Mike’s incredibly self-indulgent play

Portland Center Stage’s latest one-man show is almost charming. Mike Schlitt is a compelling storyteller armed with a gift for impersonations and foreign accents.

His character is a thoroughly unlikable middle-aged man looking to make it big, and he relays his semi-interesting story through live stage performance and cleverly integrated video and still images. Once you realize that the plot is autobiographical, however, and that the documentary footage is real, the entire performance becomes painfully (and unforgivably) self-indulgent. 

Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure opens with an awesome Bollywood song and Mike’s comedic recount of exactly how he got to the beginning of the play. He is, we learn, the less-prodigious son of a television scriptwriter, a college-educated artist producing no art, living off a trust fund and desperate for the chance to sell out and finally achieve fame.

By the time he reaches his mid-30s and finds himself with a marketing career and a pregnant wife, he balks at the thought that “by 35, you’re either on your way or you’re not.” What is a whiny artist-at-heart with no masterpiece to do?

Obviously, the answer is to accept a mysterious invitation to direct a traveling musical in India. Mike leaves his wife (the exceptionally talented Nancy Keystone, who directs this play) at home in L.A. and embarks on what he is sure will be a disastrous production of Neil Simon’s They’re Playing Our Song. He’s so sure this will be a disaster that he brings a cameraman along for the ride, intending to make a documentary about his experience in India.

Why is this a good idea? Well, it’s not. It’s a terrible idea. Neither he nor his “cross-cultural experience” is interesting or insightful enough to fill a film or¬—for that matter—a play.

Unfortunately for us, Mike has only figured out the first part. The documentary never materializes and out of hundreds of hours of videotape, he has nothing to piece together. So instead of making a movie (or giving up), Mike writes a one-man play about his experience of trying to make a movie about his experience directing a musical in India. You dig? Didn’t think so.

There are redeeming qualities to Mike’s Incredible Indian Adventure, to be sure. The integration of film footage into live stage performance is flawless and creative.

The details of his musical production are often funny, from a chorus of Spice Girls to an invented L.A. theater company and a hideous promotional poster, but it’s Mike’s reactions to these details that make them laugh-out-loud hilarious. Mike Schlitt can hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes straight, and he can successfully crack dozens of self-deprecating jokes in as many; he’s definitely talented on stage.

The trouble is that Mike Schlitt is embarrassing and unlikable, and that no one cares about his self-indulgent mid-life crisis and ensuing theatrical ensemble.

The footage of his press junkets in India is cringe-inducing—Schlitt crumbles under pressure and says unthinkably stupid things on Indian national television. He is condescending and so unenlightened that he actually thinks his trip around the world has brought him to some state of enlightenment. This plotline is played-out, uninspired and uninspiring, to say the least.

At the end of it all, closing in on 50, Schlitt has learned little beyond the basic life lessons of the average thirty-something American. They say (as in, explicitly state in the script) that it’s the journey—not the destination—that matters, but who cares how Mike Schlitt got anywhere when he’s still 15 years behind upon arrival?