Actor Under Fire
Walter Kerr blithely wrote of Neil Simon’s 1966 Broadway play "The Star Spangled Girl" that "Neil Simon didn’t have an idea for a play this year, but he wrote it anyway."
It was in that play that a young soldier with theatrical ambitions named James Gleason toured the war zones of South Vietnam, sent out by the military command in Saigon tasked with fielding in-house entertainment for the troops. Gleason, now a veteran performer with dozens of theatrical, film, and television credits, has turned his experiences with "The Star Spangled Girl" into a one-man show called Actor Under Fire, currently onstage at the Sherry Theater in the NoHo Arts district.
Touring military encampments and performing second-rate comedies on makeshift stages is hardly the material from which gut-wrenching war memoirs are forged, and Gleason admirably does not try to make his story more than it is. There is nothing wrong with employing lightness to indict the horrors of armed conflict, but using a great war as a mere backdrop for an acting showcase feels vaguely ignoble. At the very least, the war must be manifestly cathartic to justify its evocation, but if the process of writing and performing about his Vietnam experience was a soul-cleansing exercise for Mr. Gleason, he keeps it pretty much to himself.
The writer does no service to the actor by relying almost exclusively on the chameleon’s bag of tricks. Gleason skillfully impersonates dozens of people, changing sometimes mid-speech from one character to the next, investing each with quirks and voices and then limning them expertly. He rarely stops for personal reflection and when he does he diverts attention away from himself by performing his more introspective material beneath projected photos of him as a young soldier in country or, more slyly, accompanied by period songs such as Joan Baez’ "Joe Hill," for which many audience members already have a built-in well of nostalgia. He, James Gleason, can then slip neatly out of focus, and does.
Remaining so guarded traps him into having to substitute bathos for introspection as when he comes upon a cordon of body bags loaded up and ready for transshipment. He recognizes the name of a colorful soldier to whom he has earlier introduced us, kneels down and soliloquizes on this pointless kind of war death. The accompanying emotion is canned and the set up too facile by half. This is where a playwright would place his most challenging material, but Gleason lets himself off the hook with a paint-by-numbers kind of scene.
Director Anita Khanzadian does not intercede in things where she should, and then misfires in two other particulars. First, she allows Gleason to remain at a single pitch throughout his 90 minute performance resulting in an annoying barkiness at times. Secondly, she places three large black boxes onstage for Gleason to shove, push, lift, set down, arrange, kick, sit and lie upon. The endless busyness this involves resembles a self-betraying psychological tic, like chewing on the Kleenex in a therapist’s office set there to wipe away tears.
All this has the effect of heightening the sense that we are being deliberately misdirected. James Gleason himself never emerges from behind the many theatrical masks he dons. If "Actor Under Fire" was an act of personal catharsis, we are pleased for him, but what in an ostensibly autobiographical one-man show should leave us feeling as if we have experienced the raw soul of the man is here little more than a somewhat self-indulgent showcase for the actor.
Performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m. through December 21. The Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia Blvd., North Holywood. Tickets are $15. Reservations: (818)765-8732.
