Getting There!

[NoHo Arts District, CA] – “Getting There” written and performed by Rebecca O’Brien, and directed by Cameron Watson, heads to the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2023 June 2-24.

A celebration of the miracles that can occur when traveling with strangers on the city bus!

Rebecca O’Brien is a survivor, and she’s back! Now in full remission from a bout with cancer, the writer-performer re-enacts her miraculously healing encounters with strangers as she rode the bus with her little service dog on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood, to and from her treatments at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

“The strangers on the bus became like my family,” O’Brien said. “Riding the bus has been magical.”

In the show she describes as “bus stories that are funny, poignant and maybe a little shocking,” O’Brien plays some twelve of the characters she met while traveling the Metro Bus during her medical care. She remembers a man who delayed getting off the bus until she caught up with it, so that she didn’t have to wait for the next ride, and another time when she, in turn, held the bus for a frantic blond rider.

“If you’re open-minded to finding intimacy in your life, you can increase your odds of survival,” O’Brien remarked.  “These stories popped out of me, effortlessly, at a crucial period in my life. People will see the bus in a completely different way. They will understand, and their eyes will be opened to the real humanity on the bus,” she added.

A versatile veteran of stage, screen and standup, O’Brien is the recipient of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Natalie Schafer Award for an emerging comic actress. She was also nominated by the LA Weekly for a Best Supporting Actress award and again by the Weekly in the category of Best Comedic Performance by a female.

She has appeared in such plays as “Wearing My Own Brassiere,” which she wrote, “Once in a Lifetime,” “The Women,” “Rebeck Revisited,” and over 39 Theatre productions around Los Angeles. Her film credits include leading roles in “Curdled,” with Keke Palmer, “Come as You Are,” with James Russo among several other vehicles. She has been seen on television in “The Perfect Woman,” “Another World,” “NYPD Blue,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “ER,” “The Tonight Show,” “Up All Night,” and many other shows. She has also written a web series that should be out shortly.

O’Brien has plans to take “Getting There” on the road and perhaps bringing it to the screen.

“Getting There!” does have a content warning, since there are all types of folks on a city bus. Yet, the content is not sexual or violent!

Directed by Cameron Watson! The Los Angels Times, Cameron Watson is “One of our finest contemporary directors.”