Ride ‘Blacktop Highway’ home
What: A house full of secrets; a stranger’s knock at the door. You know what’s ahead: horror. But because this is a solo show by John Fleck — a writerperformer with a singularly kaleidoscopic mind and chameleonic body — you won’t be able to guess anything else.
Why this? With its interplay of live performance and video, “Blacktop Highway” is subtitled “A Gothic Horror Screenplayed on One Man’s Body.” Fleck portrays roughly a dozen humans, plus numerous animals, in a story about — as the Los Feliz-based performer puts it — “a peculiar family living along a highway in Maine” with “a lot of monsters in the closet.” They’re plenty scary, but the bigger horror might be the video, a looming presence that gradually threatens to swallow everything else. “We are so spiritually kneedeep in a fabricated reality,” Fleck says, that “we don’t know what’s real anymore.” Fleck’s solo shows include “I Got the He-Be-She-Be’s” and “Mad Women.” You might also recognize him from TV, perhaps on “True Blood.” Performed briefly at downtown’s REDCAT in 2015, “Blacktop Highway” — running just more than an hour — returns in substantively evolved form and moves across town with longtime collaborator Randee Trabitz directing.
Details: A guest production at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A. 8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Dec. 5 and 12, 2 p.m. Sundays (dark Thanksgiving weekend); ends Dec. 15. $17-$30. (310) 477-2055, Ext. 2; odyssey theatre.com