What I liked
The Quentin Tarantino phenomenon of the botched criminal underworld is over 30 years old, and since it’s phenomenon, we’ve had mediocre copycats up the Wazzu (yea I’m looking at you, Guy Richie) but not until this show have I seen an exploration of the genre done with such crisp originality and worthy of that comparison, let alone make me to want it to be an entire film. Viking symbolism, ancient Greek and Mesopotamian figures, a cultist, mumbo-jumbo, and references to Tibet… It’s all intoxicating and worthy of exploration.
What I didn't like
The parking.
My overall impression
Here lies a Molotov cocktail of the visceral and spiritual.. A hard-hitting, tumultuous, spine slapping, and lavishly poetic genetic mutation of Quentin Tarantino, Sam Shepherd, and Alistair Crowley. At its best, the Hollywood Fringe Festival gives us a first peak at cutting edge work that by comparison with less inspired dreck, howls into our audience’s faces the creative promise of our dwindling community’s all-too-neglected potential. Then along comes TAKE THE SEVENTH BREATH TWICE, the third Fringe entry by Blake Ambrovitz, and you’ll realize that this is Fringe ensemble drama at its finest. what a devilishly unglamorous and yet sexy batch of players the riveting Cathryne Dylan Oritz, the rapid fire siren, Sam Valentine, the simmering searcher Bernard Bayer, and the volatile guru of Blake, bristling as he delivers the secrets of the universe like a methed up dealer of pirated discs on the sidewalks of the garment district! Pure grit! Granted, Blake has been my friend for 12 years since his Fringe debut “DOUBLE BIND”, and to be honest, Blake is kind of an asshole the way he pummels you with a ballistic of vocabularious buckshot along your brain, making you feel like a dumbfuck in comparison, forcing you to swing like a monkey from word to word over his conjured sea of bubbling lava… His dialogue is so nuanced and majestic that it’s at times breathtaking. How does a writer of his virtuosity not disappear completely up his own rectum is beyond me. Maybe he will eventually. But until then, he is hellbent on doing the reverse, coming on sly, like the alien fungus in Stephen King‘s the Dreamcatcher, his drama’s premise is ingested so easily that you’re unaware as it gestates inside of you.. there’s a mention of a “hum” which serves the characters mysteriously, and which feels like a brief eccentricity, until that “hum” becomes literally EVERYTHING, and (returning now to the Dreamcatcher at analogy) propels the now-matured-beastie of this play exploding out of the audience’s rectum in a pitiless blast of bile-soaked Humanity. All of this is to say, we, the audience are not asked to “like” these characters or remotely agree with them. We need to expel them – to cast them out like demons. They are presented with no agenda to be observed in their raw and toxic natural habitat of a dingy Los Angeles, fully committed-to by this no bullshit cast. However, just because the actors aren’t judging their troubled and troublesome characters, doesn’t mean that you the audience aren’t meant to. It seems the playwright wants us to judge their antics as savage and self-destructive, to marvel at the lunacy of extremely flawed characters. They aren’t mere vessels for the writer’s opinion about women, drugs, or even spirituality. As far as I know, the playwright’s own views on these things is antithetical to much of what he presents here – and that’s what makes it so admirable to go down this fictional exploration of these doomed thieves. Where can ignorance destroy them, and where can love save them. And is the hum, or any of the occultist mambo jumbo they embrace with the promise of their “perfect heist” even real? GO. SEE. THIS. SHOW.
