Preview
FULLY COMMITTED
Mob Hit Productions
Starring Alison Lewis
Written by Becky Mode
Directed by Geoff Woods
Runs February 4 to 12
Pumphouse Theatres
Director Geoff Woods is an expert on interruption. So much so that he has lent his expertise to Mob Hit Productions by taking on Becky Mode’s difficult one-person comedy Fully Committed.
"You know how when you’re carrying on a conversation and someone interrupts you, and then somebody else interrupts you, and then you lose track of where you were and you try to get on track but it’s hopeless ’cause you’ve completely lost it?" he asks me.
Yes….
"Well, this play is a 45-page-long series of interruptions. There’s something like 120 interruptions that happen in this play, so to actually (have) one actor (playing) 40 different characters that are constantly getting interrupted by each other is a bit of a challenge."
That actor comes in the form of the feisty Alison Lewis, who plays Sam, a thespian-cum-waitress, and 39 other characters.
"(The play is) about an out-of-work actress who is trying to slug it out and get her money doing her chump day job – and this is a day from hell," Lewis explains. "It’s three weeks from Christmas and (Sam’s) mom has recently passed away, and (she) wants to go home for Christmas… in between (dealing with) this chaos at the restaurant…"
"Have you ever worked at a restaurant?" I interrupt.
"Yes, lots," says Lewis. "And every time I’ve worked at a restaurant, I’ve met all of these people."
In the play, which made its off-Broadway première in 1999 as a one-man show, the people in question include the obnoxious clientele of a trendy Manhattan restaurant, demanding celebrity liaisons – including Naomi Campbell’s personal cocaine-sniffing assistant –Sam’s father and a control-freak chef. The challenge for Lewis is portraying all 40 characters and juggling their various fragmented conversations.
"The longest one character speaks is probably six lines," she says. "The hard part is to make it sound conversational with each other, and as long as I can let the audience believe that I’m having a conversation with these 40 other people, I’ll be happy."
Director Woods certainly appreciates the finesse that such a performance requires.
"When you’re working with a number of actors, you’ve got one person speaking and then another person listening. And the person who’s listening is still acting – they’re still reacting to what’s happening," he explains. "With Ali having to play both sides of that conversation, she doesn’t get that downtime while the other person is talking – so she has to be able to fit her reactions into the tiny little half-beat spaces between one person talking and the next person talking. She has to be able to cut herself off as a different character, and then react to the fact that she got cut off without coming out of the character that she’s become.
"So it’s like juggling a feather, a bowling ball, a live cat and a chainsaw."
Nonetheless, Lewis is looking forward to performing the play.
"It is new every time," she says. "Every character that comes in, Sam reacts a little differently than the last time she did, just because she acted a little differently to the previous (character) than she did. So every show, every run we’ve ever done, every rehearsal we’ve ever had, there’s always a different energy in it." |
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