Actors’ Gang Lifts Gut-Twisting ‘Weights’

The night a stranger shot him in the eye, Lynn Manning was coming off a “smog-free picture-postcard day in Los Angeles,” full of good prospects: a job promotion as house director of a boys’ home; a scheduled reunion later that evening with an ex-girlfriend; at the bar, a little while before the shooting, killer rounds of pinball.

Then came the encounter with someone itching to teach Manning some “respect.”

Each of us leads a multiplicity of lives, marked by dreams deferred and unexpected ones realized. “Weights,” Manning’s compelling solo, neither bears down nor stints on the wrenching details of one L.A. man’s life. The show is back for an encore at the Actors’ Gang under the Taper, Too banner, after last summer’s successful debut.

There’s enough adversity and hard-won inspiration in Manning’s story for several evenings of autobiographical storytelling. This one, directed by Robert Egan, gathers momentum and poetic strength as it goes; Manning’s choicest descriptions give weight to “Weights.” Early on, storm clouds darken the sky “like a new bruise.” Later, months into his life as a blind person, Manning eloquently recounts the sensual experience of making love to a woman he “can only know in the absence of light.”

The stuff of Manning’s childhood is gut-twisting: alcoholism, sexual abuse and a cashed-out sense of the future, intertwined with happier times and a stubborn optimism. At a low point, with his mother off on a bender for three days, the two oldest kids (including Manning) fed their younger siblings margarine and sugar sandwiches, saving what milk they had for the infant children.

Tales of abuse involving Manning’s sometime stepfather and two of the kids shatter the young man’s trust. Eerily, Manning as a young adult foresees his own blinding; his ideal, after all, is to become a painter living in Paris. After this particular childhood, such casual fatalism comes all too naturally.

Yet from all this, Manning has emerged a rich storyteller. “Weights” mixes up the chronology of his full-to-bursting life, blending childhood incidents with the events leading up to the shooting and with the subsequent, often disarmingly funny, adjustment to blindness. (The white cane, he says, proved “a magnet for religious weirdos of every denomination.”)

There are moments in “Weights” when the poetics begin to pile up, when Manning seems hellbent on topping the last dozen similes and metaphors with the next dozen. The observations could use a little breathing room. They’re backed here by the musical score and accompaniment of Karl Fredrik Lundeberg, who favors cinematic-inflected “danger” guitar fills, which don’t help the veracity of what we’re hearing. (Al Jackson’s DJ work fares far better.)

There’s always a question to be answered with an inherently dramatic autobiography such as “Weights”: How much theater can the material take before the trappings turn against it? Manning and Egan give it a fair amount. But they’ve wisely let the story sell itself, while bending and reshaping the order of that story effectively. We’re left with a man who did more than live to tell it. He found a way to tell it well.

* “Weights,” Taper, Too at the Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Wednesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Also: April 10, 8 p.m., and April 15, 8 p.m. Ends April 15. $20. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Written and performed by Lynn Manning. Directed by Robert Egan. Scenic design by Akeime Mitterlehner. Costumes by Candice Cain. Lighting by Geoff Korf. Composer and sound designer Karl Fredrik Lundeberg. DJ and sound designer Al Jackson. Production coordinator Judith M. Smith.