Karen Hall (Photo courtesy of Karen Hall)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Hollwood Fringe at the Broadwater Second Stage
Through June 30
RECOMMENDED
Karen Hall is a cellist. Not just a cellist, but a very good one. She performs on the cello and she teaches cello. In her solo performance, on a mostly bare stage, she says that’s all she wants to do — perhaps all she can do. Do I love the cello because I’m good at it?” she muses, “Or am I good at playing cello because I love it?”
In a recent Facebook post, the retiring artistic director of the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, Stephen Sachs, wrote about his children. Whether or not they’re happy, he said, doesn’t matter so much. Sachs said he was more concerned that they find a purpose; happiness comes and goes, he reflected, but a purpose is enduring, and gives one a reason to keep going.
That kind of purpose emerges from Hall’s performance, but it’s not as highbrow as such a description may suggest. This is, after all, also a clown show (of sorts) where Hall finds a highwire on which she balances her act between transcendence and goofiness. Her show opens while she’s wolfing down the kind of Subway sandwich she’s become accustomed to inhaling while on the run. She speaks of Bach and of Baroque ornamentation while chewing and spewing flecks of bread onto the stage in front of her. No one could accuse her of pretentiousness.
Still, Hall’s insights on life’s arbitrary trajectories are as ruminative and revelatory as Bach’s Suite #1 for Unaccompanied Cello, music sumptuously performed by Hall that punctuates her reflections; music that, frankly, resonates throughout this tiny studio theater with thunderous power, before it returns to the cosmos, from whence it came.
Was her love for the cello a calling from On High? Not at all. She was 13, being home-schooled, when her parents suggested she find an instrument to play. She didn’t know what, or why? One of her friends, whom she admired, played the cello, and she was popular. What better reason to take up a musical instrument! Her friend stopped playing, got married, and died of a drug overdose before her 18th birthday.
“People forget up to 80% of what they hear within 24-hours, 60% being the average, Hall notes, alluding to the pointlessness — or let’s just say the ephemeral nature — of practicing with such rigor and determination to perfect a performance, most of which will disappear into the ether. Like a theater performance. Like her friend.
“To the glory of God” Bach dedicated so much of his music. Hall takes this anthem with a twist of mockery, standing atop a folding chair, as an ode to devote one’s life to a calling larger than oneself. She figured clowning would be a backup if this cello thing goes south. And yet, she notes with dry humor that’s almost as potent as her interpretation of Bach, “I’m the most successful of all my parents’ children.”
Perhaps that’s because people with a purpose that rings true, that sings true, find a way through the storm of cynicism and other, more external, impediments, such as paying one’s rent. Unless they succumb to a drug overdose.
Another theme permeates this performance: to be seen and not heard. Hall wears a spangled floor-length black gown at the show’s start. All that formality, she points out. At one point, she lifts the bottom of the gown over her head, revealing a pair of jeans. “Maybe if we did a matinee performance and made you feel like you were casually joining us in our living rooms at home, then suddenly you would understand Brahms!” she quips. Eventually that hood, formed from the bottom of the gown, engulfs her face like a shroud, until she disappears inside it. The image contains more than a hint of feminism.
More to that point is her description of being hired to perform cello in some spangly miniskirt for a group of married men, away from their wives at some convention, who came just to ogle her and her intimate rapport with her lover, the cello. Underscoring that point is that the cello part was actually piped in; all she had to do was the choreography of playing it: to be seen and not heard.
In Delusions and Grandeur, Hall can be seen and heard, with all of the credit that she’s earned. It’s a beautiful performance.
The Broadwater Second Stage, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd. Sat. June 22, 11 am; Wed., June 26, 8 pm; Sun., June 30, 4 pm https://hollywoodfringe.org/projects/10543?tab=tickets, one-hour, no intermission
