‘First Lady Suite’: Marrying Into History

Presidential wives don’t spring to mind as a natural subject for a musical. After all, there aren’t many common threads to explore in an accidental category of diverse personalities included only by their circumstantial marriage to the elected occupants of the White House.

It took the offbeat talent of composer/playwright Michael John LaChiusa. (“Hello Again,” “The Wild Party”) to recognize that the very capriciousness of these women’s stature--and their different ways of coping with it--is itself a theme rich with creative possibilities. While the result of his fascination--”First Lady Suite”--displays some arbitrary caprices of its own, this witty, quirky musical never fails to charm and engage in a newly revised incarnation courtesy of the Blank Theatre Company.

As director Daniel Henning points out in his program notes, first ladies are our American royalty, achieving prominence by virtue of their social position rather than their accomplishments. Unlike genetic royalty, however, few first ladies were bred for the mantle thrust upon them.

In his fun, inventive staging, Henning has configured the stage as a museum exhibit--complete with photos, historical narrative and newsreel footage on a video display--through which the audience is invited to stroll before the show. The setting is perfect for the striking ensemble opening number, “The First Lady,” in which representatives from various eras gather onstage to introspect about their changing role.

From there, the show is structured into four surreal vignettes featuring, respectively, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower, Bess Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt, each loosely inspired by historical incidents.

The first sequence is an exchange aboard Air Force One in which Jacqueline Kennedy (Bronwen Booth) obsesses over details of her appearance with her long-suffering personal secretary, Mary Gallagher (Heather Lee), who dozes off into a reverie examining the heightened level of visibility spawned by Jackie’s charisma. The whimsical humor darkens as we realize the plane is bringing them to Dallas for the fateful motorcade.

Next, Eydie Alyson gives a luminous performance as a befuddled Mamie Eisenhower drawn into the birth of the civil rights movement, the show’s high point. Alyson recalls the ditsiness of Gracie Allen as her Mamie enlists black opera singer Marian Anderson (Paula Newsome) in a time-travel journey back to confront General Ike (Gregory Jbara) over his wartime fling with his driver (Irene Warner). For Mamie, the personal betrayal of Ike’s adultery and the social tragedy of prejudice are inextricably, and hilariously, linked.

Jbara returns as Bess Truman in a bizarre one-note (but mercifully short) comic bit about the grumpy first lady continuously interrupting a recital by daughter Margaret (Warner).

The final and most visually stylish sequence speculates on the impromptu airplane flight that followed aviator Amelia Earhart’s (Kate Shindle) dinner at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt (Evelyn Halus) and her longtime companion Lorena Hickock (Mary-Pat Green). Leaving gravity and realism behind, the trio ruminate on their era’s fragile emerging possibilities of self-fulfillment for women and the associated high emotional costs.

While LaChiusa’s lyrics sometimes lapse into preciousness (especially in the final sequence), beneath their good-natured comedy are his fresh, surreal historical riffs that are slyly subversive in a way we haven’t seen since “Assassins.”

Philip Brandes

“First Lady Suite,” 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Ends April 14. $30. (323) 661-9827. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

*

‘The Dumb Waiter’ Serves Up Humor, Terror

Harold Pinter’s early one-act, “The Dumb Waiter,” contains all the elements that Pinter would later amplify in his full-length plays. There’s the hallmark interplay of dominance and submission, the existential terror of characters trapped in increasingly inimical circumstances, and, most importantly, the caustic humor that underscores the prevalent dread.

The challenge of Pinter’s plays is that they are blank slates that must be etched with the acid intent of their interpreters. The current production of “The Dumb Waiter” at St. Stephen’s Church in Hollywood is a case in point--well-staged, finely focused and hissing with purpose.

In the play, two working-class hit men, holed up in a bare room, await the go-ahead for their latest “job.” The pun in Pinter’s title is evident.

Both men are “waiters,” but only one is “dumb” enough to question his dominant counterpart about the “organization” that employs them--a line of inquiry that proves lethal. Meanwhile, a dumbwaiter in this supposedly abandoned building creaks and clatters, bearing cryptic notes from an unseen entity upstairs.

Brief and riveting, “The Dumb Waiter” is a curtain-raiser for Pinter’s later career, a blueprint for the dramaturgical mastery that was to come. In director/designer Brian Eatwell’s current staging, the tone is both ludicrous and terrifying, as well it should be. An arena for disorientation, Eatwell’s rat-trap set, lighted with appropriate harshness by Don Fauntleroy, echoes with the dripping water and running toilets of Tyler Bowe’s disturbing sound design.

The technical elements are solid down to the ground, but Eatwell’s true coup is his cast. Stage vets with extensive credits on both sides of the pond--Derrick O’Connor, who plays Gus, the hapless underling, and Michael O’Hagan, who plays Gus’ controlling partner, Ben--are perfectly cast as two British proles whose business just happens to be murder. Weary and craggy, they have the pinpoint timing necessary to infuse Pinter’s seminal exercise with meaning and menace.

F. Kathleen Foley

“The Dumb Waiter,” St. Stephen’s Church, 6128 Yucca St., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends April 7. $20. (323) 655-8587. Running time: 1 hour.

*

In ‘Trust,’ Looking For Someone Better

Poor Becca. Here she sits--bright, young and attractive--attending an out-of-town publishers convention, suffering through a date with another man who’s not in her league and wondering “why she has to pander to the midgets around her.”

Before you feel too sorry for her, though, keep in mind that Becca has a fiance named Cody back home in L.A. He’s an up-and-coming singer, no less--who’s pursuing his own amorous fling with Leah, a faded rock superstar.

In their respective single-minded quests for self-gratification, Cody and Becca deserve each other, though the essential quality ironically spotlighted in the title of Steven Dietz’s “Trust” is, by design, nowhere to be found in The- SpyAnts’ revival at the Hollywood Court Theatre.

Dietz’s play sports betrayal of soap operatic proportions against the gritty backdrop of the music business, laced with ample eroticism--elements that sustain interest in Vincent Castellanos’ capable staging. What it doesn’t have are principal characters inherently worth caring about, and even convincingly depicting them demands nuances that frequently exceed the earnest efforts of a fledgling troupe still honing its performance skills.

Darlene Mann’s jaded Leah is the most fully realized in her hard, cynically frank persona, but there is no arc to her--she’s the same after her affair with Cody as when she starts it. As Cody, the show-biz novice out of his depth as he tries to cope with stardom, Brett Hren is a charismatic presence but emotionally out of his depth as he tries to cope with the fireworks in his rocky relationship. Becca is a perky but complex and still unsolved puzzle as portrayed by Mary Van Luven, who does very well with fury but hasn’t yet found a way to sell the character’s unexpected choices.

“Trust” is one of that curious breed of highly clinical contemporary plays (Patrick Marber’s “Closer” is a slicker, better-crafted specimen) that dissect relationships as if they took place in a petri dish--some alternate universe populated only by the other characters in the play, with whom they combine and recombine in geometric configurations. Hence, in a city the size of L.A., Becca has her wedding dress made by Leah’s former lesbian roommate, Gretchen (Marina Mouhibian), while Holly (Jocelyn Jackson), an even more self-absorbed twentysomething friend of Gretchen’s and Leah’s, is the chance object of infatuation of a public radio host (Greg Woodhill) whose interview with Cody and Leah triggers a pivotal crisis. Very neat, tidy and uninvolving.

Philip Brandes

“Trust,” Hollywood Court Theatre (in the Hollywood Methodist Church), 6717 Franklin Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends March 31. $15. (323) 571-3583. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.