Welcome Our First Bloguest, Rachel B.

Hey, so I wanted a chance to be a guest blogger, and I did, after all, make Annie and Elyse recording artists, so they better give me a post on their blog! (See iTunes> The Receipt movie soundtrack> "In Any Way I Can" or www.thereceiptmovie.com)

Unfortunately, I am a rogue Richmond theatre fan who is now located in Boston, MA. That's about 240 miles north of NYC, folks. And a little background: since early July I've been working at the American Repertory Theatre, but I will be frank with you here, I'm just a telemarketer that sells season tickets (pathetic, I know, but someone has to do it!).

The first show of the season was Let Me Down Easy, written by and starring Anna Deavere Smith. Yes, Anna Deavere Smith. Anna Deavere Smith. She is best known in the theatre world for her one-woman shows, and that is precisely what Let Me Down Easy is- her latest solo show. Now, I will be the first to admit that I always have and always will shy away from one-person shows. Even with my extreme attention-span problems, when one person switches between people at the drop of a hat (sometimes literally at the drop of a hat because that's changing characters...), I get confused and want to throw a hissy fit.

But Anna Deavere Smith... now it really helped that each time she shifted between characters, they projected the name of the person and their info onto a screen over the stage (i.e. Reverend James Cone: Theologian and then a title for the monologue like "Amazing Grace"). Maybe that last parenthesis seemed a little stereotypical, I apologize, but that's actually how it was; the whole piece was about grace in the world today. And really it wasn't so much the words or the visuals or the ill-fitting pants suit she had to wear so she could look like 5 different characters by switching between ties and hats and shoes, but it was the sheer performance of the material she captured in interviews. It really changed my life. She brought people from Rwanda to the stage and doctors and rabbis and ministers and jockeys, and it was really remarkable that she could remember all of it. I mean, you know you're watching a brilliant actor when you can't tell whether they're messing up and not remembering their lines or actually acting out the way people talk and how they often mess up words and repeat things over again. I mean, to remember 28 different people's accents and the number of times they said "like" or "you know" or skipped around in their thought pattern- wow.

And let me tell you, after two disastrous shows this summer- seeing Noel Coward's Hay Fever, with poor British accents in a random park; or the high school student production of Beauty and the Beast at the Boston Center for the Arts in which Belle's hair got caught in the Beast's icky fake fur paw during the last scene and was therefore lying on top of him during the final song, seeing Let Me Down Easy was a breath of fresh theatre air.