threevoices
November 2-8, 2001

There’s an implied unity in this intriguing trio of monologues expressed by the trendy, lowercased, word-merger title. Actually, several connectives are at work. The three actors are all Bottom’s Dream veterans, who have worked before with the playwrights whose one-acts make up this triple bill. And all three pieces are directed with flair by James Martin and staged in three different sections of the cavernous Ivy Substation. In Mac Wellman’s offbeat The Land of Fog and Whistles, Bonita Friedericy is a sassy ghost from Pluto who’s survived nine rounds of plutonium poisoning on her planet, and now must tell a different story every day for 24,161 years (the length of the element’s half life). Friedericy holds impressive court for nearly 40 minutes as she ponders, mocks and relives her cyclical journeys through "the madness of small worlds." Insanity takes another form in nevertire, the second installment of Erik Ehn’s "Chokecherry Trilogy," in which Jennifer Griffin is utterly compelling as the crazy, homeless birth mother of a severely disabled child. Finally, Alice Dodd plays a delightfully sexy maid in Ruth Margraff’s The Burlesque Floggings, a brief, stylized offering rendered largely incomprehensible by densely ornate language and acoustical problems. John Zalewski’s sound design in the other two, however, is sharp, and all three are complemented by Younwha Kong’s dynamic lighting. Bottom’s Dream at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City; Fri.-Sun., 8 p.m.; thru Nov. 18. (310) 281-9517. (Terri Roberts)