MAMA MAMA CAN’T YOU SEE


Wars past and present merge into an uber-theatrical fever-dream mix of life-or-death drama and mesmerizing modern dance in Stan Mayer and Cecilia Fairchild’s Mama Mama Can’t You See, now blowing audience minds at Studio/Stage.

Largely informed by co-playwright/leading man Mayer’s five deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mama Mama Can’t You See takes place, as one of its four U.S. Marine protagonists puts it, “inside the explosion that killed some of us and did not kill some of us.”

But that’s not all.

Zigzagging back and forth in time and space, Mama Mama Can’t You See introduces us to Marine buddies Stan Mayer (played not coincidentally by Stan Mayer himself), Lance Graham (Ryan Nebreja), Jeff Schuller (Julián Juaquín), and Doc Wiener (Zack Rocklin-Waltch), and U.S. Civil War whores Anita (Carene Rose Mekertichyan), Clem (Kathleen Leary), Ellis (Marguerite French), and Wanda (Hannah Trujillo), and a heady mix of past-and-present reality and fantasy that could just as easily have ended up an artsy-fartsy avant-garde mess under lesser hands than those of director Zach Davidson, choreographers Davidson, Elisa Rosen, “and the company,” and the most supremely inventive of production designers.

It’s clear from the get-go that Mayer knows of what he writes, lines like “We have no idea what they buried out there for us. They wait, they watch us, and we can’t do shit about it” reflecting the harsh realities of war just as others like “You make it home, make it out alive, you’re just trading up from random bombs and unaimed AK-47 fire to a whole society of people that don’t even want to kill you, but they just can’t help themselves, can they?” serve as reminders that coming home alive can be every bit as harrowing as a life lived in combat.

Mayer and Fairchild’s time-tripping script features trans-century discussions of the merits of hooks vs. zippers, the indispensability of zip-ties in keeping enemy hands off cell phone triggers, radio transmitters, garage door openers, etc., and the meaning of such modern military terms as E.R.W.  and V.C.P. (Google them if you’d like.)

Still, no matter the daring creativity of Mama Mama Can’t You See on paper (and there is prodigious creativity there to be sure), Mayer and Fairchild’s words are but a part of the supremely inventive whole that is Mama Mama Can’t You See: Live On Stage.

Indeed, I can’t think of a single other production (and that includes those of John Farmanesh-Bocca’s Not Man Apart – Physical Theatre Ensemble, whose oeuvre has inspired Davidson’s own company Coin & Ghost) where meticulously synchronized movement and dance backed by a pulsating, explosive sound design and original music (like Joseph “Sloe” Slawinski’s here) have played such an integral role in bringing a script from page to stage.

Add to that Joey Guthman’s electrifying lighting design, Rosin’s spare but ingenious set (a dome-shaped jungle gym standing in for everything from a Humvee to the explosion itself), and costume designer Athena Lawton’s written-word-adorned takes on Marine camo and 19th-century lingerie and you’ve got a production quite unlike any other I’ve seen in my fifteen-plus years of reviewing.

Mayer anchors Mama Mama Can’t You See as only one who has lived through it can, but Nebreja, Juaquín, and Rocklin-Waltch’s performances feel every bit as authentic as Mayer’s self-portrait, and French, Leary, Mekertichyan, and Trujillo are every bit as memorable as women who have lost friends, family members, and lovers to war, with special snaps to Leary for the powerful monolog she delivers as the grieving mother of a slain Marine.

Mama Mama Can’t You See is produced by Joseph Baca, Davidson, French, Kendall Johnson, and Rosin. Davidson  understudies all four Marines and Stephanie Lee covers all four Whores.

Veronica Bowers is production manager. Mats Felder is stage manager. Carly DW Bones is intimacy director. Aly Michele is assistant lighting designer. Lucy Pollak is publicist.

Daringly risk-taking and thrillingly theatrical, Mama Mama Can’t You See is all this and more, its myriad diverse parts adding up  to a hair-raisingly hallucinogenic trip that adventurous theatergoers won’t want to miss.

Studio/Stage, 520 North Western Ave., Los Angeles. T
www. coinandghost.org

–Steven Stanley
November 10, 2023
Photos: Meredith Adelaide

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