Arts & Events

Last night I sat next to this woman on an airplane. She was frenetic, sometimes frantic, and irrepressible, half in her own head, and talking incessantly. Bit of an overbite with a lower lip that seldom had any part in forming the words, resulting in a lisping sibilance that smacked of the girl that people avoided in high school and still do in the supermarket line. Apparel of the bag-lady quality. Sitting next to her began as torture, but in overhearing snatches of her story, and with a little heartbreaking mishap that brought all the passengers together, I grew quite fond of her during the hour and ten minute flight. She sort of made beauty out of loss. 

The flight occurred at The Marsh in Berkeley on Allston off Shattuck. Ann Randolph creates this semi-loony, sex-crazed character in LOVELAND which has been extended through December 11. 

Randolph’s heroine is Franny Potts who is a performance artist living in Hollywood. The kind of performance artist whose art of making faces to music is so quirky that you think it’s a joke until you start to get mesmerized by it. The trip she takes us on is about her wheel-chair-bound, alcohol-loving mom back in Ohio, and all the characters she meets when she has to put her mom in the nursing home, her visits, and the final plane ride home.  

It makes this reviewer wish he had never used the words “transformed” or “morphed” before, so he could bring that cherry value to this review. Randolph changes character in body, voice, and gesture so seamlessly and utterly that it astonishes. The Southern Real Estate Lady, the too-calm Social Worker, the Business Man sitting next to her on the plane, many more, including her mom who always gestures with that permanent imaginary cigarette and who faces her fate and Alzheimer’s head-on with pure candor and a gravelly voice—the cast is enormous for a one-person show. 

Theatre is an older person’s game. When I see a non-gray head in the audience, I take note. So this theatre audience was primed for the topic. With a mom who was born before Prohibition but still running her house, and with twice-a-day telephone calls, I’m lucky—for now. We’ve all visited someone in a nursing home, and vowed, “Not me…never me.” Having a reality that you push away from your mind several times per day rubbed in your face is most uncomfortable, but Randolph makes you laugh uproariously in spite of yourself.  

The homeopathic theory of drama proposes that in seeing the play, we experience the trauma vicariously and thereby get a little inoculated to it from the exposure; thus, when it befalls us, we can better withstand its pain. The theory further suggests that in witnessing the heroine’s noble way of dealing with it, we are provided with a model to emulate when fortune serves up the inevitable. Randolph’s LOVELAND is proof of this theory on stage twice a week.  

Some performances you just don’t forget. I think this will be one of them. 

Ann Randolph’s Loveland  

at The Marsh Berkeley  

2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 

Fridays at 7 pm, Saturdays at 5 pm through December 11. 

16+, no infants. 

For Tickets Call 800-838-3006  

For Info Call 415-826-5750 or www.themarsh.org 

Written and performed by Ann Randolph and directed by Matt Roth.
 

John A. McMullen II reviews for the BDP. Comments to eyefromtheaisle@gmail.com EJ Dunne edits.