[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Red String Production’s Amen, written by Marisa Ray, directed by Rachael Maye Aronoff, and produced by Tiago Santos at Hollywood Fringe Festival 2024.
Hollywood Fringe gives audiences the opportunity to see plays in their fledgling state, new works exploring wild theories and adventures, and asking questions about what is really important. In this case, Amen asks who god is and why all the misery.
A young man is searching for his vanished town. He went for a walk one day and when he returned everyone and everything was gone. Wiped off the face of the earth. So he did the only thing he knew to do, came to god to ask for it back.
This journey is not a metaphysical one. He literally knocks on god’s door, with the help of the ‘tour guide.’ An employee who somehow got stuck with the thankless job of fielding questions and pleas from usually distraught humans with nowhere else to go. She herself was one of them when her sister’s soul was taken to help god communicate better through another of these other weirdly wonderful characters, who’s a kind of shaman…although a rather ineffectual one as it turns out.
The tour guide takes pity on the boy and accompanies him to talk to god, who they discover has no more idea of how and why things happen than they do. Like a petulant child with two faces, god is just winging it.
Amen is a very entertaining and creative rhapsody on the random unfairness of life and the lack of control we all have on the big things. Like death and destruction. What’s the use in having a 401k if a tornado wipes you and everything you have out? Most of the time what we think keeps us safe is really an illusion created by ‘the man’ to keep us distracted from what’s really going on. Which is too horrible to spend too much time contemplating anyway. So when ‘the man’ isn’t distracting us we happily do it for ourselves. Amen is one man saying no. I won’t do that. And I’m here to demand my life back.
I loved it! The performances are excellent. Funny, heartfelt, truthful and a bit weird. Very human in fact. It’s inventive and important and totally unpretentious. It’s told naively and sweetly and I think that’s also very effective. The only darkness is from god and their minions…and I felt that very deeply!
It’s lovely to see a cast invested in a story like this. It’s refreshing and delightful for them to ask these big questions about something other than themselves. Excellent Fringe show!! I would love to see this story expanded upon too. We need to be asking the really big questions now more than ever I think! Bravo!!
Amen’s Cast:
Tiago Santos, Liv Glassman, Rosemary Idisi, Javon Willis, Stephanie Wolf, and Adrian Alexander Gamez.
Tickets:
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/10427?tab=tickets
Where:
Actors Company
916 N Formosa Ave, Hollywood
When:
Saturday, June 22 at 12:30pm
Sunday, June 23 at 6pm