Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities. Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year. Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.
Sofya Levitsky-Weitz is an Ovation Fellow from Loyola Marymount University. She responds to her experience seeing Wonder of the World, presented by SeaGlass Theatre Company, with her mentor Tom Buderwitz.
In my directing class I just finished directing a short play of the teacher’s choosing. You know the type: cliché, contrived, one of those “10-minute play book” plays. I became more nauseated each time I read or dealt with it. Finally, towards the end, I started to find some miniscule value in this artificial and juvenile script because I trusted my actors and my vision as a director.
Still, how refreshing it was to venture to Burbank and see Wonder of the World by David Lindsay-Abaire, a truly well-written, dynamic and quirky piece. After a long drive on a Friday night to the little theatre, this production from SeaGlass Theatre Company, presented in a space rented from the Victory Theatre Center next door, seemed to be a cozy oasis in the otherwise industrial/residential area.
After the show, we were given this picture in the form of a friendly postcard asking us to “come back soon!”
After being welcomed by an extremely friendly staff, my mentor and I were escorted over to a backdrop where we donned yellow raincoats and were asked to make our best “so cold” faces in front of a two-dimensional painting of Niagara Falls.
We were then ushered inside and offered warm cider and freshly baked goods while we waited for the show to begin. Such personal attention and comfort was quite delightful, though unusual in the theatre these days, and my first indication this experience was about to be a slightly different one.
This feeling endured, along with enjoyment, once the show began. I knew virtually nothing about the play before I saw it, having only read Abaire’s Rabbit Hole which I found beautiful yet poignantly depressing. Wonder of the World is a very different world, that’s for sure. In my conversation with director Neil Wilson after the show, he described it as being in the same vein as Alice in Wonderland, a true trip down the rabbit hole (pun intended) for a play whose settings include rapid jumps from a hotel room, three restaurants, a bus and not one but two helicopters.
This is quite a daunting task for an 18-by-18 foot playing space, let alone any sized theatre. It leads me to wonder if Abaire didn’t write this clever, widely entertaining piece just to challenge anyone who had the gall to produce it, an undertaking difficult for any space once you understand this play requires a highly naturalistic aspect along with crazy locations. These fantastical settings may be more easily constructed in absurdist or representational theatre but, more importantly, they are more easily believed. When we see theatre, especially in a small black box, where we know capabilities are limited, we are more than willing to suspend our disbelief. But it gets sticky when we are faced with a highly realistic hotel room where one scene later, actors are skipping out the set door with headphones on to fly away on their “helicopter.”
A choice has to be made, which leads me to ask why this company decided to put on this play. Truly, it’s hilarious and the second act especially found me lost in laughter; the direction was inspired and the actors very talented but there was a certain cohesion missing. I do believe the company did a great job with what they had and I commend them on their imagination. Perhaps I need to work on my own. After all, I did make the journey all the way to Niagara Falls
For more information on Wonder of the World presented by SeaGlass Theatre Company, click here!
