"JUST LIKE LIFE" REFRESHED OF JUST...?

Just Like Life

Fringe Award-Gold Medal-thetvolution

By Ernest Kearney — Director/writer/set designer Donovan Glover won the 1991 UCLA Best-New-Play-of-the-Year Award for this work and at times Just Like Life certainly feels like the work of a neophyte – absurdist themes are the “training wheels” of choice for all greenhorn bards.

In a whitewashed room with a white fridge, white sink, white porcelain toilet center stage and white everything else; Hey-Zeus (Greg Pittenger) frantically scrubs the white tiled floor with his toothbrush as his doting Quote Mamma (Karissa McKinney) watches.

She tells us, “To live in clean is to live in perpetual orgasms.”

Their lives are a cycle of repetitions and restated experience echoing impotent frustration and mindless obliviousness. So far, we have shades of Godot, No Exit and Old Dad, Poor Dad….

But when the red-tie’d Savior (Maria McCann) surges onto the scene like a Tasmanian devil in hyper-drive things begin to get interesting.

Scatological, but interesting.

Glover proceeds to deconstruct this piece with the demonical delight of a whole detachment of demented “deplorables.”

Pittenger and McKinney are excellent as the hapless “two tramps” of the piece, but McCann is the whip hand here, capering about dispensing a creed of chaos that makes converts of Hey-Zeus and Quote Mamma while annihilating the purity of their compact and self-contained ecosystem; even though in the final analysis changing nothing for them.

Just like life.

For all involved a GOLD MEDAL.

https://thetvolution.com/2017/06/just-like-life-refreshed-or-just/