"Recommended!" - L.A. Weekly

Everyday... everywhere... in the most ordinary places... are people on the EDGE.  They may seem perfectly normal, but look inside their heads and you'll see warped worlds, twisted thoughts and disturbing lives.  With most people, it's not what you hear... it's what you OVERHEAR.

REVIEWS!

L.A. Weekly (Recommended!)

Director Mark McClain Wilson stages some interactions among the 10 characters of Russell Dobular’s sequence of soliloquies. Mostly though, the late-night “play” provides solo showcases for the 10 actors. The sibilant “s” of Michael Lanahan’s all-in-black, goateed “Director” comes coated with little blobs of spittle, as he waxes bug-eyed about the “fucking amazing!” performances of those who meet his standards, and rails against the “philistines” who don’t appreciate that “great art has no audience.” Amir Talai provides another metatheatrical cartoon — the ingratiating 20-something “Actor” — who insists he’s not controlling, but can’t utter his first line until he’s forced several audience members to change seats. However, Dobular’s writing skill best reveals itself in characters who are painfully aware of their shortcomings, yet paralyzed by them. David Wicox’s dough-bellied, greasy-haired nerd in “Rape” brings echoes of Dostoyevsky’s bitter narrator in Notes From the Underground: After a date he meets online dumps him at a party, he finds perverse heroism in suffering the blows of other partygoers, whom he belligerently insults in the scheme of his revenge. In “Crap,” Shirley Anderson’s character knows she should be fighting to keep her mind open, but she feels powerless against the narcotic of junk TV and of being unable to rise beyond a dead-end temp job. There are at least three skits too many for this format, but that’s no fault of the actors. Fine performances also from Carla Jo Bailey, Richard Azurdia, Stacy Chbosky, Liesel Kopp, Philip Newby and Mark Lewis.

-- Steven Leigh Morris
©2004 L.A. Weekly