STAGE REVIEW : A Taut, Powerful ‘Angel City’ by Ensemble Arts

SAN DIEGO —  In the world of Sam Shepard’s “Angel City,” producers believe that only disasters such as those in “The Towering Inferno,” “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Earthquake” can save movies from disaster.

In the play, a producer, Wheeler, hires a writer to come up with a catastrophe because, as Wheeler puts it, “all of the really major box-office smashes have dealt with disaster to one degree or another. . . . We have come to believe that it’s only through a major disaster being interjected into this picture that we’ll be able to save ourselves from total annihilation.”

But the longer the writer, Rabbit, spends in privileged movie-making rooms, sealed off from the populace at whom movie dreams are aimed like missiles seeking “a hit,” the more he begins to realize that the real disaster lies in the American dream-machine factory itself. The movies have become, increasingly, a source of power; people look to them for their models, for the realization of their hopes, fears and expectations. The movies can even redefine, or sometimes substitute, for family, religion and love.

That ability to influence, of course, lends itself to corruption through the desire for money and power. It’s a lesson Rabbit cannot seem to learn without being corrupted himself.

Ensemble Arts Theatre, which recently returned from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with its production of “Angel City,” playing through Sunday at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse, lunges at the powerful ambivalence toward Hollywood at the heart of this play and, for the most part, finds what it is seeking.

Director Ginny-Lynn Safford, the artistic director of this new company, keeps her finger pressed to the pulse of the play: the attraction/repulsion for movie making.

One can almost sense, through the original smoky, jazzy music of James Paul Mooney, a pumping heart in which the beats are growing louder and and dangerously closer and closer together.

The demands on ensemble work are extreme in this piece because the symbolism of the play is so intensely theatrical, more like experiencing a dream than following a linear movie. Characters melt into each other, fragment and break apart. Lanx, one of the two producers, turns into a boxer, who turns into a young boy watching the movies. Lanx’s secretary turns into an actress, turns into a madwoman foaming at the mouth, turns into an Irish nun, all without skipping a beat.

It is as if Shepard is trying to reinsert the symbolic structure of dreams into the dream machine that so often tries to mimic reality with its linear tales.

The five actors move fluidly as swimmers through their swiftly shifting roles. The supporting cast is uniformly fine, with Linda Libby (who also did the costumes) a standout in the female roles, moving from the soft sensuality of the bombshell actress to the tougher edges in a flash.

Paul Jennings is alternately smarmy as the cigar-smoking Lanx and naive and touching as the boxer. Mooney keeps a thread of self-aggrandizement in all his characters, from Timpani, assigned to find just the right rhythm for the movie, to the short-order cook and medium, whom Rabbit uses as a sounding board to explore his own ideas.

But the major roles, Rabbit, played by R.J. Bonds, and Wheeler, played by Timothy West, seem somewhat lacking. These two, as they verbally haul off at each other, should bring a Titanic intensity to a fight that reveals them as fellow reptiles under the skin. Both are good in the parts, but there is a lingering niceness to the performances that detracts from their ability to convey the ruthlessness of their methods and the deadliness of the stakes.

Paul Bedington’s bare set design, a single stone chair with a high solid back that swings to reveal and conceal certain characters, perfectly fits the impressionistic feeling of the script. The very primitiveness of Kevin Sussman’s lighting seems similarly appropriate.

A fascinating sub-text to “Angel City” would be a look at the playwright’s own life. It is curious to consider the vitriol of this work, first produced in 1976, in light of Shepard’s own increasing involvement in the Hollywood dream machine--as a writer, actor and director (“Resurrection,” “Frances,” “The Right Stuff,” “Baby Boom,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “Paris, Texas” and “Far North”) and as companion to film actress Jessica Lange.

Was the Shepard who denounced the film producers in “Angel City” 13 years ago just an outsider, bitterly denouncing what he didn’t possess?

Or, if he was telling the truth, has he sold out?

Or is there another, more honorable way of making movies that he is not telling us about in “Angel City”?

This taut and powerful production by the Ensemble Arts Theatre at is not going to provide any answers to those questions. The company takes “Angel City” at face value, and that is appropriate. A writer’s work takes on its own independent life, and the story of “Angel City” is one story that deserves to be told on its own merits.

“ANGEL CITY”

By Sam Shepard. Director is Ginny-Lynn Safford. Set by Paul Bedington. Sound by James Paul Mooney. Lighting by Kevin Sussman. Costumes by Linda Libby. With James Paul Mooney, R.J. Bonds, Paul M. Jennings, Linda Libby and Timothy West. At 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and Sundays at 7 through Oct. 29. Tickets are $12-$14. At 1620 6th Ave., San Diego, 696-0458.