Albie Selznick (Photo courtesy of Santa Monica Playhouse)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
Santa Monica Playhouse
Through March 29
Albie Selznick (Photo courtesy of Santa Monica Playhouse)
In his energetic solo show, Letter from David, at the Santa Monica Playhouse, longtime magician/actor/juggler/performance artist/jack of all trades Albie Selznick traverses freely through his past — a peripatetic journey linked by a thin premise.
Co-written by Selznick and Laura Maccabee, who also directs, the show is essentially a recapitulation of Selznick’s career, complete with archival videos and still shots culled from over the decades. (David B. Marling is credited as the video editor, Jay Lee as the photographer and videographer). The show heavily emphasizes Selznick’s professional accomplishments, with a soupçon from his personal life thrown in.
The title refers to the letters Selznick received from David Bowie, treasured relics that flash on an upstage screen. As a youth, Selznick embraced Bowie as his personal hero to an almost obsessive degree. Much of his creative identity derived from that early preoccupation, which inspired him to utilize Bowie’s spirit of experimentalism in his own theatrical peregrinations. Most strikingly, he became fixated on the notion that, if he tried hard enough and was good enough, he would one day perform with Bowie, his raison d’être through the ensuing decades.
That dream wasn’t entirely far-fetched. Selznick’s three-person performance art group, The Mums, which incorporated circus skills such as juggling, magic, and stilt-walking, along with avant-garde elements from Bauhaus to Jungian archetypes, was a hot commodity for decades, opening for several rock groups in large venues and commanding a two-page spread in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine.
Selznick’s professional reminiscences are extensive, but his personal details can be frustratingly cursory. Early on, he alludes to the crushing sadness of his childhood, only to reveal, near play’s end, that his father’s death was the cause. And his fanboy excitement when he is enlisted to fetch Bowie’s wife Angie from the airport seems odd, given his later reference to Bowie’s wife Iman. We are left wondering what exactly happened to Angie and just when Iman came on the scene. Those and other murky allusions could easily have been clarified in a sentence or two.
Selznick seems preoccupied with the media throughout his bioplay, but he cherry-picks the triumphs, from Critic’s Picks to theater awards, while blaming his defeats on negative press. He attributes a bad review from local critic “Stan Smulligan” (a thinly veiled reference to LA Times critic Dan Sullivan), for closing a show he was scheduled to perform in during 1984’s Olympic Arts Festival. (That show, the CIVIL warS, a 12-hour opus from theatrical luminary Robert Wilson, was reportedly shuttered due to lack of funding.)
A perhaps-too comprehensive résumé of Selnick’s career, Letter from David is also an in-depth résumé of David Bowie, album by album and show by show. For rabid Bowie fans who want a blow-by-blow about their idol, it holds considerable interest. Yet the show may also hold interest as a portrait of a driven artist who has devoted his life to the theater — the muse to which he remains dedicated.
Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th Street, Santa Monica. Sun., 7 pm; thru Dec. 20. https://events.leapevents.com/event/letter-from-david Runtime: 90 minutes with no intermission.
