Theatre Review: After the Fall

Director RoZsa Horvath opens the HumanArts Theater Company's production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall with an exquisitely affected homage to TV's Mad Men.  The actors coiffed in 50's attire slowly enter The Lillian Theatre's square proscenium as if in a dream and take their position for the play's opening visual.  Smoke unintrusively billows between the carefully ruffled white sheets stretched vertically as backdrops drawing the audience's eye to center stage.  They'll be used throughout the production as screens for the ruminations and recollections of Quentin, an attorney encountering a crisis of consciousness in mid-20th century urban professional America.

I can't sum up the play any better than the writeup in the production notes.  Miller's autobiographical play details "a man on a quest to make peace with his own history, struggling with the choices he has made in his public and private life while examining the personal, political and universal forces that collide when we 'fall' from innocence."  Quentin must measure self-sacrifice against self-preservation, drawing on the effects his mother (Sharon Samples), father (Michael Chandler), and brother Dan (Chris Smith) had on his being, confronting themes relating to the Holocaust and defending a friend during the second Red Scare.

Additionally, Quentin (Brian Robert Harris) wrestles with his multiple marital decisions as he tries to squeeze out a lesson in each new attempt at wedded bliss.  The unfaithful man learns to recognize both the good and evil that exists within his soul (and that of other persons), and accept and embrace his ability to live simultaneously with both forces.  His conflict plays out during the course of his first two marriages, the latter of which is personified in Maggie (Jennefer Ludwigsen), based on Marilyn Monroe, Miller's second wife.

Harris plays Quentin as an open canvass the women in his life project their emotions onto, much like his thoughts manifest and disperse across the minimalist stage.  Mary Carrig as his first wife Louise and Samples chew up their best moments while tearing the objects of their disdain new assholes.  The standout of the production is Ludwigsen who rips into her juicy Monroe-inspired role vigorously.  From sweetly innocent to passive-aggressively drunk, she seamlessly changes from one extreme mood to another like most people breathe.  Julie Anne Bermel plays Quentin's literal and figurative guide Holga with an appropriate world weariness as she patiently waits for him to make amends inside himself.

The production is extremely cinematic and manages to incorporate Quentin's thoughts effectively into this memory play.  The set design utilizes the production logo of a symbolically fractured head and visual equipment casts the stark red and black image of a concentration camp's barb-wired fence down a drape; the protagonist imprisoned in his personal battle with reconciling right and wrong with human nature.  This commendable production works against the stereotype that Los Angeles doesn't offer decent theatre.

After the Fall closes on the 1st of April.