LA Weekly - Monday, November 19, 2007
LOVE LOVES A PORNOGRAPHER is worth seeing for the care and technique (in performance and in Gary Smoot's stunning, enveloping set design) that's been lavished upon Jeff Goode's new play. Jillian Armenante directs Love Loves a Pornographer as a perfectly calibrated send-up of English gothic literature. Here, in the Loveworthys' parlour, somewhere in the English countryside, the lord and lady of the manor (William Salyers and Gillian Doyle) invite neighbors Miles and Millicent Monger (Jim Anzide and Johanna McKay) for a friendly game of blackmail. Loveworthy is a novelist; Monger, a cleric and chief literary critic for "The Times" - which Anzide haughtily spits into the crowd at every reference: funny stuff. Loveworthy needs a good review from Monger, which would be his first in 20 years, and we're off and running. The Loveworthys' rebel daughter (Kathleen Rose Perkins) returns home from America with her fiancé, Earl Kant (Matt Ford), a boorish bookseller in a dog-skin cap, whose shop specializes in erotica. (The play gets comic mileage when any character says, in somber tones, "Mr. Kant.") Goode's clever writing comes marbled with alliterations and a well-sculpted structure.Anzide's villainous Monger comes lathered in oily pompousness; McKay's performance as his wife, pocked with twitches from the abuse of her idiot spouse, is a comedic masterpiece amid this excellent ensemble, which also includes Weston Nathanson as the Loveworthys' manservant.
Circle X Theatre Company at [INSIDE] THE FORD, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; thru Jan. 20 (no perfs Nov. 22 & Dec. 23). (323) 461-3673. (Steven Leigh Morris)