Times drama reviewers look back on Los Angeles’ smaller and children’s theater productions in 1988 : Real Risk-Taking Proves a Treat

My New Year’s wish for L.A. theater is that producers stop talking about the merits of non-traditional casting and do it. I saw only one instance of a starring role cast colorblind in 1988 (a black actress, Gloria Rusch, playing the Theban wife Alkmena in “Amphitryon 38” at the Group Rep).

Otherwise, it wasn’t a timid year. There was plenty of risk-taking. Ray Bradbury’s fey Irish play, “Falling Upward,” at the Melrose Theatre, had the heartfelt nerve to serve Guinness stout and dandelion wine in the same glass, and mix grimy habitues of a village pub with five dandified male tourists in an affectionate fable of acceptance.

Another playwright, Erwin Washington, dared to dramatize the decades-long affair between Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress, Sally Hemmings, in “Sal” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. And at the gay-oriented Celebration Theatre playwright Patricia Montley brashly examined lesbianism and nuns and ex-nuns in “Sisters.”

For a performance stretch, one actress, Dana Anderson, played a sun-bathing pregnant wife while really more than eight months pregnant in Gina Wendkos’ “Ginger Ale Afternoon” at the Cast.

Strong sexual material daunts many actors, but these vividly braved the challenges in 1988: Mako’s serpentine, voyeuristic, homosexual modern-day warrior in “Mishima” at the East-West Players; J. D. Hall’s outrageous fornication with a life-size, blow-up doll in his own parable, “G/E” (a fourth-place finisher in the short-play competition at the Inner City Cultural Center); and Sarah Lilly’s teasing, if-legs-were-swords performance in “The Dummy” at the Powerhouse.

But for sheer nerve, I toast the adult sex shop, paddle-brandishing, bend-over duo of Jacqueline DeHaviland and Hal Groshon in Willard Manus’ raucous explosion of sexual repression, “The Love Boutique,” at the Skylight Theatre. Talk about commitment to craft.

Other performance risks illuminated flawed plays: George Shannon’s sleazy, loud hustler in “Spratt” at the Burbage Theatre; Lawrence Levy’s sublime, convincing young William Shakespeare learning writing tricks from Marlowe in “Marlowe” at the Globe Playhouse--and Fernando Garzon’s macho, Cuban drug-dealing father in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear” at the Callboard.

Also intrepid was playwright Hoyt Hilsman with his playful adaptation of the famous 19th-Century French novel, “The Red and the Black,” in “Stendhal” at the Colony Studio Theater.

Elsewhere, designer Don Llewellyn executed a breathtaking steel-rigged re-creation of a 10-story construction site in Kevin Heelan’s, racially heated, blue-collar “Distant Fires” at the International City Theater in Long Beach.

With fearless brush strokes, The National Theater of the Deaf’s blithesome Chuck Baird, in a local university tour of “The King of Hearts,” actually painted terrific French village scenery on great panels of white paper while scenes unfolded before your eyes.

Svelte Margaret Avery walked with a stoop and donned a gray wig and granny glasses in an endearing portrait of an old lady in “Lucy and Callie” at Inner City. Banks Harper, in a striking hatchet of a performance, wore Appalachian rags that made her look like a scrawny scarecrow in one of my favorites of the year, “A Gift From Heaven,” which reopens next Friday at the Chamber Theatre.

Singer/actress Cheryl Barnes volcanically took on the daunting legacy of Jennifer Holliday in “Dreamgirls” at the Long Beach Civic Light Opera.

Finally, there was a naked man and a couple of toilets with people on them in “The Works of Charles Bukowski” at the eMCee Studios warehouse loft off Skid Row. Some of the cast and audience, in pure Bukowski style, drank booze and smoked cigarettes during the show.

Those were the adventures.