Review: Aaron Gillespie Will Make You a Star
Playhouse West, 4250 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, 310-285-3311
by Jeff Nelson
The title character of Playhouse West’s new play is a sadistic acting teacher named Aaron Gillespie (Scott Trost) who, during the course of an intense seven-day acting workshop, dismembers a series of earnest young actors intent on achieving stardom. The play is a dark comedy about the abuse and exploitation that some actors endure in order to make it in Hollywood, and Aaron Gillespie is the bully who doesn’t mind pulling the wings off these actors and their naive dreams.
Director Michael Capellupo gives us a nightmarish hall of mirrors in which the grotesqueries and insecurities of the dream factory are enlarged and distorted and shattered before us. Watching this play is a bit like having a riotously funny nightmare, where you know that what you see is horrible and brutal but somehow you have to laugh anyway.
Trost, in a richly layered performance, is fantastically slimy. He throws himself into the role with gleeful abandon, by turns imperiously cruel and icily seductive. He is part stern ringmaster and part TV evangelist, part has-been and part wanna-be.
The students are a cross-section of Los Angeles stereotypes, from a way radical surfer (Paul Barbosa) to a nihilistic creature in black called Gore (Joseph Dean Coburn). Ricky (Danny Molina), a kid from East L.A., undergoes a terrible humiliation in one of the most degrading scenes of the play. Molina deserves credit not only for his acting but for his willingness to be put through such a scene. Sam, a cynical and angry actress who is taking the workshop against her better judgment is played knowingly by Lezlie Dean.
At its best, this production is sharp and funny. There are moments, however, when the dark side gets under the skin, and the humor becomes uncomfortable. And a play about the life of actors seems a little insular and self absorbed, to say the least. Nevertheless, Aaron Gillespie Will Make You A Star is a hilarious concoction, and just what the doctor ordered for the suicidal young actor who is considering that plunge from the Hollywood sign.♦