‘PASCAL & JULIEN’ at the 24th Street Theatre – Theatrical Haiku at its Finest

By Ernest KearneyPascal & Julien by Australian Playwright Daniel Keene is a strange, halfling of a fairy-tale.  At forty-three minutes one cannot honestly describe it as a drama or a play, so much as a musing or a meditation.  However, from the first of seventeen brief scenelets that opens the production at the 24th Street Theatre you know you are in for scintillating delight.

The narrative is sparse.  Julien (Darby Winn) is a precocious lonely child after a better father than he has.  Pascal (Paul Turbiak) is a tightly wound writer who just wants to be left alone to do his crossword puzzle.

A reoccurring motif —well as reoccurring as any motif can manage to be in forty-three minutes— is “People can dream whatever they like.”  What the playwright is dreaming about is difficult to determine.  Is he the son seeking a father or a father seeking a son?  Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Winn and Turbiak excel in their roles.  Winn perfectly displays a child’s understated longing for connection, while Turbiak unfolds to that connection with a proper mixture of reluctance and enrapture.

As always at the 24th Street Theatre the production is as near to flawless as flawless can  be.  Director Debbie Devine with her crew: Matthew Hill (Video Designer,) Keith Mitchell (Set Designer,) John Nobori (Sound,) Shannon A Kennedy (Costumes,) and Dan Weingarten (lighting) has created another feast for the senses unlike any to be found in another stage venue in this city.

At the 24th Street Theatre every production is in the truest sense a work of art.

The difficulty some may find in the production is the playwright’s brevity.   Devine compares it to a piece of chamber music, and you see that in her handling of every aspect of this production – an instrument to be fused in harmony. 

For me, it took on the properties of a Japanese Haiku.  Not an insight, but a scent.

Keene doesn’t supply any answers; perhaps that is the playwright’s intention, or perhaps it’s an acknowledgment of his, and most of ours, limitations.  Perhaps the playwright intended to present a mirror for us to gaze into and look upon our own failings when it comes to finding the love in those whose only fault is they are family.

If this is the case, then the playwright and the 24th Street Theatre have succeeded in their task.

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‘PASCAL & JULIEN’

at the 24th Street Theatre
1117 West 24th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Running through September to October 27, 2024

Click Below for More Information and Tickets

SEE LIVE THEATRE

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Ernest Kearney - author

Written by

An award-winning L.A. playwright and rabble-rouser of note who has hoisted glasses with Orson Welles, been arrested on three continents and once beat up Charlie Manson. His first play, "Among the Vipers" was a semi-finalist in the Julie Harris Playwriting Competition and was featured in the Carnegie-Mellon Showcase of New Plays. It was produced at the NPT Theater in Ashland, Oregon and Los Angeles’ celebrated Odyssey Ensemble Theatre. His following play, “The Little Boy Who Loved Monsters” was produced at The Hollywood Actors Theater, where he earned praise from the Los Angeles Times for his “…inordinately creative writing.” The play went on to numerous other productions including Berlin’s The Black Theatre under the direction of Rainer Fassbinder who wrote in his program notes of Kearney, “He is a skilled playwright, but more importantly he is a dangerous one.” Ernest Kearney has worked as literary manager or as dramaturge for among others The Hudson Theater Guild, Nova Diem and the Odyssey Ensemble Theatre, where he still serves on the play selection committee. He has been the recipient of two Dramalogue Awards and a finalist or semi-finalist, three times, in the Julie Harris Playwriting Competition. His work has been performed by Michael Dunn, Sandra Tsing Loh, Jack Colvin and Billy Bob Thornton, and to date, either as playwright or director, he has upwards of a hundred and thirty productions under his belt, including a few at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater as puppeteer. Kearney remains focused on his writing, as well as living happily ever after with his lovely wife Marlene. His stage reviews and social essays can be found at TheTVolution.com and workingauthor.com. Follow him on Facebook.

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