This ‘Cardenio’ Doesn’t Miss Shakespeare

Charles Hamilton, the late Shakespearean scholar, created a storm of controversy when he seized on an anonymous document at the British Museum Library and proclaimed it a long-lost work by William Shakespeare. By Hamilton’s reckoning, the play, loosely based on Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” was the apocryphal “Cardenio,” a lost masterpiece supposedly co-written by Shakespeare and his associate John Fletcher around 1612.

After one views the play, being presented by the Lone Star Ensemble at 2100 Square Feet, its authorship seems even more debatable.

An overwrought drama fraught with kinky plot elements and a B-story that plays like a class project in remedial playwriting, “Cardenio” is more strikingly bizarre than it is brilliant. If Shakespeare were indeed involved, his powers were evidently on the wane.

What is most remarkable about this production is the direction by James Kerwin, a young innovator who has converted a problematic play into a crackling entertainment of a most precocious stripe.

Purists beware: Kerwin plays fast and loose with his material, employing a sophisticated array of mixed media in a staging that is cinematically fluid. Character’s monologues are internalized, expressed primarily through the beautifully realized video segments that are incorporated throughout. The second act segues into a largely extraneous subplot, a comedic interlude with an oddly bloody climax.

The meat of the play concerns the struggle for power between the usurper Fernando (Corey Hayes) and his brother Cardenio (Steve Lipinsky), the rightful heir. Fernando is obsessed with Luscinda (Megan Henning), Cardenio’s love, who kills herself rather than submit to Fernando’s lustful designs. Undeterred, Fernando absconds with Luscinda’s corpse, secreting the body in his private quarters for his perverse delectation, a sin that must be avenged at last.

This is twisted stuff. Yet Kerwin and his attractive young cast deftly straddle the fine line between parody and sincerity, only occasionally slipping into excess. The Lone Star Ensemble is a vibrant company that bears watching; its “Venus and Adonis” was well-received last season, and this is another worthy effort.

F. Kathleen Foley

“Cardenio,” 2100 Square Feet Theatre, 5615 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. (Sept. 15, 3 p.m.; dark Aug. 29-Sept. 1.) Ends Sept. 15. $15. (323) 650-5111. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Fleck’s Happy Hour:

Existential Mayhem

In “Nothin’ Beats Pussy,” playing late-night Saturdays at the Evidence Room, performance artist John Fleck offers a veritable happy hour of Dadaist pyrotechnics. Along the way, he reconfirms his genius at existential mayhem.

At the outset, our body-miked host works the lobby, offering highballs all around. Using his inherited parental collection of kitsch recordings as schematic fodder, Fleck’s subsequent direct-address musings carry multiple meanings, starting with the title.

That ostensibly refers to Fleck’s latest persona, a would-be starlet of sub-Joey Heatherton stature. Her trek to Hollywood debauchery intersects with Fleck’s own flight from Cleveland to Screenland, with blond ambition, familial requirements and orifice maintenance the predominant motifs.

Possessing a classical technique tailor-made for the roles Geoffrey Rush keeps landing, Fleck gambols in jagged immediacy.

He pays attendees cash for their onstage participation. He juggles low-camp burlesque and Senor Wences-style puppetry to embody Pussy and her co-star Del Cracker, singing in a manner suggesting the lovechild of Johnny Ray and Yma Sumac. And when something goes awry, Fleck incorporates it with unparalleled reflexive speed.

The piece is less conclusive than its creator, transitions still evolving and the resolution hastily achieved, despite co-director Randee Trabitz’s knowing eye. Still, for demonstrating how to render life and art indivisible, nothin’ beats Fleck.

David C. Nichols

“Nothin’ Beats Pussy,” Evidence Room, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A. Saturdays, 10:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 7. $10-12. (213) 381-7118. Mature audiences. Running time: 70 minutes.

*

Revived ‘Black Boys’ Retains Pain, Urgency

Proud, wounded, defiant or serene, the voices in Keith Antar Mason’s “for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much” are all saying: Don’t define me, much less judge me, when you haven’t tried to understand me.

Written in the spirit of Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf,” Mason’s assemblage of poetic narratives and dances may be 20 years old, but it continues to speak with urgency and yearning in a revival at 4305 Village Theatre in Leimert Park.

In America, black men are “just numbers,” the piece declares. To drive home the point, each of the six actors wears a T-shirt emblazoned with a random number.

In moments of brotherly unity, the performers emphasize Mason’s key statements in an almost musical overlay of echoing voices or give their bodies over to the throbbing rhythms of funk and jazz. Separately, they shift through various identities.

Some of these characters cry out in protest: a young man who fears he’s being dismissed as just another statistic as he dies of stab wounds, or a young professional who, after working late one night, finds himself in a deserted parking lot surrounded by police, who assume he committed a nearby rape.

Other characters try to cut through societal assumptions, going so far as to take black women to task for readily believing the same stereotypes that everyone else does.

Under William White’s direction, the show pulses with life, surging to reverberant shouts (“I found God in me”) and quieting to moments of introspection. The tremble of sexual awakening, the pain of feeling marginalized, the peace of being happy with oneself--and much more--are deftly conveyed by Michael Broughton, Paul Eric Jerome, Devon Todd, Carlton Wilborn, Jonaton Wyne and Christopher Hines (who on Sundays is replaced by Evan Reynolds).

Further texture is provided by the live drumming of Dele Adefemi and the deft dance of light devised by Kathi O’Donohue.

Daryl H. Miller

“for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much,” 4305 Village Theatre, 4305 Degnan Ave., Leimert Park. Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 31. $20. (323) 293-1230 or (323) 293-2395. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

*

Powerful ‘Slavery’

Celebrates Survivors

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook an indispensable task, conducting interviews with surviving slaves. The accounts of those former slaves, whose experiences under the “peculiar institution” ranged from the benign to the horrific, remain a vital historical testament, filled with humor, pathos and enduring dread.

As a drama student at Santa Monica College, Jonathan Payne cobbled those interviews into a play, “Slavery,” which received the 2002 Kennedy Center John Cauble Short Play Award for Playwriting. A sort of “Spoon River” of color, Payne’s play is a simply structured piece consisting of the slaves’ personal accounts as monologues, heavily interspersed with the spirituals and the folk music of the period. That indigenous music is every bit as evocative as the oral accounts. The famous hymn “Wade in the Water” takes on chilling new meaning when one realizes that the words were not only significant of baptismal cleansing but also covert advice on how to elude a pack of bloodhounds.

Payne’s staging of his own play at the Powerhouse is lucid, clean and undeniably powerful, even when it veers into the histrionic. This is foolproof material, the kind of historically riveting stuff that could command interest if spoken in a monotone.

Occasionally, Payne’s performers, including Payne himself, overstate. A little initial restraint on the part of the ensemble would help the momentum build to the climactic final scenes.

Still, the prevalent tone of fierceness, mingled with a bracing dose of jocularity, attests to the remarkable resilience of these vibrant and unbowed survivors. Despite a few irregularities in the staging, Payne’s poignant piece succeeds as both social document and drama.

F.K.F.

“Slavery,” Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. (No performances Aug. 23 or 25.) Ends Sept. 15. $15. (866) 633-6246. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

*

Wrenching Story Is

Only a Family Affair

The autobiographical solo show--those always candid, often comical confessionals derived from an individual performer’s personal experience--are endemic to the small-theater scene. Always on the lookout for that ever-elusive dream project, many actors attempt to craft their own, mining their pasts for dramatic material.

Sometimes, a particularly artful practitioner will strike dramatic gold. However, there’s an inherent risk in such endeavors. Such highly personal accounts, however keenly felt and rendered, may not always make the transition from the genealogical to the general.

Such is the case with “Looking for Louie,” Stacie Chaiken’s solo show at Stages. The story primarily concerns her great-grandfather, Louie, a mysterious figure who disappeared from the family tree shortly after his emigration from Russia in the early 1900s. Offering snippets from her own childhood along the way, Chaiken sets out to trace Louie’s fate and uncover a long-suppressed family scandal associated with her elusive relative.

Chaiken is an ebullient actor with an obvious enthusiasm for her subject. However, despite Stephanie Shroyer’s meticulous direction and Ian Walker’s evocative live cello music, her overly exhaustive account of a long-ago family trauma seems suspiciously self-indulgent, a family skeleton that she unearths and rattles to dubious emotional effect. The whiff of unconscious capriciousness underlying the tale doesn’t help.

Certain passages, as when Chaiken leaves her then-husband without a note or a word of explanation, may be meant as necessary background. However, since the marriage itself is so scantily explored, Chaiken’s action seems dangerously off-putting.

So, too, does her relentless badgering of her grandfather for information regarding his painful past, information she insists on pursuing even when he begs her to desist.

The video segments in which Chaiken’s 96-year-old grandfather finally reveals the long-kept family secret are genuinely wrenching and cathartic. For the most part, however, the story, no matter how well-intentioned and well-told, holds limited appeal for a general audience. F.K.F.

“Looking for Louie,” Stages Theatre Center, 1540 North McCadden Place, Hollywood. Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 4 p.m.; Mondays, 8 p.m. $15. (323) 465-1010. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.