‘Autumn Elegy’: Enter Threat of Death

What happens to a 50-year marriage when cancer enters the picture?

That’s the premise of Charlene Redick’s four-person drama, “Autumn Elegy,” opening Friday at Long Beach’s International City Theatre in its West Coast premiere. “It’s a story of married love--and the process of saying goodby,” noted the playwright. “There are also themes of control over our destiny when illness sets in, choices, autonomy, independence, separateness, togetherness, isolation versus connection.”

The characters are fictional, inspired by the Indiana-based writer’s belief “that we’re ultimately alone in this world.”

She reports little audience resistance to the subject of death. Fresh from its staging last spring at the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, “Autumn” will also open in August at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. “Younger people were some of the most accepting of it,” Redick recalled. “But I would think it was perhaps more evocative for older people, because they’re living the things that we’re dramatizing up there.”

Deborah LaVine directs.

THEATER FILE: Actors for Themselves’ new season opens this weekend at the Matrix. Adam Arkin, Nancy Lenehan, Richard Murphy and James Sloyan are in the first show, the late Larry Shue’s Czechoslovakia-set “Wenceslas Square,” staged by Lee Shallat. After Aug. 13, it will play in rep with Alexander Gelman’s “A Man With Connections” (on life in the modern-day Soviet Union), directed by Kristoffer Tabori and starring Charles Hallahan and Carolyn Seymour.

Susan Berman, Jonathan Hogan and James Morrison head the cast of Lee Blessing’s “Down the Road,” which will have its world premiere Aug. 13 at the La Jolla Playhouse. . . . A Directors’ Theatre’s first annual young playwrights contest has announced its winners. Ji Yoon Francis Kim’s “L.A. Fantasia,” Login Abbitt’s “Scratch” and Michelle Fugate’s “The Unborn Problem” were selected from over 70 entries. The writers will receive $1,000 each and their plays will be staged this winter at the theater.

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: Politics meets art in “Dangerous Games” (subtitled “Two Tango Pieces”), conceived, choreographed and directed by Graciela Daniele--and co-written by Jim Lewis--which recently premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Said Sylvie Drake in The Times: “There is no way to misunderstand this smoldering, savagely sensual dance theater piece. There can only be understanding it less--adding fewer layers of political meaning to action already highly charged with sexual politics.”

From the (San Diego) Tribune’s Bill Hagen: “Daniele fuses not only theater and dance, but also tango and ballet. Her choreography, even as it simmers with sensuality and flexes with raw power, is stunningly fluid and graceful. It’s driven by the insistent music of Argentine composer Astor Piazzola.”

In the San Diego Union, Welton Jones challenged its effectiveness in dealing with Argentine atrocities: “Such nightmares deserve more interpretation than Broadway dancers and tango bands can provide. All the power of poetry is not too much. Otherwise, the foul suspicion of shock for shock’s sake is a depressing possibility.”

And from William E. Fark in the (Escondido) Times-Advocate: “Violence attends every sensual step to Piazzola’s stirring music. William Finn’s lyrics have less interest and relevance, but it doesn’t matter. Movement is meaning, and the groin is the primary source of communication.”