Review of Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight, a play by John Kolvenbach

 Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight

Review of Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight, a play by John Kolvenbach

Huntington Theatre, at the Maso Stage at the Huntington through March 23, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight put the play back in the theater experience. Though it has no plot to speak of, Stand Up runs for a very engaging hour of meta-theater. Directed and written by John Kolvenbach, the script operates like a cooperative game where the audience’s reaction become part of the entertainment. Composed specifically for Jim Ortlieb, who plays The Man in the one-man (almost) show, Stand Up asks questions about the theater-going experience, most sharply: “What is the purpose of theater? Why go at all?” Given that the play was written during the pandemic, the question has teeth. If we don’t experience the transcendence of live theater, that moment when the play and performance disappear into the emotional and intellectual understanding great theater provides, then it will have lost its purpose. Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight reinvigorates that transcendent joy and provides an hour of laughter at the same time.

The Maso Stage looks like a rehearsal space, filled with mix-and-match chairs at floor level and several rows of risers behind. The upstage wall has a mishmash of old sets, lights, and furniture from earlier shows. When Ortlieb and Kolvenbach first staged the show in Los Angeles, as the pandemic began to wane, they took hold or a performance space that had not received a human presence for a couple of years, and the set for Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight evokes that same gestalt, the purgatory of a theater waiting for a play and an audience to see it. The Man builds up interactions with the audience which pile up until prepared to feel. It’s sort of a positive response to the nihilistic view of theater without an audience expressed by The Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “It was not until the murderer’s long soliloquy that we were able to look around. . . . Our eyes searched you out (until) every exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited. . . .The silence was unbreakable.” The magic in this performance comes through theater’s ability to conjure up a connection with an audience – in fact, conjure an audience itself – from one nameless character operating with a series of comic bits, sympathetic tugs, and a few scripted interactions.

Jim Ortlieb pulls of a high-wire act for his hour onstage. The audience has little reason to engage with him as he rambles around the pile of junk that comprises the set. From the moment he enters the stage carrying a board and a sawhorse, we wonder who he is. The Man puts off the start of the play several times, or he seems too. He also breaks the continuity of illusion with several periods of silence. He tempts the audience to leave, to look away, to simply disengage, but the 200 spectators I sat with kept their focus on the stage and on the man even through the surprise ending. Ortlieb deserved the standing ovation he received.

The performance maintains its questioning interaction with the audience even after the play has ended, inviting people up to the stage for drinks and conversation. Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight leaves the audience feeling as though it has helped answer the question about how theater can survive the pandemic and even return stronger. That’s a massive achievement