Grief: A One Man ShitShow
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Hollywood Fringe
Through June 25
RECOMMENDED
“There are no words . . .”
This phrase is among the platitudes that writer-performer Colin Campbell excoriates in his solo performance about people straining to offer comfort in the aftermath of his losing his two teenage children in a car crash, on the other end of a drunk driver with already one DUI conviction who T-boned Campbell’s car. (Campbell was driving, and his wife, a fellow passenger, also survived.) There are in fact plenty of words, and Campbell has them at his disposal in his Spartan performance, directed by Michael Schlitt. “They’re in a better place,” is another. No, they’re not, he points out. They’re in a wooden box six feet underground.
There is nothing maudlin in Campbell’s colloquial, animated approach to what might be called an unimaginable horror, except that Campbell imagines it in detail, working through a multitude of aspects that accompany such heartbreak. Is losing a family so instantaneously better or worse than losing them slowly to cancer? Is it better to be present, to watch them die, as he did, or to learn about it through a phone call?
Then there is the reaction of friends trying in vain to sidestep the pain, and unwittingly encouraging him to do the same. This is one of several moments when he counters with his result of years-long reflection: That grief must be embraced, not suppressed. The grief is directly connected to love, which is directly connected to life — none of which can be stifled. Grief roars back, in memories and dreams as a kind of PTSD.
Campbell surveys the oddities and absurdities of grief books and grief support groups. In one such group, he resented people who had lost a child but had others to continue raising. Their pain can’t be as great as his, with the deaths of all his children, he surmised with twinges of bitterness — later confiding that he was mistaken on that point, that such people were compelled even more than he and his wife to “get their shit together” in order to rear their remaining, shattered children. He upends the urban legend that couples who lose a child inevitably divorce. The statistics show quite the opposite.
Campbell and Schlitt have struck a remarkable balance between tragedy and glibness that settles on a sensitivity, tinged with bitterness and humor, that’s chastening for its self-awareness. At one point Campbell ruminates whether or not he should even be doing a one person show that might be perceived as exploiting the death of his children. And for what? For attention in a fringe theater festival?
Perhaps. But I couldn’t go down that rabbit hole. Yes, there’s an element of therapy drama to this performance, but it’s counterweighed by themes that radiate beyond Campbell’s personal tragedy — the concept, as Campbell clearly knows, that grief is as constant as the tears of the world, brought into stark relief by anemic — if not botched — local responses to both Covid and gun violence.
There are mercifully few theatrical accoutrements in this performance: a chair, a bag for props, and a dark stage. No music, no smoke effects. The centerpiece is a barefoot, bearded storyteller in blue jeans and a matching blue-collared shirt whose presentation is really a sermon as presented by a kind of theater history professor; Campbell dedicates one quasi-comic scene to the Ancient Greeks, so obsessed with grief that they dedicated entire play festivals to flawed protagonists working through the darkness of existence, its grip over all of us, and their futile struggle to keep it at bay. Each festival contained three tragedies and one satyr play, i.e. a farce featuring horny men running around with outsized phalluses. Three to one. Like the Greeks whom he emulates, Campbell is no fan of diversion or escapism. Life is too deadly for that, while death is an essence of being alive.
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/7333 Running time 85 minutes
