Stage Review: 'Bust' actress gives grand performance
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Lauren Weedman goes for a dizzying ride at City Theatre.
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Sometimes theater is all about the performer.
Granted, the content of "Bust," Lauren Weedman's one-woman play at City Theatre, is interesting (and sensational) enough: feckless volunteer visits inmates at Los Angeles County Jail, population 18,000, and jail culture proves as shocking to her as it is to us, while a small parallel story about her stage auditions and writing for Glamour magazine throws everything into satirical relief.
Add to that, the show is very funny. Really. Trust me.
- Where: City Theatre (Hamburg Studio), 13th and Bingham streets, South Side.
- When: Through June 29; Tues. 7 p.m.; Wed.-Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 5:30 and 9 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; also 11 p.m. June 4 and 11; some exceptions.
- Tickets: $15-$46; 412-431-4400, ext. 227.
But what mesmerized me -- and you might think I'd be desensitized to this, after 175 shows a year for a couple of decades -- is the sheer bravado of Weedman's performance.
As I say, it's her show: She wrote it, she's the actor, the central character is named Lauren, and she really did do volunteer work at the jail -- though not, she says, in order to create a performance piece. That just happened because everything in her life is potential grist for her writing and performing.
That's plausible, because both the writing and the character have a skittish, trippy intelligence that is a pleasure to follow. She (whether writer, actor or character) launches herself, and we all hang on for a dizzy, 90-minute theatrical ride.
We can't really know how much the character Lauren draws on the writer/performer. Some, sure. But as you follow the instant switches from one character into another, perhaps 20 in all, you realize it's all acting and also all real. Weedman does it with nary a pause or a costume change, using only a different voice and intonation, tilt to her head or new tension in her body.
It's a feast of imaginative transformation.
A "confessional comedy," they call it, and I can't do better than that. Weedman's mini-portraits are vivid -- the various jail workers are my favorite. But we inevitably see them also through the eyes of hapless but spunky Lauren, the open-hearted, naive observer. She may seem goofy to start and even to end, but she also becomes a real touchstone, and she makes the confessional mode gradually seem the noble one, the way to stay authentic in the face of social catastrophe.
Weedman has been doing the show elsewhere, off and on, for a couple of years, honing and altering the material. But no solo show is really solo. Her director, Allison Narver, came in to help fine-tune this version, and Allen Hahn's lights and Mark Nichols' sound play an important part.
Tony Ferrieri's set in the intimate Hamburg Studio is jail-like bars and stairs, a stark background that gives Weedman's solo performance all the focus. What remarkable work.
First Published May 30, 2008 12:00 am
