Writer’s Suicide Puts ‘Cleansed’ in a Tragic Framework

In the few brief years that constituted her professional career, playwright Sarah Kane was both lionized and pilloried in British theatrical circles. Kane’s plays, with their graphic scenes of sex, torture and mutilation, were decried by many as pure filth and just as passionately defended by luminaries, such as Harold Pinter, who praised the brilliance of her dark vision.

When Kane killed herself in 1999 at age 28, speculation that critical drubbing had hastened her death sparked widespread reassessment of the playwright’s life and works. Her harshest critics issued anguished recantations. Her intimates warned against judging Kane’s sparse canon in light of her self-annihilation. Kane’s suicide, they argued, should be viewed as incidental, a sidebar to her autonomous artistry.

Viewing the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s production of Kane’s “Cleansed” at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana, that distinction becomes impossible. Without the context of Kane’s suicide, the dismal and lubricious exchanges that constitute “Cleansed” would seem depressingly gratuitous. In light of Kane’s death, they are tragic. This is not so much a play as a sustained shriek--a cry for help that went unanswered.

The setting is an abandoned university that houses a mysterious institution presided over by Tinker (Jay Fraley), a tortured torturer of ambivalent sexuality who doles out drugs and punishments to his terrified patients-prisoners.

Part mental hospital, part concentration camp, Tinker’s domain is the arena for continual atrocities, both physical and psychological.

The inmates of these hellish precincts are hurtin’ for certain. A bereaved sister (Larissa Tidwell) engages in incest with the spirit of her dead brother (Scott Caster). Gay lovers (Bryan Jennings and Stephen Wagner) try to forge a sustaining emotional alliance, while the hatchet-wielding Tinker whittles away their humanity--along with their vital protuberances. (Puppet rats feed freely on the bounty of severed limbs.) In turn, Tinker struggles for some psychological connection with a sex slave (Molly Dewane), and a gentle boy (Scott Barber), thwarted in love, hangs himself.

Director Dave Barton excavates his material to the exacting depths of a conscientious gravedigger, while an intrepid cast bares all and dares all pursuing Kane’s fool’s fire into the boneyard.

Kane’s point, such as it is, is that cruelty abounds in this wicked world, and all human love is doomed from the outset. Sadly, the kind of barbarity seen in “Cleansed” is not beyond imagining; it is the stuff of daily headlines. What seemed beyond Kane’s imagining was the bounteous potential of human charity and true love. Apparently, she ended her life without that ameliorating knowledge.

F. Kathleen Foley

“Cleansed,” Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; July 3 only, 8 p.m. Ends July 7. $15. (714) 547-4688. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

An Optimistic Vision of

Emotional Traumas

Life is full of surprises and, in British playwright Sarah Daniels’ unabashedly optimistic vision, many of those surprises can be self-transforming, no matter how late in life they occur.

At the outset, the opportunity for such transformations seems long past for the solitary 65-year-old spinster at the heart of Daniels’ “The Madness of Esme and Shaz” at the Celebration Theatre. A pensioner who long ago severed all ties with her family, Esme plans nothing more ambitious for her retirement years than to learn to play the piano. Patricia Fraser’s feisty, charismatic performance as Esme quickly nails the prickly defensiveness of a wounded soul who hides behind religious devotion, not as a path to spirituality but as insulation from the world’s sharp edges.

Esme’s carefully constructed fortress (manifested in Donna Marquet’s all-gray set) crumbles when she reluctantly agrees to become the caretaker for a troubled lesbian niece she’s never known. After having “come off the worse in a confrontation with a penal institution” (Daniels loves to play with British euphemisms for tiptoeing around unpleasant realities), Shaz (a convincingly angry and suspicious Annmarie Hehir) has spent the last 13 years in a psychiatric ward. As a result, her tenuous grip on socialized behavior soon pits her against Esme’s deep-rooted rules of propriety.

In a riff on “Shirley Valentine” meets “Girl, Interrupted,” their conflicts spark psychological rebirth in both women, after forcing them to confront the roots of their problems. The buried traumas aren’t hard to guess, but they’re exposed with credible and effective dramatic logic.

Director Betsy Burke skillfully modulates Esme and Shaz’s evolving emotional relationship (though her staging sometimes resorts to unnecessary flourishes, such as distracting character entrances from the rear aisles). Supporting performances from Peggy Dunne, Laura Gardner, Seema Rahmani and Kara Dahl Russell are less precise than those of the leads, but they hit their emotional marks with acceptable clarity.

Not fully solved, however, is the play’s uneasy waffling between gritty realism--including the horrors of sexual abuse, self-mutilation and a dehumanized penal system--and fairy-tale happy endings that depend far too much on the kindness of strangers.

Life may be full of surprises, but to see miraculous generosity of spirit spontaneously blooming in even the peripheral characters situates the slow, difficult and very partial process of self-transformation in the realm of wishful thinking. Philip Brandes

“The Madness of Esme and Shaz,” Celebration Theatre, 7051B Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends July 21. $15-$20. (323) 957-1884. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

‘Titus’ Stirs Shakespeare Into a Tantalizing Stew

There are two ways to view “Titus Tartar” at City Garage. You can keep your brain on high alert, striving to catch every nuance of Albert Ostermaier’s fascinating take on Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.” Or you can fall asleep. Passive observation is not an option.

Ostermaier’s text, translated by Anthony Vivis with additional text by Charles A. Duncombe Jr., is not so much a deconstruction as it is a demolition job. The complicated plot and characters of Shakespeare’s original are reduced to mere backdrop for Ostermaier’s flowing, fanciful verbiage.

Stark white mannequins are part of the backdrop in Duncombe’s eerie production design. In the play’s opening monologue, a man (Paul M. Rubenstein) laments: “Do you know what it’s like to have your art taken away from you?” The artist’s powerlessness in society, the yawning divide between pure creative expression and commercial success, the particular danger of politicized art are prevalent themes--powerful points, although belabored. A prominent poet and playwright in his native Germany, Ostermaier reiterates his plaint about the artist’s sad lot to a narcissistic degree.

To illustrate the perils of ideological compromise, Ostermaier trots out Leni Riefenstahl (Katharina Lejona) and Ezra Pound (Rubenstein) as cautionary examples of artists whose work was subsumed in the pathological mass culture of fascism.

The Hollywood Ten are invoked early on. “Yes, I named names,” a character defiantly admits. Faced with artistic suppression, he chooses betrayal.

The connection of all this with “Titus Andronicus” is intriguingly speculative. Perhaps Lavinia (Maia Brewton), Titus’ tongue-less daughter, is meant as an exponent of the voiceless artist. And maybe this doppelganger Titus, played here by Stephan Pocock and Bo Roberts, is intended to emphasize the duality of the artist--again, that painful gap between culture and creativity.

At least, those are possible interpretations. As for you, let your gray matter be your guide. The most certain elements in this tantalizing stew are the combined artistic efforts of director Frederique Michel and Duncombe--a proven team who continue to challenge area audiences with the purposely arcane. F.K.F.

“Titus Tartar,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. Friday-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends July 21. $20. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.