APARTMENT LIVING


Playwright Boni B. Alvarez takes us back to the early months of the pandemic in Apartment Living, the latest Playwrights’ Arena/Skylight Theatre Company World Premiere, and assuming you’re okay with reliving those days of apprehension and uncertainty, Alvarez’s latest offers an adeptly balanced mix of comedy and drama, laughter and fears performed by an all-around fabulous acting ensemble and featuring the most ingenious set design in town.

It’s early March 2020, and business professional Cassandra (Charrell Mack) has just informed her live-in, between-jobs Latin-American actor fiancé Alex (Gabriel Leyva) that she’ll be working remotely for the next month or so, which for Alex just means more time to have hot and heavy sex with his lady.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the Los Feliz apartment complex Cassandra and Alex call home, Filipina single mother Easter (Gigette Reyes) is insisting that her 20ish son/apartment mate Dixon (Andrew Russel) start wearing a mask at work (though presumably not when performing oral sex on his secret male lover, who just happens to be someone we’ve already met.)

Though blissfully clueless to what her hunky fiancé has been up to (or who he’s been going down on), Cassandra does learn from her out-of-town bestie, 7th-grade teacher Mayisha (Geri-Nikole Love), that their mutual friend Tamera won’t be coming to Cassandra’s upcoming bridal shower. (“You know how Tamera gets. Germs. About hands, touching. Enclosed spaces.”)

As the weeks pass, Dixon starts putting up signs limiting customers to three boxes of pasta each, Alex tries in vain to apply by phone for unemployment benefits, Cassandra begins to think she may have to postpone the wedding, and Easter is reminding her son to sing “Happy Birthday” when washing his hands.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Though not everyone may relish spending an hour and a quarter being reminded what things were like in 2020 (including street protests, store lootings, patients filling ICUs), it feels a lot better looking back at those dark days than living them, especially while seated inside a theater among others who, like you, once wondered when and if we’d ever be able to see a play again, and there is comfort knowing that we’ve come this far together.

Not only that, but playwright Alvarez makes sure to keep us laughing amidst the darkness, and never more so than when the divine Rachel Sorsa makes an eleventh-hour appearance as a “White Lady” whose interactions with Cassandra serve as a reminder that appearances can be deceiving and that people needing people may be the light that sees us through to the end of the tunnel.

Director Jon Lawrence Rivera’s pitch-perfect direction elicits pitch-perfect performances from a cast whose diversity is not only exemplary, it represents the world we live in.

Azra King-Abadi’s lighting, Mylette Nora’s costumes, John Zalewski’s sound design, David Murakami’s projections, and Michael O’Hara’s properties are all absolutely topnotch.

Still, it is Alex Calle’s miraculously intricate, constantly morphing set that not only makes Apartment Living’s production design one of the year’s best in an intimate theater, it solves the virtually impossible demands of a script requiring twenty-five scene changes to be made in a seventy-five minute play, kudos shared by a cast who probably had as many stage directions to memorize as they did lines to learn.

Apartment Living is produced by Gary Grossman and Jon Lawrence Rivera. Tyree Marshall and Cedes Sifuentes are associate producers.

Veronica Vasquez is stage manager. Joy Demichelle Ysaguirre is intimacy director. Casting is by Raul Clayton Staggs. Judith Borne is publicist.

Though the pandemic is far from over, and it most certainly wasn’t when Apartment Living ends circa September 2020, the latest from Boni B. Alvarez serves as reminder of how far we’ve come. Following last fall’s A Hit Dog Will Holler, Playwrights’ Arena and Skylight Theatre Company are on quite a roll.

Skylight Theatre, 1816 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles. T
www.skylighttheatrecompany.com
www.playwrightsarena.org

–Steven Stanley
March 19, 2022
Photos: Jenny Graham

Tags: , , ,

Comments are closed.