Inspiring Women : November 2020

for me. After a year of bugging, and an in-person meeting in Los Angeles, my theater company was
granted an official license to do the show. There are two other licensed satellite companies in New
York City and Minneapolis.
So what do I do, exactly? Well, I’m glad you asked. I take the film script and change it into something
that works without the visual cues. I write and then read aloud what the audience would be seeing
and add in my own commentary as appropriate. In the spirit of the show, I do my best to be funny
and engaging. I also pick out the key phrases, get any necessary props and costumes, ring the bell,
pick out a toast for the evening, handle the booze acquisition for the actors and generally run the live
show. The catch is, the narrator is the only person who doesn’t drink. As I said, somebody has to
keep the crazy train on the tracks. Nor does anything the narrator says trigger any drinking. I have
spent many an evening now being the only sober person in a room full of tipsy people. I take my
enabling to theatrical levels. All in a days work, I suppose.
At first, it seems like a rather childish affair. However, in reality, it’s much more for people who like
live performance, and who know the films being performed. These are all stories that we know and
love, the world over. And we tell them in very different ways. Lines that weren’t especially remarkable
in the original film are suddenly hilarious given time and distance. Back to the Future, for example, did
not age well, but was an absolutely hilarious show. And watching Doc and Marty slowly but surely
grow more inebriated, while doing their darndest to keep up the performance, is riotously funny.
The global pandemic and lockdowns did take us out of commission for a time. But at the few shows,
we’ve done since we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the hunger people have for live performance.
We’ve adjusted to do shows with smaller casts, to minimize the number of actors on stage. And on
Halloween, we will be doing our very first virtual performance. In the spirit of the holiday, we will be
performing Beetlejuice. And because it’s online, we are able to include one of the original LA cast
members in our performance as Beetlejuice himself. I’m expecting it to be an evening of muchneeded
laughter in these challenging times.
Alix Martin was born and raised in Los Angeles.
After a lifetime in theater, she was on a misguided
trip through law school when she walked into the
right cafe in Vienna, Austria at the right time and
met her now-husband. She never went back to law
school, or the States for a very long time after that.
That was 13 years ago. She remains active in
theater, on stage and in production, but, now works
primarily as a voice actor.
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