The L.A. Times
December 10, 2004

THEATER
FireFlow: Two Tales from Andersen

Ivy Substation
9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City

Meet Erik Ehn's version of the Little Match Girl: She shouts obscenities and hurls invective. She threatens and cajoles. But if you wait a minute, she'll revert to the vulnerable child, shivering in the snow, whose flame is extinguished in Hans Christian Andersen's sadly beautiful tale.

The story keeps changing direction and circling back on itself, its language sharp and glinting, like glass that has been shattered and glued crazily back together.

Such are hallmarks of Ehn's hallucinatory, poetic style as he retells "The Little Match Girl" as "Matcher in the Nigh" and Andersen's "The Story of a Mother" as "Blister." Bottom's Dream presents the plays under the collective title "FireFlow."

Both are wintry tales, chilled by mortality. Artfully presented, they nevertheless fail to make much of an impression, due in part to the stubbornly oblique language and in part to the works' brevity ("Matcher" is just 20 minutes long, "Blister" a half hour).

Angela Kang, in torn tights and fingerless gloves, leads off as the girl who, on a killingly cold night, tries to interest passersby in buying her matches. Julia Prud'homme, barefoot and dressed in tatters, follows in the second half as a mother who chases after Death in hopes of retrieving her sickly child. Additional characters include Michelle Noh as a jazz-singing nightingale in the first tale; Doug Sutherland stalks through both stories as Death.

Puppet theaters, suitcases and drifts of snowy lace symbolically occupy Susan Gratch's set, starkly illuminated, in Trevor Norton's design, by the cold light of winter. Words and images crystallize under James Martin's direction.

As a metaphor for life's evanescence, both tales imagine a shirt being carried off by a current, unraveling as it goes. "I am a shirt unthreading," the Match Girl says. Frost-tinged, the words seem to whisper: So are we all. -- Daryl H. Miller, Theater Beat, LA Times

Through Dec. 19
Sundays, 8 p.m.
Fridays, 8 p.m.
Saturdays, 8 p.m.

Price: $15
Information: 310-226-2818