“BLACK LIST LIVE!” Returns with “The Seekers of Perpetual Love”
From the Black List:
Los Angeles (September 22, 2014) — The Black List continued their Black List Live! event series last Saturday night with a staged script reading of Victoria Strouse’s “The Seekers of Perpetual Love” (formerly known as “The Apostles of Infinite Love”). Over 550 audience members packed the house at the Montalban Theatre in Hollywood for the reading, which Strouse also directed.
Black List founder Franklin Leonard welcomed cast members Alison Brie, Nathan Fillion, Seth Green, Justin Bartha, Melanie Lynskey, Jean Smart, Dean Cameron and narrator Cooper Thornton before turning the proceedings over to Strouse.
The chemistry onstage was immediately palpable and the cast had the audience in stitches from page one. The sibling rivalry between Alison Brie (Kayla Bachman), Justin Bartha (Zach Bachman), Seth Green (Wes Bachman) and Melanie Lynskey (Scarlett Bachman) was only enhanced by Jean Smart and Dean Cameron’s masterful performances as their overbearing yet selfish parents. Add to the mix Nathan Fillion’s (Rick Delacroix’s) soothingly sincere New Age musings and you had one hell of a show.
Green’s masterful physical comedy won the audience over as he mimed passing out and flopping around the back seat of a car during a high-speed chase. As Fillion’s Rick slowly lost his cool after being ‘dumped’ by Kayla, his calm demeanor devolved into drunken, angry slurring. Brie had the audience in tears with her expletive-ridden rant as her claustrophobic character Kayla had to crawl to safety through a series of underground tunnels. And when Bartha broke out in song to distract her, the audience burst into applause.
One of the pleasures of live theater is the rare moment when the fourth wall comes down. One of the evening’s funniest moments was when Justin Bartha cracked himself up trying to describe his character Zach’s music with a straight face: “Like, where James Taylor meets John Mayer.” To which Seth Green ad libbed, “I’m not sure they do,” before continuing with the scene.
Andrew Stanton tweeted that he “probably witnessed the best script read of my career last night.” And FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey called it “the best movie I’ve seen this year and it’s not even a movie yet.”
Black List Live! has found a home at the Montalban Theater (formerly the CBS Lux Radio Theatre) and will present their next staged reading there on November 15, 2014. The Black List is also taking the show on the road and will be co-presenting FLARSKY by Dan Sterling at the Austin Film Festival next month.
Looks like this is becoming something of a monthly feature, a fantastic way to put the spotlight on talented screenwriters and their great scripts. And hopefully… we can see some of these projects get made into movies!
By the way, you may be wondering why Andrew Stanton was at the staged reading? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Victoria Strouse is writing Finding Dory with Stanton for Pixar.
Photo credit: Ryan Garvin.
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