Mark Moses (Getty Images)

Santa Monica, California – I always was a cheap date. I don’t (can’t) drink. Alcohol makes my face flush and tastes like the stuff which, in my day, we used to sterilize thermometers. When others drink, I order fizzy water with cranberry juice and try to look as if I’m enjoying a good wine. You can see that I missed all the fun of the wild L.A. bars of WWII. So when a friend said, “Hey let’s hit the V Lounge out in Santa Monica,” I figured I’d have a story for the Old Broad series in which an old “historic” gal looks in at contemporary hi-jinks…

Not what I found last Tuesday night at the V Lounge. I came for my cranberry fizz fix and ended up with an evening of performances by Hollywood’s best actors reading from the short stories of Dan Chaon, a writer with a dark perception whose stories are a mixture of ordinary and  Twilight Zone, the readers delivering the material with the rich voices and rich intonation you expect from favorites of film and TV so that I, with my glass of potent fizzy juice with a twist, fell into the stories almost as a participant in the action and not the listener-in.

Dorian Missick (Getty Images)

Among the readers were Mark Moses of Mad Men, Dorian Missick of Numb3rs, Dean Chekvala of Harpers Island and ER, and Marin Hinkle of Two and a Half Men. The stories were not a small taste of each but a long, dramatic reading which kept the audience enthralled. Chaon’s stories are deceptive. You walk down an ordinary street and you are suddenly in the haze of dark emotion. An account of a brother who is the only one in the family to keep in touch with his “dangerous” sibling, and only in the final lines do we find out that they are twins and now one is joining the other. A woman fascinated with a man who wears a prosthesis. And the final shocker: Dan Chaon himself reading the opening pages of his new novel, Await Your Reply, in which we find a man driving his son to the hospital, comforting him that they are almost there, almost there, and in the final line we learn that the son’s dismembered hand is in a bowl of ice on the seat beside them.

Darkly fascinating but not depressing — just a deeper plunge into the darkness that lurks in the everyday.

WordTheater is produced by Cedering Fox, who gathers her readers from the best of stage and screen and finds local venues. Look for the next happening on October 25th at Restaurant 3, 8370 3rd Street. Fox produces on a shoestring. The little jar is there for small recordings for sale and books available — enough for an evening away from the sitcoms, listening to the best of voices delivering the best of our new writers. I’m pleased to have found WordTheater.