Charlotte’s Shorts

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Let Live Theatre
Through June 26

RECOMMENDED

Charlotte’s Shorts is an endearing collection of very short stories by Charlotte Dean. Initially published in the writer’s personal blog, these funny poignant tales reflect the perspective of either a child or a person with the perspective of one. In this barebones presentation they’re read aloud by six alumnae from The Groundlings and Saturday Night Live (The cast varies from performance to performance.).

“Isabel in High School,” a “first person” account rendered by Tom Bagley in four separate sequences, is perhaps the most moving and memorable; it follows the romantic ups and downs of a disingenuous teenager named Isabel, who early on finds herself attracted to a classmate of the same gender, and endures bewilderment and rejection before finally securing a friend of like affectionate bent.

Introducing himself as an author named Donald Bigbelow, Jordan Black reads several “original” scatological stories themed around a holiday. In Bigbelow’s “Martin Luther King Day,” an African-American woman with, by her own admission, a perfectly OK Caucasian husband, tarts herself up to have sex with the black neighbor across the street because, well, that’s what’s appropriate to do.

One of the more bizarre tales, delivered by Lynne Marie Stewart, tells of a young woman named Imogene who visits the home of her sole admirer, Linus, who’d been following her around for years. There she discovers his propensity for taxidermy. (“She took a closer look at Linus’s dad and realized he wasn’t sitting in the chair, he was the chair.”) 

Several of the monologues reflect on the testosterone-driven perspective of male chauvinist blockheads. Two of these are persuasively enacted by H. Michael Croner (in one he’s a white guy with a singular obsession with Latinas). Another misguided male is depicted by the versatile Stewart, cross-gender cast as a two-timing jerk who can’t understand why all the women he’s messed over have washed their hands of him.

Perhaps the secret charm in Dean’s writing is her gift for portraying a broad spectrum of human experience, and  embracing the freakish and the mad with gentle humor and an irony that withholds judgment.

Actors Company, Let Live Theatre, 916 N. Formosa Ave., W. Hollywood; https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/3375. June 26. Running time: 50 minutes.