Every night before I go to bed I say a little prayer and thank the universe that we have indie theatre. Without independent art we would not have a play like Crumble. It is the fascinating story of a mother, her strange daughter, Janice, and their house that is slowly deteriorating. Despite difficult dialogue, the show ultimately succeeds in creating a world with intriguing ideas and unique perspective.

Life after death is something we all wonder about, but nobody knows what it is or even if it is. What about life after death for those who keep living? Losing a loved one is not easily done, especially when that loved one is the patriarch of a family, and his death is sudden and untimely. Playwright Sheila Callaghan explores the human condition in a unique and intriguing fashion. There’s a fine line between being enchantingly odd and isolating yourself from a wide audience. At times, the cute, wacky dialogue was superfluous (reminiscent of Diablo Cody). However, the spirit of the play is wonderfully weird. It’s that quirky quality that sets the play apart from it’s contemporaries and makes it rather remarkable. So sure, some of the audience will be lost, but it’s worth it. After a certain point, mainstream theatre (and cinema for that matter) just turns into a gray paste of mediocrity.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Crumble is how congruent all the ideas and concepts were. Justin Timberlake and Harrison Ford show up abruptly in hallucinations, and it makes perfect sense. Director Jeremy Aluma should be commended for his eloquent work in facilitating the author’s bizarre perspective. That bizarre perspective would not be the same without the magnificent set that did much more than you would expect in such a small space.

The greatest redeeming quality in the show was the advent of The Apartment as a literal character in story. The house the family lives in is a unifying force between the communication avoidance of Janice and her panic-attack-stricken mother. Brendan Hunt employed the role of The Apartment with artful nuance. Mother (as referred to in the program and script, but often called Clara onstage) had the weight of the show, and the world, on her shoulders. Carrie Keranen played the part with a masterful balance of strength and weakness. When I first saw Kate Wronowski spastically dancing, I was afraid that she would be unconvincing as the eleven year old, Janice. Quite the opposite, Wronowski proceeded to be endearing and capture the essence of young, disturbed adolescent. Alyssa Preston added support and a well-accented performance as the lonely aunt, Barbara.

Among the many peculiar conceptual elements that ran rampant through the course of Crumble, were unrelenting psychological elements. The deconstruction of the house becomes internalized though the individuals who inhabit it. The play is about trying to pull everything together while falling apart. Death is as contagious as the common cold. It spreads like a cancer from loss and attacks the intrinsic body of its victims. And conquering that disease, rising above that adversity, fighting for your life is not something easily done while the world around you gradually crumbles.

– Tony Bartolone

 A widowed mother and a child in mourning, a lady with more cats than there are U.S. states, Justin Timberlake and Harrison Ford – did that get your attention? How about a talking house? Every once in a while theater comes around that you just can’t explain until you’ve witnessed it firsthand.

“Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)” can be described in one word: Brilliance.

Local and well-known director Jeremy Aluma (award winner for best revival of “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot;” and conceiver of “Four Clowns”), as part of the Sacred Fool season, brings the masterpiece “Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake)” to the Los Angeles area. Crumble is written by Sheila Callagahn, who has a notch for writing simple stories that tell themselves through emotion and dialogue.

“It tracks an emotional journey of the relationship for a single mother….while being very relatable to all facades of life,” said Carrie Keranen, who plays the mother. Crumble’s synopsis is simple and intriguing: A year after the untimely death of Janice’s (Kate Wronoski) father, she holds spiteful conversations with her dolls, while her mother suffers panic attacks and their neglected apartment begs for attention. When their celebrity crushes – Justin Timberlake and Harrison Ford (both played by the handsome John Halbach who is making his Los Angeles stage debut in the production) are the only ones who can draw them out of their shells.

From the emotional acting and staging, to intricate details of the old apartment – every crook, detail, and squeal – is represented. In fact, throughout the entire play, there is the faint sound of a mouse or rat. Some may argue that the only weakness that Crumble brings is that laughter can overshadow the serious notes and themes brought to the table. In reality, this is one of its greatest strengths. The cast, under Aluma’s masterful direction, is riveting in the way it is able to keep the sorrowful undertones alive.

While the intensity of Kernanen and Wronowski is enough for any director to be happy, Aluma delivers the one-two punch by having two secondary characters that carry equal weight. Barbara (played by the charming and boisterous Alyssa Preston) and the Apartment (as portrayed by Brendan Hunt, an LA Stage Alliance Ovation winner) bring a new level of comedic sadism. While Preston plays the cliché old cat lady to a T, she brings a charisma to the stage that makes her humor the voice of reason. Hunt, who also provides comic relief, delivers the opening monologue; supplements Preston as the Lucy-Ethel punch – one would not work without the other.

“It’s a unique theatrical show in the way that poetic language is presented in a contemporary show,” says Halbach.

– Kenne Guillory

RECOMMENDED

The walls have eyes…and ears and a mouth and arms and legs in Crumble (Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake), Sheila Callaghan’s surreal family drama, now playing at Sacred Fools Theatre.

Brendan Hunt gives a bravura performances as said walls, windows, and floorboards in the role of The Apartment, the crumbling domicile where an eleven-year old girl and her mother find escape from reality in fantasies of ‘N Sync’s Timberlake and Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones mode.

Regular StageSceneLA readers might quite accurately surmise this to be a tad too fringey for this reviewer’s theatrical tastes, and several somewhat problematic performances work against audience involvement in mother and daughter’s plight. Still, under Jeremy Aluma’s imaginative direction, Crumble is a visual stunner with enough engaging moments to make it worth catching.

Playwright Callaghan keeps us guessing about what sends preteen Janice (Kate Wronowski) and her 30something mom Clara (Carrie Keranen) into their fantasy sequences, though it’s clear from the concern expressed by Clara’s cat lady sister Barbara (Alyssa Preston) that all is not well in Apartmentland.

The emergence of the dilapidated apartment itself, quite literally through the worn-down floor in the play’s opening sequence, cues us in from the get-go that we will be in the land of the surreal, as does Callaghan’s often disjointed dialog which has The Apartment soliloquizing, Janice talking through the voices of her Barbie and baby dolls, and Justin and Indiana appearing in daughter and mother’s daydreams before making their exits by ascending quite literally through the rafters.

The Apartment is by far the best reason to catch Crumble (Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake), both in Hunt’s quirky, quicksilver performance and in its non-human manifestation in Stacy Walters’ extraordinary scenic design, which Douglas Gabrielle lights both from above and from without, through thin translucent plastic sections of its decaying walls.

Crumble comes most vividly to life whenever the charmingly charismatic John Halbach appears, first in winningly hip-hoppy Justin Timberlake mode and later as a swashbuckling Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones.

Other performances are more problematic. Keranen gives Clara a spunky appeal, but her performance could benefit greatly from a more palpable sense of ongoing pain hiding just under the surface. Eleven-year-old Janice may well have been written to be played by an adult actress, but for this reviewer at least, the choice doesn’t work. As hard as Wronowski tries to make us believe that she is a precocious-to-obnoxious tween (and she does an admirable job of it), I couldn’t help wondering how much more powerful Crumble would be with an actress of Janice’s tender years and accompanying vulnerability in the role. Preston does subtly moving work as Barbara, but it can be overly subtle, a kind of acting for the camera that seems too low-key (and low volume) for the Sacred Fools’ relatively large dimensions. That being said, Preston’s emotional moments in the play’s last third are some of the evening’s best.

Christy Hauptman has designed some terrific costumes, with special snaps to Janice’s kidswear, Justin and Indiana’s iconic outfits, and most particularly The Apartment’s “distressed” duds, which make him/it seem quite literally to be part of the ramshackle walls, windows, and floors. Daniel Hoal’s excellent sound design aids greatly in enhancing the play’s surreal mood, and Lisa Anne Nicolai gets high marks for Crumble’s many worn out/worn down properties. I’m not sure whom to credit for insuring that the parts of the apartment that fall down from ceiling to floor do so precisely on cue, but he/she gets a high five for ingenuity.

Chloe Weaver is videographer, Andrew Amani fight rigger, and Dave Knutson master carpenter. Jeremy Aldridge is producer, and Aluma and Kyle Garcia are associate producers. Heatherlynn Gonzalez is stage manager.

If Crumble (Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake) doesn’t succeed as well as it would with some performance adjustments, and if playwright Callaghan’s style here is considerably less to this reviewer’s tastes than her previously reviewed Lascivious Something, the visual imagination shown by director Aluma and Hunt’s uniquely watchable performance make it worth a look-see by adventurous theatergoers.

– Steven Stanley

The holidays and grief have always made for combustible drama, and playwright SHEILA CALLAGHAN’s Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) has plenty of emotional tinder on hand.

You have the widowed Mother (played by CARRIE KERANEN) facing her first Christmas—and her panic attacks– without her beloved husband. There’s her daughter Janice (KATE WRONOWSKI), making her dolls voice feelings too raw with pain to own directly. Both Mother and Janice call upon their respective household Hollywood gods (Harrison Ford for Mother and Justin Timberlake for Janice), with JOHN HALBACH maintaining a divine balance between humor and pathos. And LISA ROTHSCHILLER (understudy for ALYSSA PRESTON) finds that same sweet spot in her portrayal of Mother’s cat lady sister Barbara, whose infertility makes her season of sorrow unending.

Director JEREMY ALUMA sets Crumble ablaze with the playwright’s stroke-of-genius character: The Apartment (BRENDAN HUNT), aided and abetted by STACI WALTER’s wonderfully-realized dilapidated apartment set and CHRISTY HAUPTMAN’s spot-on costume. Anyone who has entered a building and immediately sensed happiness or sadness will wonder why such a character wasn’t created sooner. The interplay of The Apartment’s scheming, Mother’s mourning and Janice’s dreaming makes for inspired drama.

Crumble made me think about Detroit, a city that once—like The Apartment—knew grander and happier times. Crumbled buildings, crumbling hopes. Silent screams from broken windows.  They say “the walls have ears” but do we? Well, perhaps Crumble will provoke different musings in you. See this play and find out. You may receive a holiday gift that will linger long after the toys have been trashed.

– Greg Simay

Managing to elude the creep factor of a vengeful, languishing apartment with its own personal opinion of cleanliness and living, a spiteful and troubled little girl with a death wish and a mom who can’t see past her own panic attack induced hysteria or the kitchen, Sacred Fools Theater turns in an amusing, South Park style rendition of a family in turmoil and falling apart in every possible way in its current production of Crumble, written by Sheila Callaghan and directed by Jeremy Aluma.

It’s easy to laugh at the cat lady with 57 felines instead of children because of a defective husband and a defective womb, jealous of the sister who “got it all” and somewhat happy about her troubles. It’s bizarrely and curiously funny observing the private, and quite often dirty, machinations of a little pre-teen girl carrying on during play dates with her dolls. It’s easy to relate to any mother worrying incessantly about – well – everything when it comes to money, surviving a dilapidated, unheated apartment, how she will get on after the loss of a loved one and most of all, not being able to get through to her child. But add in the narrative voice of a woe begotten, creaky, apartment, living in past grand memories of lace and lust, who quietly begins to plot the demise of them all in order to make way for someone new to move in and bring it back to life, a slightly dark, satire begins to arise.

Crumble as a title is certainly effective, describing the state of affairs not only with the apartment but the lives within. Like the apartment which is falling apart, their lives are crumbling from neglect, lack of attention, despair, accusation, envy. The apartment even confesses to not liking the dad as he “touched milady in the night.” Although mostly begging for attention and much needed repairs it eventually alludes, as a jealous lover of sorts, that it, as hidden truth would have it, had a more active involvement in dad’s fatal accident when floor boards gave way underneath the stool sending dad out a glass window to his death; the blame for which rests solely upon mother according to her little girl who lost the one man in her life while hanging lights on Christmas; the one man who could make her laugh most when things were worst. Everyone is living in their own little fantasy which gets them through the day. And then, for no apparent reason whatsoever, in come Justin Timberlake and Harrison Ford.

In an ironic comedy of events, the men of two women’s dreams enter the scene with their “awesomeness,” endowed with the qualities that both women miss in husband and dad. Harrison Ford inspires mom, with his strength, masculinity, wisdom and light-heartedness, to relax. Justin Timberlake of INSYC thrills daughter, Calamity Janice, with cool affection, compliments and even sex to pull them out of the void of nothingness. Through the dialogs with both characters each hatches her own little plot to change the status quo. Mom wishes to be exactly like her deceased husband, laughing in the face of any disaster – Janice giving her mother a Christmas gift wish list full of chemicals in order to blow them up for the holidays. Effective as they were ridiculous, these visitations champion the actions these women take that foil the house from carrying out its own plans to murder them both.

The entire mini-drama plays itself out strangely to everyone’s satisfaction and everyone gets their wish including the house who gets clean up and repaired, the sister who decides to not live alone and isolated any longer, and even Darwin the cat, who manages to bring about the “miracle of Christmas” by giving birth after having been spaded. Evolution.

But in between, the brilliant timing and delivery of understudy Lisa Rothschiller as cat-loving sister, Barbara, the droll and capricious vicissitudes of the genuinely amusing Brendan Hunt as the apartment, poetry spouting mom played steadily by Carrie Keranen, and slightly grotesque conversations between the quite childishly proficient Janice with her personal supporting cast of slamming back-talk baby boy doll along with Barbie, who are constantly “getting it on” and socially shunning Janice in her dirtiness and weirdness, there lacked a real strong climax in this production. Some jokes went on a little too long, the drama a bit flat and at times had a feeling of disconnectedness and lack of character depth. The poetic vignettes were an inspirational addition of spontaneity pulling us away from the ever deteriorating abyss, but felt a bit non-cohesive, as the language and ideas were difficult to follow in the delivery.

That’s not to say that the performances were lacking. They most definitely were not. Everyone here put in a great show, from directing to acting to sound and lighting effects. As a whole presentation, just not outstanding. Crumble presents a bizarre tale effectively and humorously, with a mediocre resolution but none-the-less succeeds as an audience pleaser as a laughable good time.

– Tracey Paleo