There’s a growing demand for one-person shows based on historical characters – shows which are devilishly difficult to pull off correctly:  first, the actor must match the character on several levels: looks, age, silhouette, gender; next, the homework must be massive so that one doesn’t distort the historical character’s reality; and thirdly, there must be some kind of audience for your character choice.  Without all these particulars, the show will fail critically, and. as important, fail to book.

So, when the opportunity to see, up-close, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), one must fly to the occasion.  Actor/director David Bridel chose, this time for critics, to unleash his fine impersonation on L.A. for only two performances, followed by two more in New York City.

We can only hope he finds more outlets for his show.  Coleridge was an ungainly man, full of self-doubt, anxiety and depression and suffered illness all of his life, which got him addicted to laudanum, an opium derivative.  But he was a major poet in his day, along with his friend, William Wadsworth, both of whom credited with starting the Romantic era of poetry.  Coleridge has long been considered one of the most important English poets, who influenced all the major poets of his time.

Best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and the never-finished Kubla Khan, most students have at least a passing acquaintance with his work.  So Bridel’s impersonation is of strong interest, however difficult to watch at times.  Bridel makes him physically unattractive with his buck teeth and fright-wig of hair, and how problematical it is having his character’s defecate into an on-stage toilet, taking drugs, and complaining about his other physical ails.  It’s works, but it’s tough to watch.

The year is 1797 and Coleridge is staying at a friend’s home, trying to complete Kubla Khan (“In Xandau did Kubla Khan/A pleasure-dome decree,/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea…”).  Goofy looking and slightly mad, he welcomes “us” into his home, then blames us for interrupting his composing session (“The muse has fled”).  Still, he regales with tales of his life, his work, his fears and terrors, his opium addiction, as well as asking someone in the audience for a recent dream and then improvising around it.  He’s very clever, this actor.

Bridel is handsomer than his Coleridge, costumed in a dirty sleeping garment, with his teeth-and-hair act, but the “mask” allows the actor all sorts of freedoms.  He has a credible English accent and is charm itself onstage.  His show is a fine addition to theatrical representations of historical figures and, in spite of his gross acts on stage, is worthy of high-school, college, libraries, or literary establishments. Co-directed by Bridel and Jeremy Aluma, it’s a startlingly strong addition to the one-person list of shows.

– Dale Reynolds