STAGE REVIEW : ‘Family Baggage’ More Therapy Than Theater

There’s the little matter of truth in advertising. “Family Baggage” at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre is billed as theatre--as a play.

It isn’t any such thing.

The co-writers of this series of therapeutic skits, Errol Strider and Lou Montgomery, appear in the presentation, though Strider’s wife Rochelle Alicia sometimes takes Montgomery’s place. They are credited in press releases as actors and therapists. The former they may be, but not here. In “Family Baggage” the therapist takes the spotlight, along with the intermission huckstering of their videos and workshops.

The subject is “adult children” of dysfunctional families, the “co-dependent” person. Strider and Montgomery define this term “depending on someone who’s depending on something that’s not reliable.” They mean any addiction, from alcohol to drugs to power to you name it. They include Jewish mothers addicted to domineering and fathers addicted to fondling their children.

They are the voice of the “pity-me generation” of the ‘90s, an outgrowth of the “stroke-me generation” of the ‘80s and the basic “me generation” of the ‘70s. They want to live in “Father Knows Best” and be grown-up Bettys and Buds, forgetting that life isn’t like that. That’s not how character is built, nor great works, nor nations. It’s sad that children sometimes have a rough time making it into adulthood, but Darwin’s survival of the fittest tells why.

It may not be a balm to the pity-me’s, but one has to stop and think. Happy, bland existences do not create a need to make something of yourself. Without dysfunctional families we wouldn’t have had Michelangelo or Da Vinci, the work of Freud or the genius of Eugene O’Neill. We wouldn’t even have the humor of Neil Simon, whose “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is as human and loving a picture of a dysfunctional family as you can find.

Without dysfunctional families, Strider and Montgomery would probably be doing community theater somewhere in vapid giddiness. Instead, Strider is president of Creative Recovery Inc., according to the program, and has “developed a new paradigm for creative communication called Creative Recovery Training which supports people and organizations in making the shift from a co-dependent/addictive model to a co-creative model for personal and interpersonal wholeness.” These workshops are then advertised in the program.

Strider is an operative mime, and Montgomery can work up a tear or two when her lines require it, but they should be grateful to their dysfunctional families for providing them with careers, and handle their family baggage with affection for the blessings it contains.

At 4401 W. 8th St.,; Wednesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m.; mat. Sunday, 2 p.m.; indefinitely. $18-$25; (213) 939-1128 o r (714) 740-2000.