[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Theatre Unleashed’s The Meeting, written by Brian James Polak, and directed by Richard Piatt, at the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2025.
The Meeting is an unusual blend of improvisation and constructed text. These two forms of theatre are never mutually exclusive, it’s true, but this particular play is presented as if the entire thing is improvised. There is a looseness to the structure, or at least it feels that way. The characters are constantly looking to each other for reassurance and support for the direction of the piece while they also include audience members with trigger questions and some input. The effect is a little chaotic, but in a very nuanced way. The Meeting is bold and slightly stressful, it presents a dire interpretation of tomorrow and I was glad to have a soft chair for it…in a good way.
The setting is an actual meeting. A room full of chairs set in two semicircles, with a space in the middle for whichever character is making whatever point they have to make. It is the near future. A dystopian one, of course, where art has become illegal and even certain words are forbidden. This group was artists once, before the change. And so they meet in secret to vent or formulate a plan or simply to be in each other’s company. While they do this, they are on constant alert for the ‘boots.’ These seem to be police of some kind who are on constant alert and patrol to ensure no one breaks the rules, and if they do, they are beaten or sometimes even killed. It’s pretty grim…but not exactly beyond our immediate world order. And while our country and our city in particular are in the grip of all this horror, with brutal masked men whisking away our citizens with impunity, the sounds of soldiers at the door are far from fiction.
Without these phenomenal actors, this concept might fall flat, honestly. It’s the spine-chilling tension they create collectively that really sells The Meeting. They stumble around the hate and the heartbreak. They wince and crawl out of their own skins. Some seem hopeful, most do not, and while all this angst unfolds, at one point a piano plays Clair de Lune in the next room and within minutes the person playing is brutalised and spirited away.
That was the moment when I truly felt this play. Something about the song. Something about a piano. Something about the abruptness of the music ceasing. Art is life and life is art. The one cannot exist without another and just like Winston Churchill said when asked why art funding must be protected during WWII, “Then what are we fighting for?” He believed that art was not a luxury but a fundamental part of a nation’s identity and well-being. For us to be reduced to parts of a machine, without meaning, without rest, without passion, speaks death. An Orwellian existence with fear being the primary noun in our heads at all times. Are we heading in that direction? Are we already there? The Meeting cunningly poses those constant and universally important questions while entertaining us with an illusion. The Meeting might wander off its script from time to time, but at its essence is a story of a possible future where we are broken, dissolving into dust and utterly bereft without what every animal on earth needs to survive…art.
The Meeting has a couple more performances and of course, each one will differ slightly from the last depending on the participation of its audience. But I can highly recommend it. However, be prepared for sadness. And be grateful that we are not there…yet.
Tickets:
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/12246
Where:
Thymle Arts
5481 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, California 90029
When:
June 25 – 8:30 p.m. June 28 – 3 p.m.
The Cast
Veronica Matthews, Julia Plostnieks, Kristen Bennett, Marcela Barrientos and Mitch Lerner.
****
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