The Old Woman

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Lounge Theatre
Through June 18

RECOMMENDED

John Grady, an Angeleno transplant from New York, works very much in the Spalding Gray-style of story-telling, if you could imagine Gray as a ballet dancer.

By that I mean his canvas is a blank stage (and a minimal sound design). Grady is a wordsmith who sculpts stories with exquisite craft, sometimes with a spitfire-pace, broken by extended pauses. He faces the audience with almost no special effects to “heighten” the image of a lithe, silver-haired fellow (most of that hair is in his beard) in a T-shirt and jeans, weaving a yarn that’s part narrative, part impersonation and — near the conclusion of his latest effort, The Old Woman — part ballet.

This description might sound like the show has little to recommend it. Nothing could further from the truth. The Old Woman is a testament to the power of theater’s most primitive elements — story, mime, impersonation, and dance — what the Greeks called spektakal.

Like his earlier solo performance, Fear Factor: The Canine Edition (presented in the 2011 Hollywood Fringe) — a gorgeous homage to the life and death of his dog who was, for all intents and purposes, the love of his life -— Grady tosses in some stunningly accurate portrayals of canines. In The Old Woman, there are two dogs he was hired to walk through Griffith Park, and he portrays the drama surrounding their meeting a rattlesnake.

In the midst of this adventure, as he’s warning park-visitors away from the “rattler” (employing, partly from boredom, a Southern accent to do so) — he runs into a woman who recognizes him as being from Brooklyn. She not only recognizes him, she recalls him from dates they went on together, her case further cemented by a description of his Brooklyn apartment that she’d visited.

For the life of him, he can’t remember her at all.

And this is the lapse, encapsulated within an extended, gormless stare, that triggers in him the terror that he, like his mother, the eponymous old woman, is slipping into dementia.

The Old Woman is ultimately the story of a man caring for his mother and over-seeing her inexorable death. It is the story of how memory gets trapped inside an aging cerebral vault that has no room for the future, and not much even for the present. It is, in that tradition of Spalding Gray, the story of how life itself is so ephemeral, how love and agony, and everything to which we attach value, disappears into the static of an overused video tape. Once it contained images. Once those images sprung from experiences. For what? To what?

It takes a great story-teller to turn such existential ponderings into a performance so nimble, and funny, and poignant, and marbled with pathos.

The closing ballet, a dance of death and of life, comes out of nowhere, and everywhere.

It’s unspeakably moving. It’s perfect.

The Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Sat., June 18, 8 p.m. https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2113