Lauren Weedman’s Search for Home - Joe Donnelly:
You may not know about Lauren Weedman. She’s not a big star. She may be someday, or she may not, but when she’s onstage I’d advise that you duck — painful truths go whizzing by like bullets, send-ups rain down like bombs, an uncensored id explodes like shrapnel out of some internal minefield. It kills me like art. Killer art. I’m not sure we’ve seen anyone like Lauren Weedman before.
In her latest one-woman journey to the center of her psyche, Bust, which ran for three mostly sold-out dates in March at REDCAT, Weedman details the descent of a naive, self-absorbed creature/victim of Hollywood into the bowels of the prison system, where she has volunteered as a kind of inmate pal in a program called Behind Bars. Along the way, Weedman, acting about 15 different roles, mercilessly, lovingly and hilariously skewers her vapid network of friends and colleagues (unforgettable is her pillorying of a women’s mag editor and a dog-rescuing friend), the inane prison bureaucracy, the self-defeating prisoners, the earnest volunteers and mostly herself. And while I’m watching it, I’m shitting my pants at how funny and poignant, ferocious and precise the whole thing is, and all I can think is: Who is she? Why isn’t she a huge star? And I’ve got to meet this woman.
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