Theater Review

In a small town in Indiana, gossip doesn’t have to travel far. Just a few steps off the porch, and news has reached the neighbors before the screen door bangs shut. And when the neighbors are family, and everyone’s business is everyone else’s business, word travels even faster, and penetrates deeper. Such is the case in the Santa Monica Theatre Guild production of Paul Osborn’s comedy “Morning’s at Seven,” playing at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica through November 26. The play debuted on Broadway in 1939, and music of the 1920s and 30s’songs like “I Wanna Be Loved by You” (Marilyn Monroe in “Some like It Hot”)’sets the mood in this production, directed by Jennifer Harvey and co-produced by Palisadian Chana Messer and Lewis Stout. The story of a house divided’sisters growing apart and back together, and the ramifications on their seemingly dysfunctional family’is not new, but in “Morning’s at Seven” some well crafted, quirky characters make the show highly entertaining. Set in 1938, the play centers on the tightly knit lives of four sisters who have lived in close vicinity’in the same house, next door to each other, or just down the street’for decades. These senior citizens are, at times, childishly jealous, and know exactly how to push each other’s buttons. They harbor resentments and emotional anxieties, but they are also extremely protective of each other’s secrets and feelings, and deeply devoted in their sisterhood. When the show begins, they are anticipating the arrival of sister Ida’s son Homer (Michael Blackman), who is bringing his fianc’ Myrtle (Andrea Leblanc) to meet the family for the first time. They have been engaged for seven years and dated for some five years before that, but these 35-year-olds act shy and awkward around each other like a new, much younger couple. A mama’s boy, Homer has delayed proposing to Myrtle because he is too comfortable living at home and reluctant to take the next step into manhood, even though his father, Carl (Wayne Baldwin), has offered him a furnished home nearby. Blackman is comical and charming in his boyishness, sitting on the floor and then standing with his chest puffed out, his emotions written all over his face and erupting constantly. As Myrtle, Leblanc is delightfully intriguing and bizarre. Wide-eyed, and slightly hunched over, feet turned in, she successfully captures Myrtle’s private and timid but curious personality. Like Homer, Myrtle is caught between childhood and adulthood. “I guess what a woman really wants is a home of her own,” she says, echoing one of the play’s themes that place defines one’s identity. Another sister, Cora (Mary Ann Link), also wants her own space. She lives next door to Ida and Carl with her husband, Thor (Jack Winnick), and unmarried sister, Arry (Lareen Faye). Jealous tension between the mild Cora and wild Arry explodes when Cora comes up with a plan to change their living situation. Arry, who is insecure about her identity, says, “Marriage gives women dignity.” Cora argues they she feels just as lonely in her marriage. “You can be alone in a lot of different ways,” she tells her sister. And it’s true’most of the characters in this play seem to feel alone despite the fact that they aren’t lacking a shoulder to cry on. This underlying sadness humanizes the characters and allows for some moving, emotional scenes within the comedy. One of these moments is the brief but compassionate scene between the oldest sister Esti (Lois Bostwick) and her domineering, insensitive husband, David (Laurence Braude), who tries to prohibit Esti from interacting with her uneducated family whom he considers “morons.” The chemistry between actors Bostwick and Braude is clear; they create two vulnerable characters struggling in their marriage’a husband whose sharp and mocking comments drive his loving wife away until she decides to play his game and regain the respect she deserves. “I have a good time with my sisters. I don’t care how ignorant they are,” says Esti, the smartest and most likable sister. She is also the only one who seems to be able to pull Carl out of his “spells,” when he is overcome by a sense of failure at not having become a dentist or, as he puts it, having taken the wrong turn at the fork in the road and gotten terribly lost. Ultimately, although the female characters blame themselves too often for family problems (reflective of the 1930s male-dominated culture), they are much stronger and more intelligent in their scheming than the men. The male characters are often oblivious to the planning, talking and decisions being made behind their backs. Actor Winnick comically plays the most rational of the male characters, the bold but lovable Thor who is often caught in the middle between his wife and sister-in-law. And can these actresses scream and run! Some of the small-town Midwestern humor is forced, but the production successfully captures the back-porch culture and mood of the era, with soft lighting by Dan Weingarten and costumes by Suzanne Scott. Set design is by Nadia Morgan and sound design by Badger Coon. Performances run Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets are $18; $15 for seniors and students. Contact: 828-7519.

Dorothy Dickman and Patrick Klein Exchange Wedding Vows in Malibu Dorothy Cuyson Dickman, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Bardales of Portsmouth, Virginia, was married to Patrick Spillane Klein, son of Robert and JoAnn Klein, longtime Palisadians, on June 11 in Malibu. The ceremony was held at Our Lady of Malibu, followed by a garden reception at the Palisades home of the bridegroom’s sister and brother-in-law, Kristin and Adam Keefe. The bride, a pediatrician employed by UCLA Mattel School of Pediatrics, attended Stanford University and the University of Tulane Medical School. The bridegroom, an attorney, attended Corpus Christi, Loyola High, Stanford University and UCLA Law School. The maid of honor was Christy Lacey-Krietz. Aline Neuyen, Lilia Osterloh, Darcie Everett, Kristin Clark, Brooke Klein, and Kristin Keefe were bridesmaids. The best man was Mimmy Klein, brother of the bridegroom. Robert Thomason, Daniel Thomason, Adam Keefe, Brady Hiete and Brian Kirch were ushers. The couple enjoyed a wedding trip to Hawaii and now make their home in Westwood. Rebecca Ebin and Adam Gross Marry at Riviera Country Club Rebecca Saltoun Ebin and Adam Philip Gross were married on August 20 at the Riviera Country Club by Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller of Temple Beth Torah in Ventura. The bride, 24, is the daughter of Synthia Saltoun Siever of Pacific Palisades and Joe Ebin of Brentwood. She attended Kenter Canyon Elementary, Paul Revere Middle School, Palisades High School, and the University of Wisconsin’Madison, where she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees in French. The bridegroom, 27, is the son of Elliot and Laura Gross of Pacific Palisades. He attended Palisades Elementary, Brentwood High School, and UC Berkeley, where he received his bachelor’s degree in business administration. After college, he worked as a software engineer for Vivendi Universal and Idealab for four years. The bride’s brother, Jason Saltoun Ebin, was the best man. Adam’s sister, Sheri Roberts, was the matron of honor, and Rebecca’s cousin, Vanessa Moran, was the maid of honor. The groomsmen included Alan Roberts, Jamie Salka, Benno Ashrafi, Ardy Haghighat, Steve Lackenby and Frank Moran. The bridesmaids included Jessie Salka, Stephanie Krauss, Lauren Cohen, Lauren Weiner, Amanda Moran and Sarah Weiner. The flower girls were Elliana Bogost and Rebekah Blumenfeld, and the ring bearer was Joey Bongar. The newlyweds first met in 1994 when they were both on the tennis team representing Los Angeles at the Maccabiah Games in Cleveland. But it wasn’t until about six years later when they were dating that they soon found out that it was a real love match. The couple is currently residing in Claremont, where Adam is pursing a master’s of bioscience degree at the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, and Rebecca is teaching French at Claremont High School and working part-time at the Summer Camp Gallery.

Playing straight man is never easy, but to be in that position when interviewing three comedy writers is nearly impossible: it’s hard to write while laughing. Palisadians Maiya Williams, Chris Cluess and Dick Blasucci all work on “MAD TV,” a one-hour sketch comedy show which airs Saturday night at 11 on Fox. They sat down at Mort’s Deli one Wednesday morning to discuss the show’well, almost discuss the show, which is in its 11th year. After sausage jokes, caffeine references, flying barbs and witty repartee, the three stopped just long enough so that I could get some facts about them and the show. Blasucci, one of the executive producers, has been with the show for eight years. Cluess and Williams are writing supervisors and have been with the show five years and four years, respectively. All three have extensive writing credits including “Night Court,” “SCTV,” “Charlie & Company,” “Fresh Prince,” “Newhart,” “Tracy Ullman” and “Rock.” Sketches include political satires, commercial spoofs, pop culture set-ups and parodies of film and television. Although not every sketch is a winner, the show is worth watching because the writing is intelligent and has an edge. Some of the humor is scatological, but sketches and jokes are not done for shock value. At times, the variety of topics the show spoofs, the amazing ensemble cast and the inspired moments are pure brilliance. TV Guide named MAD’s parody of “Felicity” one of the 50 funniest moments in TV history. “It’s become an alternative to Saturday Night Live for many baby boomers,” Blasucci said. “We’re starting to gear it so it’s not just for teenagers.” “We write for ourselves,” Cluess said. “If it makes us laugh, it gets on.” Williams explained there’s a large group of writers for the show, with a lot of different backgrounds. “Everyone has his own type of humor,” he said, “which means the sketches reflect those types: political, gross-out, smart.” When I said I had laughed at one of the recent sketches, Cluess was quick to jump in. “What made you laugh?” he asked, and without waiting for my reply he said, “I wrote it.” Turning to Blasucci, he added, “We’ve got to do something on the NBA dress code; it was in the paper this morning.” Although “MAD TV” is compared to “Saturday Night Live,” the resemblance has to do more with the fact that they’re both sketch shows. “We’re not live, which means we can take more chances,” Blasucci said. “We also have time to edit and can take out things that don’t work. We have more time to set up scenes.” “We also don’t have to rely on a guest star,” Williams said. “The sketches aren’t written for stars.” “The shows are two different animals,” Cluess said. “‘SNL” is driven by a guest host; we feature the cast. ‘MAD TV’ has half the number of writers they do and we’re driven by ideas.” Blasucci said that the show’s 15 writers have backgrounds that include the Groundlings, Second City, and some who have sitcom experience. Many writers at “MAD TV” were actors before joining the staff. Every week the writers work on three shows simultaneously. They put the final touches on the show that’s taping that week. They write close to 25 sketches for the following week, of which approximately 10 will be chosen. They pitch new ideas that could potentially be written for sketches the week after that. All three have high praise for the cast, calling it one of the strongest they’ve seen. The actors and writers are collaborative. In a pinch the writers perform on the show. “On sitcom writing, it’s the same characters you write for over and over,” Williams said. “And the situation is realistic. On ‘MAD’ you can write about anything. If you want a scene with a chicken, you put someone in a costume.” “There was a TV show about man vs. beast,” Cluess said, “where a man might race a horse.” “Chris and I wrote a parody of that show with Reba McIntyre playing ping-pong with a toad,” Williams said. “It’s a very inventive form,” Cluess said. “I get to write things you rarely do.” Williams is married to Patric Verrone, the newly-elected president of the Writers Guild, West. They have three children: Patric,10, Marianne, 8, and Teddy, 5. She is also a published author of “The Golden Hour,” a middle grades novel that was published in 2004. Her second novel, “Hour of the Cobra,” will come out next spring. She attended Harvard, where she was editor of the Harvard Lampoon for four years. Cluess is married to Joyce and they have two children: Jessica, a junior at Northwestern University, and Meredith, a senior at Marymount. He attended Fordham University and then served four years in the Navy as a hospital corpsman. He was the editor of the National Lampoon magazine. Blasucci is married to Beth and they have two children: Maria, a sophomore at Loyola Marymount University, and Anthony, who is working on “Family Guy” on Fox. Blasucci graduated from Southern Illinois'”The Harvard of southern Illinois,” he joked. “Many people thought it was as hard as an Ivy League school.” “We all ended up in the same place on ‘MAD TV,'” Williams laughed. “It shows I spent too much money to go to school.”

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor Wallace Berman may be the most important unknown artist in California history. A leader of the postwar avant-garde, he was the founder and editor of “Semina,” a hand-printed, free-form journal that he produced irregularly between 1955 and 1964. He was also an avid photographer, collagist, and installation artist. His Los Angeles residences, first in Beverly Glen and later at the top of Topanga Canyon, were the center of beatnik life in Southern California. Since his death in a car accident on his 50th birthday, in 1976, his life, work, and contribution to cultural history has often been reduced to the annals of cult memory. A new Santa Monica Museum of Art-organized exhibition and catalogue, “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” brings him and 53 of his fellow artists and poets into the broader history of American life during the second half of the 20th century. Berman was born on Staten Island in 1926, but moved to the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles in 1936. After his father’s death the following year, the family moved to Hollywood. Although his parents were observant, he was not raised strictly within the Jewish faith or tradition. A lifelong lover of poker, pool, and ping pong, he was expelled from Fairfax High in 1943 for gambling. He entered the Navy after an arrest for possession of marijuana, but stayed in for only six months. Back in Los Angeles, he spent increasing time in the city’s jazz clubs, where he met Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. During this time Berman supported himself by working for a furniture company while immersing himself in the arts community. He made a passing attempt at art school, but dropped out twice. While waiting in line to see a film by Jean Cocteau, one of his favorite artists, he met Shirley Morand; they married the following year, 1952. With a $5,000 loan from Berman’s mother, the young couple bought a house at 10426 Crater Lane, in Beverly Glen. After Berman purchased a Kelly hand press through the mail, “Semina” sprung to life. The first issue included writing and art by Cameron, Walter Hopps, David Meltzer, Jean Cocteau, and Bob Alexander. Berman produced 150 copies. He published eight more issues, produced in Los Angeles and San Francisco over the next nine years. The work of Herman Hesse, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs, among many others, was included. Only one issue was bound; most consisted of an envelope filled with loose pieces of paper printed with contributors’ art and poetry. Berman mailed out “Semina,” free of charge to his friends and associates. With the exception of a few copies available at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, ‘Semina” could not be bought. Michael Duncan, co-curator of the exhibition, in an interview with the Palisadian-Post, spoke of Berman’s commitment to “multiplicity in the arts and multifarious forms of expression.” In Berman’s world, “art is made for other members of the group, not made for just the art or poetry world.” Berman believed art to be a “mysterious force,” in Duncan’s words, and therefore was hesitant about discussing the meaning behind his work. His skepticism of the commercial and academic art world was no doubt confirmed when his first one-man show, on view at the Ferus Galley in 1957, was shut down by the Los Angeles Vice Squad. Charged with obscenity, Berman was fined $150. The Ferus show included a cross, a series of paintings of Hebrew letters, and several other installation pieces, including “Homage to Herman Hesse,” the only piece from the exhibition that survives. It was a line drawing of a couple making love by the artist Cameron’from the first “Semina,” pages of which Berman had scattered throughout the gallery’ that the police arrested him for, not a photograph of a couple in a coital position on the cross, which didn’t register with the police. The show’s shutdown was devastating to Berman, who, disgusted with the whole experience, moved with Shirley and their son Tosh to San Francisco later that year. They did not return to live in Los Angeles until June 1961. Rebecca Solnit, in her book “Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era,” writes of Berman: “The Ferus show is the only time he left out irony and distance. He truly exposed himself, though it was another kind of exposure that got him into trouble.” He never tried to explain his work. Kristine McKenna, Berman’s biographer and co-curator of the exhibition, recently said in an interview with the Post: “Berman was very secretive in ways. He never discussed his work, never gave an interview, never kept a journal, and never taught a class. There’s no record of how he felt about his work or life. “Secretiveness was a strategy,” McKenna continued. “Berman was very strict about work, how it was shown.” He never stopped making art; he took thousands of photographs and spent his last years producing his Verifax collages, grids of different images taken from popular culture magazines, each framed by a photo of a hand holding a transistor radio. As Duncan writes in the show’s catalogue: “The structural device is a resonant metaphor for Berman’s broader role as a transmitter of images and ideas that were metaphorically ‘in the air.'” He never incorporated his own photographs into his collages. Yet it was seeing these photographs a few years ago that piqued McKenna’s interest in Berman. “I started looking at the negatives and saw he had connections with all kinds of people’ Jack Smith, Allen Ginsberg. I was surprised that he was a really good photographer. I wanted to show the photos.” At this time, she heard that Michael Duncan was organizing a show about “Semina,” that would, in his words, “do a social history of that time and an examination of the participants.” They decided to join together to curate the Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibition, which includes more than 300 works, approximately 75 of them by Berman. The show illustrates, as McKenna puts it, that “Berman was an important catalyst. He was the vibrating energy field at the center of it all.” It also sheds some light on some of the underground figures who are less well known along with better-known figures like Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Dennis Hopper, Michael McClure and Henry Miller. Curator Duncan notes that it took real “field work to find objects by some of these people.” One was John Reed, “a casualty of the group, who ended up homeless and with mental problems.” Duncan found two handmade books by Reed in the late curator Walter Hopps’ basement. Some things, even if found, could not be borrowed, such as a 1949 black painting with crucifix by Allen Ginsburg that was too fragile to lend. The artists in the exhibition were photographed by Berman, and those portraits, most of which were printed especially for this show, give the viewer a snapshot of how much Berman respected and nurtured his friends and colleagues. Duncan equates him with Andy Warhol, who shot two films at Berman’s Crater Lane house, and his infamous coterie of artists. Duncan said: “Warhol was more of a vampire; Wallace was more of a solicitor. He was a more lyrical, more sensitive artist. The comparison is interesting, for both had a close-knit group and used pop culture in new ways.” Berman’s untimely death further cemented his position as “a symbol for a whole era,” suggested Duncan. McKenna believes that many young Los Angeles artists think of Berman as an indisputable influence. With the exhibition complete and all of her interviews finished, she must now sit down and write her biography. She has collected so many differing points of view, so many different versions of Wallace Berman that she recently admitted: “I haven’t figured out how to resolve it.” While McKenna works to figure out the Berman she wants to represent in her book, the exhibition will embark on a national tour after closing at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. For now, it will be up to us to decide who he might have been. “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle,” curated by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, is on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through November 26. Contact: 586-6488 or www.smmoa.org. The exhibition will then travel to Logan, Utah; Wichita, Kansas; Berkeley, California; and New York City. The catalog is published by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and D.A.P.