‘Conduct of Life,’ at LA’s Rosenthal Theater, shrewdly examines human cruelty – San Bernardino County Sun

★★

When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, through June 25

Where: The Rosenthal Theater at Inner-City Arts, 720 Kohler St., downtown Los Angeles

Tickets: $25

Length: 60 minutes, no intermission

Suitability: Mature teens and adults

Information: 323-893-3605, contactherotheatre@gmail.com, herotheatre.org.

In days gone by, people made names for themselves by doing something useful for society. Mara Irene Forns wrote plays that broke old rules, broke barriers and taught something, whether to other playwrights or to audiences.

Though she was a leader of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s, the Southland knows her better from her establishing role in the also legendary Padua Hills Playwrights group and festival.

Now, her 1985 play, The Conduct of Life, is getting an airing at Inner-City Arts in downtown Los Angeles. In part because of her importance to theater but also for what the play still says about humanity, this highly stylized, challenging, disturbing work is well worth viewing.

It consists of a plotless series of scenes, many of them soliloquies or duologues, telling and not showing. It pulls from mismatched theatrical styles, the most easily recognizable of which is absurdism. It has no protagonist, no ones journey we wish to join in on. It ends in gunfire.

And yet, as a whole, it effectively and efficiently makes its points in a mere 60-minute running time, with a theatrical depth and richness not always achieved by plays with plots and standard exposition.

In what can be gleaned of story, we learn that military officer Orlando (Nick Caballero) interrogates and tortures captives in an unnamed, presumably Latin American, nation. His goal is maximum power.

He seeks that, too, in his relationships at home. His wife, Leticia (Adriana Sevahn Nichols), knows shes in a loveless marriage. But uneducated, though bright and articulate, she needs marriage to survive.

In a presumably secret room in Leticia and Orlandos home, he repeatedly rapes a child, formerly homeless and orphaned, now imprisoned there, though the play keeps us guessing, until the end, whether this is real or his fantasy.

Visiting the home, Alejo (Jonathan Medina), symbolizing passivity, cant stop himself from admiring Orlando. The sometimes-stuttering maid Olimpia (Elisa Bocanegra) disdains her employers. But she, too, cant walk away from her job (the time frame of this work seems ambiguous, though the dial telephone gives us an approximate era).

The child, Nena (Antonia Cruz-Kent), is last to speak, revealing her horrific childhood and her coping mechanisms. Likewise, the visual focus ultimately turns to Nena. Its director Jos Luis Valenzuelas statement that our actions leave the next generation to cope with the results.

Forns themes are status, gender, class, education and, in particular, how we blame others for what ails us and how our deepest misery shows up as violence, which becomes contagious.

Valenzuela makes visual and even more visceral the potent script. His actors, even working in various styles throughout the play, make their every moment believable, a pure reflection of human behavior.

Symbolically, Franois-Pierre Coutures pristine all-white set design belies the messiness of the characters lives. It also serves as a canvas for Johnny Garofalos highly saturated lighting design that changes with the intensity of the scene.

John Zalewskis superb sound design underscores the scripts brutality, notably in the sounds almost cruel intrusions on our hearing and heartbeats, but also in the juxtaposition of classical music to the inhumaneness of words and actions here.

Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.

Rating: 4 stars