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A middle-aged man wearing a black blazer, burgundy sweater and black plastic-framed glasses sits reading from a letter of recommendation he wrote on behalf of a colleague. But soon, Professor Jason T. Fitger (David Berkson) is shouting about bulldozers and wrecking balls demolishing Willard Hall, a vein protruding from the side of his reddening neck.
For an hour and a half, we become intimately acquainted with Professor Fitger in the first-ever adaptation of Julie Shumacher's book Dear Committee Members. The collection of fictional letters by an asshole-but-still-likeable English and Creative Writing professor won the Thurber Prize for Humor, and it's well-deserved.
Shumacher's dialogue sounds like it was meant for the stage, either for stand up comedy or this one-man show at Blackfish Gallery. Berkson's neck vein protrudes, he swallows laughter during absurd letters, and he recites the most academic language with precise articulation and the lung capacity of an opera singer.
The best letters of recommendation—"LORs", as Fitger calls them—include speculation about a professor who pees in wine bottles and lines them up around his room and a letter recommending a student with anger issues for job at Paintball Emporium.
But though Berkson masters the comedy of reading letters that were never meant to performed, the best moments are when Fitger's humanity shows—he's a writing professor downtrodden by funding increases for technology and cuts to English. While some letters stand alone, others are pieces in the plot of a year in Fitger's personal life, like ones for his favorite student and the ex-wife who works with him and whom he still loves.
The play is right: the concept of a letter of recommendation is absurd, but this show still deserves one.
Willamette Week