Pauline Adamek
Hey groovy readers! This week’s theater review for the LA Weekly is of Hurricane Season, now playing at the Eclectic Company Theatre in North Hollywood.
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Hurricane Season 2013
Now in its 10th year, Hurricane Season is a competition of short new plays. Block Two (reviewed here) continues over this weekend, with Block Three running Aug. 9-18. The audience favorites of the festival will receive awards in an Aug. 23 ceremony, and a jury will give monetary prizes to the top three best-written plays.
In The Road to Paradise, by Caroline Marshall, Ryan McDonough plays a terminal patient with gallows humor. His fiancée (Rachel Kanouse) — a frequent visitor to his hospital bed — at first cannot account for his renewed lusty vigor and impassioned speeches. Marshall’s dialogue is occasionally too theatrical when it needs to be natural, but this is a sweet, half-hour one-acter.
Less successful is Dean Farell Bruggeman’s decidedly unfunny satire Supermom, about a stay-at-home mom (dreadfully acted by playwright Caroline Marshall) who slaves for her ungrateful family. She is set on her true mission of saving the world by a sassy, colorful, African-American spirit guide, “Mother Earth.” This clichéd caricature is only partially rescued by the casting of Gabriel Green in drag.
Harry M. Bagdasian’s Carrying On is the best of the bunch. Its bittersweet tale of a developmentally challenged young man (Elliott Davis) anxious to break away from an oppressive, small-town home life is well plotted and nicely staged.
Hurricane Season 2013
5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd.,
Valley Village
Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.;
Runs through Aug. 18, 2013
(818) 508-3003
Terry Morgan
