An emotionally abusive childhood provides the backstory to the celebration of survival that is Inda Craig-Galván’s memory play I Go Somewhere Else, a playwrights’ Arena World Premiere as superbly acted as it is strikingly designed. If only it were easier to figure out who’s who and what’s what.

 Growing up in the 1970s with a mama as crazy as Reda (Cheri Lynne VandenHeuval) can’t have been easy for Lanny/Langree (played at ages eight and fourteen by Kita Grayson and as a thirty-three-year-old by Donna Simone Johnson), not when something as trivial as appearing to “talk like white folks” might be provocation for a whoopin’.

Indeed, with Reda as her mother, it’s no wonder that Lanny grew up feeling “less than,” that she dreamed of having telekinetic powers like Carrie, that she dared not contradict the woman who gave her life even if that meant telling whoever asked, “If my mama says that Reverend Jackson killed Martin Luther King, then that’s what happened.”

And then there was Reda and teenage Lanny’s trip down to Alabama for the wedding of a half-brother she’d never met and Mama’s reunion with the man who done her wrong, a visit that threatened to rob Reda of whatever was left of her sanity.

 No wonder then that to escape a reality too painful to accept, Lanny goes “somewhere else,” to a place in her mind where her future self (or selves) are there to offer advice and encouragement while attempting to figure out among themselves what made Reda tick.

If it’s not already clear, Lanny/Langree’s got issues that may even plague her today, fifty years after her birth.

Where I Go Somewhere Else works best (and at these points it works quite splendidly) are in scenes between Reda and her pre-and-just-turned-teen daughter, achingly real to anyone whose experienced or witnessed the kind of parental abuse that even a seemingly loving mother can administer, and often quite funny to boot.

What doesn’t work is the introduction of a character named Tabitha (Inger Tudor), first and foremost because it doesn’t become crystal clear until nearly the end of the play exactly who this woman with a name nothing at all like Lanny/Langree is, though in Tabitha’s defense she does provide 30something Langree with a sounding board as they discuss Mama’s many manias and what Langree’s life might be twenty years from now.

(Spoilers in the following two paragraphs.)

 Scenes between Reda and Cliff (Kevin Coubal), the white Southerner who seduced and abandoned her (though significantly not the child they conceived) are gut-wrenchers, whether it’s a young Reda realizing that marriage to Cliff might never pass the planning stage, or imagining what their twenty-year reunion might be, or being forced to face things as they really are.

Unfortunately, it’s never made clear why Cliff’s parents would choose to raise their son’s illegitimate, biracial son as their grandson when they’ve threatened to disown him for wanting to marry a black woman, not to mention how Cliff’s wife could accept the boy’s presence in their home or why Reda and Lanny are invited guests at the wedding of the grown son/half-brother the two of them have apparently never met.

In other words, minus script revisions, I Go Somewhere Else proves too frequently perplexing to be entirely effective.

 What does work, and sensationally so, is VandenHeuval’s bravura star turn as a woman who could give Blanche DuBois lessons in delusional thinking and behavior and recent L.A. returnee Grayson’s astonishingly believable transformation from Howard University grad to tween/teen heartbreaker.

Under Jon Lawrence Rivera’s incisive direction, Playwrights’ Arena’s latest is never less than visually stunning, both Johnson and Tudor do their accustomed excellent work, and the equally fine Coubal treads the line between victim and cad quite adeptly indeed.

Austin Kottkamp’s thrust-stage scenic design provides a just-right backdrop for Derek Jones’s dramatic lighting, Lily Bartenstein’s evocative projections, Mylette Nora’s pitch-perfect costumes, and above all Matt Richter’s richly moody sound design.

 I Go Somewhere Else is produced by Henry ‘Heno’ Fernandez. Christina Bryan is stage manager. Raul Clayton Staggs is casting director.

As undeniably compelling as it is frustratingly puzzling, Inda Craig-Galván’s I Go Somewhere Else is, if nothing else, a showcase for two of the most remarkable performances you’re likely to see this year.

Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles.
www.PlaywrightsArena.org

–Steven Stanley
August 25, 2018
Photos: Playwrights’ Arena

Tags: Atwater Village Theatre, Inda Craig-Galván, Los Angeles Theater Review, Playwrights' Arena