Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
The Dell’Arte production of the farcical The Golden State at Keck Theater last Friday and Saturday attracted many, but did not necessarily impress.
The Dell’Arte company has performed in more than nine international theater festivals. Their style of directing involves collaborative direction: all actors may critique and direct each other, and the majority of the cast develop their own characters.
The Golden State is based on Moliere’s play The Miser, which tells the story of Harpagon, a successful curmudgeon unwilling to share his fortune with his two marriage-aged children.
Unlike other versions of The Miser, the set and props were sparse in The Golden State. Long white sheets portrayed the grandeur of the Miser’s mansion, while a diving board and palm tree screamed the specific location of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Southern California.
The Dell’Arte adaptation cast Joan Schirle as the Miser, changing the Miser’s gender and weaving in contemporary Los Angeles issues such as illegal immigration, gay marriage, drugs, wildfires and the infamous LAPD.
The Miser, Gertrude, is the widow of a wealthy speculator involved in the Los Angeles water supply scandal of the early 1900s. She has allowed her middle-aged children to sponge off her “magnanimity” by living at home unemployed.
The style the Dell’Arte company uses in the play is called Commedia, which departs from the formal Commedia dell’arte style and allows the actors more freedom.Commedia dell’arte is an Italian-born style of comedic and playful theater that reached its height of popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In this tradition, there are several set plot outlines that the actors follow and improvise around, along with stock characters who wear masks. Because actors wear masks, they must rely on their bodies to convey emotion instead of facial expressions. Golden State included many elements of the Commedia dell’arte style: master-servant relationships, long lost children, forbidden love, womanizing and immature body humor.
Theater professor Susan Gratch said the department chose to bring this production to Occidental because of its physicality and “social bent” that brings up relevant political, economic and social issues. The production and Commedia dell’arte-inspired theater workshops are paid for by the William Hume fellowship.
Keight Gleason-who played Ursula, one of the two illegal immigrant maids-wielded a thick, over-the-top Russian accent appropriate to the Commedia style. Unfortunately, it was spiked with American pronunciations of words and even whole sentences. This seemingly minor flaw distracted and detracted from the performance as a whole.
Schirle, however, used her expressive face and energy deftly with her mischievous scowls and grand grins. Her character was one of the best of the play, embodying the Commedia style while maintaining believability.
In one scene, she pulls out a tissue and tears it into smaller pieces to blow her nose. This subtle detail showed the audience her extreme frugality without making them feel stupid. Details like this had the potential to create a strong production.
The convoluted plot of the play was laced with social commentary focused on LA and America. Gertrude plans to marry her son Cubby off to Bunny Schimpf, a large German woman who was played by the talented John Achorn. In the first act, Cubby tells the story of how he discovered he was gay by meeting his new lover Federico, a nurse-whose costume was perhaps the most outrageous of the bunch: a skirt made of ties that showed off his tiny electric blue thong. Cubby met the nurse at the hospital after his quest to save six pounds of cocaine on the highway led to a truck running over his foot. This scene involved an emphatic arm-waving description of falling cocaine that the audience laughed at hysterically.
These gems of social commentary, when considered separately, were spot-on, but there were so many that it was difficult to come away with a strong message other than that of America and Southern California being home to greedy navel-gazers and wise illegal immigrants. Though entertaining, The Golden State was not mind-altering or deeply moving.
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