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Eight years back was slump time for the funny and talented comic, Jim David. So when Mom said she had a friend who had a friend who was looking for a director, he went back home to Thermal City, NC, to direct an amateur theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire. After all, when you’ve been a costumed chicken delivering singing telegrams for a living while climbing the ladder of success, this must have sounded pretty good! As David says “It’s all who you know!” Besides which, he told his friends he’d been hired by “the most up-and-coming experimental theatre in the South.”
With this premise, he created a clever behind-the-scenes cast of Southern hometown folk, including a janitor from Bosnia-Herzegovina, for wisdom and pathos, to the miscast characters who play the mélange of misfits in Streetcar.
They’re all a nutty bunch with a screw loose here and there, and David morphs from one to another, using the back curtain to enter and exit or simply stands on stage impersonating each of them. You gotta love Ethelene McGraw (as Blanche), Bob Smith, used car salesman (as Mitch), Darlinda Shepard, the local stripper at Foxy Lady on Rt. 47 (as Stella) and meth addicted Stanley, originally from Brooklyn!
David works extremely hard in this show, which he wrote and Peter Smith directed. There are some really funny lines and priceless facial expressions. However, for this reviewer attending the last performance, his-on-the-money David-isms that had nothing to do with Pathetic or Streetcar produced major laughs. From my standpoint listening to the audience, many reacted similarly.
There’s no doubt Jim David has that special something of which great comedians are made. His wry wit and timing are brilliant. David is quoted as saying this one man show is a “fictionalized biography” and there never was a Streetcar in Thermal City. Imaginative genius!
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