[ssba]
Murder Blood Bear Story
Reviewed by Lyle Zimskind
Elephant Studio / Theatre Asylum
Through June 25
RECOMMENDED:
Chatting and playing with audience members already seated while others are still straggling in, actor and playwright Katelyn Schiller draws us into the ethereal mental realm of her pixieish lead character, Blue, before the solo performance of Murder Blood Bear Story even begins. Schiller never lets us get too certain about the metaphysical coordinates of this realm, whether we’re with Blue in the tangible world or perhaps inhabiting a dream of hers, while we watch her play. All we know for sure is that Blue is convinced that the simple but elusive quality of happiness resides with a bear somewhere out in the wilderness and she is on a single-minded spiritual quest to track it down and reclaim it.
Along the way, Blue recalls her meetings with four other people, asserting that all their stories sit digested in her belly, although she summons them by pulling props associated with each one out of her travel valise. Schiller also plays these four individual interlocutors in reenacting Blue’s encounters with them, blithely maintaining they’re just “humans enjoying how human they are” despite their evident troubles.
Ignoring her own observation that “it can be dangerous to go on somebody’s story with them just to get their happiness,” Blue not only intrudes into these other lives for the sake of foisting happiness on them, she also insists we tag along on her personal-happiness venture. When she finally discovers what she has been tracking down, though, the peril that Blue anticipated becomes an evident reality. For all the satisfaction that Schiller’s buoyantly vivid performance provides, none of us who join in on her hunt gets to escape the realization that happiness is dangerous prey.
Elephant Studio / Theatre Asylum, 1078 Lillian Way, Hlywd.; through June 25. https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2122?tab=details
The Board
Reviewed by Lyle Zimskind
Elephant Studio / Theatre Asylum
Through June 28
In Jaeger Christian’s one-character drama, Sarah Hollis plays a young Coast Guard officer whose unauthorized and ill-fated decision to board a Peruvian cargo vessel she suspected was transporting drugs has landed her in front of a military review board. Convinced her actions were “morally in the clear” even if they fell within “a legal gray area,” this unnamed character insists that her pending court martial is grounded not in substantial wrong-doing, but in the sexism and sensationalism attached to her sudden notoriety.
Addressing the review board for the entire play, the officer tells of her escapade aboard the San Leandro freighter as well as the story of her short-lived marriage now heading for divorce. The character study of an immature military professional unable to accept her quite obvious personal responsibility for initiating a catastrophic international incident is potentially interesting here. The problem is that her narrative is too relentlessly self-centered to allow the external events she describes to generate any dramatic tension. For now this show feels like the early draft reading of a not-yet-suspenseful maritime thriller.
Elephant Studio / Theatre Asylum, 1078 Lillian Way, Hlywd.; through June 28. https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2296?tab=details
