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It's the end of the world as we know it...

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Picking up where Paradise Lost leaves off, David Davalos’ play depicts a reconciliation between Jesus and Lucifer. But unlike Milton, Davalos shows his story through a corporate frame, which ultimately buries his engrossing premise and inflates his one-act idea into a two-act play. The product manufactured by family business Potter & Sons is faith — packaged and marketed to the masses. A potentially fatal spill down some stairs on New Year’s Eve lands Potter the elder in the hospital, where his doctor, Rae (Piper Henry), his lawyer, Gabby (Tabatha Hall), and the chief of police, Mike (John Prince), worry about the prospect of Potter’s businessman son, Lucifer, a.k.a. Luke (Seth Kanor), taking over the company in the absence of the rightful inheritor, Jesus, a.k.a. Josh (David Holcomb). However, the mix of biblical and corporate allegory confuses. It intrigues intellectually but renders the drama somewhat ambiguous, without clear emotional or narrative stakes. This leaves Jesus and Lucifer waxing philosophic about the nature of faith and mankind, and leaves us in search of an anchor for their story. Davalos’ language, though, is spellbinding, epitomized in the rhyming verse of Luke’s Act 2 speech, which reiterates Milton’s compassionate defense of Lucifer. This elevated language, however, proves elusive to director Tenny Priebe, who stages the show with jarring naturalism, thereby turning his actors into talking heads instead of offering them the stylization that might help their soliloquies take flight.

DARKFALL is an interesting and thought provoking new play by David Davalos. The dialogue celebrates language in an era when language is often brought down to its lowest common denominator. Soliloquies often slip into verse in a way that is quite delightful.

An old man falls and sets off a chain of events that has far reaching consequences. We learn that the old man is the patriarch of a vast empire and his would be inheritors gather in the hospital waiting room to fight old battles and speculate on their own personal visions of the future.

Good versus evil, innocence versus reality, these are some of the weighty issues being pondered here. Although we don't really find an answer (did you really expect one?) the journey makes an interesting evening.
 
Seth Kanor who plays Luke (Lucifer?) did a wonderful job and captivated the audience with his fluid performance!  A very believable "devil",  who better to portray the "bright red one" than a corporate CEO? Josh, played very convincingly by David Holcomb, is the counterpart, the Junior High Teacher who is being asked to come back to the corporate fold. The supporting cast all performed in a way that put it all together into a professional production well worth seeing.

The Sacred Fools Theatre is one of those delightful small L.A. theatres where there are more klieg lights than seats and the actors are within touching distance. The lighting was very dramatic. However, there was an annoying buzzing sound emanating from the equipment that this reviewer found quite distracting.
 
Tenny Priebe's direction was well done, some very clever business with a table and an old microphone as the setting for a couple dramatic speeches, also the "three muses" had some cute choreography that was very well executed.

-- Herb Rubinstein
©2000 LA THEATER GUY

· Click here for El Puente Latino's Feature Article on Sacred Fools production of Darkfall and it's author David Davalos!