Review: NERVOUS UNICORNS at Cat's Crawl

Nervous Unicorns is a gripping world premiere play by Jake Sidney Cohen at The Cat’s Crawl in Hollywood. This is a meditative drama about a group of eight people who participate in recovery meetings and then, quite unexpectedly, a supernatural experience changes them all. A thoughtful production weary of cliches, Nervous Unicorns avoids the easy route of showing us a clear journey where, at the end, everyone is sober and healed. Instead, Jake Sidney Cohen writes with poetry, humor, and insight about the thorny, convoluted journey of addiction and recovery, about wrestling and coming to terms with yourself in a deep and profound way.

Jake Sidney Cohen’s lyrical and beautifully written introduction to Nervous Unicorns in the program describes it perfectly: “I was withdrawing in a room with a bunch of hotheaded and insecure drug addicts who had all a bunch of sober time on their hands. And it was the most magical period of my life.”

I have seen another truly great play about addiction and recovery at Rogue Machine recently, Baby Foot, and it’s fascinating to watch these two plays as companion pieces about the addiction and recovery experience. Nervous Unicorns focuses more on the group experience of recovery.

It’s always a considerable challenge in true ensemble productions to form all the characters clearly, but director Lauren Boone works excellently and specifically, and the actors create vibrant characters from very start of the play. The costuming is inventive and pitch-perfect in capturing their wildly different personalities, superbly done by costume designer Elisabeth Adams. Nervous Unicorns also benefits from a very strong and talented cast.

Standouts include a striking performance by Jami Belushi, who brings a great deal of depth to her performance as a party girl struggling with family dysfunction and eating disorders. She is an incredibly compelling actress, with enormous charisma and raw charge. Belushi has a scene of utterly fearless intensity and unhinged sexuality with actor Andrew Garrett, who is also fantastic and ferociously believable as an unraveling drug dealer/musician with a rage problem. Damian Conrad-Davis is transfixing, hilarious and oddly touching as a financial sector criminal who can’t stop gambling with his own money or other people’s. He wears a brand new suit to every meeting and has quirky and passionate beliefs about extraterrestrials. Carlo Figlio has a truly incredible voice and delivers a deeply human performance as the recovery group leader, who in the end, succumbs to addiction himself. Every member of the cast is memorable and fearless.

There is excellent use of the space, lighting, sound that creates some startling effects and greatly heightened drama, with innovative, immersive design and technical work from Nick Foran and Andrea Adamson. The Cat’s Crawl is a great space, with opulent Victorian curtains, exposed brick walls, chandeliers, disco balls, and a legless torso with the head of Darth Vader all providing the ambience.

Nervous Unicorns is absorbing and thought-provoking, and in the end, offers an unexpected sense of grace. My favorite line “Enjoy it all when you have it, even the grief, even the disappointment.”

This show has great work from director Lauren Boone, writer-producer-actor Jake Sidney Cohen, and an excellent cast unafraid to go dark, deep, and weird on the journey.

Photos by Manolo Alzamora

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