A review of Bottrell's show at NYC's Pangea (Image via David Dean Bottrell)
If you're familiar with David Dean Bottrell, you may know him from his memorable arc on Boston Legal, any of his many, many, many other episodic TV guest appearances, or even his book Working Actor: Breaking In, Making a Living and Making a Life in the Fabulous Trenches of Show Business.
But going forward, he should be known as the man behind the one-man show Teenage Wasteland: Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen.
Bottrell's show is a series of monologues (hardly; he engenders such amazing responses from the crowd they verge on collaboration) about his tortured teen years, which fall squarely under the old saying: laugh to keep from crying.
With a mischievous gleam, he easily and breezily regales with structured stories that focus on his sexual awakening, an early bad hair summer, and even a straight crush. All of it is informed by his upbringing in a southern Evangelical family in the early '70s, and all of it is made bearable by Bottrell's delicious wit, which kisses self-deprecation and then boomerangs back into self-reliant defiance.
Not only is the show a journey, and not only are each of his vignettes journeys, Bottrell sometimes makes a single sentence a journey, floating from what seems like it will be a belly-laugh to instead delivering a tearful and sincere moment of reflection.
Most impressively, like a randy Will Rogers, Bottrell manages to always be likable — and with 50+ movie and TV credits over 35 years, he's entitled to be the hero of his own story, a story that many gay men will recognize as a version of their own.
TOUR DATES
More info at DavidDeanBottrell.com
Palm Springs — May 17
L.A. — May 22-23
San Francisco — May 27
Cap Cod — June 18
Nantucket — June 20
NYC — July 16
Hyannis — August TBA
