Thirty years after its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, Tales from Hollywood returns to L.A. in a stylish production at the Odyssey Ensemble Theater. Christopher Hampton, who wrote the play on commission from the Taper, took the WW II German refugee community in L.A. as his subject -- such famed writers as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht.
Having fled Hitler, they arrived in L.A. with little more than the clothes on their back, seeking not just sanctuary but survival. For someone like Thomas Mann (Kent Minault), the struggle wasn't onerous, thanks to the success his novels had enjoyed in the USA. But for those like his brother Heinrich (Walter Beery) and Brecht (Daniel Zacapa), who had no American royalties coming to them, life was hard indeed.
Speaking little English, dead broke, they tried to find writing jobs at the Hollywood studios. Culture shock was the result when these European highbrows collided with the philistine film industry, as personified by the schlockmeister producer Charles Money (JP Sarro), the Roger Corman of his day.
Hampton has good fun satirizing Hollywood's shallowness and tawdriness (though these are familiar and easy targets). Only one of his characters, the Hungarian writer Odon Von Horvath (the superb Gregory Gifford Giles), enjoys these qualities and feels at home in tinseltown.
It's Odon who guides the audience through Tales from Hollywood's episodic construction; the play runs 2 1/2 hours and meanders from vignette to vignette, requiring Odon's narration to hold things together and give it some kind of central thrust.
Tales also benefits from the strength and sparkle of its female characters, especially Heinrich Mann's wife Nelly (Ursula Brooks) and Odon's girlfriend Helen (Jennifer Sorenson). Thanks to director Michael Peretzian's skilled hand they deliver brash, gutsy performances that give needed color to the grey-toned exile community with its endless bickering over status and money.
