"Solo Performer: The Lone Figure Touching the Pack"
This autumn accompanies a theaterical landscape of unusual scope, even fora community as diverse as Los Angeles. One familiar form enjoying a heightened resurgence is the autobiographical solo performance with numerous monologists taking personal confessional to new levels, and audiences with them. ...Fielding Edlow of Coke-Free J.A.P. at the Complex under Aspen Comedy Festival noteworthy Craig Carlisle's direction also views theatre as "a place for healing, to my gratitude." Though autobiographical, the emotional and psychological details are filtered through stage persona Sage Saperstein, named for two of Edlow's best friends.
Acclaimed at the 2001 New York Fringe Festival, Coke-Free's title derives from the slang acronym for "Jewish-American Princess" and self-medicating "to kill a pain so terrible that you literally think your feelings will kill you."
This University of Pennsylvania graduate and Neighborhood Playhouse trainee has been aiming toward a West Coast move for "about two years. I'd amassed a body of work, acting and writing, the confluence of both. It got to be serendipitous. I'd be walking down the street and people would run into me and be, like, 'just GO, dahling, GO!' It seemed nerdy to continue to live where I grew up."
The palpably intelligent Edlow, who says, "When I'm writing, I feel like I'm in the palm of God," participated in the Dixon Place commemorations of the first and second anniversaries of the [9/11] attacks; her piece, Angels in the Sky, was excerpted in Newsday.
"I needed to be part of a community. That's really what the theatre is to me, a community that you give to, you're of service to. And if, by healing things in myself, I can heal you, so much the better."
By David C. Nichols, LA Stage, Issue 22, November/December 2004