| Fun goes beyond surface in ‘FACEvalue’ By Nadine Goff For the State Journal West Covina Gloria Harding knows how to do many things. A former child star who’s transformed herself into an aggressive talent agent, she knows the most efficient way to dispose of a dead body, as well as where a few bodies are buried. She knows how to shape a quartet of unknown, unruly, and mostly untalented young men into an overnight musical phenomenon guaranteed to make teenage girls scream for more. Above all, West Covina Gloria Harding knows how to massage and manipulate the media: buzz and spin are her specialties. “FACEvalue,” writer-director Rob Matsushita’s latest play, is the story of West Covina Gloria Harding and the four member pretty boy band she helps to create. It’s filled with guns, corpses, references to celebrities getting away with crimes, oodles of testosterone and a significant scintilla of estrogen, but it doesn’t have very much music. A moody sanguinary saga about the perils and perquisites of of success, “FACEvalue” careens through time zones and switches tenses with alacrity. It’s an adventurous theatrical creation with a structure and sensibility that owe more to the movies, MTV, and novelist Chuck Palahniuk than to William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett or Wendy Wasserstein. Like Broom Street artistic director Joel Gersmann does, Matsushita weaves lots of allusions into his work, although they’re more likely to be derived from pop culture than ancient Greece. Recognizing them is part of what makes seeing this play fun. But if you’re not up to the challenge, you can still have a good time. Steve Van Haren is impressive as Carl, the “forgettable” member of the band who narrates “FACEvalue” for the same reason that Chief Bromden narrates “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”—he’s the only major character who can tell this story from beginning to end. Van Haren creates a believeable character who’s often a beguilingly unreliable narrator. Nathan Caracter (F.Z.), Ethan Mutz (Artie) and Kevin French (Earl) are also formidable as the other three members of the band. Betsy Matsushita is magnificent as West Covina Gloria Harding, a woman bigger, bolder and badder than all of the boys in the band. Her performance demonstrates that nepotism is not always naughty. Linda Hartay is divine as Rosie O’Donnell, as well as filling several other roles. Scott Feiner created the effective, sometimes excruciating intense, sound design for the play. --June 28, 2001 |
| Wow, this is exactly what The Isthmus hated about the show. I gotta go look up "alacrity." |
| Review |
| Commentary track |
| Another Palahniuk comparison! (Okay, I gave her that one when she interviewed me--but still, that guy walks on the ground I worship. |
| Hey, Scott gets another mention! You know they like it when sound design gets a nod. Personally, though, I'm glad for him--but Jhen and Alex deserve a nod too. |
| Man, and I was mentally prepared for Nadine to not get it! Oh, well. |
| I'd like to take credit for this, but really, "Cuckoo's Nest" is one of the few works I didn't steal from for this. |