The End of the Tour

Road Theatre Company
5108 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo
Friday-Saturday 8 p.m.,
Sunday 2 p.m.
Through March 8
Tickets: $25
www.roadtheatre.org

Joel Drake Johnson’s Chicago-bred work is an above-average family-dysfunction seriocomedy. Though some characters are more interesting than others, and the play takes too long to convey its complex exposition and allow the dramatic fireworks to ignite, it’s ultimately a funny and heartrending journey. Director Heather Dara Williams and a superb cast illuminate the playwright’s compelling exploration of the struggle many people face to express unconditional familial love and move past communication barriers before it’s too late.

Facing the challenge of dealing with an aging parent reaching out for care and attention, while trying to enjoy one’s own adult life, is an issue that divorced schoolteacher Jan (Rhonda Aldrich) and her gay brother, Andrew (Scott Burklin), grapple with when their self-centered and manipulative mother Mae (Gwen Van Dam), a once-famous singer, is temporarily placed in a nursing home. Fearful she may face a similar fate, Mae angrily lashes out at a dementia-inflicted woman (brilliantly played by Sylvia Little) who endlessly wanders around with a blank stare. A huge emotional block precludes displays of affection between bossy Mae and stubborn Jan, and an even bigger wedge exists between Mae and Andrew. When Andrew was a teenager, Mae allowed her late husband, Andrew’s stepfather, to kick Andrew out of the house because they discovered he was gay. Prodigal son Andrew reluctantly returns to his conservative Midwestern hometown (Dixon, Ill.—Ronald Reagan’s birthplace) for a bedside visit with his mother, with his supportive lover, David (Albee Selznick), in tow.

The interactions between Jan and Mae in the hospital room, and Andrew and David in the nearby waiting room, form the core of the play. The two women’s mutual hostility speaks volumes about the suppressed love and hurt beneath the surface, and the arguments between the male lovers tellingly stem from Andrew’s pent-up guilt and fear of his mother’s disapproval. This makes for profound and gripping drama. In the third and least interesting story element, Jan’s divorced husband (Tom Knickerbocker) hangs out with his longtime friend Tommy (Michael Dempsey), bemoaning his separation from Jan. Nonetheless, this is a highly watchable piece, eliciting a lump-in-the-throat reaction in the home stretch that feels sincere and richly earned. An exemplary production design adds to the satisfactions of Williams’ finely crafted production. —Les Spindle

Prove it on me

Stella Adler Theatre
6773 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
Friday-Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 3 p.m.
Through March 2
Tickets: $30
www.plays411.com/proveit

The setting is Harlem in the late 1920s. The stock market is crashing, the blues and booze are flowing in speakeasies, and a soothsaying voodoo mama from New Orleans periodically enters to ominously remind us there’s a metaphorical storm-a-brewin’. The dark clouds she foresees are precipitated by forbidden love. Race-mixing and same-sex love are of course verboten in this milieu, so when sultry African-American chanteuse Georgia Brooks (Sweet Baby J’ai) is hotly pursued by spoiled white rich babe Lindsey (Aynsley Bobbico), the stage is set for enough melodramatic clichés for a library full of dime-novel potboilers. During its amusing early scenes, Dee Jae Cox’s new play, sprinkled with sultry ballads and jazzy ditties by Michele Weiss, promises to be a guilty-pleasure delight. But the proceedings become more contrived and talky as her overreaching piece progresses, seemingly wanting us to take the overwrought dramatic developments seriously, as if this was some sort of historical social treatise rather than popcorn entertainment.

Under Kelly Ann Ford’s uneven direction, the production’s strongest asset is Sweet Baby J’ai, who croons swinging nightclub numbers with panache and elicits a degree of empathy for her character, a thick-skinned survivor with a good head on her shoulders, but a weakness for the seductive powers of female beauty. Bobbico is likewise a good singer and has fun with Cox’s dicey double-entendres, but her portrayal leans toward the wooden, and the Doris Day wig she wears is a further obstacle in her attempts to come across as a daring, sexually aggressive temptress. Deserving of our sympathy—as an actor, not as a character—is Alan Brooks, who makes a futile attempt at credibility as the black-dyed villain, Lindsey’s homophobic, racist father. We kept waiting for the handlebar moustache and the line, “You must pay the rent!” As Aunt Josie, the psychic gypsy woman, Deborah Kellar has the good sense to play this role for laughs, but her sentences missing countless words—apparently meant to convey a gypsy shorthand lingo—sound ludicrous. The other cast members (Malik B. El-Amin, Alan Keith Caldwell, Terrence Tatum and Melinda Edmonson) offer capable support. Cutting much of the redundant and pretentious dialogue and ramping up the humor could bring this intermittently fun, but rambling piece closer to a palatable evening. —L.S.