Going ‘Round the Round Table, Again

The legendary love triangle of King Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot gets a contemporary reinterpretation in “Artie and Gwen,” opening Friday at the Court Theatre.

“It’s almost a time-lapse version of the old story,” said Barbara Feldman, who wrote the play with Eric Rosse and Gareth Stevens. This time around, though, Guinevere is Gwen Darthur, King Arthur is her betrayed husband, Morton, and Lancelot is body builder Artie DuLac (whose name, Feldman said, is a combination of Arthur’s and Lancelot’s names).

“We’ll have a little synopsis in the program to refresh people with the story,” said Feldman, who is also directing. “The love of Arthur and Guinevere, the interception of Lancelot and her passion for him--which brings the end of the Round Table and Arthur’s dream of uniting all the kingdoms. But there’s no blame here. People fall in love and they can’t help it.

“We follow Gwen and Artie’s relationship from the outset: the vulnerability, falling more in love, the not trusting, the paranoia.” Meanwhile voice-overs of Arthur and Guinevere counsel the young lovers, encouraging them not to repeat their own mistakes. “But even through their guidance, a tragedy befalls Artie and Gwen; when Morton discovers the truth, he confronts them in a very harsh way.”

Added the playwright (whose “Acute Obsession”--which she also co-authored with Rosse--premiered locally in 1985 and was reprised on Broadway last year), “The story speaks to contemporary issues, to our times. It’s exciting: there’s gymnastics, dance, fighting. And it’s about love, revenge, betrayal--all that good stuff.”

Women and war are at the heart of Debra Jo Thornton’s “Soldiers Without Guns,” set in Tennessee during World War II, and newly opened at the Stage Lee Strasberg.

“Everything we see in the media is about how the war affects men,” said the Kentucky-born Thornton. “Films like ‘Hamburger Hill,’ ‘Platoon,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’--they’re all wonderful, but they’re about the male image. There’s nothing done about women, how they fought the battle at home. Especially during the ‘40s: the emotional part of dealing with your loved one being away, raising a child for five or six years without a father--and not knowing if he’s ever coming back.”

In Thornton’s play, in which she also appears as lead character Sadie Mullens (“the equivalent of Rosie the Riveter--Homegirl U.S.A.”), the hardship on the home front is equally shared by local Jews “who had to practice their religion behind closed curtains,” blacks “who couldn’t get hired at artillery plants,” plus German-Americans and Japanese-Americans.

After the war, the playwright-actress said, women’s problems were far from over. “After giving up everything for the cause, working for four years and enjoying being working women, they were sent home to reproduce. The reason I wrote about that period is that it changed our lives. And yet we’re still fighting today for recognition. Women have to climb higher up the (professional) ladder to be equal with men. In those days, it was even harder.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: An environmentalist “freedom fighter” and an ambitious TV reporter match wits in William Mastrosimone’s tale of urban terrorism, “Cat’s-Paw,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Bill Bushnell directs Tony Geary, Christine Ebersole, Michael Cutt and Kelly Wolf.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “There’s no problem with the (play’s) message. But the first duty of a thriller is to make the audience believe what’s happening. That isn’t achieved at LATC.”

The Reader’s Joel Levy disagreed: “It is so engrossing that one leaves the theater full of thought and feeling, as if having suddenly awakened from a vivid dream.”

In the Herald-Examiner, Richard Stayton applauded Douglas D. Smith’s “entertaining” warehouse set and the actors’ performances, but criticized Bushnell, “who seems to have seized upon ‘Cat’s-Paw’ as a polemical opportunity.”

The L.A. Weekly’s Steve Mikulan found that “the even-handedness doesn’t develop a political or ethical thesis about the violent Apache dance between the press and extremists, and the play winds down on a brutal sleight of hand that approaches Grand Guignol.”

Said Drama-Logue’s Lee Melville: “(Mastrosimone) sets up a wonderful premise here that never pays off because of the many loopholes in this script, which are further enlarged by Bushnell’s rather careless direction.”

Daryl H. Miller, in the Daily News, found the play “skillful,” but added, “Still, the show doesn’t quite work. The problem is that Mastrosimone commits the same offense that he attributes to the media: he sensationalizes.”

Said the Orange County Register’s Thomas O’Connor: “Unfortunately, the humor is the first thing you feel being hammered with thudding, thick fists in Bushnell’s plodding production. Irony is visibly underlined and meaty speeches highlighted as if by Magic Marker.”

Last from Jay Reiner in the Hollywood Reporter: “Despite the contrived feel of the play, there’s a certain charge to the events we witness. The writing may border on melodramatic at times, but Geary and Ebersole give taut performances that allow their characters to be more than cartoons.”