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'Living Out': A nanny diary set in L.A.
 
By Michael Phillips
Tribune theater critic

As a hyperstressed attorney and her Salvadoran-born nanny — two squares in the multicultural Rubik's cube known as Los Angeles — Cheryl Graeff and Sandra Marquez make for excellent theatrical company in "Living Out." Lisa Loomer's play careens from broad, borderline-caricature comedy to crushing pathos. You may find these extremes powerful and effective. Or you may find them a tad manipulative.

Yet in this nicely accomplished co-production of Teatro Vista and American Theater Company, at the ATC space just off Lincoln Avenue, Graeff and Marquez steady the waters, never doing too much or too little. They do what actors are supposed to do:

They bring out the comic, dramatic and human best in the material. The material may be facile, but it's playable.
Written several years ago, it's a very L.A. show. One of its strengths is Loomer's firsthand knowledge of L.A. angst — the traffic, the smog, the asthma, the multiracial strands of a social fabric. Loomer, whose earlier works include "The Waiting Room" and "Expecting Isabel," writes here about parental doubts and pretend crises as well as genuine ones. The people with money can afford to sweat the pretend ones, while the working-class characters sweat other, more pressing, issues. The recent James L. Brooks movie "Spanglish" explored similar territory.

Nancy Robin (Greaff) is a successful, hard-charging lawyer interviewing prospective nannies to take care of her daughter. Ana (Marquez), a serene and winning applicant, has two sons, one back in El Salvador, one living with her and Ana's husband (Joe Minoso, who brings nice shadings to his role). Ana knows she won't get the job if she tells Nancy the truth — so she lies, saying instead that both sons are in El Salvador.

Each character, rather too schematically, has her or his deception to protect. Nancy's attorney husband (Thomas Gebbia, not quite in control of his "smarm" button) tells Ana not to let Nancy know the baby learned to crawl while Nancy was on a business trip. An acquaintance of Nancy's urges her to buy a "nanny cam," a Teddy bear concealing a video camera, to guard against theft. Loomer knows this scene well, right down to details such as the name "Jackson" being, in one Latina character's words, "the new Jesus."

Ultimately Loomer sacrifices her characters on the altar of narrative convenience. Over and over, some dopey misunderstanding or other — misinterpreted information from a hospital, lipstick on a drinking glass — guides an increasingly melodramatic plot. "Living Out" is a far better play than "Expecting Isabel," in which Loomer played false the very real anguish surrounding infertility, but the writer is one of those multioutlet authors who doesn't write one kind of story for the stage, and another for TV or the movies. Her plays tend to sound, and move, like cable TV movies.

Wisely, director Cecilie Keenan doesn't play up the sketch-comic aspects of "Living Out." The pacing's pleasantly swift, and scenic designer Brian Sidney Bembridge — one of the busiest and best in town — cleverly solves the problem of a one-set house interior serving as two families' houses, both done up in stylized splashes of bright color.

The reasons to see the play, and this production, are pretty simple. Graeff makes fresh a mighty familiar archetype. And Marquez, in the role the play should've focused on more intently, slips easily and smartly inside the skin of Ana.