A FUGUE FOR STRANGERS
Pillar Studio
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Most successful of the monologues is Nathan Carver’s bittersweet “A Girl in Every Town,” a series of woeful encounters between a traveling salesman and women who have caught on to his line. As directed by Jeff Christian, Carver offers a take on romantic losers that has neatly suited his story to his style.
The same driven story telling lifts David O’Donnell’s “A Story Told” (staged by Kelly Ann Corcoran), a bizarre vignette about a compulsive confessor whose mind has broken since he supposedly saw a flower bloom from buckled pavement; even if his monologue seems stunted by its cryptic poetry, O’Donnell conveys the man’s obsession. Equally perplexing, Meghan Strell’s “New Year’s Resolution” depicts a Chicago woman with a strange spiritual link to her songwriting brother in New York; in Hillman’s staging the story seems less consequential than Strell’s impassioned delivery of it.
If ever a bunch of Angelinos worked overtime to earn the Big One (no less than eight on the Richter scale), the male denizens of Hurlyburly do. An endurance feat that’s catnip for actors but can be bread and water for an audience, David Rabe’s bilious 225-minute epic anatomizes four Hollywood phonies and the spiteful, petty, misogynistic, solipsistic world they’ve assembled out of countless cool cruelties.
A young actor who at first seems too casual to convince, Michael Shannon plays Eddie with mumbling distractedness, an affectless deadpan from a dead soul. It turns out to be a shrewd choice when Shannon finally explodes.
