A Game of Cat and Mouse where the Mouse Gets its Ass Beat |

I emerged from Andrey Esterlis and Diana Brown’s “Dead Certain” vomit free.

Here at the Arts Review we have a term for that: “personal growth.”

The show “Dead Certain” is part of a larger movement of “Pop-Up Theater,” a term I have been recently droppin’ like it’s hot cause I never left 2004 and that Snoop Dogg song is still relevant, yo.

Pop-Up Theater can pop up anywhere. This particular play, written by Marcus Lloyd, popped up in a back room of the Hotel Cartwright in San Francisco. And lucky for us, Hotel Cartwright had decided to pop some bottles, so the vino was flowing that night…

And would continue to flow throughout the performance from my glass to my mouth to my bladder. Full disclosure, I spent a good 5-minute chunk of this 80-minute show at the urination station.

As in I peed.

Did everybody get that?

By the end of the show we were all a couple glasses in and after howling for three curtain calls and my third stop at Urinetown, we corralled the two actors/producers into a group photo and an impromptu post-mortem.

This “Behind the Music” scene was little more than a twenty-minute gush session where we assured the very, very kind actors that we had seen the performance OF A LIFETIME.

The gushing:

“Fantastic.”

“I was like ‘WHaaaaat??!”

“And she was like ‘NOOOOO’

“I’m gonna YELP the fuck outta this”

Evolved into what we would all prefer to remember as a sophisticated discussion between a community of artists:

“Artistic Process.”

“Continuous motion.”

“So…That’s what the bananas were for.”

I can’t speak for my friends, but the impression of undiluted admiration I left with the actors was not a very honest one.

I blame it on the alcohol.

The a-a-alcohol.

But mostly, I blame it on the intense need I felt to validate the drive and effort of two grown ups trynna make it in a really, really hard business and not just following, but hardcore stalking and chasing after dreams that I’ve already shelved.

I liked the play. I liked that the actors weren’t hot twenty-somethings. A little paunch here and there never hurt nobody. It’s a little grittier watching a middle-aged actor try to catch his breath on stage. Yeah, I was into it.

We were also 10 feet from the actors and it was awesome. Theater is getting up close and personal these days and I friggin’ love it. I don’t just wanna see the blood, sweat, and tears, I want it to fall into my outstretched palm — feel me?

But here’s where the ball stopped rolling…

The show is billed as a “game of cat and mouse,” but it’s not very fun to watch the mouse get its ass beat and then crawl back for 8 more rounds of the same thing.

The plot revolved around an ex-dancer now bitterly confined to her wheelchair playing a series of mindgames with an actor she’d hired for the evening to “help her with her play.”

As always I was hoping for that “OHSHIT!” moment when all is revealed, but when it finally came all I could summon was a lackluster “Oh…”

The play tried to bring in some larger themes of determinism and well—I didn’t really get what else—but each time stopped just short. The twisted spinster in a wheelchair kept dropping philosophical demi-monologues, none of which I understood or, more importantly, bought into. But hey! Maybe I’m just stupid!

All these might be sourced back to problems within the script, but you gotta work with what you got. The issues I took with dialogue, theme, and plot might have been resolved or at least diminished with better choices on the part of the actors and directors.

But in all my rosy-cheeked enthusiasm, I did not let slip a single indication that the work I had just seen was not, in fact, fit for the Globe Theatre.

It’s a scary world out there for artists, and I won’t dare lump myself in that brave category. I plan on clinging to my Stanford degree like a buoy until I can claw my way to a job with a consistent income and benefits. Imma ride this diploma into the dimming horizon like the desperate cowboy I am.

I’m grateful that there are people out there with the talent and ambition to put on shows like “Dead Certain,” but more than that, I’m grateful there are people like Andrey Esterlis and Diana Brown who will stay after a show to talk with a bunch of kids. They made me feel special like I, too, was a part of the action.

I haven’t felt like a theater kid since high school, and it was nice to be one again.

And this time, I didn’t even have to play a zit in my high school’s production of “Puberty: The Game Show.”

A literal friggin’ zit.

Man, fuck high skool.