn.

Said The Times’ Dan Sullivan: “What to do about Debby? It’s not just a problem for her father and mother. It’s a problem for Margulies. Here’s an example of a character too real for the play around her. Or perhaps of a play too unreal for its central figure.”

From Thomas O’Connor in the Register: “ ‘The Model Apartment’ may take on more than its character structure can support. If Debby is a comic terror, (her parents) are--as written now--too conspicuously second bananas, set-up stooges for her dark punch lines. Their monologues come from rhetorical necessity, not character.”

Noted the Herald Examiner’s Richard Stayton: “There are so many negative models on display that the real challenge is to find something redeeming in ‘The Model Apartment.’ A search for the redeemable, while admirable, is in this circumstance a long haul.”

In Drama-Logue, F. Kathleen Foley found that: “At some point early on, one comes to the welcome realization that one is watching a profoundly important new work. Margulies’ tightly knit story, laden with layer after layer of artfully devised metaphor, is a real find--a compelling family drama rebounding with large truths.”

The L.A. Weekly’s Tom Provenzano wrote: “(The) sledgehammer symbolism in this play about Holocaust survivors provides plenty of intellectual questions, but does not offer much theater to experience. . . . This play is not a story but a long moment of cramped suffering, alleviated only by universally fine performances.”

Said Tom Stringer in the Reader: “The conflicts in the play are classical: parent vs. child, the present vs. the past, even the living vs. the dead. Margulies takes some great risks, mixing comedy into this tragic family situation. But his vision remains dark, a cruel look at involuntary separation from the perspective of a child.”

And from Tom Jacobs in the Daily News: “(The play) is thick with symbolism, some of it too obvious, some of it too obscure. . . . But much of the dialogue is very funny, and Levitow’s production is quite good. Chloe Webb is rapidly establishing herself as one of the finest actresses around.”