FULLY COMMITTED

730pm, Friday, January 25
730pm, Saturday, January 26
230pm, Sunday, January 27

The Green Room Theatre, Rock Island
www.thegreenroomtheatre.com   309-786-5660
Tickets $10
Running time: one hour and ten minutes, with no intermission

 
Becky Mode’s one-man comedy, FULLY COMMITTED, has to be on every young actor’s dream list of "must-do" shows.

A well-written contemporary piece, with plenty of heart as well as humor, FULLY COMMITTED includes more than 30 characters and at least a dozen accents. Add to those challenges the breakneck pacing of much of the script, and it is clear that this show is the kind of rich opportunity that actors live for. It is also – and quite obviously – the caliber of material that requires a major talent to make it work.

Luckily for The Green Room Theatre, which is producing a (too-brief) three-day run of Mode’s award-winning play, Eddie Staver III is just such an actor.

Full of energy and intelligent interpretation, Staver delivers on every single character. It is a truly marvelous performance that the lucky audiences who see this will be talking about for a very long time. Virtually a workshop for actors who want to see how theater is supposed to be done, Staver and director Derek Bertelsen have a winner on their hands.

As Sam, an aspiring actor who works in a high-end New York City restaurant (taking reservations at a card table in the basement), Staver is wonderfully pleasant. Put upon from all sides, his Sam handles demands and belligerence via the phone – all while dealing with every single crisis the restaurant can provide. A critic whose reservation is nowhere to be found, a couple of employees who don’t show up for their shifts, a bathroom disaster, and other problems keep cropping up – and all the while Sam has to deal with gangsters, powerbrokers and socialites who want their reservations fast-tracked. Since Staver plays more than a half-dozen other restaurant employees, several relatives, at least 20 customers, his agent and a handful of other callers, both Sam and Staver have a lot going on – and both keep it together all the way through.

I especially loved several recurring characters: Bryce, the effete supermodel’s assistant who keeps calling back to add to the list of things his employer won’t eat, is perhaps the most hilarious, but he is far from the only source of laughs. A fellow actor, who keeps calling to apprise Sam of his latest callbacks, is another especially funny character who we hear from more than once.

Using vocal inflection and volume as well as the accents, Staver delineates each character from the others, and he momentarily inhabits the physicality of each role as a way to reinforce the lightening-quick changes from one to the other. Not only does he switch from one caller or visitor to another, but each time he plays both parts of a conversation, so we hear Sam interacting with the other folks – and in a way that is clear and easy to follow.

In fact, Staver even does all this without actually using a telephone (which proves, initially, distracting), but he is so fully invested in these conversations that this omission is all but forgotten. While – from a director’s perspective – I may have tried something different, it is obvious that Bertelsen understood just how little need of a phone prop Staver would need to get the job done.

Simply too good to only run one weekend, Green Room’s FULLY COMMITTED is a stellar showcase for Staver’s talent. As challenging and as rewarding as theater can be, it is a great show that you just have to see. Make sure you do.