EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

"Critics watch a battle from a high place then come down to shoot the survivors."   ~ Ernest Hemingway     

Photo by Jim Cox

THROUGH DEC. 15: Hudson Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Bl., Hollywood. www.onstage411.com/TylerPriceMusical 

[REVIEW TO COME]

Photo by Lizzy Kimball

Broadwater Studio Theatre

I confess I spend a lot of time when at home enjoying the grisliest of grisly bad horror movies—and as a critic, let me also admit the conundrum here is that the cornier they are the better—but never has a stage nail-biter managed to freak me out.

Although it’s not a traditional thriller, the world premiere of PEN USA and LADCC Award-winner Shem Bitterman’s inherently spooky and even sinister new play The Civil Twilight truly put me on the edge of my seat.

Part of that reaction is the proximity of the action. Entering the Broadwater’s ultra-intimate Studio Theatre, a “room” about big enough to host a small actors’ workshop, the size of the claustrophobic space immediately gives the sense of walking directly into a rundown motel room in a desolate mid-American locale. It’s the kind of place where one first checks the mattress for crawly things and the bathtub for bloodstains—something that actually happened to me once on tour with a play in the boonies—before tentatively unpacking.

There’s a raging storm outside, a weather event nasty enough to send two stranded traveling strangers (Taylor Gilbert and Andrew Elvis Miller) into sharing a cab from the shutdown local airport to this bleak southwestern-themed motel decorated in early Walmart, an annoying development made worse by the fact that the place only has one last room available they’ve reluctantly decided to share.

Ann is a kind of dumpy, salt-of-the-earth suburban wife, while John is a rather put-together businessman-type who keeps things close to the vest and may or may not be someone to trust.

At least he’s good for finding ways to turn on the lights and sleuth out why the room smells as though something died in it—which it has. Soon he is using one of the room’s only two towels to remove a dead ferret or some other now unrecognizable small putrid animal from under the bathroom sink.

The pair soon finds they have a lot more in common than they initially realized, as John is a regionally famous radio personality and Ann, as it turns out, is his professed biggest fan, someone who knows the names of his wife and kids and, figuratively speaking, where all the bodies are buried.

Or does she.

A kind of creepiness soon begins to descend over this purgatory-like motel room like an ominous shroud. Bitterman’s quirky play is full of twists and turns that give the sense that it could have been an old classic Twilight Zone written by Sam Shepard. In fact, when this play closes, someone should grab up the space as is for a revival of Fool for Love.

There are many twists and turns in this tense 80-minute ride and, although some are a tad far-fetched, it feels eerily personal as the audience sits in such close proximity to the performers that, if one sneezed, the other might be inclined to say “Bless you.” After the performance, when introduced to my partner Hugh, Miller actually said it was as though they’d already met since it felt as though he had shared an airplane-sized bottle of Tanqueray with him at the onstage table placed inches from where we were seated.

Under the sturdy directorial hand of Ann Hearn Tobolowsky, the crisscrossing shocks and snaking revelations that crash through the play are sharply realized. Still, there's a far deeper and intentionally camouflaged message here: a kind of lament for the rapid decline of rural midwestern values that leaves the door open for what Bitterman calls “hucksters and charlatans [who] for a few bucks or some cheap outrage offer a path to desperately needed change”—you know, like the current conman pulling the wool over the eyes of half of our countrymen that may just result in him being in a position to soon destroy our society even more than he already has.

I believe this play is one of the year’s most unique and hauntingly memorable, especially considering a great writer’s good fortune to have developed it in collaboration with a director as accomplished as Tobolowsky and two veteran actors as consistently efficacious and arresting as Gilbert and Miller.

As John, Miller’s calm demeanor that hides a frightened and miserable trapped animal ready to spring is a remarkable accomplishment, only slightly overshadowed by the jarring intensity of Gilbert, who with this performance caps a long career of consistent excellence. Her work here, finding both a strength and vulnerability in the multi-faceted role of Ann, is the performance of a year in a year full of great performances in Los Angeles, a miraculous thing since it was born and cultivated in this unobtrusive and nondescript playing space.

Druthers? Only a few. Joel Daavid’s set is impressive but not dirty and grubby enough for how the room is described, while both actors sometimes come off less troubled by the icky conditions in which they find themselves than they should be, especially after first finding a decomposing critter as an unwelcome roommate.

When Miller takes off his wet jacket, he seems to know where the hook to hang it is located without a quick look around an unfamiliar space and when Gilbert turns down her bed, she appears far too confident that it doesn’t need a little exploration to prove it isn’t somewhere where one would be less inclined to wiggle their toes.

Without a doubt, however, Shem Bitterman’s The Civil Twilight is a totally unexpected eleventh-hour diamond in the rough that tops off our dynamic 2024 season with a bare-boned yet gleaming gem of extraordinary theatrical brilliance. I wanted to go home to take a shower and, in this case, that was a good thing.

THROUGH DEC. 22:  Broadwater Studio Theatre, 1076 Lillian Way, Hollywood. http://theciviltwilight.ludus.com

Photo by Cooper Bates

Fountain Theatre

The groundbreaking Fountain Theatre, currently represented off-Broadway with their transplanted smash hit Fatherland, has given us another socially conscious “ode to the working class,” as I, Daniel Blake’s director and 32-year producing director of the complex Simon Levy commented.

Adapted for the stage from the 2016 British film by Dave Johns, who played the leading role in the Palme d’Or and BAFTA award-winning movie, I, Daniel Blake tells the woebegone tale of a hard-working middleaged carpenter from Newcastle in northeast England who, after a heart attack, is deemed unable to work.

The play follows Daniel (played by the indomitable JD Cullum) as he tries desperately to navigate the bleak and heartless public help institutions in an effort to keep food on the table and a roof over his head. As dysfunctional as our country’s own governmental social system may be, I venture to guess his agonizing Kafkaesque journey through endless paperwork, hours of hold time, and dealing with insensitive employees who obviously couldn’t care less, is even more soul-crushing than our own.

The incredibly gifted Cullum is heartbreaking as this innocent victim pushed to drastic measures to survive as he simultaneously strives to help a displaced young mother and her teenage daughter (Philicia Saunders and Makara Gamble) facing their own struggles to buck the bureaucratic odds.

The production is smoothly guided and sturdily staged by Levy and, as usual, impressively designed on the Fountain’s challenging playing space. The performances are uniformly heartfelt, but sadly the play itself isn’t worthy of the attention. Although it may have worked well on film, onstage it is unrelentingly bleak, achingly predictable, and I would defy almost anyone to not foresee the ending in the first few minutes or to not guess the fate of the desperate welfare mother continuously backed into a corner.

Maybe these themes were new and unexplored to their original British audiences, but there's nothing we haven’t heard many times over. Johns’ adaptation is told in short filmic scenes that hamper the flow of the storyline, while his glaringly two-dimensional characters are given nothing cathartic for the actors to navigate and make more interesting. As hard as the supporting players try to rise above the writing, black hats vs. white hats abound and the script offers them little to explore and shape as their own.

Cullum does a remarkable job breathing real life into his character, while Saunders has the toughest time here. Except for a couple of sweet, loving, brief interactions with her daughter, she is basically left to continuously look tortured when she’s not screaming in frustration and then subsequently begging to be forgiven for her outbursts.

Aside from these limitations, Levy, his designers, and his veteran cast of dynamic actors could not be more committed to rising above the shortcomings inherent in the play itself. Gamble, who made a memorable stage debut as the granddaughter in Pasadena Playhouse’s magnificent A Little Night Music last season, once again proves herself to be a young performer to watch.

Still, as the most important and scary election in our lifetime looms ahead of us in less than three weeks, what I, Daniel Blake beautifully delivers in spite of its theatrical blemishes is a reminder of how urgently we all, like Johns’ goodhearted workingclass Everyman hero, need to join together to lift one another up from the ugliness and communal malaise threatening to destroy everything we hold most dear.

THROUGH NOV. 24: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Av., LA. 323.663.1525 or fountaintheatre.com 

El Portal Theatre

Longtime Los Angeles weatherman Fritz Coleman retired in 2020 after four decades delivering his signature uncannily cheery forecasts on a daily basis but at age 76, his new solo show Unassisted Residency, which plays once monthly at the El Portal’s intimate Monroe Forum, proves he’s still got the chops to deliver a jocular and lighthearted tsunami to his eager and most loyal fans.

Coleman began his career coming to LA to pursue his passion for standup comedy in the early 80s after first achieving success as a well-loved deejay radio personality in Buffalo, New York.

As the story goes, a producer at NBC caught his act one night at a local club and began to woo him to become a weatherman at KNBC-TV since our weather here was so consistent that he felt it needed a little on-air boost of humor to make it more interesting.

Delivering the daily forecast with a twinkle in his eye beginning in 1984 didn’t stop Coleman from continuing to chase his original dream by performing on local stages in several successful live shows, including his hilarious award-winning turn in The Reception: It’s Me, Dad! which played around town for several years to sold out houses.

Now, after leaving NBC four years ago, Coleman is back but the demographics have changed—or I might politely say… matured.

In my own case, as someone a year older than Coleman, his focus on finding the humor in aging is most welcome. In Unassisted Residency, the comedian talks about the challenges life has to offer in these, our so-called golden years, from physical deterioration to losing contemporaries on a regular basis to navigating the brave new world of technology and social media.

As his opening warmup act, the very funny and professionally self-deprecating Wendy Liebman notes, while looking out at the sea of gray hair and Hawaiian camp shirts in their audience, that Coleman chose to present his show as Sunday matinees so his target audience can shuffle our drooping derrières on home before dark.

Along the way, he also tackles subjects such as retirement communities, nonstop doctors’ appointments, incontinence, and Viagra, not to mention having grown up sucking in our parents’ omnipresent clouds of secondhand tobacco smoke and that generation’s lackadaisical attitude toward our safety and our health, all before moving on discuss to his all-new admiration for those heroic modern educators who during the pandemic had the patience to deal with zoom-teaching his grandkids.

The one thing he doesn’t talk much about is the weather—that is beyond mentioning how grateful he is that our current heat wave didn’t deter those gathered from venturing out of our caves and offering as a throwaway that one of the reasons he retired four years ago was climate change. Although he never says it, he doesn’t really have to; we get that even for someone as funny as Coleman, everyone has their limits when it comes to the potentially catastrophic future for our poor misused and abused planet.

Then when he launches into reminiscing about the amazingly incessant search for sexual gratification in our younger years (that time Stephen King once wrote when the males of the species all look at life through a spermy haze) and how that has changed since then. As a now single guy still looking for love—with some choice remarks about online dating sites—he tells a rather steamy tale about one date that proves it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, something of which I can definitely relate.

I first met Coleman in 1988 or 1989 when I did a feature interview with him as a cover story for The Tolucan (the more industry-oriented and less Evening Women’s Club-ish-pandering predecessor of the Tolucan Times).

He was gracious and charming and kept me laughing so hard back then that I couldn’t take notes fast enough, a knack he not only hasn’t lost but has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the audience members at the Forum have been following him since then and for whom the topic of not-so gently aging hits home as dead-center as it did me.

This doesn’t mean you have to be 70-something to appreciate Fritz Coleman’s hilarious gift for creating homespun storytelling in his ever-extending monthly outing called Unassisted Residency.

Although my partner Hugh, who was quite literally at least three decades younger than anyone else in the audience last Sunday and is a mere 42 years my junior, laughed longer and louder than anyone else in the audience—perhaps a reaction to hearing me bitch continuously about getting old for the last 12 years?

EXTENDED to play one Sunday a month through 2025: El Portal Monroe Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo. www.elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html