HELLO AMERICA!—The most gratifying realization is when an actor is not facing a camera or a theatre audience, he if talented enough there is time to write. And this is what actor Blake Shields Abramovitz has done. His play “Double Bind” directed by Aaron Lyons is making a big theatrical splash at the Asylum Theatre onSanta Monica BoulevardinLos Angeles.
This wonderfully mounted play will keep you laughing and remembering a time when free love, drugs and the search for human liberation was the theme song on every barefooted, flower-wearing young person’s lips at every turn. Double Bind is about two buddies, Sam (Clark Preeman) and Frank (Blake Shields Abramovitz) who took time out travelling the globe together experiencing wild and insane adventures. They did everything imaginable i.e., dabbled in drugs, women and, of course, made music together.
As the curtain opens, Sam who is the intellectual one has decided to follow a saner path of existence with a rather serious, extremely passionate woman, Laura (Ceri Bethan) and a real job as well. Now buddy Frank is a very charismatic but somewhat damaged street-singer and hustler; he is still clinging to his unbridled neo-beatnik existence. His problem is that he desperately misses his buddy Frank he considers his only true friend. So he shows up and is determined to win his friend back to retrieve the journey they had begun years before.
Abramovitz doesn’t hesitate to note that he feels that the play is worthy of his “fleeting time here.” He added, “By plumbing the recesses of my own pain and attempting to elevate it into the realm of art, and by using understandings I have arrived at through therapy and spiritual practices such as Buddhist insight meditation to inform the process, I hope to mae a worthwhile contribution to my community.”
Clearly, director Aaron Lyons understands how to pull his actors into an artistic space producing theatrical magic on stage. In 2012 the director took home the “Best World Premiere” award for the Hollywood Fringe Festival production of “Rise”, nominated for two LA Weekly Awards, including Best Comedic Ensemble for directing the critically acclaimed ‘Pulp Shakespeare.’
Audiences can see “Double Bind” at the Asylum Theatre,6320 Santa Monica Boulevardon June 24th and 28th at 8:30 with the final performance on June 30 at 4:00 p.m.
By Michael St. John
