‘Times Like These’ At California Stage In Sacramento Is At Once Wickedly Funny And Scary As Hell

There’s an unusual show at California Stage in Sacramento, about a pair of prominent actors in Berlin as the Nazis were seizing power. The play, titled "Times Like These," features outstanding acting and a bit of gallows humor.

The play is set in 1934, when actress Meta Wolff, who has a popular following but also a Jewish ancestor, is abruptly told to stop coming to the theater. She lays low in her apartment, only occasionally venturing out.

Confined to quarters, Wolff’s mind churns with theatrical creativity. When her husband, Oskar, an actor who is not Jewish, get a starring role in The Taming of the Shrew, Wolff urges him to turn his performance into a veiled satire on Nazi Germany. She wants Oskar to play the domineering Petruchio as a tyrannical Brownshirt bully, slapping his wife around. Meta: Let me play him, and you play her.

This seditious humor is wickedly funny and as scary as hell, and things get even spookier when Oskar is cast as Hamlet, and Wolff grimly rehearses him for that role.

This play is a sequence of short, intense scenes between two remarkable actors — Lois Masten Ewing and Gary Alan Wright, both of whom have multiple professional credits. They are most convincing as this increasingly desperate artistic couple, who initially assume that the Nazis are so dysfunctional that they’ll quickly fall from power.

But gradually, Wolff and Oskar realize that they are the ones running out of options and running out of time. This show mixes bleak irony with looming tragedy. It gives you plenty of perplexing problems to consider, and two of the finest performances you’ll find in Sacramento at the present time.

"Times Like These" continues through November 18 at California Stage.