Sick

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Sick

Playwrights' Arena and the Latino Theatre Company at Los Angeles Theatre Center

Reviewed by Travis Michael Holder

April 20, 2010

Photo by Adam Blumenthal

Playwright Erik Patterson admits to personal hypochondria in the program notes for this resplendently twisted effort—yet another in his string of hilariously wicked and glaringly contemporary plays gloriously sending up the communal sickness that affects us all as our country becomes progressively more immune to wellness. Sandra Burns' clever design uses every corner and level here. And although she turns a difficult space into a starkly white hospital setting, the action becomes more than a waiting room complete with a rack of get-well cards for sale; it becomes our lives as we crash headlong into a collectively ailing modern society with not one advanced pharmaceutical yet developed that we can ingest to make it better.

Pamela (Vonessa Martin) is indeed a hypochondriac, more interested in finding someone who will diagnose something terminal in her own body than in worrying about Michael (Quinton Lopez), her 10-year-old son battling leukemia. She gets it on with Michael's pediatrician (Brendan O'Malley), hoping he'll find a lump in her breast while copping a feel, while ignoring her husband (Ramon de Ocampo), who is lusting after his A.A.-obsessed sister-in-law (Diarra Kilpatrick), estranged from her overindulging husband (Johnny Giacolone) in favor of falling in love with God. In other words, just your average everyday American family, if one has Patterson's ability to strip off the thin veneer of civilized behavior we as a society desperately try to maintain.

Director Diane Rodriguez's cast is uniformly golden, especially the deadpanned Martin and the smoothly over-the-top Giacolone, who provides the best scene as he teaches young Michael how to roll a joint and then share it: "Puff, puff, give" is his mantra. Patterson's wit and insight couldn't have found a better partner in creation than Rodriguez, who clearly gets him at every delightfully askew corner and turn. Even beyond that receptivity, Rodriguez is a master at staging a simple little story in a complex space, keeping the play's short filmic scenes from flattening by leaving her performers onstage throughout, out of the light of whatever current scene is played out, reading magazines in the hospital's waiting room or sitting vigil by Michael's oversized sickbed. Every transition here is fluid and watchable, every actor patently willing to follow Rodriguez's discerning guidance as their characters search for a cure for what ails us all.

Presented by Playwrights' Arena and the Latino Theatre Company at Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., L.A. April 17–May 16. Fri.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (213) 489-0994, ext. #107. www.thelatc.org.