Fully Committed stays subtle

By Becky Mode. Directed by James Fagan Tait. A Snowblind production. At Havana Theatre on Wednesday, October 15. Continues until October 25

Becky Mode’s Fully Committed, in which a solo actor shifts rapidly between 40 different characters, is essentially about showing off. If you play this kind of thing properly, it can be impressive, but no matter how much flash you get out of it, Fully Committed is hollow.

Sam, the central character in the script, takes reservations for the most popular restaurant in Manhattan, and he deals with a lot of assholes. Sam and his so-called friend Jerry are both struggling actors, and Jerry keeps phoning with updates on his successful auditions while offering undermining sympathy about Sam’s failures. Naomi Campbell’s assistant requests an all-vegan tasting menu for 15, bans female wait staff from Campbell’s table, and insists that the lighting be changed. The chef is a sadist who demands that Sam clean up diarrhea in the women’s toilet, then asks if Sam’s hands smell like shit.

Sam is the underdog who’s trying to get Christmas off so he can spend it with his recently widowed father. He eventually achieves success of a sort—of course. But he does it by leveraging power just like all of the jerks who’ve been abusing him, so it’s not terrifically satisfying.

Mode is a New York playwright and Fully Committed is typical of the kind of American theatre that attempts to substitute energetic delivery for content. All that Fully Committed really offers is the opportunity for an actor to deliver a bravura performance.

In that sense, the understated style preferred by director James Fagan Tait is a bad match for the material. Solo performer Shane Snow is a gifted guy—as an actor, musical theatre performer, and director—and he gets too few opportunities to exercise his talents. He does a fine job here, deftly flipping between the voice of a Japanese woman, a falsely warm American socialite, Sam’s sweet dad, and so on. With its thousands of shifts of direction, the script is a minefield of potential disasters, and even in the preview performance that I attended, Snow skipped through it with confidence. But, under Tait’s direction, Snow’s work is subtle, and that’s not what’s called for.

Snow is playing the violin. The script begs to be played like a drum solo.

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