Notes on Small Spaces
Los Angeles is so big.
More than five hundred square miles, sprawling from mountain to sea, it is the infinite possible city.
On Saturday I went to see local legend, Justin Tanner, performing in his new play, ‘My Son the Playwright’ at the Rogue Machine Theater in the Melrose Arts District.
It is only three miles away, but I gave myself an hour to get there. The suggested route was so easy from Koreatown; Olympic to La Brea to Melrose, but somehow all of Los Angeles was out at four p.m.
Olympic was crowded, La Brea was very crowded, and Melrose was crazy crowded.
The joyful bursting metropolis, with folks lining up for designer sneakers outside of hipster storefronts, a parade of cars trying to get into the Trader Joe’s at 3rd Street, and as I was turning on Melrose, the hordes of hot dog lovers outing themselves at Pink’s.
I found parking a block away from the theater and it was a joy to walk down Melrose, which I always hear is dying. Truthfully, it was packed to the rafters with young people lining up outside of stores for more designer things, eating on the street, and even a guy smoking pot out of a bong at the corner, with a huge portable radio, dancing with himself.
It was a piece of St. Marks Place on a very long corridor.
I was fascinated watching a young guy having soup, a chowder, from a ceramic bowl with metal spoon, as he walked down the street. Did he take that from a restaurant, or did he bring it from home? Either way, I followed him for a bit and completely missed the theater, so I had to backtrack.
The second space at Rogue Machine Theater, which for many is still the Matrix space on Melrose (one expects Joe Stern to be proudly standing out on the street), sits about thirty-five people, I would imagine, with just two rows of seats, right in on the action of the play, which I find is literally at a half arm’s length of the performer.
If every live performance is an ephemeral unique gift to itself, I can say I was there in the tiny space when an audience member shifted his legs and sent a lit lamp crashing off a set piece right in front of him.
Tanner, so wonderfully alive and present in his performance, stopped mid-story, acknowledging the accident by wondering to himself if their might be ‘ghosts in the room’, declaring that he had ‘no time for this’, and went on with the compelling tale.
The other transient moment was the woman in our front row, who gleefully arrived and announced she was the playwright’s sister, even offering to show us pics of herself in the program, and which ones she had lent to the playwright. It was lovely.
If Tanner’s last play, the beautiful ‘Little Theatre’, was his Glass Menagerie, this one is his Long Day’s Journey into Night. I have to say that often during the play, I would look over at self-proclaimed sister to see if she was okay.
Tanner is the king of words, and his wonderful ability to use humor to mask heartbreaking pain is on lovely theatrical display here. It is an emotionally unwieldy play, with a matching performance, and I was here for it.
Somehow, the timing of the event itself seemed to prep me for such experience. The performance was at five p.m. which took big Saturday night expectation and demand out of me. I went in thinking about what I was going to make for dinner afterward, leaving me more disarmed and open than I would expect.
The messiness of families and their secrets is on equally hilarious and awful display here, and the playwright is squirming through it in divine exorcism, arms and legs flailing through a father desperate to numb his pain with booze, and a son masking it with weed.
It’s also a very queer play. Full of damage, but also full of truths. Sex positive, emotionally dangerous, Its content is surprising, and even its running time, two acts to make way for a transformation, messes with how we see the work.
The blessing of the small space itself, which takes me back to lots of great small theater spaces in Los Angeles during the 80’s and 90’s, like the old Celebration theater on Hoover, and that small Moving Arts space on Hyperion, where we literally saw the actor/playwright, Nick Salamone, perform a piece in a closet, leaves room for other meditations.
For instance, when Tanner leaves the room, you can literally hear him running down the stairs and then making his way back up. When he walks out and into the restroom, all the accompanying ambient sounds follow along. The accompanying silence of such moments is unnerving.
The joy of a space this small is that the performer has no place to run but into himself. If he’s feeling it, he is doing it two feet away from you. The director, Lisa James, and her design team, have created a lovely petri dish in which to see the experiment unfold.
There are a lot of laughs, story to gasp to, even live music and singing, but nothing destroyed me as much as the father taking a drink of liquor in utter desperate sad silence.
In the smallest of spaces, the devastating debasing, deliberately gulped, even suicidally enjoyed, the spectacle of ritualized drinking, was enough to send me near my own desire to reach over and grab the bottle of booze. Lord knows, I was close enough.
And that is reason enough to make your way up the stairs at Rogue Machine for a few more performances.