Sister Sister Sister
By Dan the L.A. City Bureaucrat - Friday December 08th 2006 |
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Jesus. I’m lost.
Where the hell is the Brentwood Theatre? (And where do they get off with the snotty British spelling of “theater” anyhow?) Allegedly at the corner of Wilshire and San Vincente, the theater is more accurately at the corner of Random Building and Raised Parking Lot in the far west corner of the Westside VA complex.
Once found – via the usual incantation of curse words coupled with random wandering – the venue underwhelms. It has the feel of a pricey private school theater (think Harvard Westlake), which is, well, perfect, since the one-nun show is set in a parochial classroom.
As in the other two Sister’s Catechism plays, we, the audience, are the students. The lights are left on – quite disquieting to a generation that prefers its entertainment in darkened rooms – and immodest dress and poor posture is frowned upon.
Though it drags toward the end, the show is funny, weirdly educational, and, in a word, brilliant. It also is the first show I’ve seen commencing with The Star-Spangled Banner sung by a homeless group.
Scolding latecomers, praising the largely Jewish audience for their knowledge of obscure Catholic saints, and doling out Vatican II wisdom with a side of sharp wit, Maripat Donovan (Sister) almost makes you want to go to church again. Well, almost.
Sister’s Christmas Catechism
By Maripat Donovan
Brentwood Theatre
Dec. 5 – 17
Tickets: $40 [ buy now ]
Runtime: approx. two hours
My wife and I were going to try to see a play at the Brentwood, but we inadvertently missed the fact in the L.A. reader listing that the run had ended two days earlier. We did have the tech manager for the theater give us a tour of the place and my sense of it (while it was empty and the sets were being struck) was that it was actually a quite nice theater. Perhaps the nicest of those that I’ve been to in L.A. What venue whelms you?
I dunno. Jeez. You expect me to back up my ill-conceived and half-baked opinions with actual fact? It IS a quite nice theater, just one that looks like it had a previous life as a movie theater (which, I believe it did, back in WW2). Perhaps I’m just hard to please… I think that the inside of Disney Hall looks a bit too IKEA.
It’s previous life is actually a bit more complicated than that. It was primarily a rec hall for the vets being treated at the hospital (when they did the last round of renovations to the theatre, part of the deal was they built a new rec hall for the vets). It has that movie theatre look (especially when you look at the lack of backstage and the float space above the stage), but it apparently was mostly used for musical variety presentations (the dieing days of vaudeville) when it was built.
This is where Noel Gallagher did his acoustic thing. I too had the same thought, ‘Where the fuck is this place?’ It wasn’t hard to find though. Do not fret. The only thing you should know about this place is that no alcohol is served.