Review: THE SPHERE OF FIXED STARS IN THE HEAVENS at Theatre 68 Arts Complex

J. Holtham’s THE SPHERE OF FIXED STARS IN THE HEAVENS is a powerful meditation on love, time, and timing. Taking place on an apartment-building rooftop in North Hollywood, the show focuses on Owen (VonDexter Montegut II), a chatty Black guy, a children’s TV animator who dreamed and dreams of being an artist, and Elodie (Tiffany Smith), a more reserved Brown girl, who works in a licorice factory. Friends of a couple downstairs throwing a party, they meet over chocolate cake and the perceived persuasions of psychopaths, and realize they kind of like each other. Meeting at different times on the same roof, their relationship evolves in fits and starts as they ruminate on aspects of the world far larger than what is transpiring between them as well as the vastness of space and time within them and between them.

With just the two actors, the sparsely populated set — a couple of patio chairs, a chaise longue, a rooftop vent — in the black box theater becomes as vast as infinity. Montegut II and Smith are natural with each other, an innate charisma from the get-go as they navigate both Owen’s and Elodie’s differences and their similarities. She wants to live in the moment, he wants to fill canvas of the future, but they want to do it together, no matter what.

Writer and director Holtham’s script is sweet without being cloying, melancholy without being sappy, smart without being smug. His characters are fully developed when they first appear and become even more complex as they reveal unexpected layers, their words nuanced and meaningful, the spaces in between often meaning just as much. He allows his actors time to breathe, which is meaningful in a project like this where nothing should be rushed.

Montegut II is charming and awkward (and awkwardly charming) with elements of a young David Alan Grier. He has an everyman appeal, the boy next door, almost a puppy’s enthusiasm and idealism. Smith excels at hiding her feelings just below the surface, her hesitance marking an old soul who has been hurt yet still wants to make the most of the present. It sounds pedestrian but in the hands of these two capable and expansive actors and with the confident direction and smart, introspective writing by Holtham, it is anything but. It’s poetic and moving and larger than we are, just like love.

THE SPHERE OF FIXED STARS IN THE HEAVENS is just another gem of a production that should not fly under the radar. The Theater 68 Arts Complex in North Hollywood is an unsung space that consistently offers up intimate and challenging material.

Photos by J. Holtham

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