Life-threatening illness and human mortality aren’t usually the stuff of comedy, but expect to laugh your socks off at solo-show whiz David Dean Bottrell’s The Death Of Me Yet, now paying a five-performance-only visit to Rogue Machine’s Matrix Theatre.

Los Angeles playgoers will recall the now New York-based multi-hyphenate from David Dean Bottrell Makes Love: A One-Man Show, a 2011 Rogue Machine smash that proved so popular it returned twice in the same calendar year.

Matters more life-and-death than a gay man’s dating life take center stage this time round, but that doesn’t stop Bottrell from once again scoring laughs galore.

Bottrell gets things started by recalling his last visit to L.A., four performances of DDBML:A1MS that his literary representative “Mr. Shitbag” had promised would be packed with potential buyers from TV and film who’d be wowed by its hilarity and guarantee Bottrell “that sweet TV money — that had for the last 10 years, somehow eluded me.”

(This, unfortunately, did not occur because, as Bottrell puts it, “Mr. Shitbag and Associates had not put one person. Not one person into the seats.”)

Making matters worse, in his rush to hightail it back to NYC, Bottrell had only just gotten out of the Uber that had taken him to LAX when he slammed his head “full force into the corner of the open hatchback” leading to gushing blood, agog spectators, hilarious airport hijinks, and The Death Of Me’s ensuing trip down memory lane.

There’s the time Bottrell was walking down the street when suddenly, without warning, the entire left side of his body went numb. (I’ll leave it to Bottrell to recount more of the year-and-a-half journey that followed.)

Or the time that a couple of L.A. hoodlums pepper-sprayed Bottrell’s face just for the fun of it, prompting him to imagine his Variety obit: “Actor and screenwriter, David Dean Bottrell has died. Rumored to be in his mid-fifties, Bottrell liked to believe he looked a little younger.”

Or the time back in his early childhood when little David attended his father’s Uncle Ray’s funeral and he realized that his dry-eyed Illinois relatives “just came for the food.”

Or the time back in the late 1980s that Bottrell found himself at the deathbed of “the first not-young man that I knew of who had AIDS” doing everything in his power to keep Donald alive until his nephew and his nephew’s wife got back from dinner.

That each and every one of these life-and-death incidents manages to score laugh after laugh after laugh is a tribute to Bottrell’s devilishly clever way with words and his pitch-perfect comedic timing.

Heck, Bottrell even had me ha, ha, ha-ing as he enumerated various more eco-friendly options than cremation for the future disposal of his own corpse including Aqua Cremation, Mushroom Infinity Burial Suit, and simply donating his mortal remains to science.

In other words, as thematically serious and reflection-provoking as Bottrell’s latest solo show is, it’s the furthest thing from a downer.

With only a handful of performances remaining, haste is of the essence not to miss David Dean Bottrell’s The Death Of Me Yet, a master storyteller at his masterful best and a dark comedy solo show gem guaranteed to give you a brand new lease on life.

Note: Production stills from a previous production do not reflect the current incarnation’s considerably spiffier look on the Matrix Theatre stage or Bottrell’s color palette this time round.

Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles.
www.roguemachinetheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
January 10, 2024
Photos: Conor Weiss

Tags: David Dean Bottrell, Los Angeles Theater Review, Matrix Theatre, Rogue Machine Theatre