A(Partment 8)

Reviewed by Bill Raden
Santa Monica Blvd. & Lillian Way
Through June 25

RECOMMENDED

In the few years since she landed in Los Angeles, experimental playwright-director Annie Lesser has firmly established herself as one of the most fearless and adventurous forces in the city’s emerging immersive stage scene. Lesser’s métier is interactivity and radical explorations of extreme intimacy — what happens when the live theatrical event is pushed into the immediate personal space of the spectator.

At last year’s Fringe, Getting to Know You paired a room of audience members with as many actors, each of whom played eight characters at eight different points in a relationship in ever-rotating scenes. The conversational naturalism and in-your-lap proximity of the performances took audiences on an uncanny and profoundly unsettling journey to the inner ontological limits of the dramatic performance.

With this year’s A(Partment 8) — the first installment of an ambitious 26-play performance cycle — Lesser surpasses herself by taking the experiment even further and into a much darker, more deeply haunting and poetic place. Staged in a Hollywood apartment just off Santa Monica Boulevard, the site-specific ten-minute piece begins by launching an audience member into the action to come by having him/her recite the line, “What have I done? What have I done? I am a good person, but I did a bad thing.”

What happens next examines the consequences of that offense and in the closest quarters imaginable, with performer Keight Leighn delivering a courageous and disturbingly embodied portrait of love gone heinously off the rails.

To say more would spoil the shock and surprise. But suffice it to say that by drawing into the experience the play of subjectivity normally reserved for the actor in a drama, Lesser not only successfully implicates audience members in their own sundry crimes of the heart but opens a space between empathy and horror for something more critically and morally contemplative.

Santa Monica Blvd. & Lillian Way, Hlywd; through June 25. (323) 455-4585, hollywoodfringe.org/projects/3822. Running time: ten minutes.