EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

"Critics watch a battle from a high place then come down to shoot the survivors."   ~ Ernest Hemingway    

Photo by Lizzy Kimball 

THROUGH MAR. 9: Hudson Guild Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Bl., Hollywood. playswithpeople.ludus.com   

Photo by Skye LaFontaine 

THROUGH MAR. 6:  Space Pirates Theatre Collective at the Zebra Room, 5176 Santa Monica Bl., Los Angeles. www.eventbrite.com 

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Rogue Machine

It has come to my attention just now that listening to Debussy’s Clair du lune while attempting to write about a new play by Justin Tanner is simply not feasible. I’m not sure what is. Scriabin, maybe? Or Stockhausen? Varese? Yoko Ono?

Tanner, whose early works at the now iconic Cast Theatre beginning in the late 80s, such as the Pen West Award winner Pot Mom, as well as Teen Girl, Coyote Woman, Tent Show, Bitter Women, and the 10-year run of Zombie Attack, not only began the careers of such artists as Laurie Metcalf and French Stewart, it put our scrappy Los Angeles intimate theatre scene on the map and made the LACC-bred playwright something of a living local legend.

I had the privilege of working alongside Tanner in that other LA theatre counter-culture superstar Michael Sargent’s American Nympho in the late night serial The Strip: A Living Comic Book at the lost and dearly lamented Evidence Room in 2002, where each week us game performers would receive our scripts by Thursday night, rehearse once, and then each Saturday at midnight would perform new uber-wacky live episodes of three mock soap opera stories by Tanner, Sargent, and Patricia Scanlon as her notorious Hildy Hildy in what the LA Times then referred to as “savagely funny renegade hilarity” reminiscent of “R. Crumb meets the Cockettes on a bender.”

In 2009, Tanner’s Voice Lessons, in a much-extended run at the Zephyr and later Sacred Fools, also starring his then-fervent disciples Metcalf and Stewart, was swamped with award nominations, but it was his newsmaking antics with his 2005 production Oklahomo! at a small theatre in Burbank that raised the writer to undying eminence for me.

Justin’s deliciously irreverent take on one of the 20^th century’s sappiest musicals featured a small gay theatre company presenting an unauthorized all-male version of the classic Oklahoma!—and the playwright brazenly typecast himself as the show’s abrasive director who suffers a nervous breakdown during rehearsals.

When the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation found out about the production, they immediately issued an official Cease and Desist order demanding the production be shut down. Instead of stopping performances, however, Justin Tanner wrote in a new ending scene, with representatives from the Foundation (played by actors) rushing from the back of the house shouting “STOP!” and waving court orders. Oklahomo! defiantly continued its run to sold out houses.

Anyone who knows Justin knows his performance as that out-of-control director in Oklahomo! was hardly a stretch for the guy. Tanner’s personal reputation for being a tad… volatile, may I say?… is nearly as notorious in LA theatre circles as his outrageously off-centered and genuinely hilarious plays themselves.

In his maturing years, Justin has come to work diligently on his demons—and his plays have become more and more autobiographical along the way. Such was definitely the case with his last offering, Little Theatre, which three years ago began his tenure as Rogue Machine’s resident playwright and almost uncomfortably dredged up his early years and lingering trauma initiated during his beginnings at the Cast Theatre.

Still, as Justin conjectures in My Son the Playwright, his newest and most autobiographical play yet, now debuting in Rogue Machine’s upstairs second space, “trauma can be really good for creativity.” If that truly is the case, Justin Tanner’s theatrical fertility might be entering its epic stages.

When I first heard that this new work was more personal than any that came before it and Tanner would be performing it as a solo play, I have to say my first reaction was a bit apprehensive. Although I consider this guy a longtime friend-adjacent, when I wrote a review of Little Theatre that wasn’t exactly a rave, I had the impression my opinion wasn’t exactly taken as constructive criticism.

I decided to brave the possible upcoming firestorm to check out My Son the Playwright and I’m glad I did. Indeed, this is Tanner’s most personal play and as so, it’s not only both courageous and painful, it ultimately emerges as a fascinating monograph laying bare how personal compulsions can foster something akin to great art—and how life’s repeated letdowns and early familial cruelty can blur the edges between them. “Disappointment,” we’re reassured, “breeds character.”

In a two-act format, Tanner plays both a young El Lay playwright overwhelmed by massive career disappointments—obsessively fueled by drugs, alcohol, and a penchant for casual sex (“It’s like popping Kit Kats”)—and his equally dysfunctional rage-prone father who sees himself as even more of a victim than his son does.

Both characters kvetch incessantly about the other and how they’ve been treated, something that emerges most of the time as though we, the audience, are a cadre of mental health professionals studying a subject trapped in front of us like a character on an episode of Twilight Zone being studied by aliens.

Act One begins with a ringing phone in a cramped and blandly impersonal empty apartment (a perfect canvas for designer Mark Mendelson in the former Matrix’s tiny upstairs storeroom turned into a unique playing space in 2023) until Douglas, the father in question, emerges angrily from a side room accompanied by the sound of a flushing toilet.

It’s his son James on the phone, whose tardiness in his promised visit to Douglas’ Monterey Peninsula home has already reached the three-hour mark. When he finally ends the call, Douglas turns to us to lash out about what a loser his kid is. “He’s a playwright,” he shares in his frustration. “Not exactly the field a dad wants his son to go into.”

During his 45-minute rage-filled diatribe going off on his offspring, he all but kills an entire decanter of gin but somewhere, although he blames his “succubus” ex-wife for James’ many problems, underneath there’s another layer where a well-hidden and somewhat twisted love for his son lingers—as well as a bit of jealousy that James openly embraced his homosexual nature while he spent his entire life suppressing his own similar tendencies.

After a break to rearrange furniture and add a few movie posters to indicate the son’s equally claustrophobic LA apartment, Tanner reappears looking equally distraught under a youthful wig as James frantically searches the place for his missing bag of weed while letting us know how agonizing it is to drive up the coast to see his father without being sufficiently wasted.

The two men, although each rants to us about the horrors of dealing with the other, are in many ways like the same person. This is something Tanner, with the help of his longtime directorial collaborator Lisa James, works hard to overcome with subtle body language. Where Douglas has the tendency to physically pull into himself and bend deeply from the waist to somehow make himself smaller, James’ demeanor is large and even commanding, arms spread apart grandly to make his points.

It may be an understatement to say My Son the Playwright is exhausting, although it must be even more exhausting for Justin Tanner than it is for his audience. His performance is a huge commitment to his characters but hopefully, as the run settles in a tad, I think the play would be better served if it could be a little less frenetic and in-your-face.

I would think for even the most unfamiliar with the massive outpouring of work by Tanner, it would be nearly impossible not to realize how psychobiographical the piece is. At one point, when a quickie with an anonymous partner ends, his trick whispers into James’ ear, “By the way, I loved your play Pot Mom." It’s clear the line between fiction and reality is somewhat intentionally breached here.

My Son the Playwright is a phenomenal achievement, ironically both selfish and unselfish at the same time. Still, it’s impossible to leave the theatre without feeling, although you’ve been privy to something that in lesser and less comedically genius hands than Justin Tanner’s, as though you’ve been bombarded with more raw personal information than most people might want to absorb. I left not quite sure if I wanted to go home and write this review or to see if I could snag my monumentally talented though sometimes uncomfortably manic friend a prescription for Risperadone.

THROUGH MAR. 1: Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Av., LA. 855.585.5185 or roguemachinetheatre.net 

Photo by Guy Manly 

Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre

The premise for Catherine Butterfield’s Brownstone is both unique and clever, as separate storylines about three different pairs of tenants living in the same Manhattan brownstone at different periods of time in the 20th century are explored simultaneously.

The first couple resides there in the 1930s as the country tries to recover from the Great Depression. The brownstone at that point is still an elegant address, owned by an uppercrust New York industrialist. It’s where his rather spoiled socialite daughter Davia (Chelsea Spirto) is being pursued by a cheeky young journalist (Matthew Goodrich) as if they were characters in an old Phillip Barry play whose once prickly relationship goes from animosity and resistance to true love.

In the 1970s, at a time when the now crime-ridden streets of the once fashionable neighborhood have given way to poverty and urban decay, the brownstone has been divided into small walk-up flats, two wide-eyed young actresses just graduated from a midwestern college have arrived in the scary big city to achieve fame and fortune. How they survive their career challenges—and each other—is the basis of their third of the story.

The more pragmatic Maureen (Amber Tiara) is the stronger of the two since she comes from humble beginnings, but her roommate Deena (Rosie Byrne), a child of privilege being supported by her wealthy family, has promised her father if she’s not a star in two years, she’ll return home to Texas.

In the hanging chad days of the Bush Jr.-led years in the early 2000s, Jessica and Jason (Jade Santana and Issac W. Jay) are a hard-driven engaged power couple who have moved into the newly reclaimed and renovated building to begin their life together with nothing, they’re confident, but a yellow brick road ahead in their future.

Along the way, the journey of each couple is shaded by real life events and people: in the 1930s, both the loss of the Hindenburg and Hitler’s invasion of Poland changes the trajectory of the idyllic lovers’ life together, while in the 2000s, the rise of the dot-com bubble and the embracing of universally accepted “Greed is Good” mentality is part of what derails the future of Jessica and Jason’s relationship.

And ironically, when the world-weary and disillusioned Deena begins to fantasize a relationship with their nearby neighbor John Lennon, her disillusionment results in the fragile young woman having to depend on a lot more than the kindness of strangers.

The idea of this trio of divergent people sharing the same space in different decades is hardly a new concept, but Butterfield has created something fresh and special since all three tales of survival weave in and out of each other, surely the biggest challenge facing her husband and Brownstone director Ron West.

Much of West’s staging is fluid and innovative, but is somewhat done in by unwieldy production values, including a massive floor-to-ceiling, loud and wobbly white screen that’s dragged in and out from the wings for frequent scene changes to depict Maureen and Deena’s partitioned flat—something that could have easily been accomplished by a more creative lighting design.

Butterfield’s script is engaging but plagued by predictability and somewhat soap opera-y dialogue, saved by the crafty ways in which she manages to eventually weave elements of the three stories together. Still, the promise of Brownstone somehow falls flat. Where it could have been an absorbing treatise on blind ambition, avoiding social challenges, and the pitfalls of relying on approval from others—especially how those themes bring conflict to all three generations depicted—ultimately nothing is truly resolved, nothing about the play leaves us enriched or challenged intellectually.

Although West’s staging is beautifully and innovatively choreographed, it feels as though as a director he concentrated more on that visual aspect of it than helping this ensemble of six gifted performers find a path to develop their characters more fully and breathe real humanity into their individual voyages through time.

The promise here is a given, but as presented this time out, Brownstone misses becoming what could have been a far more satisfying experience.

THROUGH MAR. 14: Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. 323.882.6912 or www.openfist.org

Photo by Ken Sawyer 

Road Theatre Company

During the performance of the world premiere of Robert Axelrod’s intensely moving new play Lifeline at the Road, a series of factoids are flashed on the back wall of Desma Murphy’s incredibly contextural in-the-round set. One reads: “Since 2022, nearly 1.3 million LGBTQ+ young people have reached out through dedicated crisis support asking to be heard.”

Indeed, Lifeline takes place in the multi-purpose room of one such center as a group of four volunteers begin training to provide a voice willing to listen for one of our troubled society’s most vulnerable and at-risk members: queer teens and young adults who find themselves at the crossroads of whether they want to live or die.

These sessions are being conducted by two of the facility’s counselors, a clearly nervous relative newbie named Jen (Brittany Taylor Visser), who is obviously for some reason apprehensive about being on this side of the game, and her super-cheery supervisor Drew (Tommy Dickie), a confident veteran of such procedures.

As much as these colleagues do their best to work together and support one another on their potentially fragile quest to get their charges up to speed and ready to hit the phone banks, along the way their relationship begins to unravel. It seems Jen has just returned from a personal hiatus after facing a crisis of her own with a caller and the gay white privileged Drew wonders if she’s ready to resume this responsibility. 

When she gently but firmly calls him out as possibly himself being someone not quite as able to identify with young people in need as he proudly claims to be, there’s a moment of tension between them they resolutely but uncomfortably strive to resolve.

Aside from their own shaky footing, we get to know each of the four trainees along the way, as well as a young gender-fluid homeless guitar player (Joh Chase, alternating with Lou Roy in the role not in Axelrod’s original script) who for the present calls the floor of the center their home and contributes to the proceedings by adding musical interludes to identify passages of time between the coaching sessions.

The trainees could not be more diverse. There’s Kai (Clifford J. Adams), a rather flamboyant club kid who seems able to breeze through the classes with a snap of the fingers and penchant for breaking into his titillating dance moves; Sarah Beth (Naomi Rubin), a disruptive and angry neurodivergent loner who can’t seem to keep from adding her opinion no matter how inappropriate; and Maya (Xoe Sazzle), a trans woman who's the best of the group at understanding what’s needed of her—and will probably make the best counselor of the bunch.

The fourth volunteer is an older suburban housewife named Patti (Amy Tolsky), who though well-meaning is somewhat of a visitor from another planet who might not ever comprehend the others’ more contemporary lingo and sensibilities or have the ability to get comfortable in these surroundings.

Getting to know and understand these eclectic characters and become privy to each of their individual stories is a lot to unpack here in the play’s 100-minute running time, but with the help of Axelrod’s highly accessible dialogue and this knockout ensemble of incredibly gifted actors, the inherent clumsiness and predictability of the storyline is quickly and expertly overcome.

The real glue that holds all the elements together here, however, is the sensationally malleable staging of award-winning director Ken Sawyer, who with this production makes his long overdue return to the Road, the company that first emboldened and honed his talents many years ago.

It was Sawyer’s idea to reconfigure the theatre’s proscenium stage into a four-sided arena playing space for this production, a conceit that brings the audience into the mix as the counselors and trainees acknowledge our presence during Lifeline’s training sessions as though we are guests invited to observe the process.

It was also Sawyer’s idea to add both the musical breaks and the projections of not only staggering real life statistics about the rampant numbers of queer youth contemplating suicide, but also images of the counselors as they grew up and how those sweet-faced kids became young adults who have probably seen more of our fuckedup world than anyone should ever have to endure.

The cast is uniformly excellent and the camaraderie between this intrepid band of players is something quite palpable—again, I suspect, thanks to the patient and beneficent leadership of Sawyer.

Adams is especially winsome as the continuously lighthearted Kai and Sazzle is a major standout as Maya, someone who has been through a lifetime of pain and social isolation but is still nowhere near giving up the strength to make things more equitable for our country’s legions of displaced young people.

Still, the heart and soul of this ensemble comes from the remarkable Tolsky, who delivers to us a breakable, discombobulated sweetheart achingly wanting to do her best, an uncannily relatable everyman we’re all left wanting to give a hug. Yet, although much of the play’s sly humor comes from her character, when the personal reason Patti wants so desperately to succeed at helping troubled youth is revealed, Tolsky succeeds bigtime in breaking our hearts—and sending at least one patron (ahem) out of the theatre totally unable to speak.

Axelrod, himself a volunteer with the Trevor Project, our nation’s leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention service for LGBTQ youth, has created a timely, urgently important work, a breath of compassionate fresh air as so much of our lives today seems tainted by racism and greed and people out to destroy everything the good people of our country hold dear.

“In the time you have been watching this play,” a final projection tells us, “1,060 calls have been made to the National 988 Suicide Hotline. We would like to dedicate this performance to those who were there to listen.”

Thanks for the cleansing generated here by each and every one of the committed artists who collaborated to bring Lifeline to the venerable Road Theatre stage; we all need it bigtime right now.

THROUGH MAR. 1: Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch

Skylight Theatre

The brand new and welcomingly irreverent musical Kid Gloves, with book and lyrics by Matthew Leavitt with music by Nathan Wang, is making its world premiere at the Skylight and there sure is a lot of fun to be had here. That said, although the future of Kid Gloves is hopefully as bright and sunny as Mark Mendelson’s set, the promising production still has a ways to go to polish it all up to a gleaming shine.

The concept is clever and Leavitt’s book and lyrics are snappy and delightfully quick-witted. From the first song, with the perfectly cast Will Collyer as an ex-Mouseketeer reduced to hosting a cheesy reality competition show airing on an obscure streaming network called  KIDZ+, I was absolutely onboard.

Leavitt’s opening ballad “Kids Are the Future” was my favorite number in Kid Gloves, with these delightfully tongue-in-cheek lyrics to portend what’s in store here:

“Kids are the future / They’re pure and brand new

They’re small in stature / But they matter more than you.

Their skin is free of wrinkles / Their hair is free of grays

Their eyes still have a twinkle / And there’s wonder in their gaze.

Time will soon erase us / And they’ll all replace us / And your role will be recast

‘Cause kids are the future / And we’re the past.

Yes, kids are the future / They’re you, but improved

‘Cause anything newer / Is always better than used.”

Other song titles include “Let’s All Live in a Bubble,” “Quinoa and Kale,” “Let’s Everyone Recycle,” “Hey! Be Polite!” and “Edmund the Elephant’s Theme.” It’s all quite fresh and unexpected. Unfortunately, Wang’s musical contribution does not offer the same sparkle and potential; there aren’t any catchy melodies to hum on the way out of the theatre and the score does not in any way match the potential of Leavitt’s originality, nor the talents of musical director/keyboardist Anthony Lucca and his spirited band of musicians.

Kid Gloves is the title of the aforementioned reality show where four acts compete for the honor of hosting their own children’s program on the same network, all judged by a trio (or quartet, depending on if you count puppets) of clearly hasbeen former Nickleodeon-style personalities.

Still, as we all hear about all those real reality shows bombarding our streaming services, behind the scenes is not all fun and games and lollipops. The competition gets brutal as the sickly sweet contestants begin to unravel and sabotage one another with a glee that could only rival the vitriol of our current man-baby resident of the White House.

The cast features some of LA’s best musical theatre talent (of course it is, since they were all cast by Michael Donavan) and, with only one glaring exception, the performances are all worldclass wonderful.

The pint-sized but huge-voiced Natalie Lander is a scene-stealer here as the Baby June-esque contestant Darla Darling, while the deadpanning Suzy Nakamura as the caustically opinionated judge Penelope (manipulating her far more cheery hand-operated bunny companion Bonita) provides the perfect juxtaposition to Lander’s gooey good girl who can swear like a longshoreman when off-camera.

Jonathan Slavin and Harry Murphy are hilarious as Nakamura’s fellow judges Edmund the Elephant and Professor Penguinpants, although Salvin could back off a tad in his constant focus-pulling reactions to the constantly frantic goings-on.

Adam J. Smith and Heather Marie Marsden are both great as the older and world-weary married entertainers Eddie and Meredith. The couple’s raucously inappropriate double entendre-ridden “The Most Fun You Can Have,” extolling the joys of playing with “Balls! Balls! Balls!,” proves to be the highlight of the evening, while later Marsden aces Leavitt’s cynical and bittersweet eleventh-hour ballad “It’s Simple.”

Chris Kerrigan kills it as the looming and not at all kid-friendly bipolar Juaquin, who becomes even scarier when another contestant swipes his ADHD meds, while Lauren Lorati is a charmer as the naïve and put-upon girlfriend of the annoyingly woke Jackson, who as played by Joey Richter takes the concept of being annoying a bit farther than necessary.

All these ridiculously eclectic characters add to the fun as they are introduced and each is gifted with his or her moment to shine—however, perhaps if performers are given one solo in the spotlight instead of multiple numbers, Kid Gloves would be...well, lke OJ's, a better fit.

Although director Richard Israel’s staging is fast-paced and kinetic, his efforts are thwarted bigtime by the show’s length. The program tell us the show runs an intermissionless 100 minutes, yet opening weekend the actual running time clocked in at one hour and 50 minutes. By the time it ended with the otherwise infectious grand finale “Playdate at the Playground,” I was frankly more than ready to pack up my own balls! balls! balls! and stop playing.

Also dragging the show down is Mendelson’s otherwise flashy and colorful set, which morphs way too often into the studio’s backstage area complete with a craft table full of snacks. Since Leavitt’s script brings multiple and frequent filmic cuts from the major soundstage set (with us doubling as the studio audience) to behind the scenes, the constant switch from one place to the other, elaborately performed in blue light by the actors trying hard not to bump into one another, gets highly monotonous.

With the unique width of the Skylight stage, why half of the space couldn’t have housed the soundstage and the other the backstage area is a real puzzlement—and would have saved all of us fidgety studio audience members about 15 minutes of our valuable time.

If Kid Gloves could be judiciously and ruthlessly pruned of about 30 minutes of the more repetitious songs and equally overstated situations, it could be something even more special with a guaranteed future. I hope the gifted creators might rethink the project, Wang could goose up his lackluster score, and the team could be brutal in their quest to lose some excess.

I truly believe with a little reexamination, Kid Gloves could be a major hit to rival The 25th Annual Putman County Spelling Bee or Anenue Q in skewering entertainment meant for all of those pushy little “Kids of the Future” now preparing to replace us flawed predecessors.

THROUGH FEB. 15: Skylight Theatre, 1816½ N. Vermont Av., LA. TICKETS @ kidgloves.ludus.com

El Portal Theatre

Longtime Los Angeles weatherman Fritz Coleman retired in 2020 after four decades delivering his signature uncannily cheery forecasts on a daily basis but at age 76, his solo show Unassisted Residency, which plays once monthly at the El Portal’s intimate Monroe Forum, proves he’s still got the chops to deliver a jocular and lighthearted tsunami to his eager and most loyal fans.

Coleman began his career coming to LA to pursue his passion for standup comedy in the early 80s after first achieving success as a well-loved deejay radio personality in Buffalo, New York.

As the story goes, a producer at NBC caught his act one night at a local club and began to woo him to become a weatherman at KNBC-TV since our weather here was so consistent that he felt it needed a little on-air boost of humor to make it more interesting.

Delivering the daily forecast with a twinkle in his eye beginning in 1984 didn’t stop Coleman from continuing to chase his original dream by performing on local stages in several successful live shows, including his hilarious award-winning turn in The Reception: It’s Me, Dad! which played around town for several years to sold out houses.

Now, after leaving NBC four years ago, Coleman is back but the demographics have changed—or I might politely say… matured.

In my own case, as someone a year older than Coleman, his focus on finding the humor in aging is most welcome. In Unassisted Residency, the comedian talks about the challenges life has to offer in these, our so-called golden years, from physical deterioration to losing contemporaries on a regular basis to navigating the brave new world of technology and social media.

As his opening warmup act, the very funny and professionally self-deprecating Wendy Liebman notes, while looking out at the sea of gray hair and Hawaiian camp shirts in their audience, that Coleman chose to present his show as Sunday matinees so his target audience can shuffle our drooping derrières on home before dark.

Along the way, he also tackles subjects such as retirement communities, nonstop doctors’ appointments, incontinence, and Viagra, not to mention having grown up sucking in our parents’ omnipresent clouds of secondhand tobacco smoke and that generation’s lackadaisical attitude toward our safety and our health, all before moving on discuss to his all-new admiration for those heroic modern educators who during the pandemic had the patience to deal with zoom-teaching his grandkids.

The one thing he doesn’t talk much about is the weather—that is beyond mentioning how grateful he is that our current heat wave didn’t deter those gathered from venturing out of our caves and offering as a throwaway that one of the reasons he retired four years ago was climate change. Although he never says it, he doesn’t really have to; we get that even for someone as funny as Coleman, everyone has their limits when it comes to the potentially catastrophic future for our poor misused and abused planet.

Then when he launches into reminiscing about the amazingly incessant search for sexual gratification in our younger years (that time Stephen King once wrote when the males of the species all look at life through a spermy haze) and how that has changed since then. As a now single guy still looking for love—with some choice remarks about online dating sites—he tells a rather steamy tale about one date that proves it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, something of which I can definitely relate.

I first met Coleman in 1988 or 1989 when I did a feature interview with him as a cover story for The Tolucan (the more industry-oriented and less Evening Women’s Club-ish-pandering predecessor of the Tolucan Times).

He was gracious and charming and kept me laughing so hard back then that I couldn’t take notes fast enough, a knack he not only hasn’t lost but has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the audience members at the Forum have been following him since then and for whom the topic of not-so gently aging hits home as dead-center as it did me.

This doesn’t mean you have to be 70-something to appreciate Fritz Coleman’s hilarious gift for creating homespun storytelling in his ever-extending monthly outing called Unassisted Residency.

My partner Hugh, who is a mere 42 years my junior and was quite literally at least three decades younger than anyone else in the audience last Sunday, laughed longer and louder than anyone else in the audience—perhaps a reaction to hearing me bitch continuously about getting old for the last 12 years?

NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR! Plays one Sunday each month at the El Portal Theatre’s Monroe Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo.  For schedule: www.elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html