| For seventeen years, the
Los Angeles Women’s Theatre
Festival has been presenting performances by talented women
from the theatre, dance, and performance
art world. This year’s festival, with the theme
“Meeting the New Decade,” was presented at the Electric Lodge
in Venice over the unusually hot weekend of March 25-28.
Opening night on
Thursday featured an awards ceremony honoring Fifth
Dimension singer-actor Florence LaRue, dancer-choreographer
Sri Susilowati, performance artist Odalys Nanin, character
actor Connie Sawyer, and posthumous awards to actors Beatrice
Arthur and Alaina
Reed Hall.
Los
Angeles City Council member Bernard Parks posed for photos
with the winners, although he did not fulfill the hosts’
humorous suggestion that he recite Shakespeare.
As a bonus, there were special performances like Juliette
Marshall’s laugh-inducing one-woman cabaret show “Shift
Happens,” about her experiences with divorce.
Friday
night’s highlights included Cynthia Lee’s “ruddha
rude huh?” in which the dancer-choreographer used kathak (Indian
classical dance) movements while speaking in nonsense syllables
and watching her own invisible performance from the audience.
In a similar vein, Sheetal Gandhi’s “Bahu-Beti-Biwi” was a
combination of Indian
dance and music with odd verbalisms seguing into nonsense
comments like “My brother cannot wear short shorts in India.”
These pieces managed to be both amusing and graceful.
On
Saturday afternoon, Raleigh S. Pinsky took the audience
through “Evolution of Soul 685,” in which she played a soul
(complete with glittery halo) who decides to be born and live on
earth. The childlike nature of her narrative seemed a quiet
interlude compared to many of the more raucous Festival offerings.
Saturday
evening offered an energetic program with Elaine Del
Valle’s hilarious and ultimately moving “Brownsville Bred,”
the story of growing up Latina in an African-American neighborhood
in New York;
and Barbara Cole’s “Surviving Chrysalis,” about a maturing
mother struggling with erotic temptation and identity.
Sunday
afternoon featured the strongest performances. Gloria
Rosen’s “Listen, Can you Hear Me Now?” dealt with the
dilemma of a woman whose parents are deaf and rely on their
daughter as a “translator.” This story of family conflict was
amazingly funny at times and audience members, regardless of their
backgrounds, identified with it.
Lydia Nicole’s “Calling Up Papi”
was another stunning tale of a girl growing up in the inner city
with a pimp for a father. Erika
Green Swafford’s monologue “The
New Black” drew whoops and cheers from the audience for
her observations on the marketing and co-opting of black identity.
And Dina Morrone’s “The Italian in Me,” was a hoot, with
Morrone telling of her attempts to find movie work in Italy and
meeting a series of film
industry types (including Federico
Fellini!).
One audience member, who had made a
long trip from Palos
Verdes to attend the Festival, told this reviewer: “What
I love about this is the amazing cultural diversity.” Not only
was the diversity in the performances, she noted, but it was also
in the way that audience members from different backgrounds got to
meet and talk and befriend each other. The Los Angeles Women’s
Theatre Festival can be proud of this achievement.
LYNNE BRONSTEIN
Mirror Contributing Writer
lynne@smmirror.com
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