Driving Hollywood

Dylan Brody works in nested digressions, pacing near a vintage typewriter in a three-piece suit while recalling the drive to a meeting with a studio executive who could change his fortunes. The setup is a narrative trick to examine thirty years of professional stubbornness. Brody recounts walking into grade school with Marvel comics concealed inside a copy of Crime and Punishment, and getting banished to the principal’s office because he could not resist correcting the teacher. When his father, a Skidmore College professor, was summoned to intervene, he defended the boy’s intellect while gently warning him about the exhaustion of needing to be the smartest person in the room.

Filmed at the David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles and directed by Nancy Carlin, the hour-long performance leans heavily toward theatrical storytelling over standard club rhythms. Brody points out that his resume, which includes writing monologue jokes for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show and landing a single speaking line on Moonlighting, only looks impressive to people reading it outside of California. Inside the industry, it simply tracks decades spent on the perimeter.

That friction between literary taste and commercial show business shapes each tangent, from fighting to stage Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun instead of Oklahoma! in high school to watching comedy club owners demand safer sets to keep bar tabs running. British and American stage reviews noted Brody’s languid pacing and old-fashioned raconteur style, punctuated by deadpan quips about an atheist who does not even believe people when they claim to believe in God.