Modern life is a fragmented place in 'Carmen Disruption' at City Garage

Modern life is a fragmented place in ‘Carmen Disruption’ at City Garage

Sept. 15, 2017 6 AM PT

The woman in red is the only familiar figure in the shattered world of “Carmen Disruption.”

Make that semi-familiar, because this woman in Simon Stephens’ play is not exactly Carmen, but an opera singer who’s made a career of playing Carmen, while the actual Carmen is a rent boy who …

Well, let’s go back to the beginning.

Stephens, an English playwright who’s been particularly visible in L.A. this year with “Heisenberg” and his adaptation of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” was inspired to write this play after a director friend introduced him to Israeli mezzo-soprano Rinat Shaham. From her stories of the disorientation and loneliness of a city-hopping career, he envisioned a piece that evokes the social fragmentation of our age.

OK, sure. Why not?

But this patchwork of elliptical monologues, stretching across two intermission-less hours, proves to be an endurance test at City Garage in Santa Monica.

In Frédérique Michel’s staging, the performers are given little to do, other than some sporadic stylized movement that makes them look like automatons. The projection that designer Charles A. Duncombe provides as a backdrop is a static image of a theater in the midst of either renovation or decay.

SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter »

With so little to look at, we’re left with just the narratives that each character delivers about his or her day in some faceless city. The merest trace of a “Carmen” character can be glimpsed in each one. Rather than operatic, these lives are fairly mundane, some sporadic violence aside.

A woman misses her son, an inverse of the opera’s Don José. A young woman mourns the end of a relationship. She’s Micaela. An investment banker is the bullfighting Escamillo. The name Carmen and associated reputation as a serial amorist are bestowed on a male prostitute. Anthony Sannazzaro, who occupies the role, delivers the most arresting performance, strutting toward fate with a misguided belief that beauty makes him invincible.

The fifth character is a singer headlining a production of “Carmen,” her emotional GPS thrown off-kilter in a city that blends into all the other cities in which she’s performed. Occupying the role, Kimshelley Lessard sings snippets of Bizet, with new lyrics, to minimal, recorded accompaniment.

If you go looking for reviews of this play, you’ll find descriptions of a massive chorus used in Hamburg, Germany, and a prone bull in London. Even on a limited budget, Michel and Duncombe surely could have been more inventive, though bless them for their commitment to nonconformist European theater.

What mainly comes across is a sense of disjointed, disrupted lives, complicated by hypnotic electronic devices, preening social media and numbing pornography. We quickly get the idea. Yet the talking goes on and on. And on …

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦