HEAVENLY SAINTS PRESERVE US
Ten days after opening night, Luis Alfaro still wasn’t off-book for his one-man confessional work-in-progress. This matters because the moment when he leaves his lightly comic, heavily clichéd script, and whirls himself into performance-art 
dervish, it is transporting and beautiful; but there is only one such occasion in an hour and change that feels much longer. Mr. Alfaro covers territory so common to one-man shows (I grew up gay; I grew up a minority; I have a passionately ambivalent relationship to the churches that shaped me; I was molested; I’m an addict; I love the family that never really “got” me; I’m a middle aged man whose parent is dying) that one might get the impression he’d never seen one and didn’t know how picked-over this territory is. The respected playwright and avant-garde performer, here directed by Robert Egan with lights up/lights down off-handedness, repeatedly pricks his finger and bleeds onto an overhead projector as a substitute for the kind of stagecraft and soul-expression one might have expected. When Mr. Alfaro mentions that he once performed naked in a cathedral in Mexico City, audiences may wish they had been there instead of here.
photo by Craig Schwartz
St. Jude
Center Theatre Group and RADAR L.A.
Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City
scheduled to end on October 6, 2013
for tickets, visit http://www.centertheatregroup.org
