Considering how much of what’s coming out of Washington DC these days seems like théâtre de l’absurde, the time could hardly be riper for City Garage to debut Charles A. Duncombe’s absurdist comedy Border Crisis, though in the case of this contemporary adaptation of a 1967 Polish play, excellent intentions yield less than successful results.

Early scenes adhere closely to Stawomir Mrozek’s The House On The Border*, in which a multigenerational family living under one roof is informed that their home now straddles the border between two “zones,” and before they can even process the news, yellow barrier tape has split their house down the middle.

Visits from government diplomats, customs men, and more quickly ensue to entertainingly absurd effect.

The trouble with Duncombe’s 2025 adaptation is that the border crisis that split a single city, Cold War Berlin, into two halves (the basis of The House On The Border) resembles America’s current border crisis in name only, which is why the more City Garage’s latest deviates from its source material, the less effective it becomes.

Early scenes have a quirky Inonescan feel as family members chat about their lives over dumplings at the dinner table.

Father (Bo Roberts) could not be happier with the status quo, i.e., “not asking anything of anybody except to be left alone.” Mother (Martha Duncan) believes that “nothing good comes from getting involved.” Grandpa (Andy Kallok) and Grandma (Geraldine Fuentes) express their love of family traditions “from the old country.” Son (Justin Parrish) would be happy spending every minute of his free time playing video games and Daughter (Hillary Kang Oglesby) is either scrolling through TikTok or keeping her followers updated on what’s happening in her life.

The arrival of a pair of Government Agents (Gifford Irvine and Angela Beyer) “on urgent business of national importance” is the first sign that things are about to unravel, and unravel they do.

The family abode, previously in the middle of nowhere, is now “in the middle of somewhere of strategic importance vital to the national interest” and “the subject of diplomatic negotiations at the highest level” and of a territorial dispute that, if not settled, “could spark a global conflict with catastrophic consequences.”

So far, so good (and wryly funny to boot as was Mrozek’s original).

Unfortunately, its about here that Border Crisis, in an attempt to reflect post-presidential-election America, takes a sudden turn for the darker, the much darker, when foreign-born Grandma crosses from one side of a room to the other “without the necessary citizenship papers” and promptly gets hauled off to a detention center from which she delivers a dramatic monolog so jarringly inconsistent with everything that’s come before that I felt as if I were watching an entirely different play from the one I’d been mostly enjoying up until then. (It should be noted that none of this is in The House On The Border, nor is Son’s transformation into a self-declared “resistance fighter, patrolling the streets looking for anyone who doesn’t look like they belong and beating the shit out of them.”)

Director Frédérique Michel elicits the 70-minute play’s drollest comedic turns from Irvine and Beyer, who morph into a trio of Agents, Diplomats, and Guards to both entertaining and menacing effect.

City Garage newcomers Oglesby and Parrish are pitch-perfect as contemporary Gen Z’ers, and Kallok and Fuentes have their moments as a pair of bewildered grandparents.

Roberts and Duncan, on the other hand, are not only miscast as parents of children still in their teens but their performances lack the sharpness you’d expect by at least the second week of a run.

On the plus side, Duncombe’s set design and Josephine Poinsot’s costumes have that distinctively City Garage look I’ve come to look forward to, Duncombe’s lighting is quite effective, and his sound design features jaunty tunes** just right for an absurdist comedy like this one is in its early scenes.

Duncombe is producer and Ralph Radebaugh is assistant director.

There’s no L.A. membership theater company more adept at staging the absurd than City Garage, whether it’s Ionesco or Beckett or Pinter, and I’m guessing The House On The Border as originally written would have been right up their alley. Border Crisis, though its heart is in the right place, misses the mark more often than it hits.

*as translated by Pavel Rybak-Rudzki
**music by Tonton Biquet, alias Octave Callot, Chef de la Fanfare des Beaux Arts de Paris

City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica.
www.citygarage.org

–Steven Stanley
November 16, 2025
Photos: Paul Rubenstein

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Tags: Charles A. Duncombe, City Garage, Los Angeles Theater Review, Stawomir Mrozek