(2 of 2)
Kingfish is a sardonic homosexual love triangle. The characters are a ravaged, prissy-elegant middle-aged photographer (Hollywood veteran Buck Henry), a chilly CIA agent (Sam Anderson) and a ditzy, petulant muscle-boy prostitute (Merritt Butrick, in a striking star turn of alternating vice and victimization). The play is a series of enigmatic, off-center vignettes of selfishness, loneliness and casual brutality bred of despair. Nominally realistic, the plot veers off into absurdism: the title character is a dog that likes to discuss current events, and the animal is represented by a black box with a rope for a tail and a jagged hole full of green light for a mouth. Every character onstage knows, yet denies, that this is actually an inanimate object rather than a pet. Believing in its dogginess is just one in a welter of expedient lies that these people live by.
Director David Schweizer shrewdly opts for a staged-reading style of presentation that emphasizes the play's metaphoric intent rather than its moments of naturalism. Schweizer himself is visible throughout, seated on a catwalk, reading aloud the stage directions; a few feet away sits an actor who provides the snuffles and howls of the pseudo dog. If the stage were actually filled with Oriental rugs, television sets and bars stocked with glassware, as specified in the text -- rather than the photographs of them that are fleetingly projected onto the floor -- spectators would probably see Kingfish as an unconvincing problem drama instead of what it becomes, a chilling cautionary fable.
A Turgenev adaptation might easily seem more suited to PBS's Masterpiece Theater than to the yeasty political traditions of the Los Angeles stage. And indeed, that is what resulted when playwright Brian Friel adapted Fathers and Sons for Britain's National Theater in 1987. But Nothing Sacred, by Canadian dramatist George F. Walker, persuasively makes the debate among student anarchists in 1860s Russia echo that among Marxist collegians of 1960s America. Film star Tom Hulce (Amadeus) is impressively showy as the charismatic yet destructive Bazarov. As the admiring friend he visits at a decaying country estate, Corey Parker (Biloxi Blues) is a well-intentioned, quietly compelling Everyman with whom audiences can identify. Walker risks big themes: the conflict between valuing the heritage of the past and envisioning the ideal of the future, and the debate over whether it is possible to take the best of the past without inheriting its cruelty as well. This is the stuff of enlightened discourse in any democracy, and on the eve of a presidential election, Nothing Sacred demonstrates enduring political vibrancy on the stages of La-La Land.