Okay, to begin with this title You in Midair confuses me. Immediately I thought of "Send in the Clowns" from A Little Night Music, but the context feels...off. So in fact did the entire show. Not that it wasn't funny, at times moving, generally entertaining and involving--but here we a one-person show about the loss of the loved one (in this case Rebecca Schaeffer, a rising star in Hollywood when murdered by a stalker). The writer and performer is this person's mother, a witty and in her own way eloquent person sharing details of her relationship with her daughter and how she coped with the horror of learning that child had been killed. But--and maybe this is too personal--the show never went very far below the surface. I don't mean it came across an insincere! Not at all! But having lost a loved one myself about a dozen years ago (my fiancee who died very suddenly), this show about grief did not feel very familiar. It touched me at times, but did not remind me of the way my brain simply stopped worked properly, of the hours spent doing nothing until my belly growled or my bladder absolutely demanded attention, the weird way I fantasized about bringing my lady back to life and trying to figure out how to get her a new social security card. Yeah, everyone's grief is different. But this felt on a different, lesser scale than my own. And I don't believe for one moment this woman felt less grief for her child than I did for my beloved. So while pleasing and sympathetic, I did not feel enlightened. Nor did it help me in any way to understand grief, loss, the gaping hole left in one's soul by an event like this. Your mileage may vary, but this felt incomplete.
PERFORMANCES
Thursday June 14 at 10pm
Saturday June 16 at 8pm
Sunday June 17 at 4pm
LOCATION
The Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd (one block east of Vine)
(Note: For some reason I was unable to post this review on the Hollywood Fringe FEstival site)
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