By Ernest Kearney — Playwright Pamela Eberhardt has written a funny comedy that conceals, beneath the laughter, a very vicious “Bouncing Betty.”
The play is set up with rear stage projections, some perhaps a tad too dim and shifting a tad too fast, but they’re amusing little asides about the difficulties the production faced with the casting.
From there we find ourselves in a prison visitation room where a young woman meets her prison pen-pal. The meeting is awkward, as they speak on handheld phones while sitting on opposite sides of a thick glassed panel.
Eberhardt, who plays the young woman, is evasive, Tyler Hayes Stilwill who plays the convict, a former actor, is emotive to the extreme.
Eberhardt and Stilwill are both charming, and the laughter comes effortlessly and plentiful.
The audience is having a lovely time, just as the bull romping about the bullring enjoys himself lunging at that red cape completely oblivious to the fact that concealed beneath it is a very sharp estoc.
Under Scott Leggett’s deft direction, the reality of Eberhardt’s flashes into view by which time it’s too late. Eberhardt’s character is responsible for Stilwill’s prisoner being convicted of a series of murders he was not guilty of.
The play continues to confuse us, is it a comedy we’re watching? We will get a happy ending, won’t we? Then the photos and names are projected against the back wall: Carlos DeLuna, Ruben Cantu, Troy Davis—men who were wrongly convicted and executed for crimes they were innocent of.
And Eberhardt slips the estoc right into our hearts, in her subtle, smart and savage indictment of the system.
The system that has convicted innocent men of capital crimes somewhere between four percent and twenty percent of the time; it’s hard to determine because state authorities are reluctant to open their files.
The system wherein the Supreme Court of the United States has declared that the U.S. Constitution does not give convicts the right to DNA testing.
Here we thought it was a comedy we were all laughing at, and in reality we were laughing at the joke that is the American justice system.
Ha. Ha.
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This Show is Surrounded by True Events
Playing During the Hollywood Festival Fringe 2024
at
The Broadwater (Black Box)
6322 Santa Monica Blvd.
Saturday June 29 2024, 10:30 PM | 1hr
Sunday June 30 2024, 8:00 PM | 1hr
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