Burt…A Homeless Odyssey 

Reviewed by Lara J. Altunian 
Theatre 68 Mainstage 
Through March 31  

Full of ongoing dark humor, director Ronnie Marmo’s latest show, Burt…A Homeless Odyssey, consists of a simple plot fueled by fantastic acting and strong dialogue, but ultimately overstates its message. The play aims to shed light on artists whose voices are ignored, as well as on the plight of the homeless who are commonly regarded with disdain. While it’s a noble intent, the number of times Burt hits the audience over the head with different versions of the same scenario becomes grating and predictable.

Written by Sam Henry Kass, the play begins when a poet named Burt (Ed Dyer) decides to leave his family to live on the streets of New York in order to find himself. Although he describes the depth of his misery to his wife, Sadie (Laura Lee Botsacos), she, not surprisingly, is unsympathetic to his abandoning her and their children — which leaves Burt to fend for himself without a cent to his name. From there the play unfolds in scene after scene with Burt meeting people who disrespect him in various ways. His situation escalates from being denied a glass of water at a bar to dealing with lawyers and the police, who take turns laughing at him and overreacting to his poetry. Even the food he is offered by a two-faced do-gooder is taken right out of his hands. 

The play is filled with surprise suicides, a crazy rabbi with strange advice and inexplicable access to Burt’s wife’s Twitter account detailing her divorce and quick remarriage, and an appearance by the Trump family. The characters are drawn with the depth of cartoons. Each is lonelier and more jaded than the last, and the shock caused by their actions fades.

The first half of the play is more enjoyable as Burt’s dialogues — with his wife, a bartender (Jennifer Nwene), cops (Chris Kelly and Thomas F. Evans) and a lawyer (George Russo) — are wonderfully bold and reveal the different ways in which each character is despondent about his or her lot in life. Their varying outlooks affect how they treat Burt, whose poetry is a sweet, sentimental and introspective response to all the ways in which the world is unfair. As the show progresses, however, every new response begins to mirror the last. The second half drags, especially after it is established that the entire sequence of events takes place in one day. Really, it only takes two or three encounters for Burt’s point to be made clear — that despite our differences, apathy can blind us all into making the same negative judgement calls (reflecting how alike we all actually are).

Dyer is excellent as the disappointed Burt, who somehow preserves enough soul to continue making his opinions and value to society known. Everything — from his mannerisms, his accent and his way of playing off of the other actors — feels genuine and emotional. As the coked-up lawyer, Russo provides the biggest laughs, and as Sadie Botsacos proves Dyer’s greatest foil and best onstage partner; watching the two of them push their marital arguments to the limit is entertaining, to say the least.

But while the monologues Kass writes may be clever, they all seem to end up saying the same thing. After almost an hour and a half, that grows wearisome.

Theatre 68, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood; Sat.-Sun., 7 p.m.; through Mar. 31, except Feb. 18 and Mar. 18. (323) 960-5068 or https://theatre68.com/burt-a-homeless-odyssey/. Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission.