After 20 Years, ‘Watering’ Resurfaces

Twenty years ago, Lyle Kessler’s Vietnam drama, “The Watering Place,” opened on Broadway. It closed the same night.

“It was devastating for a young playwright,” admits the author, who’s now overseeing a revival of the work, opening Thursday at the Powerhouse in Santa Monica. Since its 1970 debut, Kessler put the play away, determined to make some changes on it . . . someday. Although other productions have been mounted without his permission, he’s given his approval to Dallas Vogeler’s current staging--and done some judicious editing.

“I’ve cut it from a three- to a two-act play,” Kessler noted, “gotten rid of a lot of the repetitions, the overly symbolic stuff. I don’t even remember what critics said when it opened on Broadway (without benefit of out-of-town previews). But there were a lot of problems. We’d had a change of directors, some of the casting wasn’t right. And at the time, people didn’t want to see anything about Vietnam. But this is just as much about violence at home, the kind of violence that’s perpetuated inside the family.”

The Santa Monica-based writer (whose most famous work, “Orphans,” premiered locally at the Matrix before going on to New York, London--and film) added that “All my plays have to do with some inner conflict, something I might not even know I have--and this is the way I deal with them. But with this one, so much time has passed. I look at it now and say, ‘I wrote that?’ ‘The Watering Place’ is still me, but I’m not close to it. I almost don’t recognize it.”

In the refamiliarizing process, Kessler chose “to relate to the play as it was then, not as I am now,” eschewing the 20/20 hindsight of 20 year’s distance. As for the subject’s time-specificity, “It could be any war--although it does take place in the ‘60s. But it deals with the thin line of exaggerated reality, the emotions of family, and not particularly the Vietnam experience. So I don’t think of it as a period piece. The play is so claustrophobic it’s almost cut off from time; it’s a world in and of itself.”

LA MIRADA BOUND: Barbara Bain says goodby to sleek, and hello to Brooklynese and sensible shoes in her role as Kate Jerome, the put-upon mother in Neil Simon’s mostly autobiographical “Broadway Bound,” now playing at La Mirada Theatre.

“I have to believe myself as her--then I can do that with the audience,” Bain said of the decidedly unglamorous role. “They want to believe; it’s up to you not to let them down.”

Although her own life experience hardly mirrors Kate’s, “I grew up in a big city (Chicago)--and I had big eyes. I saw a lot of these women. Their primary thrust in life was their children and their house. Kate has two sons, I have two daughters. So I understand that investment. I’ve done it.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: “And Baby Makes Seven,” Paula Vogel’s parenthood tale of two lesbians and their gay roommate, is now playing at LATC. Peggy Shannon directs Kim O’Kelley, Valerie Landsburg and Peter Anthony Jacobs.

Said The Times’ Don Shirley: “(It) emerges as nothing more than an amusing extended sketch. Although there are suggestions of complex issues, down deep in the subtext, Vogel and Shannon appear disinclined to dig below the showy veneer at the top of the play.”

From John C. Mahoney in the Downtown News: “‘Baby’ has a tantalizing theme, conveyed through a delicious stream of film and literary allusion by a trio of excellent actors who get to engage in multiple cartoon characterizations. It is as clever and weightless as juggling feathers.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Ed Kaufman enjoyed “lots of comic dialogue, blackouts and a stageful of schtick, with occasional profundity. At times the audience gets way ahead of the onstage action . . . but Shannon keeps things so pitched and charged that we never seem to bog down for too long.”

Daily Variety’s Kathleen O’Steen noted that “without a strong dramatic premise, Vogel’s play is actually more of a short ironic elegy to the argument that reality can drag down the human spirit. To this production’s credit though, is an acting trio that injects a sense of fun and playfulness.”