Hollywood Hell With 'Angel City,' The Upstairs Theater Co. Takes Over Where a.k.a. Left Off By Margaret Regan HERE'S A TRUE-life Hollywood story: A talented and funny young writer was snapped up by a production company at a very high salary. Everything seemed great at first. Fred was given a desk and a nice office. But, mysteriously, he was left alone, no assignments, no advice, no meetings, no nothing. Each day he came to work and couldn't get anyone to tell him what was wanted of him. Six weeks and thousands of dollars in paychecks later, he was fired. Hollywood experiences like Fred's have been darkly caricatured by so many disenchanted writers, from the '30s playwrights George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart to '90s movie hotshot Tim Robbins, that it's almost a cliché--the Kafkaesque Hollywood, you might call it. The young Upstairs Theater Company right now is staging playwright Sam Shepard's savage version of the genre. Angel City (read: Los Angeles) was written in Shepard's early days, just after he fled the city in disgust over his treatment as the screenwriter for Zabriskie Point. Not surprisingly, given the strange, allegorical playwrighting that later won Shepard the Pulitzer Prize (for Curse of the Starving Class in '76), this early work is surreal, metaphorical and furious. An odd young stunt man cum script doctor named Rabbit Brown (Eric R. Chapdelaine) is summoned to corporate headquarters by two bizarre execs (Evan Andrew and Dean Mauel) who want him to salvage their $122 million film. (A price tag that high was surreal 20 years ago back when the play was written.) But like Fred, Rabbit can't pin them down, except to learn that they want a "disaster." Shepard, naturally, uses the word on a few levels: disaster, as in a major blood-spilling, money-making catastrophe movie, and disaster, as in artistically that's all Hollywood is capable of producing. Rabbit's instinct is to flee, but somehow the studio sucks him in. (Even Shepard later made his own accommodations with Hollywood's golden eggs.) Other long-term toilers Rabbit meets include the docile Tympani (Andy Tafoya) who drums futilely in search of a rhythm never before heard. Then there's Miss Scoons (Merrie Greenfield) who, in between her female scut jobs of fetching coffee and scrubbing floors, tends to lofty pronouncements on God and angels and blood. This production is best when it luxuriates in its Hollywood-style effects, which, just like in the movies, transform the scenes instantaneously into something else. (Credit goes to A.J. Epstein for the creative lighting and scenic design.) A glowing blue rectangle at center stage by turns becomes window and movie screen. A languid shadow from window blinds casts a '30s film-noir glow over Rabbit's investigations. The music from a real-live jazz band underlines the weird improvisations the characters and plot undergo. But the straight-out scenes of pure dialogue are harder going, especially when the five actors can't be heard over the music. This is a challenging play any way you look at it, and Upstairs Theater Company's earnest production, directed by Anthony Runfola, and performed by relatively unseasoned actors, is moving only on occasion. Still, it's encouraging to see a young troupe take on a serious play. Its choice of season opener may be prescient. The now-defunct a.k.a. Theatre looked on Sam Shepard as a patron saint, and it could be that Upstairs Theater is just the company to fill the ragged alternative theatre gap left by a.k.a.'s demise. Angel City continues through Sunday, September 15, at the Tucson Center for the Performing Arts, 408 S. Sixth Ave. Curtain is at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and at 2 p.m. Sunday. Available at the door, tickets are $8 general, $5 students. For information and reservations call, 791-2263.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth