In Alcohol Applied Liberally to a Bitterly Busted Life Andy Webster reviews the one- man performance “___ Done Broke,” which is being performed at the Bushwick Starr. He begins by giving the reader a little overview of the play, which is about an alcoholic steelworker named Donny, who “is adrift from his three children.” His life has lost all of its meaning and he turns to alcohol to fill in the gaps.
The reviewer then describes the actor and writer of the one man piece, D.J. Mendel and discusses some his former performances. He devotes about half of his article to discuss this actor without giving any references to the play or the evaluation of his performance in this specific play. This stuck out to me, because instead of discussing the play, the reviewer chose to mainly focus on the actor and his past performances. It sounded as if the reviewer was not so interested in the performance because he hardly mentioned anything about the performance that was intriguing to him.
On one hand I would really enjoy seeing this play because I am interested in seeing how one man would be able to put on a whole play by himself. D.J. Mendel is involved in every aspect of the play, from writing the script to performing it. However, on the other hand, this review gave me the sense that the play is not worth seeing because there is not really anything that sticks out about it.
According to Andy Webster’s review, it is difficult to follow the plot but that isn’t the point and that’s how it was meant to be. I don’t think I would like this though because plot is so important to a one man play. I think that when there are more characters involved it is easier to forgive something like this because there are other things to focus on besides plot. When there is only one man in the play, however, plot plays such a crucial role and I don’t think I would like it if the plot was hard to follow.