Saturday Night at the Palace - Pasadena Star-News Review

Furious Theatre Company marks anniversary with `Saturday Night at the Palace'

By Frances Baum Nicholson, Correspondent
Article Launched: 05/01/2008 02:52:59 PM PDT

If one had to pick a time when theater mattered, few could stand up to 1982, and the interracial Space Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. There, Paul Slabolepszy and Athol Fugard (now South Africa's best known theatrical voice) broke apartheid law by putting black and white actors together on the stage, holding up a mirror to whomever would look regarding what their country's racial policy was doing to their country's people.

One play to emerge from that time, Slabolepszy's "Saturday Night at the Palace," became ground-breaking a second time when it was adopted as the first venture of the Furious Theatre Company, now the resident group at the Carrie Hamilton Theatre upstairs at the Pasadena Playhouse. Challenging and adventurous, the Furious crew of committed performers create theater intended to make people uncomfortable, willing to discuss, and ready to rethink. They have done so, intimately well, for six years. Now they return to the play that started it all, celebrating their own history and the reopening of their renovated home.

The play, done without intermission, rivets one from the first moments. Forsie's motorcycle has broken down, and he and his fellow Afrikaner passenger, Vince, are stuck at a closed roadside burger stand called Rocco's Burger Palace, where a Zulu employee is in the process of cleaning up from the day. Gradually, what begins as a moment of frustration escalates to sociopathic behavior on the part of Vince, laced with a core-deep, universally acknowledged racism which keeps anyone from being able to check the progress of events.
Director Damaso Rodriguez has been able to bring back his entire original cast from six years ago. Their ease with the characters allows a naturalism that makes the tale all the more scary. As Vince, Shawn Lee spouts Afrikaans, which mixes liberally into his conversation, with such natural conviction that it becomes understandable even without consulting the handy glossary in the program. Almost vibrating with an undercurrent of rage, Lee's character manages to seem explosive from the start and still have places to go - a very neat trick indeed.

Eric Pargac, playing Vince's rather milquetoast friend Forsie, develops into that most impossible of men: a person with a conscience who is simply too weak and self-centered to do anything about it. Again, the turn proves so naturalistic it plays well against Vince's intensity. Sean Blakemore's majestic September, calming his seething anger at mistreatment, desperately trying to keep from being destroyed by the thoughtless actions of a pair of visiting rowdies, fills the stage both physically and emotionally. He is most impressive when not doing what he easily could, being larger and stronger than either of his tormentors. It's a fascinating physical as well as emotional juxtaposition.

"Saturday Night at the Palace" proves an excruciating window back on a time when long-held beliefs and legal restrictions made strong men weak and weak men strong. It is the two men around Vince who define the inequities in the system. Vince would be a sicko anywhere. And that can translate this play into any place and time where inequities create an unequal playing field.

And this is what you'll be discussing afterward, among other things. Happy birthday, Furious.

Saturday Night at the Palace - Talkinbroadway.com Review

Saturday Night at the Palace

Sean Blakemore, Eric Pargac and Shawn Lee
I'll be honest with you. For a while there, I wasn't sure about Saturday Night at the Palace. The production comes with a pretty spiffy pedigree: Furious Theatre Company is revisiting the award-winning show that launched the company six years ago, with the same cast and director (and some of the original designers). Knowing the show was well received the first time around, and knowing that it could only benefit from the artists' growth and experience in the interim, the prospect seemed like a dead-bang winner.

And yet, at times, the play seems to drag. Paul Slabolepszy's play, rarely produced in the U.S., about a racially charged incident (inspired by an actual event) in 1982 South Africa, takes a lot of time to build. We're dealing with what happens when two young white men are stranded - courtesy of their broken motorcycle - by a roadside burger stand at 2:00 a.m., when the only person at burger stand is a black waiter who just wants to lock up and go home. And you know - you absolutely know - from the increasingly frenetic drumbeats that herald the play's opening, that this isn't the sort of play that's going to end with all three men learning a little bit about each other and becoming the best of friends. It's going to get intense, and dark, and ugly. It just takes its time getting there.

Slabolepszy shouldn't really be blamed for taking his time. The purpose of Saturday Night at the Palace isn't to shock the audience with the acts that ultimately occur; the purpose is to investigate the complex web of motivations that can lead to racial hatred and violence. (For a play about South Africa under Apartheid, there are an uncomfortable number of similarities to issues we've heard raised in the current presidential campaign.) But, in order to do this, the play has to really establish Forsie and Vince as something more than two young white thugs, and September as something more than an innocent Zulu waiter. And, since the guys' language is peppered with Afrikaans, while September speaks a bit of Zulu, it isn't the easiest thing to follow, and the audience isn't immediately drawn into the piece.

And then ... it happens. You can actually see the turning point in the play. Vince snags September's keys, preventing him from locking up. Forsie, who had previously been friendly (if a bit condescending) to September, first tries to get the keys back for the man. But when Vince tosses the keys to Forsie in a game of "keep away," Forsie takes the side of his friend, rather than the waiter, and events get on the unstoppable train to edge-of-your-seat, heart-pounding theatre.

It is, when you get right down to it, Furious doing what Furious does best: a harrowing scene, not just of violence and cruelty, but the darker side of human interaction. Humiliation and dehumanization arising out of desperation and frustration - a battle born of individuals trying to empower themselves when there isn't enough power to go around. The cast is a fearless ensemble willing to go right to the edge, working under the confident direction of Dámaso Rodriguez, who takes them there. Each escalation of the stakes is a surprise, yet it also conveys an element of sadness for the lost opportunity at a peaceful resolution. Slabolepszy's script pays off, as everything that happens is character driven. This isn't a quick, shocking cap on the play, but the meat of the play itself - a well-paced, enthralling series of confrontations that builds to a stunning conclusion. Saturday Night at the Palace starts out slow, but by the end, it is unforgettable.

Saturday Night at the Palace runs at the Pasadena Playhouse Carrie Hamilton Theatre through May 31, 2008. For tickets and information, see www.furioustheatre.org.

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Furious Feature in Pasadena Weekly

Mad talent
Six Years Young, Pasadena’s Furious Theater Co. is taking LA theater by storm

By April Caires 05/01/2008

No, they’re not angry. In fact, the six founding members of the Furious Theatre Co. seem to be having the time of their lives.

On the eve of a sixth anniversary revival of their inaugural production, Paul Slabolepsky’s “Saturday Night at the Palace,” the little theatre company with the ferocious name is all smiles. An acclaimed ensemble, a track record of consistently bold and often brilliant productions and an unchecked determination to do theatre their way — full of piss and fury — has made this no-longer-fledgling company a gem of the LA theater scene.

The choice to revive “Palace” is apt on many levels. In typical Furious fashion, even the date of the play’s opening was designed to make a splash — April 26, six years to the day from the 2002 premiere. The material itself also embodies much of what the company strives to be. Revolving around a midnight encounter between two white travelers and a black waiter in Apartheid South Africa, “Palace” is dark, funny, volatile, challenging — in a word, it’s Furious.

In execution, the revival is also a measure of just how far Furious Theatre Co. has come. Six years ago, the six cofounders were the cast, crew and marketing team. The play’s lead actors were building risers and hanging lights between rehearsals, while the director was up on a scaffolding painting the ceiling. The last seats were screwed in at their original performance space — a donated section of the Armory Northwest that used to be a plastics factory — minutes before doors opened on their first show.

This time around, the company comes to the material with 14 productions under its belt, a string of critical accolades and awards, a blooming ensemble of 15, a cozy home at Pasadena Playhouse’s 99-seat Carrie Hamilton Theatre, and a name that is increasingly equated with high-quality theater delivered with high-wire intensity.

Key to its burgeoning success are the longstanding relationships between the six core ensemble members, who describe themselves as “artistic soulmates” — Sarah Hennessy, Shawn Lee, Vonessa Martin, Eric Pargac, Brad Price, and Damaso Rodriguez, ages 31 to 34. The group includes two married couples — Rodriguez and Hennessy, Lee and Martin — and a pair of friends, Price and Lee, who have known each other since kindergarten. Some of them went to college together; all six hail from the Midwest or Texas, and all came to LA at about the same time. In their early days here, they worked day jobs and internships and went on weekend camping trips together, where they started talking about what it would be like to form their own company.

From the beginning, their vision was remarkably clear and unified. Pargac, who is reprising his role as Forsie, the gentler of the two white Afrikaners in “Palace’s” central confrontation, attributes this consistency to their longstanding relationships, shared backgrounds and their habit, established early on, of retreating together once a year to discuss artistic goals.

“Part of the reason we all sort of know our aesthetic is because when we first started, we all took a retreat to Palm Springs. We had all these big Post-It pads on the wall and we wrote down everything we wanted to accomplish as a theater company and what we thought made a good theater company, things like what we want the audience to experience and all that kind of stuff. We collectively came up with what we thought was Furious.”

Some of what went on the Post-It pads wasn’t remotely flashy. The company’s first goals were to incorporate as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, to secure a performance space and to announce a full season of plays — three things they’d seen successful companies do to establish themselves.
They also dreamed big. On the pads they scrawled heady, long-term ambitions: to be one of the leading theater companies in the nation, a destination company for young talent, along the lines of their artistic idol, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Co., which was co-founded by Gary Sinese and includes members like John Malkovich and Joan Allen.

They also brainstormed about what, exactly, it means to be Furious.

Like their plays, the name is an attention-grabber, but it doesn’t mean what you might think. Although the company has never shied away from tackling hot-button issues with eviscerating irreverence and daring, the name has nothing to do with anger — political, religious or otherwise.
“It was never about being angry,” says Lee, who is returning to his role as Vince, a racist white Afrikaner, in “Palace.”

“But there’s a lot of strength in that word, and I think that the company is built on strength in numbers, the whole belief in ensemble.”

The name Furious captures that core strength of the group, as well as the raw energy they throw into their work. It’s also about the potency of the experience they try to give the audience. Those who have seen a few of their plays know that you know a Furious play when you see one — the productions are characterized by provocative topics, gripping plots, dark humor and a certain know-it-when-you-feel-it intensity.

More than anything, that is the mark of a Furious production. Although the material is often thought-provoking, a Furious play is not an intellectual experience. It’s a gut check.

Like “Palace,” the company’s four most recent productions are a testament to this sensibility. Craig Wright’s “Grace” begins with an explosion of gunfire and two dead bodies in the home of a born-again Christian couple. Matt Pelfrey’s “An Impending Rupture of the Belly” revolves around a young would-be father whose determination to protect his family devolves into militant paranoia about nuclear terrorists, avian bird flu, killer earthquakes, and other imagined threats of the post-Sept. 11 world. In Yusef El Guindi’s “Back of the Throat,” an Arab-American writer’s tiny apartment is made claustrophobic by the questioning of two unannounced guests, government agents whose friendly inquiry turns into relentless interrogation.

As for the company’s latest production, Alex Jones’ “Canned Peaches in Syrup,” it’s an outlandish comedy about an environmental apocalypse that leaves the planet populated by — I’ll give you a thousand guesses — nomadic, foul-mouthed cannibals.

All of which gives an audience quite a bit to think about. Pargac says the company’s hope is that they’ll save the thinking for the drive home. “We just want people emotionally involved in the experience, in what the characters are going through. Then we want them to talk about it when they leave,” he says, adding, “We strive to keep the audience engaged.”

Rodriguez, who has directed 12 of the company’s 14 productions, including both the premiere and the revival of “Palace,” says the company’s unique aesthetic was born partly out of necessity. Starting a theater company in LA? Get in line. Finding a way to stand out in the saturated regional theater scene was as much a practical consideration as an artistic challenge. Even in Pasadena, where competition is not so intense, Boston Court does new and provocative work all the time.
As a first step in distinguishing themselves, company members decided to focus on material that, in Rodriguez’s words, “had a reason to be done” — premieres, in other words. All but one of their productions thus far has been either a world, national or regional premiere.

Beyond that, the Furious team says they set out to create something wholly different, an intense, visceral theatergoing experience — theater that grabs you by the gut, throat, or other sensitive parts and doesn’t let go long enough for you to breathe, let alone intellectualize anything.

“Every piece that we have taken on, we challenge ourselves and we challenge the audience,” says Lee. “I think that excites our audience, whether they love it or hate it. No one ever walks out — I don’t think — going, ‘Eh, I don’t really feel anything.’ Everyone walks out feeling something.”

Indeed. Apartheid, post-9/11 terranoia, highly marginalized dietary choices — the company is drawn to material where the stakes and emotions are high and, in the case of “Canned Peaches,” one wonders whether the writer might have been too. Rodriguez says that underlying their desire to provide a gripping ride for the audience is a broader goal: revitalizing the theatergoing experience for new generations.

Theater has its work cut out for it to compete with DVDs, HBO and the many other entertainment options out there, he says. “It’s got to be this powerful, memorable experience, I think, to really start to engage a new audience. People talk about that all the time, but I don’t think it’s just getting them into the theater to see a play; I think it’s getting them into the theater to see a play they won’t forget.”

He adds that in the commercial world, this is being done with “big, musical, spectacle productions,” while smaller theaters are often sticking to a well-worn path of material that’s mainly directed at the existing theatergoer.

“We want the mainstream theatergoer to come see it and like it, obviously, but we are going after people like us who didn’t grow up going to see plays,” says Rodriguez, who, like all six of the core ensemble members, came from a working-class family and is a first-generation artist. “They find themselves in the theater and they have this experience and they want to try and have another one at some point.”

On the whole, Furious productions are reliably sharp, sophisticated and always superbly performed. But the material they choose is occasionally criticized as dancing the fine line between boldness and gimmickry. Their decision to focus on edgier material and exclusively on premieres makes every Furious production inherently risky; the results don’t always sit well with audiences.

“Our audiences are sometimes upset by our work,” says Rodriguez. “We have walkouts; we have people perhaps complain that the work is too vulgar or whatever.” As for the fury Furious productions can sometimes trigger, he adds, “We tried to do a good job, starting with our name, to not set any expectation other than this is going to be an intense, kind of challenging experience.”
The company hopes the revival of “Saturday Night at the Palace” will be just such an experience for an audience that might have missed it the first time around. Written in 1982, eight years before the official demise of apartheid, the play is a contemporary classic in South Africa but, amazingly, had never been performed professionally in the US until Furious brought it to Pasadena.

An American premiere full of provocative, emotionally charged material — Rodriguez says that choosing “Palace” as the company’s first production was a no-brainer.

“I remember it was like it absolutely defined everything that we wanted to be in terms of what a theatrical experience could be like,” he says. “If ever there was a play that was Furious Theater, it’s this play.”

“Saturday Night at the Palace” shows at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and at 7:30 p.m. Sundays through May 31 at the Pasadena Playhouse Carrie Hamilton Theatre, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Tickets are $25 or $10 for students. Call (800) 595-4849 or visit www.furioustheatre.org.