LA Weekly
December 10-16, 2004

Fireflow: Two Tales From Andersen

Bottom’s Dream is one in a trinity of local theater companies (that also includes Padua Playwrights and Son of Semele) devoted to primacy of the word -- intensely heightened and poetical language which challenges commonly held perceptions of how thoughts and meanings are constructed. In a pair of interlocking tales commissioned by the theater, playwright Eric Ehn has composed linguistic riffs on two tales by Hans Christian Andersen ("The Little Match Girl" and "The Story of a Mother"), here re-imagined as Matcher in the Nigh (a joke on Catcher in the Rye) and Blister. Both are dreams floating on themes of love, loss and afterlife, elegantly staged by James Martin with a kind of Brechtian surreal-ism, thanks in large part to the combination of Susan Gratch’s emblematic set dressings of shrouded furniture (in Matcher) and suitcases (in Blister), Tom Slotten’s Wonderland costumes, Eli Presser’s gargoyle puppets and the ethereal washes of Trevor Norton’s lighting design. Julia Prud’homme heroically plays the forlorn Mother in Blister, who takes two tortured journeys to the underworld in order to find her dead son. When told by Death (Doug Sutherland) she has one chance to choose and thereby rescue her son from among dozens of spirits enclosed within flower buds, her gamble has the same vicious emotional current that rolls across The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Angela Kang is slightly too strident as the Match Girl in Matcher, here an urban waif visited by a Nightingale (the ebul-lient Michelle Noh) and Death (Sutherland) while selling fire sticks for her abusive father. Both plays push sentimentality into a corner while toying with images of light and night, of life as the burning of sulfur -- a flash quickly enveloped by blackness. Yet for all its probing in the dark, the production is as magical as it is majestic. Bottom’s Dream at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City; Fri.-Sun., 8 p.m.; thru Dec. 19. (310) 226-2818. -- Steven Leigh Morris, LA Weekly