Review: EXPERIENCING LIFE (POSSIBLY) FROM BEHIND THE WHEEL IN DRIVER'S SEAT at Theatre 68 Arts Complex

Ellie Brelis is...well, she's a lot of things.

She's an actor and a playwright (obviously!) as her solo play DRIVER'S SEAT showcases. She is a woman with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), although the condition seems neither to shape nor in any way to define her identity. She is a queer woman who has experienced love from several people in her life who, one would very much hope, would provide it, and also some pretty lousy treatment from an ex-boyfriend.

An East Coast native, Brelis is, betimes, very high and dangerously low. She has spent the better part of her early years without a driver's license, afraid that her OCD might lead her into an accident and therefore content to experience life from the passenger's seat. As the title of her play suggests, this particular circumstance may be on the cusp of changing. Most significantly, considering the journey she recounts in DRIVER'S SEAT, Ellie Brelis is alive.

This is no mean feat since she begins her tale with a creative list of ways she could end her life, including triggering a lethal allergy to tomatoes by ordering and consuming a pizza. While there are not typically a lot of yuks for people experiencing mental illness, Brelis delivers her tale with archness and irony along with the sad. It's working for her. DRIVER'S SEAT took home several awards at the 2022 FRIGID Festival. The play's West Coast premiere at NoHo's Theatre 68 Arts Complex gives us an actor/playwright very much on top of her game and in the stable guiding hands of director Emily Mikolitch. One-person shows are so very prevalent in these parts; this 60-minute trip, featuring a charismatic and very relatable performer, is worth the ride.

It certainly fits well in a venue designed for intimacy. The performance space at Theatre 68's Emerson Theatre is small, containing only a car's two-person driver and passenger's seat and a wall for strategically deployed projections (designed by Nick Wass). At one point, Brelis dashes between towers flanking the stage, lighting them up as she touches them. She also dances cathartically and sans inhibition to Katy Perry's "Firework" - perhaps the most overused pop song in pop culture.

She presents her OCD as a lifelong battle to make peace with and impose an order on the voices inside her head. There is a sequence of repetitious "I love you, I love you, I love yous," for example, which - if not repeated correctly - could trigger something bad.

Ultimately, the combination of life spent in COVID quarantine, the death of her grandfather, the end of a relationship and her mental health leads Brelis to a psychiatric hospital. She asks for help and, thanks in part to having good health insurance, she gets it. The boyfriend who did her dirt, meanwhile, ends up winning a bundle on "Wheel of Fortune."

Although there are times when she gets plenty pissed off, self-pity is not part of DRIVER'S SEAT's makeup. Not necessarily one to turn the other cheek when hit with misfortune, Brelis does express gratitude for the people who assisted her on the journey...even for the rotter of an ex-boyfriend...even though she lit a bonfire in the backyard and ceremoniously "burned his sh-t."

As for whether the performer ultimately gets to experience life from behind the wheel, that question is left satisfyingly ambiguous.

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