Caged

City Garage Theatre, Santa Monica, Calif.

(310) 453-9939

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It’s not immediately clear who’s living inside a cage in this new Charles A. Duncombe play, said Myron Meisel in The Hollywood Reporter. At first, the bars dividing the stage seem to enclose two naked, nameless figures, played by Megan Kim and RJ Jones. After all, outside their apparent enclosure sits an authoritative-sounding woman (Katrina Nelson) who is telling us that the pair are members of an intriguing species prone to violence and the formation of elaborate group hierarchies. Then again, so are Nelson’s researcher and all the other clothed observers on her side of the bars. The setup underscores the show’s central point: that point of view shapes our grasp of reality. But though that observation is hardly groundbreaking, Duncombe and director Frederique Michel have expanded it into an inquiry into human behavior that “becomes piquantly allusive, even haunting.”

All the more so if you know its precedent in history, said Steven Leigh Morris in LA Weekly. A mere century ago, people from cultures that were considered uncivilized were tossed into cages to be gawked at; Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy, was even displayed alongside the monkeys at New York City’s Bronx Zoo. While Kim and Jones “convincingly channel primitive angst, communicating and reacting with grunts,” Duncombe puts them on equal footing with the passing spectators, whose assorted hang-ups provide “a wallop of humor and irony.” Dramatic tension never builds to a momentous level, but Caged proves to be a “delightfully provocative and insightful” rumination on the oddities of our species.