Given that this is a city whose inhabitants live and die by their cars, this unique melding of site-specific theater and freeway crawl should be hailed as a local treasure. The production consists of 15 one-act plays, performed in 15 different cars in the theater parking lot. When you arrive, a “carhop” escorts you to one of three rows of parked cars, seating you in one of the back seats.
Before long, the actors perform their play — usually in the car’s front seat. Ten minutes later, the carhop moves you onto the next car and the next play. It’s quite amazing how many stories can be told in the front seat of a car, and the production’s voyeuristic appeal is undeniable: As you promenade from car to car, you literally feel like a ghost, popping in and out of the characters’ lives.
The plays themselves are brief and quite charming — on the night reviewed, particularly enjoyable was “The Cooler”, a taut Pulp Fiction–esquesketch in which two thugs argue over who is going to perform a murderous crime after they park their car, and the hilariously dark “Hollywood Hills,” in which a pair of coked-up bimbos on their way to a Hollywood Hills party accidentally run over and kill a pedestrian. With each actor performing his or her sketch 15 times each day, the performances are unusually tight and are crisply timed to the second, to allow for the audience’s simultaneous “commute” from car to car. Moving Arts and the Steve Allen Theater in the parking lot of the CENTER FOR INQUIRY–WEST, 4773 Hollywood Blvd.
, Hlywd.; call theater for schedule; thru Oct. Given that this is a city whose inhabitants live and die by their cars, this unique melding of site-specific theater and freeway crawl should be hailed as a local treasure.
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