Clever script and fine acting make 'Bakersfield Mist' a must-see
by Rita Moran, Theater critic

---

 Ojai Art Center Theater’s production of “Bakersfield Mist” is a play fans of clever scripts and fine acting shouldn’t miss. Award-winning playwright Stephen Sachs has packed 90 minutes with witty and thought-provoking lines that keep audiences alert and laughing.

It helps immeasurably that the show’s two stars strike a perfect balance between all-out fun and serious moments. Lee Ann Manley as Maude, who lives in a trailer park with a splatter-painting that she insists is a genuine Jackson Pollock work, and Paul Sulzman as Lionel, the distinguished art-assessor from New York who has deigned to decide whether Maude might be harboring an immensely valuable artwork in her weathered trailer, flesh out their roles with irresistible vitality and humanity. The laughs keep coming, but so do the flashes of burdened hearts.

Director Susan Kelejian keeps the action moving with a balance between the determined Maude and the diffident Lionel, and set designer Steve Mitchell gets a shout-out for the perfectly kitschy trailer interior. All of the supporting managers, designers and workers must get pats on their backs for removing the debris and salvaging the furnishings at the end of each performance. 
Naturally, writer Sachs not only has built an engaging storyline, actually based on a real incident, but peppers it with lines that catch the whimsy and poignancy as well as the built-in comic confrontations. 

It helps to understand the basic conflict the pair battles over when Lionel explains, somewhat haughtily, that “the world wants to be fooled.”

One cautionary note, for the faint of heart, is that Maude peppers her conversation with plenty of expletives not often heard in the Art Center Theater. Adding to the theater’s atmosphere for the occasion are works on interior walls by local artists reflecting Pollack’s style.
Director Kelejian invites audience members to linger for a few minutes after the play to talk about the comedy’s intriguing aspects, including art, people and life. Photo by John Branagan

---

Trailer trash clashes with upper crust in current production
By Sami Zahringer, Ojai Valley News

The scene is a kitschy, cramped mobile home in Bakersfield, California but the questions raised in the “Bakersfield Mist”, now playing at Ojai Art Center Theater, are Big and universal. What is Art? Who gets to decide that?  In exploring them, this comedy of indignation and high stakes for the soul throws up further questions of class, education, truth, and humanity and the audience watches them being battled out with sass, sauce, wit, and pathos between two characters from two very different Americas.

Unemployed Maude, (Lee Ann Manley) a salty, bourbon-swigging, middle-aged woman has acquired for $3 at a yard sale what she believes to be a genuine Jackson Pollock painting. Enter Lionel, a snooty, travel-weary, world-class art appraiser just arrived from NYC, whom Maude has scrimped and saved to hire in order to authenticate the painting, and who clearly wants to be anywhere but in her trailer.

Most of the comedy of the play proceeds from the contrast and clash between these two chalk-and-camembert individuals. Lionel is a pompous, insufferable, out-and-out snob who makes no effort to hide his distaste at Maude, her home, and everything she represents.

Lionel, a one-time director - or “the Pope”, as he has it - of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now serving out his years as an art appraiser and haughtily brags about his famous “blink” that can discern a masterpiece from a fake in an instant. Paul Sulzman in the role gives full rein to his considerable comedy chops while effectively giving us a real sense of a lonely, wounded man. The chemistry between this real-life, multiple-award-winning couple adds pleasing seasoning to their riotous double-act.

As the play progresses, Maude insists that she “knows”- she “FEELS” - that her painting is a true Pollock  - and it turns out she has a good case for her belief. What we also see, though, is just how much she needs it to be the real thing. A pointedly individual character, she also represents the multitudes of economically forgotten and socially derided Americans who feel invisible and left behind by the culture. In addition, life has been cruel to her in the worst of ways.  Far more than the potential fortune her painting could make her, she needs the personal validation of having something that matters, and therefore, for once, being someone who matters.

Manley plays Maude with sassy, saucy, brassy, bravado, zinging Lionel with sharp one-liners and cutting insights that prove that, although she lacks aesthetic training, or “taste”, as Lionel puts it, she is a woman of considerable intelligence in her own right. Although she wears that intelligence lightly, by design, she proves a formidable combatant against Lionel. “Be a person!” she barks at him, and, later, for different reasons, he has cause to level the same thing back at her.

Manley expertly handles the affecting transitions in and out of blowsy, bourbon-soaked trailer trash, displaying flashes of anger and pain, to a soul that has genuinely been profoundly moved by her painting. In some beautiful lines of dialogue, she describes finding her troubled late son in the chaos of the piece’s paint spatters and her authentic response to it somehow renders Lionel’s dismissal of its authenticity redundant and almost ridiculous. 

Lionel, as we learn, has his own reasons for desperately needing to be right in his appraisal. Our initial visceral dislike of him is tempered by his impassioned delivery of a beautiful, shining, personal manifesto on the power of art on his heart and soul. First impressions in art and in life can often be wrong, as it turns out.

Susan Kelejian, the director, manages the pacing of the piece almost as a piece of music. Fiery, combative scenes rage on at top kilter, but are punctuated by sudden, lovely moments of calm as the two discordant characters find for a moment small patches of harmony, moments they each find as surprising and enlightening as they are cautiously welcome.

Set Designers, Robert Decker and Steve Mitchell, have designed an authentic looking run-down trailer home, which Kitty Batholomew has clearly had fun decorating with tchotchkes of all sorts to illustrate Maude’s pack-rat lifestyle.

“Bakersfield Mist” is a fast-paced blend of heart, brain, and belly laughs. From the chat in the ladies bathroom afterwards - which is often where one hears what people really thought of a play - the universal feeling was that nobody had quite known what to expect from this relatively new play but had been “blown away”, “delighted” and thoroughly entertained by a well-cast, food-for-thought production.

Producer Aaliyah Mora-Khan and Ojai ACT’s Artistic Director Richard Camp have delivered to local audiences an hilarious rendition of a US and world-wide hit that has been translated into several languages and, notably, been performed in London’s West End by no less an actor than Kathleen Turner. The many conversations provoked by this production will continue long after the curtain closes on it. This is a very easy play to heartily recommend.

Photo by John Branagan

See the "glowing Lee Ann Manley" and the "wonderful Paul Sulzman" in this play that asks "what makes art?  But the more important question is, when it comes to flesh and blood are we all worth the same?"
Emily Dobi, VC Reporter

Who decides what is real? Who gets to determine the worth of something? Or someone, for that matter? These are some of the questions lying at the heart of Stephen Sachs’ Bakersfield Mist, onstage at the Ojai Art Center Theater through May 27.

Inspired by true events, Bakersfield Mist is about Maude (the glowing Lee Ann Manley), a 50-something unemployed bartender who pays a few bucks for a painting at a thrift store to give as a gag gift to a friend. Thanks but no thanks, her friend says. Maude doesn’t want the thing either. To her it looks like some kind of joke — all squiggly lines and splatters of paint. Nothing like the clown painting that holds pride of place on the wall in her trailer. Maude tries to unload the painting at a garage sale, where an art teacher tells her she might have a Jackson Pollock on her hands. Maude has no idea who Pollock is, but she knows enough to call in an expert.

In walks Lionel, a renowned connoisseur (his favorite word) from New York. He takes one brief, annoyed look at the painting and announces it’s a fake. He doesn’t hold Maude in much esteem, either. Maude refuses to accept his decision and the two enter into a verbal and physical pas de deux that wrestles with the questions of authenticity and value — not just of art, but, more importantly, of people.

The wonderful Paul Sulzman plays Lionel with a deft hand on an emotional thermostat that runs from ice-cold snobbery to blistering passion. Manley fully embodies Maude as a woman with a complicated spirit and a battered heart. She’s like a fighter who has been knocked down so many times but refuses to stay on the mat. Maude needs the painting to be real, not so much for the fortune it would bring her, but because she needs something real to hold on to.

Directed with great heart and skill by Susan Kelejian, Bakersfield Mist is a two-person, one-set drama without an intermission. The tension builds without reprieve until the last word is spoken and the final toast is raised.

Actually, there are other characters. One is the painting itself. Local artists Vonder Gray, Kenny Dahle, Gary Best and Clay White each painted a “lost Pollock” that will be featured on a different weekend. (The paintings will be auctioned off at the end of the play’s run.) Another character is the set, designed by Steve Mitchell, constructed by Mitchell and Robert Decker, dressed by Kitty Bartholomew and lit by Larry Blumenthal. Together they have created an authentically outfitted and weathered trailer. It’s Maude’s whole world and it shows all her pain and slog disguised as thrift-shop kitsch.

Maude provides some impressive evidence to prove that her painting is the real thing, but will Lionel be swayed or will he cling to the cognoscenti’s deference to provenance? Can a Pollock be a Pollock if it was bought at a thrift store? The play asks, “What makes art?” But the more important question we are left to ponder is, when it comes to flesh and blood, are we all worth the same?

Photo by John Branagan