July 29 - September 3, 2006

Reviews

 

Variety

August 20, 2006

Unfinished American Highwayscape # 9 & 32, or the Broken Tractor Graveyard

(Boston Court Main Stage, Pasadena; 99 seats; $30 top)

 

A Theatre @ Boston Court production of a play in one act by Carlos Murillo. Directed by Jessica Kubzansky.

 

Delia - Carlease Burke

David - Will Collyer

Samuel - Matt Foyer

Eleanor - Casey Kramer

Amy - Ashley West Leonard

Magdalena/Emma/Meghan - Maureen McDonough

James - Patrick Thomas O'Brien

Don - Karim Prince

 

By PAUL HODGINS

 

"Unfinished American Highwayscape # 9 & 32," Carlos Murillo's fitfully inspired new play, is being given a sensitive and detailed world premiere at Pasadena's Boston Court theater. But underneath the studied performances and high-gloss production values is a talky and static script in need of retooling.

 

The story -- about lonely people wrestling with their troubled pasts and uncertain futures as they drive alone at night -- teases us with tantalizing moments of angst and clear-eyed insight into the quiet desperation at the heart of the noisy American soul.

 

But there's an insurmountable problem bedeviling Murillo's play: It's essentially a string of sedate monologues and dialogues. People sit in cars and describe the sources of their unhappiness rather than revealing them through action. The real villains of this piece are largely unseen; hence the absence of drama or conflict.

 

The characters themselves are interesting enough, and each one is meticulously portrayed. Delia (Carlease Burke) is trying to escape her blues-singing boyfriend, but God is playing a cosmic joke: Her broken car radio receives only one station, and it's spinning her ex's hit song constantly -- the one that's all about her.

 

Patrick Thomas O'Brien plays James, a nerdy schoolteacher from Hibbing, Minn., who wants to take his place among the town's famous people and institutions (they include Bob Dylan and the Greyhound Bus Co.). His path to immortality, though, is an odd one: He is collecting fridge magnets.

 

James hooks up with Eleanor (Casey Kramer), a woman who's escaping her philandering husband after decades of marriage. They hit it off at first, but his rash decision to sing one of his own songs -- a rambling parody of Dylan's worst excesses -- causes Eleanor to change her mind about the value of freedom.

 

James and Eleanor's scene is one of four couplings that form the latter part of this intermission-free production. They reveal many intricate relationships that link different characters and stories. Unfortunately, some links are more lucid and meaningful than others, and Murillo's insistence on quick inter-cutting undermines comprehension and our grasp of the big picture.

 

Burke and O'Brien are standouts, but everyone enjoys his or her minute of glory; Murillo is generous to his performers, and director Jessica Kubzansky shows a master's deft touch with scenes of epiphany and intense but hidden emotion.

 

Typical of Boston Court's stagings, the production looks first-rate. Sibyl Wickersheimer's set, distinguished by risers of various levels, ladders and upstage platforms, is spare but effective. Jeremy Pivnick's lighting is artfully conceived for the most part, though he could have come up with a more creative solution than pairs of actor-held flashlights to represent nocturnal driving. Ann Closs-Farley's costumes signal both poverty and occasional, defiant flamboyance, and John Zalewski's sound design captures the uneasy calm of the heartland at night.

 

Sets, Sibyl Wickersheimer; lighting, Jeremy Pivnick; costumes, Ann Closs-Farley; sound, John Zalewski; production stage manager, Nate Genung. Opened July 29, 2006; reviewed Aug. 13; runs through Sept. 3. Running time: 1 HOUR, 35 MIN

 

 

Pasadena Star/U-Entertainment

by Frances Baum Nicholson

 

The back roads of America are what America really is. That's an elemental contention of Carlos Murillo's "Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32, or The Broken Tractor Graveyard," now receiving its world premiere at The Theatre at Boston Court in Pasadena. According to the play, by looking at those who end up wandering the odd highways left behind by our Interstate culture, one finds the things which connect us all.

 

Whether or not the result lives up to such a lofty ideal, the beautifully crafted, intertwined portraits do create an empathetic core - a kind of root American persona we can all empathize with on some level. Eight people taking highways to small towns find their paths intersecting as they run to or away from situations with enough urgency to put them on the lonely road at midnight.

Director, and Boston Court co-artistic director Jessica Kubzansky creates a spare environment for this highly imaginative tale, highlighting the sense of isolation of each individual. Flashlights become headlights on Sibyl Wickersheimer's spare, layered roadway set where personalities drive or are driven.

 

A highly skilled ensemble cast makes the piece hum like a well-tuned instrument. They include Carlease Burke, wryly funny as a woman trying to escape the fame of a famous ex-husband and Karim Prince as the husband on the way to his next gig. Will Collyer wrenches the heart as the disillusioned son of an erstwhile prophet, and Meghan Maureen McDonough vibrates with pent-up anguish as the sister searching for him.

 

Matt Foyer and Casey Kramer wrestle with the legacy of their involvement with a philandering pseudo-artist making sculptures out of the flotsam of the past, deep in the desert. Ashley West Leonard, as a woman spooked by life and running toward and from her past at the same time counters Patrick Thomas O'Brien as the calmly obsessive commemorative magnet collector.

Murillo has taken all of these rounded characters and woven them into a tapestry filled with commonalities and the little ah-ha moments which help us recognize each other. Based on people he actually met crossing the country on its lesser highways, it rings of the things which make us Americans but never get into the textbooks.

 

Unfortunately, Murillo's vision of America, for all its comic overtones and innate friendliness has a core of loneliness and despair, and the identification one feels can be painful. Still, this beautifully crafted piece has something to say to us about who we are as a people. As such, and as a work of theatrical art, it leaves much to mull over late into the night.

 

What: "Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32" When: Through September 3, 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday Where: The Theatre at Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave. (at Boston Court) in Pasadena How Much: $30 Info: 626-683-6883 or www.BostonCourt.org <http://www.BostonCourt.org>

 

 

ReviewPlays.com 8/13/06 and

Entertainment Today

8/18/06

 

TICKETHOLDERS

by Travis Michael Holder

 

Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32 or The Broken Tractor Graveyard

Theatre @ Boston Court

 

Lovely performances, ingenious direction by LA treasure Jessica Kubzansky, and unbelievably creative design elements all conspire reverently to present the world premiere of Carlos Murillo's haunting view of disenfranchised Americana, Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32 or The Broken Tractor Graveyard, instantly providing another reason for Theatre @ Boston Court to be proud of the incredible things they've accomplished in only three short years of existence.

 

Perhaps the coolest thing about Boston Court is the dynamic creative team's unswerving dedication not to pander to guaranteed commercial success at the cost of celebrating art, fearlessly presenting material again and again—despite the infancy of their theatre—that's obviously about championing potentially risky new work rather than opting for building an aging subscription base by throwing in an occasional Neil Simon warhorse or sappy American musical comedy.

 

If nothing else could be said for their current risky business, there is no doubt that Unfinished American Highwayscape celebrates the advent of a remarkably poetic and prolific new playwright with a passion for understanding what it is to be an American in the dawn of this troubled millennium, a guy intent on exploring the displacement and fear for the future we all feel right down to our bones. Eight people are here discovered at midnight driving the deserted, lonely highways which intersect the heart of our country, each alone in their thoughts and desperate to understand why their individual lives have become such desolate dime-novel versions of what they had originally planned.

 

The eight performers of Unfinished American Highwayscape begin their journey across Sybil Wickersheimer's gloriously stark and innovative set—a series of dramatically intersecting roadways where the stories cross and occasionally meld together—by facing the audience and shining two flashlights ahead in the darkness to immediately establish their whereabouts: each alone and lost somewhere on the road in the middle of the night looking at the world, at their past and towards their future, through the ever-searching headlights of their separate vehicles.

 

What must be on the page a series of singular isolated monologues is slapped into life by Kubzansky's typically inventive staging, never offering a static moment as we get to know Murillo's indelibly ordinary people with extraordinary tales to tell. Kubzansky's cast is golden throughout, with particular nods to Carlease Burke and Casey Kramer as two strongwilled women fleeing from abusive relationships, Will Collyer as a young kid so filled with sorrow and confusion that he contemplates an ending for his life that only he can control, and Patrick Thomas O'Brien as a nerdy schoolteacher traveling the country hoping his collection of souvenir magnets will one day rival the other entities that have put his rural hometown somewhat dubiously on the map: as the original home of the Greyhound Bus and the birthplace of one Bob Dylan.

 

Kubzansky's direction simply could not be better, serendipitously collaborating with some of LA's best designers, including set designer Wickersheimer, LADCC's Angstrom Award-winning lighting guru Jeremy Pivnik, and hot-hot local costumer Ann Closs-Farley. Perhaps the best of the magnificent design efforts comes from sound designer John Zalewski, who craftily provides some of the production's subtlest touches, including different hums assigned to the motors of each of the character's overworked cars.

 

Murillo's script is grandly sweeping yet oddly introspective, heralding the beginning of what will surely be an auspicious career. That is not saying, however, this particular work is absolutely perfect. There is a real frustration by the end of the journey for what is not explored, explained or resolved, though surely a choice by an author who obviously recognizes that all lost souls do not always find the answers for which they were searching. As worthy as is this perspective, it becomes hard for the viewer to be presented with eight stories that seem to somehow eventually go nowhere. Babies are forgotten, one character's fascination with abandoned cars along the highway just seems to fade away, and the start of some new alliances, as most of the eight characters are suddenly paired off, that feels more like a quick theatrical band-aid than a resolution. Still, of course, Murillo does prophetically call his play Unfinished American Highwayscape, so much of this could surely be intentional—just not terribly satisfying.

 

What does satisfy is that Murillo pays unintentional tribute to the traditions established by two enduring works for the stage: Dylan Thomas' 1953 landmark Under Milkwood, which also ends without a satisfying conclusion to the characters' storylines and has still proven itself to have a place in history regardless, and Charles Aidman's LA-born 1963 stage version of Edgar Lee Masters' 1916 poetic anthology Spoon River Anthology, bringing 244 former citizens of a fictional rural Illinois town to life in a series of postmortem autobiographical epitaphs. For me, despite its youthful shortcomings, in a fair world Unfinished American Highwayscape could easily join this earlier pair of classic plays to become a triumvirate chronicle of our lives and times that could be presented in rep for the next few centuries, if the human race survives that long.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald is quoted in Unfinished American Highwayscape as believing there are "no second acts in American life," leaving Murillo's lovingly sketched unsung American heroes to each wonder, as they travel in an adrenalin haze to an unknown place where they hope to begin a new and less convoluted phase of their downwardly spiraling lives, if there is any hope for them in the rapidly morphing scheme of our contemporary existence, a place where greed and power and a twisted sense of entitlement have forever altered our future.

 

In a quintessential example of how great art can summons up the recollection of great art and thus inadvertently solidify the enduring durability of great art, I was immediately reminded by the mesmeric Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32 or The Broken Tractor Graveyard of a quote by Bertolt Brecht from his 1945 masterpiece The Private Lives of the Master Race: "I sit by the roadside watching the driver changing wheels. I do not like the place I am coming from. I do not like the place I am going to. So why do I watch the driver changing wheels with such impatience?" Some things never change.

 

The Theatre @ Boston Court is located at 70 N. Mentor, Pasadena; for tickets, call (626) 683-6883.

 

 

Los Angeles Times

THEATER REVIEWS - RECOMMENDED!

Some detours on the road of life

By Philip Brandes, Times Staff Writer
August 4, 2006

The open road serves as an apt backdrop for exploring our peculiar shared heritage of displaced lives and reinvented identities in Carlos Murillo's new play, "Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32."

The lone motorists prowling the asphalt in the dead of night are skillfully differentiated by the Theater@Boston Court ensemble under Jessica Kubzansky's atmospheric direction. Drawn from life stories Murillo encountered while researching the back roads of the U.S. highway system, these portraits are steeped in the quirky specifics of real life — funny and poignant by turns, despite some artifice in the narrative structure.

What starts out as individual monologues evolves into dialogue as history and circumstances connect the various travelers. Gifted comic actor Patrick Thomas O'Brien is instantly riveting as a lonely Minnesota high school teacher who collects souvenir refrigerator magnets. On separate journeys, a popular blues singer (Karim Prince) and his ex-wife (Carlease Burke) offer hilariously contradictory takes on their failed marriage.

A young mother (Ashley West Leonard) indulges her fascination with people who abandon their cars and disappear. The widow (Casey Kramer) of an adulterous junkyard sculptor sets out in search of a new life. A man who restocks gumball machines (Matt Foyer) reflects on the reasons for his rootless existence.

After abandoning her family years ago, a woman (Meghan Maureen McDonough) finds herself drawn back by emotional ties she couldn't completely sever. The saddest case is a burned-out preacher (Will Collyer) trying to follow in the footsteps of the dead evangelist father he never knew.

Kubzansky's staging emphasizes physical isolation with minimal embellishment (hand-held flashlight beams suggesting headlights). However, the use of extensive direct address to the audience clashes with the supposed mutterings of solitary nocturnal drivers.

The characters' stories and interrelationships emerge in fragments of speech and occasional song that gradually fit together with jigsaw puzzle intricacy; sometimes the cleverness of the intellectual exercise eclipses emotional involvement.

At their best, however, Murillo's fractured narrative and junkyard imagery poetically mirror the displaced lives he chronicles — telling a story, as one character puts it, "using all the stuff that people throw away."

"Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32," Boston Court, 70 N.  Mentor Ave., Pasadena. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Sept. 3. $30. (626) 683-6883 or www.bostoncourt.org. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

 

 

Backstage West

 

Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32

August 03, 2006

By Wenzel Jones

 

Faultless performances, technical brilliance, and adept direction are on display, firmly adhered to the flypaper of Carlos Murillo's hopelessly page-bound script. It's easy to see why this looked so good on paper. The characters are deftly etched, and the whole notion of roaming the highway in search of connection is timeless. But, c'mon, we're talking people in cars. On a stage. Talking to themselves, for the most part. What seems so lyrical and poetic to the reader translates into an incredibly static production. The words are lovely. But the action, such as it is, is being driven largely by the misbehavior of men we never see. Jessica Kubzansky's staging is handsome and innovative, but the airless nature of the piece proves insurmountable. Individual moments shine, but on the whole the production is more well-mounted than brought to life.

 

Carlease Burke, playing the rather showy part of Delia—a woman who can't escape her ex-husband because he has a pop song that plays every hour on the only station her car radio receives—would walk off with the show were it not for the estimable cast. There are a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to Ashley West Leonard's character, a woman traveling with her infant daughter to a house that no longer exists, but Leonard makes her ambiguity fascinating. Patrick Thomas O'Brien is perfection as the high school biology teacher who hopes to bring further glory to Hibbing, Minn. (birthplace of Bob Dylan and Greyhound Bus Lines), with the magnet collection he has proudly acquired in situ from tourist spots across the nation. His performance of a gloriously wretched Dylanesque song, banal lyrics unencumbered by meter, is a gem. Will Collyer, Matt Foyer, Casey Kramer, Meghan Maureen McDonough, and Karim Prince, the latter two possessed of lovely singing voices, complete the solid ensemble. Jeremy Pivnick's lighting is particularly impressive as it includes illuminating the lines on the noteworthy highway set (Sibyl Wickersheimer) to indicate motion and direction. John Zalewski's subtle sound design nails the ambiance of the open road. The production is very strong on mood, but the somewhat baffling ending leaves the audience member wondering: "Gosh, are we there yet?"

 

 

Pasadena Weekly

Freeway reveries

 

Carlos Murillo's new play at the Theatre@Boston Court takes audiences on an unusual trip

 

By Jana J. Monji

 

Making its world premiere at the Theatre@Boston Court, Carlos Murillo's "Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32 or The Broken Tractor Graveyard" evokes the common and the uncommon, the sadness and gentle humor in the everyday lives of ordinary people in small, almost forgotten towns. The image and the words linger — a credit to the actors, director Jessica Kubzansky and Murillo, yet the ending is abrupt and unsettling: This is a story half told.

 

In the summer of 2003, Murillo traveled to the roadside attractions on the secondary roads romanticized by songs like "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" as part of a project funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant.

 

In a time before interstate highways made travel more efficient, people drove through these small towns and Americans met other Americans. Yet now these small towns are rarely seen by travelers, a theme echoed in the recent animation feature, "Cars."

 

According to the program notes, Murillo takes the theme that Americans "are collectively a displaced people that share a continent" and we have been "forced to invent and reinvent ourselves individually and as a nation," and he sets eight lone drivers on the road at midnight. We see how their lives are intertwined and the full meaning of their first words on stage, which rise more like the confusion of traffic and then slowly become individual voices, like the sound of each separate car on the highway.

 

Scenic designer Sibyl Wickersheimer has a series of ramps, miniature highways that the actors walk up and down, using flashlights to simulate headlights. In the middle of the stage are parts of mechanical things — like the roadside trash and abandoned cars that Amy (Ashley West Leonard) seems to fixate on while quieting her baby. Delia (Carlease Burke) curses her radio. Samuel (Matt Foyer) quietly explains why he left home as he drives back for a funeral. David (Will Collyer) yearns to hear his sister's voice. Emma (Meghan Maureen McDonough) dreads what she always knew would happen when she ran away from her home to celebrate the ordinary. Blues singer Don (Karim Prince) finds that sorrow has made him rich and famous, yet he's still lonely. Eleanor (Casey Kramer) finds life after being betrayed by her husband. Yet perhaps the most charming character is James, played with a sweet nerdiness by Patrick Thomas O'Brien. O'Brien imbues James with an earnest enthusiasm for his hobby that, while not infectious, still makes you want to smile.

 

When all these lives finally collide, touching each other due to death and sometimes hope, nothing comes of it. Instead of words or some type of denouement, the cast sings a song. It's like abandoning a much-loved car at the side of the road while it was still working fine.

 

It's not that one needs a happy and unbelievable ending as in Pixar's "Cars." And perhaps we don't need to know exactly what happens to each of the drivers, just the direction they decide to go from here. Still the cast makes each character distinct and multi-layered, and Kubzansky has deftly given each character enough space and time to hold our attention and make us yearn to know more.

 

"Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32 or The Broken Tractor Graveyard" continues until Sept. 3 at the Theatre@Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena. Show times are 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays and 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $25 to $30. For more information, call (626) 683-6883, or visit www.BostonCourt.com

 

 

L.A. Weekly

 

UNFINISHED AMERICAN HIGHWAYSCAPE #9 & 32 In Carlos Murillo's 90-minute work, eight individuals are driving somewhere in the American night, each burdened by problems comic and ominous. These are not the anarchic highway spirits of Jack Kerouac, but small people bedeviled by life's petty indignities and destiny's larger insults. How these drivers cross paths, as the focus darts back and forth among them, and how their dilemmas are resolved, form the evening's tension. Director Jessica Kubzansky's mise en scene is dark and memorable, but Murillo's script often feels like a fragmented roundelay of conversations with the "road" thrown in less as a metaphor than as a convenient connecting device. THEATER @ BOSTON COURT, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru Sept. 3. (626) 683-6883. (Steven Mikulan)

 

Detours

A lost highway and roads not taken

By STEVEN MIKULAN

Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - 12:00 pm

The American road, we've always been told, is both a great emancipator and a hanging judge -- the asphalt river of freedom and the stern tester of wills. In Unfinished American Highwayscape #9 & 32, playwright Carlos Murillo's ensemble piece premiering at the Theater@Boston Court, eight individuals are driving somewhere in the American night, each burdened by problems comic and ominous. James (Patrick Thomas O'Brien) is a high school biology teacher whose true passion is his magnet collection; Delia (Carlease Burke) is a woman leaving her singer husband (Karim Prince), whose blues hit bearing her name haunts her every time she turns on the radio; a disillusioned evangelist, David (Will Collyer), writes letters to his sister Emma (Meghan Maureen McDonough); Amy (Ashley West Leonard), a woman on the run with a kid, gets spooked by the sight of abandoned cars; Samuel (Matt Foyer) is the son of a dead scrap dealer and of Eleanor (Casey Kramer), who presides over her late, unfaithful husband's main legacy, a giant junk sculpture.

 

This steel-and-rubber assemblage also dominates set designer Sibyl Wickersheimer's fragmented stage and serves as an ambiguous lodestone. Early on, the ensemble switches on flashlights around it in the theater's darkened gloom, invoking the cars and the roads they travel. It's a more effective image than the sculpture itself, and director Jessica Kubzansky's shadowy mise en scène is most memorable when it's darkest. (Her midnight world is ably punctuated by Jeremy Pivnick's dim shafts of light and John Zalewski's jangling sound design.)

 

Murillo's narrative, however, takes a while for us to comprehend and comes together only at the very end, when the eight characters are fleetingly paired up. (One character quotes Fitzgerald about there being no second acts in American lives, and, as if taking heed of this, Murillo confines his piece to one act.) For 100 minutes, the drivers talk to us, sing, recount histories and ruminate back and forth in an evening of presentational performance that has some tender moments but never really adds up to a sum greater than its parts.

 

Perhaps our expectations were raised too high, too early. Highwayscape's long title is joined by an equally lengthy subtitle: The Broken Tractor Graveyard. The compound title's free-associative quality hearkens back to the apotheosis of free association, the 1960s ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and to that era's rebellious romance with The Road. However, here there's little sense of our insurgent passion with spaces and the wide-open roads that thread through them. Murillo's characters are not the anarchic highway spirits of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, but small people bedeviled by life's petty indignities and destiny's larger insults. There's nothing wrong with this, but viewers will feel as though they've sat on the business end of an artistic bait and switch. It's a dead end any way you look at it.

 

UNFINISHED AMERICAN HIGHWAYSCAPE #9 & 32 | By CARLOS MURILLO | Theater @ Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena | Through September 3 | (626) 683-6883