[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Abi Watkinson’s solo show 5:45 making its premiere at the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2025.
We can all fall prey to the bliss of routine. Patterns comfort us. Repetition gives us something solid to hold on to in this always chaotic world.
5:45 is a play about one woman’s own comfortable cocoon of patterns and systems and efficiency. Writer/performer Abi Watkinson leads us through the world of Maya, an accounts assistant with routines that verge on the religious and a comfortable life with her almost absent boyfriend and her pin neat house.
The story takes a turn when her boyfriend leaves her, she gets a promotion she hardly knew she wanted, and veers dramatically from her chosen path one night, celebrating her success with ‘the girls’ in the office. Sitting in the audience, I experienced that sickening sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as Maya flirts with the wrong guy and wakes up in his bed. No routine can protect you from the evils of the world. How simple minded are we to think we can protect ourselves from anything really? Some cute guy equates to heads of state and murky government agencies and private security firms with bandanas and masks. Is that too far? I don’t think so.
As a woman, I have always been primed for fear. Abi Watkinson has simply created a story where we begin by being amused by a woman’s charming existence and are suddenly thrust into the horror of her naiveté. While at the same time wondering why any of us could react in a way that could have her at fault in any way at all. Even though Maya feels exactly that. She should never have put herself in a position to be raped. We should never put ourselves in vulnerable positions. If we are taken advantage of, it is therefore our responsibility. Our fault.
Abi Watkinson is English. So am I. This play is not uniquely English, but the character of Maya and her story is very very English, while the story itself is still a distinctly universal one. We all know a Maya. We have all been in places, at work or not, where a Maya could happily exist. Abi Watkinson plays Maya as a person who understands herself completely. She knows herself. So when this happens to her after taking a chance, it’s almost worse for her than it would have been for someone who was regularly risky.
Abi Watkinson a a phenomenal writer. 5:45 is frighteningly believable, stunningly sneaky in its unravelling. I honestly had to sit in my car for a while post show and consider what I had just seen. And to also compare the many many moments in my life when things could have taken a similar turn and the times they did. I’m older now, but I honestly don’t know how I survived my 20s in the 80s. There were so many choices and so many wrong moves. And I was lucky when so many were not. It’s incredible when you consider how we always think of lucky and unlucky when it comes to rape and not that there are predators everywhere, like lions waiting for their pray and that in the end we could wear a sack, or not drink, or not even go out at night, or never leave our house and it could still happen.
I’ve seen hundreds of solo shows. I particularly love the genre. It’s such an intimate way to tell a story and when it all comes together, the writing, the actor, the space and the subject, it’s magical. 5:45 is magical. It is shocking and profound and strangely deeply moving, even before the terrible thing. This person, Maya, is utterly real. She is formed and flawed and tenderly played. So the terrible thing that happens feels too close to home because we love her, his lovely, sweet, funny, ambitious perfectionist. But the effect of all of this is extraordinary and completely devastating.
I urge you to see this incredible play. Abi Watkinson is phenomenal and this story is brilliant, incredibly significant and breathtakingly well told. Bravo!
Tickets:
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/12096?tab=tickets
When:
Monday, June 16, 7:00 PM
Wednesday, June 18, 5:30 PM
Saturday, June 28, 7:30 PM
Sunday, June 29, 8:30 PM
Where:
The Actors Company
916 N.Formosa Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90046
****
Check out more Hollywood Fringe Festival 2025 show reviews>>