By: Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/21/25 – Opening with the Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood on Friday, June 18, was a play written by John Kovenbach – Reel to Reel. A co-production with HorseChart Theatre, this fascinating 90-mintue play explores a 55-year marriage of Maggie and Walter through a collage of memories, sounds, and moments. Directed by Matt McCray, the story unfolds non-linearly, as it follows Maggie and Walter at three different ages: 27, 42, and 82. Appropriately titled Reel to Reel, the play focuses on the relationship between sound and memory. The play features a unique theatrical experience where actors create all the sounds live on stage, providing a foley backdrop and exploring how memory and love are shaped by sounds.
The play opens with Maggie (Alley Mills Bean) and Walter (Jim Ortlieb), both aged 82, together after 55 years of marriage, as they begin to reflect on the evolution of their relationship over the years. Maggie, a sound artist, captures everyday noises and weaves them into evocative performance pieces, while Walter, an aspiring but reluctant filmmaker, becomes her partner in documenting their life. The play explores how sounds and memories intertwine to shape our understanding of love and relationships, particularly within the context of a long marriage. From the start, we experience how humor, tenderness, and emotional complexity shape their daily conversation.
“This play is a theatrical journey exploring a love affair over 50+ years,” says Matthew McCray, director of Reel to Reel. “Enduring love is something the world could use more of, and it feels wonderful to elevate this kind of story right now. Reel to Reel is a play that explores the ways that relationships evolve over decades, while love remains constant.”
The play features a cast of four actors who not only portray their characters but also orchestrate the numerous sound effects. We first meet the octogenarians Maggie (Alley Mills Bean) and Walter (Jim Orlieb) in an imagined 2050 still living their somewhat funky flat that looks untouched in décor or technology since they spent their first night there together in 1995. Maggie is busy at her desk, meticulously working on the tape of a reel-to-reel player (which even back in 1995 would have been ancient), with Walter commenting, “You’re the last splicer alive.”
Maggie is hyper-focused on editing sound bites on her aged Reel-to-Reel player and Walter tries unsuccessfully to convince Maggie to go outside for a walk. Their playful conversations leads to them noting the physical details of each others’ bodies and habits as observed over decades of living together. Of course, Maggie is more sensitive to sounds – recalling the most comforting sound of her childhood being that of the churning of her mother’s washing machine.
What does a marriage of fifty-five years sound like? Her middle of the night mumbles, snorts, and snores? His habit of opening a squeaky cabinet ever so slowly to hear each tick? Her end of day footstep that is “like a sack of flour dropped off a three-inch cliff”? His upset voice that “sits on the back of his throat and there’s sandpaper run through it.” Her sigh? His sigh? John Kolvenbach’s Reel to Reel is a play that is meant to be heard and not just seen, and this is reinforced with the recurring performance of Maggie with her collage of sounds recorded on her Reel-to-Reel tape recorder, where she asks her imagined audience to put on the eye-covering masks under their theater seats.
As night falls and they wander off to the bedroom, they comment on their less-than-interesting sexual desires which usually end up with one or the other falling asleep. Then suddenly that bedroom of octogenarians sends us back to the beginning of their relationship at a party where a 27-year-old Walter (Brett Aune) is attempting to leave the party but finds an attractive young woman named Maggie Spoon (Samantha Klein) sitting on his coat. Maggie teases him and then announces that she is planning to go home with Walter for the night, whether he is ready for that or not. Walter seems befuddled and uncertain about Maggie’s intentions. He tries to play host at his apartment but quickly discovers that Maggie is determined to get him into bed right away. In the morning, Walter discovers the Maggie has disappeared and he frantically searches all over the city, trying to find her.
Where does he finally find her? In a tiny performance space where she does a skit about the sounds she constantly records. Maggie has spent much of her life cataloguing and labeling the noises around her – the first being her mother’s washing machine which she still listens to when anxious. (She even re-recorded a noodle cracking 600 times, just to get it right.) Along the way, not only has she recorded much of her and Walter’s quirks and quarrels, she secretly recorded as a girl 4144 minutes of her parents’ private moments in their bedroom – all of which she uses now as a stand-up entertainer, Maggie Spoon, in shows where her audience put on airline masks to enjoy her act better. Apparently fascinated with Maggie’s quirky charm, he is soon stunned to find her arrive with suitcase and a reel-to-reel tape recorder – ready to move in and live with Walter.
The lives of Maggie and Walter alternate between their fifty-fifth year of marriage and their first year, with two sets of older and younger actors rising from behind the foley curtain/screen where all kinds of sound effect devices from radio plays are used. They slam doors, snap sticks, pop balloons, or swish water in a gallon milk container for a myriad of Maggie’s recorded sounds. While scenes alternate between these two ages along with the ages of 42 and 80, sometimes the various-aged actors interact with each other on the stage, providing sharing hilarious observations about their partners’ idiosyncrasies from sounds to shapes to smells and filling in each other’s incomplete sentences.
The power of John Kolvenbach’s script is that he has Maggie and Walter say things that most of us would never, ever have the creativity to say but can immediately imagine wanting to have said to someone we love. Alley Mills Bean and Jim Orlieb as the older Walter and Maggie are both brilliant and funny in their subtle nuances of portrayal. Jim Orlieb’s Walter is so loving and adoring of his Maggie while still acting as if irritated at her inattention while she is preoccupied with her splicing sound bites. Alley Mills Bean’s Maggie is a gentle soul who loves to tease her husband one minute and then act impatient or indignant the next of his constant prodding and questioning.
The younger Maggie, played in by Samantha Klein has a sharp edge to her from the start., She speaks rapidly in paragraphs with hardly a breath or staring forever at Walter while not making a sound or a move. She is impulsive and impetuous, unpredictable and unbending, determined and devilish. She is also heads over heels in love with a Walter who at first has no idea who she is or why she wants him. Samantha Klein tackles this role as a true stand-out.
Brett Aune as the younger Walter often appears as a deer frozen in headlights, particularly as he first meets the invading Maggie (whom by the way shows up uninvited to his apartment even before he knows her name). He speaks in a manner mild and almost monotone — except when he first starts panicking over Maggie’ presence and then over her sudden absence with her work as a performance artist. The strength of the performances by all four actors leads to a highly engaging look at their relationship as both remembered and half-forgotten, but linked so much by sound, the very sounds that Maggie conscientiously records. This is a play that forces us to think about what sustains a marriage as a long-term relationship and how its nuances of two human beings living together for so long are best remembered by our faulty memories. John Kolvenbach’s Reel to Reel is a delight for the ears – funny and deeply touching story in capturing the scenes from a marriage so ordinary that it feels extraordinary.
Playwright John Kolvenbach is an Olivier Award-nominated writer whose play Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight premiered in LA and at Harbor Stage, subsequently running at American Blues in Chicago, in Paris, and at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. His West End: Love Song (with Cillian Murphy) received an Olivier nomination for Best New Comedy, directed by John Crowley) and On an Average Day (with Woody Harrelson and Kyle MacLachlan, directed by John Crowley.) Director Matthew McCray has helmed productions, concerts, and workshops at premier Los Angeles institutions including Center Theatre Group, LA Philharmonic, South Coast Repertory, and Deaf West Theatre.
Samantha Klein as the younger Maggie (LADCC award for If I Forget at the Fountain Theatre; selected credits include A Shayna Maidel at Laguna Playhouse, Their Eyes Saw Rain, On Emotion, Trip to Bountiful, Into the Woods, Chapter Two). Brett Auneas the younger Walter 1 has worked with the Denver Center, Arvada Center, Curious Theatre, Dallas Theatre Center, and others, including regional premieres of Constellations, Venus in Fur, Proof, Inventing Van Gogh, The Swan and How I Learned to Drive, as well as Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, Last Train to Nibroc, Ghosts, Cabaret, Hurlyburly, Deep Throat Sex Scandal, Henry V, Metamorphoses, Alarms and Excursions.
Alley Mills Bean as the older Maggie has selected theatre credits include starring roles at the Mark Taper Forum, Odyssey Theatre and at Pacific Resident Theatre in Candida, There’s One in Every Marriage, Hogan’s Goat, often alongside her late husband, Orson Bean. Jim Ortlieb as the older Walter has been seen on Broadway in Guys and Dolls 2009 revival, The Farnsworth Invention, and Of Mice and Men. More recently he received the LADCC award for Best Actor for Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight.
Reel to Reel had it opening night at 8pm on Friday, July 18. The play runs 8pm Fridays, Saturdays, 2pm Sundays through August 23, 2025. Rogue Machine, at the Matrix Theatre, is located at 7657 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90046.Tickets are $45 General Admission. Seniors: $35. Shows4Less on Fridays July 25 ($15+), August 1 ($15+), August 15 ($25). Reservations: Go to https://www.roguemachinetheatre.org or for more information 855-585-5185.
