Lisa Robins (Photo by Todd Felderstein)
Reviewed by Catherine Crouch
Beverly Hills Playhouse
Through August 17
RECOMMENDED
In Committed? A Ritual for Robbie, writer/performer Lisa Robins fashions her lifelong grief over her brother Robbie’s suicide 35 years ago into a dramatic work.
Going through a box of his things, Lisa shares an entry in his notebook. His writing bears all the markers of a deeply depressed individual (at this point, audiences already know that Robbie took his own life). Yet Robbie writes that he wishes to feel better and to be with other people. As Lisa succinctly remarks, “[It] sounds like he wanted to live.”
While Robins does not shy away from the raw pain of her loss, she makes no apology for her macabre humor—in fact, she wants us to laugh along with her. At the same time, she balances this flippancy with a surprising softness. Her altogether delicate and messy vulnerability honors Robbie’s difficult, complex, and contradictory life, and warmly lets audiences in to honor him, too.
One of Ritual’s few weak moments comes at its halfway point, in a scene where Robins is briefly overtaken by emotion. Audiences know they are seeing a piece of theater, albeit an atypical one. Yet when Robins leaves the stage in a scripted moment of overwhelm, her authenticity momentarily wavers. As she switches into the present tense, speaking directly to the audience about the play and asking the sound designer to bring up the house lights, she breaks the illusion that she and the audience have created together, watering down one of Ritual’s emotional climaxes. The moment diverts from the piece’s larger integrity, but Robins quickly returns to the stage and reestablishes control over both the story and the audience’s attention.
Thus, while the production has its speed bumps and roadblocks, they are easily offset by its far more plentiful moments of honesty, earnestness, and the unbridled display of love. On the whole, Robins gracefully gambols among years, characters, and emotions. And under Mitch Levine’s intentional and controlled direction, Robbie is memorialized not as a person or an event held strictly in the past, but as Robins’s eternal companion. Her brother may have passed, but Robins powerfully asserts that her relationship with Robbie still lives.
Moving forward from despondency over a sibling’s suicide is an endless journey, and creating an immortalization such as this work of theater — or more simply, discovering how to mourn and celebrate someone so close to you — would understandably be a self-conscious undertaking. To this end, toward the production’s finale, Robins wonders aloud, “What if I’m not a good enough actress to play me?” Before audiences can telepathically reassure her, her industrious pacing and strong writing bring spectators closest to answering her decades-wondered question about her own capacities to tell such a story. What would be worse than disappointing Robbie, wasting his death, or letting fear hold her back? To not try at all.
Robins has been processing Robbie’s death for a very long time and her show, a tribute to his importance in her life, reflects this. She speaks and moves with earned gravitas: She is an expert on her own life and loss. It’s easy to see how many might find comfort in her sagacity and in her strength to endure the impact of such a tragedy.
Beverly Hills Playhouse, 254 S. Robertson Blvd., Beverly Hills. Fri., 8 pm; Sat. Aug. 2, 5:30 pm; Sat. Aug. 9, 2 pm, Sat. Aug. 16, 5:30 pm; Sun., 3 pm and 7 pm; thru Aug. 17. https://committed.ludus.com/index.php. Running time: Approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.
