Vacuum packed show with jokes, crackling dialogue and tenderness
This pitch deserves to get green lit. Or rather its creator does!
Erica Bitton is one helluva actor; she’s appeared in a theatre production of Medea with Annette Bening, and served her time in California rep theatre. Her performance in this show – an imagined pitch to a big budget TV producer – is whip-smart funny, nimble and heartbreaking. In fact she's well on the way to how Michael Caine describes himself: a “skilled professional actor”. (The rest of his quote isn't so inspiring: “whether I have any talent is beside the point...”)
Bitton, as Jane, is on the phone to her Dad. He's “pissed” (a US term we should adopt for brevity) about her parking tickets... and the story fills out, of an ambitious New Yorker actor pulling down restaurant shifts to live. You really do see the scenarios she rips through as a producer might; the scenes appear on your mind's screen, the dialogue crackling and the jokes and tenderness prompting real laughter, or sympathy for her unrequited love of a co-worker, Harry (just after they seem to be about to kiss; he goes home with Brook).
Jane's father urges her to find a “good Jewish husband”; Harry is a “white gentile man”. That somewhat cliched storyline is less impressive than the skill with which Bitton delivers her material. More effective is her take on another staple of low-paid women's work, sexual harassment, from sleazy customers. The mantra: “A man braces her for his passing by grazing her lower back” is repeated over and over, to get the message across that despite “Me Too” played out by a million Harvey Weinsteins in the same city, it's still a sordid fact of working life.
Bitton and producer Meghan Dineen present a technically accomplished set with lighting and sound effects, that cements the strong screen sense of the story. I'm not that taken by the story; it might have been lifted from almost any rags-to-riches Broadway tale. But what's indisputable about the show is that it showcases a superb show-woman, who can act the arse off Michael Caine.
Venue 288, Just the Cask Room at Just the Tonic at The Mash House, 1.05pm, until August 24 (not 12th)
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