Love and Lies are All That I Will Ever Be

"How could I lie about who I really am to the person I love the most?"

It seems almost a rhetorical question when coming from the mouth of one of the supporting characters in Studio Theater's All That I Will Ever Be. But it's the question that writer Alan Ball, of "Six Feet Under" and American Beauty fame, meditates on throughout the play. Ball has created Omar (Carlos Candelario), a man whose back story, nationality, and entire identity is constantly in flux, depending on what he chooses to let his lovers, his clients, and by turn, his audience, believe.

This unreliable narrator is undeniably seductive, in part due to Candelario’s presence, alternately rugged, practiced and piercingly vulnerable. When Omar ends up, almost in spite of himself, in an unlikely romance with Dwight (Parker Dixon), the potential for danger is clear, but the possibility of some form of happiness for the pair for a time keeps any wariness at bay. Dixon, for his part, owns up to the more caricature-like aspects of his pondering but self-pitying stoner without defining Dwight as merely that.

The play is at its best when concentrating on the developing relationship between these two, and when playing with our perceptions of who Candelario really is. It falters when Ball steps away from this in order to skewer the more superficial aspects of L.A. society. The pacing of supporting characters’ early scenes in this vein feels rushed and clipped; people toss around ideas like "rugged individualism,” terms like "meta faux" and statements like “Such an American question,” with abandon, but it never adds up to credible conversation. The jokes feel awfully insider-y as well. It doesn’t help that supporting performances such as Leayne Freeman’s Cynthia fail to render the dialogue any more plausible.