Writer-performer Heather Woodbury took a bet she couldn't resist - that she would write and perform a new solo piece every week for a year in the back of an East Village pub. For nine months she toiled, creating the 10 hour, 100-character epic What Ever in the process. Starting Nov. 30, Woodbury will be performing two What Ever spin offs, Violet With Shades of Blue and The Lost Christmas Episode at Los Angeles' Evidence Room.
The first one-act, Violet With Shades of Blues, visits Woodbury's popular, aged New Yorker at the birthday party for her dog Balzac. The second piece is more complex. It expresses the true meaning of Christmas as seen through the eyes of the mismatched Folsom family, whose members range from a Christian Coalitionist to a radical environmentalist, California raver kid Skeeter (freezing to death in Wisconsin before encountering a girl on her way to an unpermitted abortion), high schoolers Clove and Sable, one babysitting for the Buddhist children at her parent's Dharmadatu and one wandering among the Redwoods on a mushroom high; and the whores of New York City's Hell's Kitchen, who imagine the festive goings-on in the windows above their street corner.
Woodbury won 1998 L.A. Weekly Award for Best Female Solo Performance. Dec. 10, during the run of Violet and Christmas in L.A., she will fly to Chicago to perform The Lost Christmas Episode at the Steppenwolf Theatre, where it will be recorded for National Public Radio. What Ever enjoyed an extended run at the Steppenwolf.
Tickets are $20-$15. The Evidence Room is located at 2220 Beverly Boulevard. For reservations, call (213) 381-7118.
— By Christine Ehren
