Review: PLEASE UNDERESTIMATE ME at Olney Theatre Center

Look up biscuit recipes online and you’ll find hundreds of different takes on the same subject vying for your attention, from “quick and easy” biscuits to “easy and fluffy” biscuits all the way to “the BEST” biscuits. Click into one and you’re likely to be greeted with a sizeable preamble on some topic or other: a provocative manifesto on the milk versus buttermilk debate, a preemptive mea culpa for the biscuits being slightly less easy than advertised, a tangent on the music of Kacey Musgraves, or maybe even someone’s entire life story. 

There’s a recipe to recipes, just as there is a recipe to the autobiographical one-person play. Simmering various conflicts, turmoil, and hardships down until they’re reduced to a concentrated, well-focused roux for a rich stew. Stick that in the oven while you cut up some humorous tangents, sprinkle some words of wisdom, maybe even spice things up with some audience participation and various little trifles of theater magic. After about ninety minutes, all the flavors in the stew should be well incorporated and ready to hit that big climax where adversity is triumphed over, lessons are learned, and catharsis is reached. Serve warm.

If all that’s a little reductive then that’s exactly what a recipe should be: a starting point from which you can build upon and, as the dramaturgical note to Carla Hall’s Please Underestimate Me puts it: “throw in your own tips and tricks.” And that’s how the play starts: a biscuit recipe. But you’ll have to give her a moment, Carla Hall has to think about her entire life before she bakes. 

The script—written by Carla Hall, Lori Kaye, and Leslie Thomas—is no coup to the form, which is fitting enough considering Hall hails from an extensive entertainment background rooted in the type of equal parts comforting and formulaic content that makes up food programming on daytime television. In and of itself, it’s fairly straightforward inspirational memoir fare that charts Hall’s early upbringing and her circuitous path towards becoming a food media personality, but all that’s just the platform on which the true main dish is served. 

Fans of Hall from her stints on shows like Top Chef and The Chew will already know what a charismatic and warm character she is. Stepping into live, dramatic theater, especially with a ninety-minute, one-person show, is a bold move and a big risk, but Hall carries the performance with unending, joyful energy. 

That same energy carries into every piece of the surprisingly impressive production. Director Lili-Anne Brown fills the piece with fun, surprising changes of pace, navigating the varied beats of the work well and keeping things humming along. 

The show is like a puzzle of sorts, beginning in media res during a faux-taping of a cooking segment on a cooking show before splintering out into all the segmented sections of Hall’s life that eventually brought her to the TV screen. 

Lauren M. Nichols’ set brilliantly brings that concept to life, starting as an image-perfect replica of a cooking show set that magically comes apart into smaller pieces as needed in a truly inventive and special manner. There’s even a remote-controlled dancing stove that’s stupidly well done. 

With regard to the meat of the play itself, there’s no doubt it’s the perfect night out for Hall’s existing devotees, but as a work of theater in its own right? The pitch may seem like a bit of a stretch, but what becomes immediately clear even to those experiencing Hall’s talents for the first time is how firmly rooted her being is in theater. From wanting to become an actress as a child to becoming a regular patron of Olney Theatre Center, Carla Hall is definitely not underestimating the challenge of stepping onto the stage. 

Please Underestimate Me, then, becomes a fascinating blend of daytime TV aesthetics and antics with an ambitious attempt to capture the unique tensions at the heart of Hall’s career. Being a television personality is an odd job that asks someone to simultaneously be uniquely of themselves and also become a blank plate for a producer-approved image to be projected upon. Add to this Hall’s place as a woman of color in American entertainment and the result is a constant push-pull between the forces of personal identity and corporate-fueled conformity. What better forum to tell such a story than a one-person play in which Hall, alone on stage, literally contorts between characters and years and cities at a snap? 

In the end, Please Underestimate Me is fundamentally less interested in food than it is in the question of being Carla Hall. It’s no tell-all memoir, but rather a goofy and heartfelt encapsulation of Hall’s personality into a well-proportioned, unassuming treat as nourishing and welcoming as a good basket of biscuits, warm from the oven. 

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