Darin Dahms, one of the unsung heroes of the L.A. theater scene, has remounted The Player King, his one-man show about the Booth family which won critical acclaim in its introductory run last August at Son of Semele Theater. Dahms, a brilliant actor/director, portrays three famous 19th century actors in the piece: patriarch Junius Brutus Booth and his two sons, Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth, the notorious assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
The Booth family was haunted by tragedy: Junius was not only alcoholic but mentally ill; Edwin, regarded as the finest stage actor of his generation, lost his wife to tuberculosis; and John Wilkes went down in infamy after shooting the president.
Dahms, in the course of his intense, tour de force monologue, manages to flesh out all three Booths and bring them to life, not only when they're on stage and performing classic roles, but in their private lives as well, grappling with their ferocious demons. Dahms' main focus is on Edwin, who at age 13 took on the responsibility of caring for his mad father while the latter was on tour with a Shakespearean troupe. Somehow Edwin managed to become an actor himself and win fame for his portrait of Hamlet, only to be forced to give up the stage for two years when his racist brother John Wilkes brought shame down on the family.
Edwin's struggle to find the courage to begin acting again gives The Player King much of its narrative urgency and suspense, but the true glory of the show is to be found in the Booth family's love of acting. Driven and doomed as they were, they still threw themselves passionately and happily into their work on stage. Dahms gives us a strong sense of what they were like as actors, delivering soliloquies from Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth in their own inimitable fashion. In so doing, Dahms pays tribute not just to these three remarkable actors but to the illustrious history of American theater itself.
