Review: BABY FOOT at Rogue Machine, The Henry Murray Stage At The Matrix Theatre

What a pleasure to take in Rogue Machine’s latest triumph, Baby Foot, on the Henry Murray Stage in the Matrix Theatre on Melrose.  It’s sexy, gritty, funny, and adult.  This recovery and relationship drama feels like something that came roaring out of Sundance in the 90s. One of the most common laments you hear among filmgoers is, why don’t they make movies for adults anymore?  If you long to see something that gives you the indefinable feeling of a great, golden era film by Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, or the Coen Brothers, you will love taking in this striking new play by writer and director Tim Venable.

In a way, this is a particularly challenging play to describe because I feel the less that is said about it, the better.  The journey it takes you on is moment-to-moment, unexpected, and full of explosive, character-driven surprises. I don’t want to ruin the pleasure of that discovery for anyone.  Even the immersive staging in the upstairs attic theater, with brilliant, startlingly original design work by Joe McClean and Dane Bowman, is astonishing.

Baby Foot takes place in rehab in the witching hour between 2am and the next day, when insomnia haunts two addicts. A woman is about to leave rehab after a successful 90 days, a man is just entering.  Both are the kind of people who can’t seem to inhabit their own lives without smashing themselves and everything around them to bits.  In the naked unpeeling of damage, it reminds me of the great John Patrick Shanley play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.

Writer and director Tim Venable pulls on his own experience of addiction and recovery for this drama.  It feels bare, truthful, twitchy, and intimate, pushing boundaries between theatre, life, and therapy.  The play was developed with and for these actors, and the fit is seamless.  As an accomplished theatre actor himself, Venable brings finely honed specificity to his direction, with every moment landing hard and unfurling tenderly and silkily.  Baby Foot feels organic and so weightless that it’s hard to believe at some points that you are watching something fictional and not watching real life unfold in front of you.

There are times that accomplished film, TV, and stage actress and musician Hope Lauren (The Forever Purge, Different Flowers, series on CW, HBO, ABC, MTV) has a dewy golden radiance making her feel like an improbable fit, visually, for the part of jaded, punk rock musician heroin addict Alexis.  But she digs deep into the cockiness, toughness, vulnerability, shame and longing at the heart of the character, and you never see a moment where you catch her “acting.”  It’s an intense, no-holds-barred, and winning performance.  She sings and plays “Memphis” by Bob Forrest so beautifully and simply, with so much yearning and brokenness, it’s breathtaking.

She has savage sexual chemistry with fiercely talented theatre and film actor Daniel Dorr (Fury with Brad Pitt, and Bill & Ted: Face the Music opposite Keanu Reeves) playing Blackie.  Blackie is a flailing actor and Chili’s manager, crash landing in rehab after destroying his family with his drug use.  Daniel Dorr’s work is brilliant and perfect in every detail, subtly shaded, intelligent, charismatic, funny, and tortured in the way that we recognize from people all around us, who can’t stop doing the thing that is killing them.  It’s a truly exceptional performance that makes you grateful for the intimate garret space, where like a filmgoer, you can take in every shifting expression.

Broadway and film and TV veteran Paul DeBoy (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Good Fight, Law & Order,  FBI: Most Wanted, White House Plumbers) also has a virtuosic turn as the caretaker of the place, Fred, and although he has few lines, he lands every single one sparely and elegantly, like a boxer’s knockout punch.  While his face is appropriately impassive for a Vietnam vet janitor who has been in recovery for years for his wartime morphine habit, there is so much violent depth and felt truth in his words, it’s like a magic trick.  What an incredible, understated talent.

Baby Foot is another fresh triumph for producers Guillermo Cienfuegos and John Perrin Flynn, and the audacious creative team at Rogue Machine, who can’t seem to stop making fierce, groundbreaking, sublimely original theatre hits one after the other.

Photos by Jeff Lorch

Baby Foot runs through November 20, 2023 at Rogue Machine, The Henry Murray Stage upstairs at the Matrix Theatre, located at 7657 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90046.  Tickets are available by calling (855) 585-5185 or by clicking the link below:

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