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Brian Dykstra SELLING OUT 2013 Top Ten L.A. Theatre Productions Barrow Street Theatre, NYC “Brian Dykstra is a master of language, absurd flights of fancy and raw, unbridled emotion and director Margarett Perry gets the best out of him. A visiting production from a New York performer who must be seen to be believed.” |
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“The show’s stunning set, dynamically designed and dramatically lit by David Arsenault, signals the critique. A backdrop of splayed boards angling and extending across the floor is Old Glory’s stripes, while the blue star-field is skewed and lit like a marquee. A musical build-up unrolls (Don Tindall, sound) and Dykstra emerges, like a talk-show host beginning his routine. He wears comfortable clothes and costumer Lisa Boquist’s cream jacket painted with multicolor designs: a postmodern jester with license to critique the status quo-- speak truth to power.” |
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“Dykstra stalks the stage between an end table piled high with magazines and newspapers and a filing cabinet filled with material printed off the Internet, digging alternately into these two troves of information and then sharing his research with the audience in his manic, pop-eyed profane and yet hyper-articulate way. As he summed up point after point with a particularly ferocious line, there were actual murmurs from audience members that amounted to the secular humanist equivalent of ‘amen.’” |
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“The balance he finds in delivering his material while remaining eloquent, warm and inclusive obviously comes from warm natural depths as well as a honed delivery. Though it provokes self-examination by design, his A-plus entertainment scours the ear and soul clean.” |
