Jim Ortlieb (Photo by Michael Brosilow Photography)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Echo Theater Company
Through September 27
RECOMMENDED
Playwright John Kolvenbach’s Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight premiered in Los Angeles in 2021, produced by VS. and Circle X Theatre companies, and winning the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best solo show. Kolvenbach wrote it with Jim Ortlieb — his friend and the play’s featured performer — in mind. (According to an interview conducted by the late theater journalist Gil Kaan, the piece came about after Ortlieb mentioned to Kolvenbach that he was looking for a project and asked if Kolvenbach had anything on hand. Familiar with his friend’s talents, Kolvenbach came up with this one-of-a-kind, almost — but-not-entirely — solo piece.)
Currently remounted by the Echo Theater Company as part of their Fall Fest, this theatrical experience is as unique, rewarding, and truth-filled the second time around as the first.
The Man (Ortlieb) wears a dowdy brown suit, a little too big, while his shoes are scuffed. He stands against the backdrop of assorted shabby pieces of furniture. – chairs, cabinets, and so on — piled willy-nilly, as if about to be carried away in a U-Haul to a city dump (and reflective, perhaps, of a disordered mind.) He might be an instructor in a backwater junior college somewhere, or an impassioned apostle of some treasured belief from back in the day, standing on an urban street corner, willing people to listen to his earnest message.
By way of welcoming the audience, he says early on: I know how you’re feeling……I understand you would rather be home watching TV. . . I get it, but you are here, and you are welcome.
Excepting the last 10 minutes or so, Stand Up can be likened to an hourlong pas de deux, except half of the deux is the entire audience whom the Man instructs and maneuvers as if he were a choirmaster readying and refining the skills of his choir. Nothing too strenuous, some hums, a lot of clapping, or standing, or sitting on cue, that sort of thing. A couple of people have short stints in front of the audience, or are read briefly from a paper that the Man gives them. It sounds rather commonplace and unsophisticated, even rather kiddie-like, but with Ortlieb guiding the event, the evening becomes a journey into the shadows where so many of us hide.
Indeed, the entire hourlong presentation is a fervent effort by the Man to make contact with the people around him, to blur the borders that keep most people walled inside themselves.
As I have hitherto suggested, this isn’t an entirely solo piece. Towards the end, the Man summons a Woman sitting in the audience to the stage and enacts with her a poignant fragment of story involving a mother and her young son in which he undertakes to play the child. It’s a bittersweet denouement to a very special journey into the intricacies of human longing.
Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater. Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., Sept. 14, 7 pm, Moon., Sept. 15, 8 pm; thru Sept. 27. EchoTheaterCompany.com Running time: one hour.
