MONSTERS OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA


What starts out a sitcom-style two-hander about a precocious teen being reared by his late father’s gay black husband ends up something far darker and deeper and more powerful in Christian St. Croix’s Monsters Of The American Cinema, the latest in a string of world-class Rogue Machine winners.

It’s been three years since Remy Washington lost his husband Brian to addiction, three years that have only strengthened the bond between Remy (Kevin Daniels) and and his late husband’s sixteen-year-old son Peter (Logan Leonardo Arditty), aka “Pup,” a duo linked for life not only by their connection to Brian but also by their love for the classic black-and-white horror movies screened Fridays and Saturdays at the drive-in Remy owns and operates in San Diego-adjacent Santee. (“Population: mostly white. The, um, red kind of white.”)

Pup’s upbringing may be out of the ordinary, but tonight’s prom is about as typical a rite of passage as teenagers go through, one that has Pup searching in vain for his socks, needing Remy’s help in tying his tie, and fending off questions about his prom date Mia, who Pup insists is “just a friend,” and by the way just happens to be black.

What’s less typical are the nightmares that have plagued Pup since his father’s death from a heroin overdose, an addiction Brian shared not only with Pup’s long-gone mother but with his own addict mother as well, nightmares fueled by the horror movies Pup grew up on like his own personal favorite, The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

Unfolding as an alternating series of parent-child monologs and scenes taking place both in real life and inside a teenager’s nightmares, Monsters Of The American Cinema examines not only the everyday ups and downs of a single parent and a hormonal teen, but the particular challenges that ensue when one is gay and the other straight, one black and the other white.

And it does so especially well at Rogue Machine, where director John Perrin Flynn, two extraordinary actors, and some of the finest production designers in town give St. Croix’s two-hander the kind of Los Angeles Premiere most playwrights can only dream of.

The last time I saw Daniels on stage (in Rogue Machine’s Bull), he played a corporate bully bent on making a wimpy co-worker’s life a living hell, so his gentle giant of an unapologetically flamboyant gay husband and stepfather is as charming, powerful, and revelatory as tour-de-force star turns get.

Newcomer Arditty matches Daniels every step of the way in a compelling, touching, heartbreakingly real performance made even more miraculous by the fact that not only has Arditty never taken an acting class in his young life, but this is quite remarkably his stage debut.

The Cinemascope-wide Matrix Theatre stage allows scenic designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz to give each of Monsters Of The American Cinema’s three locales its own roomy playing area, its walls doubling as movie screens upon which Michelle Hanzelova-Bierbauer projects clips from horror classics of the monster-mad 1930s (Frankenstein, The Mummy) and the atomic-bomb-fearing 1950s (Them, The Deadly Mantic).

Ric Zimmerman’s striking lighting design alternates between realistic and nightmarish, Christopher Moscatiello’s topnotch sound design and original music add to the thrills and chills throughout the evening, Christine Cover Ferro’s costumes suit both Remy and Pup to a T, properties coordinator Athena Saxon fills the set with household and high school student paraphernalia galore, and violence designer Ned Mochel choreographs an eleventh-hour confrontation to gut-wrenching effect.

Monsters Of The American Cinema is produced by Lexi Sloan. Brett Aune is assistant director. Keith Stevenson is videographer. Ryan Wilson is technical director. Rachel Ann Manheimer is stage manager and Ramón Valdez is assistant stage manager.

With its string of critical and commercial successes like Blue, Heroes Of The Fourth Turning, Baby Foot, and Middle Of The World all staged within the past eight months, there’s no other Los Angeles membership theater that can match Rogue Machine’s recent track record of hits.

Christian St. Croix’s remarkable, revelatory, deeply rewarding Monsters Of The American Cinema makes it five Rogue Machine winners in a row.

Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles. T
www.roguemachinetheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
April 6, 2024
Photos: Jeff Lorch

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

 

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