By Ernest Kearney — “At a Caribbean funeral, grief is to the Holy Ghost what an 8-ball is to Rick James…”
This is one of the lines from Rodney Gardiner’s one-man show about the crisis of faith he experienced after his father’s death, and the transition he and his family were faced with after his father’s illness. The need for treatment forced the family to leave the small idyllic Caribbean island he’d been raised on for the Miami Beach of 1980; a time when cocaine, drug dealers, refugees, bad cops, and riots turned the Florida city into Hell, only with nicer beaches.
Gardiner describes his fall from religion into a deeper spirituality during this period of his life with great humor and sincerity, and I wish I had jotted down a few more examples of that.
The reason I didn’t is that I was utterly and completely bedazzled by Gardiner’s performance. In his bio, Gardiner claims to be “a recovering Shakespearean actor.”
Now after reading one too many resumes where a young actress claims to have played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Hedda in Hedda Gabler and Virginia in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, please excuse my hesitance in accepting such a statement at face value.
My bad. Only by having spent a decade at Ashland, Oregon’s Shakespeare Festival could an actor develop the kind of chops Gardiner displays in his performance. The craft of acting is a difficult balance between the dynamic and the delineated, between power and control. The best actors learn to master riding the tornado.
Gardiner manages it bareback.
A Platinum Medal well deserved….
****
Smote This is playing at the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2023
at
The Broadwater in Hollywood.
***
For Hollywood Fringe Festival Details, Smote This Show Information and Tickets
Click HERE.
