Like They Do in The Movies Off-Broadway Reviews

Fishburne has the air of wisdom of someone who, having undertaken deep self-investigation, is eager to share his findings. (The restrained undulating projections designed by Elaine J. McCarthy have a light-behind-the-eyelids feel, evoking memory and contemplation.) To the question of legacy, Fishburne seems to say: It’s not the stage and screen roles that matter, but his powers of perception — of others and of himself. It’s a skill you don’t have to be a movie star to perfect.

The sketches are good, clean — uh, mostly clean — fun, but it’s likely that audience members on exiting (a large percentage are fans, it’s to be presumed) will remember having spent the past hours with a man whose honesty about his achievements and shortcomings won’t soon be dismissed and may even serve as a model for living a life free of secrets and lies. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it here.

He tells stories. The stories, in eight different scenes or segments, range from harrowing to comic, and sometimes both; and are, he says, sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes both: He is an actor and a storyteller, he explains, “which is a polite way of saying I’ve been a bullshit artist all my life.” Fishburne mixes recollections and impersonations that seem connected only by his talent and intelligence. There is no obvious overall theme. This is how “Like They Do in the Movies” differs from the solo shows by the three theater artists who have apparently inspired this piece: Among the many people Fishburne thanks on a page In the playbill are “Dr. Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, and Anna Deavere Smith, for showing me the way.”

But no spoilers here; to see “more about that,” the truths Fishburne learned from the stories and lies he was told, and his masterful embodiment of a variety of disparate roles and emotions, don’t miss his galvanizing reflections and stellar performance in Like They Do in the Movies.

Best experienced live, Fishburne’s detailing of his private family history takes turns eliciting humor and generating sympathy for both the actor and his octogenarian mother. During his childhood, Hattie Crawford ran a charm school — his Brooklyn home decorated with several full-length wall mirrors as women took turns striking poses and strutting the catwalk of his living room. In the play, Fishburne depicts the character playing his mother as one who plies her child with “nasty pills” on occasion, and takes sexual advantage of him during the same years she pushed him toward early film roles like “Mr. Clean” in the Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now.”