If you’re in the mood for an hour of decidedly offbeat whimsy, then John Kolvenbach’s Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight, now getting its West Coast Premiere at Atwater Village, just might be your theatrical thing. At the very least, you’ll reward its star Jim Ortlieb with much earned cheers.

Opening the show with the welcoming words “Here we are, at last,” Ortlieb, whose character I’ll call his “Jim,” seems to be proposing a look back at our sixteen months of enforced isolation, at the people we were before the pandemic hit, at who we’ve become since then, and who and where we are now in August of 2021.

Think again.

It doesn’t take long for Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight to turn existentialist. (“Who hasn’t taken a walk to the beach and found themselves trapped in a thicket with no idea of how to get home?”)

Nor does it take long for audience participation exercises to ensue. (“Stand up if you’re here tonight. If eavesdropping is the closest you get to intimate conversations, stay standing.”)

An audience member gets called up on stage and is given a simple word association game and a “script” from which to read lines.

Next comes a clapping game. (“When I clap, you clap.”)

Jim later informs us that a dial tone is comprised of two notes, an F and an A, and has half of us practice one note and the other half the other. Oh, and we’re instructed to “SIGH” in unison on multiple occasions as well.

Indeed, there’s so much audience participation in the play’s first forty-five minutes that when yet another member joins Jim on stage, you might be excused into thinking that this latest participant isn’t in fact actress Peggy Goss (suitably droll), who’s been sitting among us for three quarters of an hour waiting to turn Kolvenbach’s play into an existential two-hander.

On the plus side, and this is a big plus, Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight had me laughing pretty much throughout, though more so early on than as the minutes went by.

And it does indeed feel good to be back in a room with friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all of us vaxxed, all of us masked, all of us relishing something we took for granted for years and years.

Under the playwright’s direction, leading man/playwright stand-in Ortlieb delivers a tour-de-force performance in a role he seems born to play, a feat made even more remarkable by his ability to commit to memory fifty-plus minutes of all-over-the-place stream-of-consciousness and deliver it all without a hitch.

Production designers Danny Cistone and Zane Stein have filled the upstage area with an attic’s worth of chairs and other paraphernalia, and lighting designer Derrick McDaniel does his accustomed nuanced work.

Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight is presented by Vs. Theatre Company and Circle X Theatre Co. Sarah Dawn Lowry is stage manager. Helena Ortlieb is house manager. David Elzer is publicist.

As bemusing as it is frequently bewildering, Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight is out-of-the-ordinary theatrical fare at a time when out-of-the-ordinary has become our way of life. I’ll leave it to you to decide what to make of it.

Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village.

–Steven Stanley
August 12, 2021
Photos: Carlos Hernandez

Tags: Circle X Theatre Company, John Kolvenbach, Los Angeles Theater Review, VS. Theatre Company