Sick, by Erik Patterson: The Los Angeles Theatre Center

What a joy it was to attend the world premiere of Sick, award-winning playwright Erik Patterson’s latest, playing at The Los Angeles Theatre Centre through May 16. It is funny, personal, brutal at times, and deeply profound. From the first scene, where we witness a married couple, Pamela and David (played by Vonessa Martin and Ramon de Ocampo) discuss her health issues, we know we are in the hands of an ensemble we can trust. The tone of the piece, set immediately by Patterson and the director, Diane Rodriguez, is confident, absurd, and unafraid of sentiment when the time comes. Not sentimentality, which is deadly, but true and honest sentiment. Sick is a terrific piece of work.

Pamela, in a panic, opens the play by breathlessly describing to her husband that “something is wrong” with her. The humor here is that her “symptoms” immediately take on a sketchy quality, as in: she does not appear to be a reliable narrator of her own body. She informs her husband, “My poop is weird.” He tries to be patient and interested, but you can tell that this is a conversation they have had countless times over the years. She is convinced that the restaurant where she works is “giving her cancer”. She needs to get a new job. Her “poop is weird”. In her neurotic mind, everything is connected. As indeed it is. It’s a small cast, and Sick lets us get to know them in pieces, the actors rotating through scenes with one another, and through this we get to know their relationships. Pamela and David have a young son Michael, played with beautiful sweetness and clarity and intelligence by 11 year old Quinton Lopez. Johnny Giacalone, in a fantastic performance, plays Gary, Pamela’s out-of-control brother, who has been thrown out of the house by his newly-sober wife Carla (the night I saw the show, Carla was played by the understudy, Regan Metoyér – she was wonderful). Carla is now attending AA meetings, and has become a Christian, and cannot deal with her husband Gary, who is still drinking, smoking pot, and thinks if he promises to her that he will cut out “vodka and jello shots”, that that will be enough. Carla is new to AA, and she finds help and inspiration from an old-timer, Jeannie, played by Anita Dashiell, in a really subtle and effective performance. She has all the steps down, she has been clean for 12 years, but she is not without her flaws (she is obviously addicted to coffee, and watch how she INHALES the half of that Krispy Kreme donut, terrifiied that the Overeaters Anonymous people will judge her), and shows that health (mental or otherwise) is a process. You are never DONE. Drunk Gary has moved in with his sister Pamela. Meanwhile, Pamela continues to think she is dying. She is perpetually sick. Something is wrong. In desperation, she goes to see her son’s pediatrician, played by Brendan O’Malley, in a wonderfully sociopathic performance, and even though he insists that he is a PEDIATRICIAN, he does listen to her problems. She just knows that something is WRONG.

Well, yes. Something IS wrong. But not with Pamela. She’s got it all wrong. In more ways than one.

Patterson has created a really personal piece of work here. There isn’t one didactic moment. It’s not politicized, even in this climate where healthcare reform is on everyone’s lips. This is te story of one wacky family (but no wacky than any other family), and how they deal with sickness, imagined and real. Nobody is exempt. Perhaps hypochondriacs know this on a deeper level than other people, which causes them to obsess, and fixate, and spin their wheels. Everyone has an “end”. It’s out there, waiting for each of us. Hopefully, we can spend our time on this planet not worrying about it too much, and trying to have a good and meaningful life while we are here. But sickness can throw that balance out of wack. Everyone reacts differently to sickness, the specter of it, and Patterson examines all of the diverse ways that people respond. Some deny it entirely, some accept it, some become totally selfish, others can’t help but empathize. I loved how much variety he was able to find in his script – the humor leavened by the seriousness, with the entire cast on the stage the whole time, with those not in whatever scene was happening, sitting in the background, reading magazines, and I really got that feeling of being in a hospital waiting room. The masses of people. Sitting, waiting, watching the clock … maybe one person is waiting for a benign routine test, maybe one person is waiting to hear whether they have two months to live or not. Regardless, everyone sits together at the hospital, and there’s a FEELING in those places … unmistakable to anyone who has spent any time at all in a hospital. Sick nails it.

The acting is fantastic. I hesitate to say too much about each character, since each specific journey unfolds in a way that is individual and full of surprises (I did not know how it would go, the ending was not “telegraphed” to me in any way, which was very effective), but each actor was marvelous. Sick is about one specific family. And yes, the family has a lot of problems, and are in the midst of fighting with one another (Pamela and David fighting over her hypochondria and how to raise their son Michael, Gary and Carla about to split up over his drinking and her rigid sobriety) – but one of the things Sick so understands, and I found it deeply moving, was how families can come together. How they operate, when under duress. How things become clear, horribly so, when something bad happens. The people in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were like everyone else: maybe someone had left home having a fight with his wife, maybe someone else hadn’t said “I’m sorry” to their kid for whatever reason, things left unsaid, unresolved – but what were the calls about coming from those towers on that day? “I love you.” “I love you.” “Just calling to say I love you.” “I love you.” I felt that the cast of Sick, every one of them, helped create a family. Sometimes, in plays, where “families” are supposed to be represented, you just never buy it. “No way are those two siblings.” “Those two are cousins? Not a chance.” Everyone seems like separate individuals. This happens in films, too. But here, I really felt this FAMILY operating as a FAMILY. This is a great compliment to Patterson’s writing, and also to every actor on that stage.

Information and tickets for Sick here.

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1 Response to Sick, by Erik Patterson: The Los Angeles Theatre Center

  1. Emily says:

    I love how Jeannie wound up cradling every character she encountered – did she even know they were all from the same family? She had this great gentle quality that kind of balanced out the madness and confusion that confronted her.

    Dr. Brown (“Tim Brown. That’s such a boring name!”) going from a seemingly compassionate, likeable character, only to turn out to be this insane pervert was classic. It was fantastic the way that sort of led to Pamela having this moment of self-realization in regards to her hypochondria and how selfish it had made her – that scene in the hospital where her son was lying in bed, probably dying, and she’s carrying on about not being able to breathe – I wanted to KILL her more than I wanted to kill pen clicking lady (you had to be there). But through that encounter with Dr. Brown where he tells her to leave being sick to people who are actually SICK, she at least learns to try.

    Gary was a fantastic character, who very easily could have been taken over-the top by a lesser actor. Johnny Giacalone was terrific. The scene where he introduces Michael to pot is probably my favorite.

    One thing I LOVED was that this was a totally intimate story, ultimately just about people and their personal struggles that were mild compared to the bigger picture. It allowed for a bare-bones setting with interchangeable props, but at the same time there was a lot of movement and rhythm between scenes that kept everything at a great pace. It never got boring or mundane. You never stopped to wonder why you should care about these people and their lives. You just CARED.

    Great, great show.

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