My Maryland Visit, Charles Ross's "One-Man Star Wars"

I just returned early Sunday morning from my trip to visit mom and nana in Maryland. A very nice visit - I think that one week was a perfect amount of time. There wasn't a whole lot going on and we focused on a few projects: one, organizing and cleaning my room, which mom plans to make into a guest room. It has a nice, albeit creaky, wooden bed frame that grandpa had decades ago brought back from Denmark; and a nice desk and dresser to match. My window looks out over the backyard, level with the branches of several tall trees, over a path that runs through a grassy park.

We also did quite a lot of shopping, mostly for clothes for myself. Mom and nana were both very generous. Nana bought me a new pair of shoes that I picked out: a pair of shiny black Nike Air Forces from the mall. Mom ordered me some fleece slipper/scuffs from L.L. Bean. On Friday, the day before my retour par avion, we shopped for Christmas gifts and I got Laura some earrings and super-soft socks.

We also took in a one-act, one-man play at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in D.C.: "The One-Man Star Wars". The actor, Canadian Charles Ross (who bore a striking resemblance to a young Mark Hammil) did all three of the original movies back-to-back, with only a few-second water break between each. It was pretty crazy.

We made ticket reservations online ($28 each) and the whole time until I saw it I was pondering just how this guy would go about such an act. As it happened, he skipped all but the major, memorable scenes and characters. He sang-slash-hummed the music to begin separate scenes, but overall his attempt at mimicking John Williams' score was rather dismal.

Basically, he excelled at some characters and muddled through, or avoided others. He was great at C3P0 and R2D2: he had 3P0's stuffy, prissy accent, and stiff-limbed walk down-pat. For the two robots' journey through the Tattooinne desert after escaping Leia’s ship, Ross mimed almost perfectly R2's beeps and whistles, during their little exchange before they decide to part ways. The Luke Skywalker portrayal was fantastic, replete with Luke's boyish whine; and Ross was able to extract the humor out of Luke’s later afflicted, self-righteous heroism. He got a ton of laughs from the audience on Luke's behalf – maybe partly because they do in fact look alike. But Ross couldn't really do Han Solo or Princess Leia (he made her sound kind of like a gay man), but I suppose we can cut him some slack for taking on such a task! It really was amazing.

The little running jokes throughout were great, too: about Luke's whininess and the supposed pathetic acting career of actor Hammil. Also, Ross extracted some clever humor from the love triangle between Luke, Leia, and Han. And then, of course, the familial relationship between Luke, Leia, and Darth Vader/Annakin Skywalker.

Actually, after the first act, when the lights dimmed and Ross went to the back of the stage and chugged a water bottle, the audience clapped and it looked as though that was all. But after probably 10 seconds, he came back for Episode V/Empire Strikes Back. I couldn't believe that he went through the trilogy as rapidly and tirelessly as he did. Pretty awesome. In addition to the music, he even mimed those gargantuan AT-AT walkers on Hoth, and the smaller AT-ST walkers in the battle for Endor. He acted out the following: Luke's destruction by tripping, of the walker with his snow speeder's cable gun; and the Ewoks' crushing the AT-ST walker's "skull" with the two swinging logs, as well as the log roll booby-trap that tripped another one.

There were, of course, some glaring abscences - Rancor in Jabba's palace, for example, but mostly with Ross's acting it was just a matter of emphasis. And since he excelled at some characters and scenes more than others, it worked out pretty well.

When he was finally done, after a little over an hour of non-stop running around stage reducing George Lucas's creations to a fast-forward, human puppet-show, he left stage and then returned to bow and chat briefly with the audience. He explained that he has a similar act for the Lord of the Rings movie - but that he had been issued a warning from the movie people to cease doing it. So he gave everyone just a taste, by doing his Gollum impression. It was excellent, very accurate - and hilarious!

- d.g.w. 12/19/07