Center Stage with Pat Launer on KSDS JAZZ88

THEATER REVIEWS

“The Recommendation” – The Old Globe

“A Behanding in Spokane” – Cygnet Theatre

“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” – Welk Resort Theatre

February 3, 2012

Getting ahead – and getting a hand. Going for what you want – and appreciating what you’ve got once you’ve gotten it. Three different takes on a theme – musical, macabre and starkly dramatic.

The drama is a world premiere at the Old Globe: “The Recommendation,” by up-and-comer Jonathan Caren, and I’d give him my 5-star recommendation any day.

The intense, three-character story begins comically, with two disparate roommates at Brown University: a cocky, well-connected white kid, and a first-generation black student, whose father is from Ethiopia. Aaron Feldman is happy to use his expansive influence to help his friend rise, which both amazes and enrages Iskinder.

Recommendations get him into law school, and a job, but then he starts chafing at the strictures of loyalty and obligation. Meanwhile, Aaron has landed himself in jail, where the only person with power and connections is a criminal conman. Tables turn, promises are made, and the entanglements become ever-more compelling and unpredictable.

“The Recommendation” is about class and race, money and power, cultural ladder-climbing and limitations. But mostly, it’s about the tensile bonds of friendship. Tautly written, imaginatively directed and exquisitely acted, it’s a chilling, often thrilling piece of theater.

Bone-chilling might describe the work of Martin McDonagh. “A Behanding in Spokane,” the first play the Irish Brit set in the U.S., is as grisly as his previous creations. McDonagh finds comedy in morbidity.

In a stunning production at Cygnet Theatre, guns are drawn, gasoline is poured, racial epithets are spewed, and a pony-tailed nutcase confronts a one-handed mono-maniac. And we laugh. Did I mention the suitcase filled with severed hands?

Carmichael, an explosive Mama’s boy, is desperate to find the hand he lost to six “hillbillies” 27 years ago, and he doesn’t care who he has to off to reunite with his long-gone limb.

This is a tale from hell, enacted by a heavenly cast, directed by Lisa Berger, Mistress of the Macabre, starring Jeffrey Jones and Mike Sears as hilariously dueling whack-jobs, with stellar support from Kelly Iversen and Vimel as two kids on a con. You’ve gotta have the stomach for this sort of stuff – and the stamina for a war zone of F-bombs. You may be more puzzled than enlightened at the end, but you might just laugh yourself sick.

Now, if you prefer to travel in the middle of the road, get a lesson in “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” at the Welk Resort Theatre. It’s a protracted, amusing, well-sung, sometimes overacted production, under the high-spirited direction and choreography of Ray Limon. The principals are terrific, though you won’t exactly cozy up to these misogynistic men or husband-trapping women.

So choose your poison: venomous, melodious or incisive. You can’t go wrong this week.

“A Behanding In Spokane” runs through February 19 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.

“The Recommendation” plays through February 26 in the Old Globe’s White Theatre.

“How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” continues through February 26 at the Welk Resort Theatre in Escondido.

©2012 PAT LAUNER