Review: RORSCHACH at Skylight Theater

A drop of ink plops down on a surface and starts oozing into a shape resembling… well, could be a camel, could be a weasel, could be the profile of Taylor Swift? It all depends on the perspective of the viewer. “What might this be,” is the question repeatedly served up across several contexts within Kelly Younger’s play RORSCHACH. You’ll become accustomed to the ask, but Younger’s sweet-sad romantic fantasy, in its world premiere at the Skylight Theatre Company, may keep you perpetually off guard. Whether one is an actor, a wardrobe supervisor, a budding psychologist or an academic in Boston studying that budding psychologist, there is much to be perceived in shifting shapes.

From the pen of the scribe who wrote several Muppet properties as well as the viral “Kermencement” U of Maryland graduation speech, RORSCHACH is its own animal. At its heart, this is a trio of love stories - successful and doomed - as well as an inspired-by-history take on the necessity of sticking to one’s scientific guns in the fate of naysayers. Director Cameron Watson’s six-person cast deliver equal parts charm and skill and humor. If this play is to have a future, one suspects the next ensemble will be even stronger.

Few may know details about the life and work of Hermann Rorschach (played by Paul Culos), the Swiss scientist whose career as a legitimate psychologist depend entirely on the validation of these inkblot tests. His thorny history and relative anonymity (no Freud here) is exactly the point. The first person we meet is actually Justin (played by Elijah McNally), a researcher who is at a conference in LA to give a talk on Rorschach and his methods, a presentation that not a single person is attending. Well, except Aimee (Carolina Rodriguez) who stumbles in late and apologizing before realizing she’s in the wrong place. The person she’s supposed to schmooze in the hopes of securing a coveted Getty Fellowship is in a different room. Aimee bolts, but she has stayed long enough to get enough of the Rorschach itch. She makes an impression on Justin and he on her. They’ll see each other again.

Somewhere else in LA, a charismatic young actress named Olive (Linzi Fenix) has some exciting news for her partner, wardrobe supervisor Dana (Tessa Claire Hersh). Olive has just landed her first major speaking role in a movie, but the movie shoots overseas - which will take her away from Dana – and Olive accepted the part without discussing it with Dana first. Prior to this, things were getting increasingly serious, but now with Olive’s consistent live-in-the-moment disregard for the person she claims to love, they might be breaking up.

Come to find out that Aimee is Dana’s roommate and Justin is Olive’s brother, visiting and crashing with his sister while he’s in town for his academic duties. Justin and Aimee are thrown back together, and she develops some insight into the barrier that is preventing him from finishing his dissertation. Alcohol is consumed and the two connect. So as one relationship is fracturing, another is blooming.

And a third is taking a different form. Back in Switzerland in 1922, Rorschach himself (Mitch Ross) reaches a tipping point of his own when he realizes that his collaborator, the psychologist Emil (Paul Culos), has submitted his own responses to Rorschach’s inkblot tests instead of those of his patients. This is hugely problematic since Rorschach’s reputation as a legitimate scientist is dependent on actual data, his future is jeopardized. Complicating things further, he learns that Emil is in love with him.

Younger’s consistently clever plotting links the events of the past to the present without things feeling overly ham-fisted. The central metaphor of the Rorschach inkblot – particles coming together and breaking apart – as it applies to Justin and Aimee; Olive and Dana, Hermann and Emil - is unmissable. And those amoeba-like, Rorschach-ian  blobs that bedeck Tesshi Nakagawa’s scenery and Nicholas Santiago’s projections, in addition to keeping the aesthetic alive, are also wicked cool.

Also, Younger has created characters worth caring about. The boyish McNally infuses Justin with a truckload worth of neuroses and insecurities which Rodriguez’s sympathetic Dana – lonely and academically ambitious though she may be - helps to ease. Credit to both actors that we want these two to end up together. Given how truly obtuse Olive is, the Dana/Olive push-pull might be a little harder to stomach were in not for the fact that Hersh is so credibly grounded while the wonderful Fenix charms the stuffing out of Dana, Aimee and the audience alike.

The Hermann and Emil relationship proves to be deeper and more delicate. Even with limited scene time, Culos and Ross negotiate this friendship and professional collaboration with authenticity and tenderness. Clearly, the real-life Rorschach – who died at 37 of a ruptured appendix - didn’t have it easy. One could only wish that anybody who go on to make their mark could have an acolyte with the devotion of an Emil in their corner.

RORSCHACH continues through Nov. 22 at 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave., LA.