I Love You, Bro by Adam J A Cass

What a triumph of storytelling! One young actor creating individual voices for eight characters to convey a real-life intrigue.
While the actor must bring it off, the success of the piece is a tribute to playwright Adam Cass. He took evidence from the 2003 attempted assassination case and re-created it from the point of view of fourteen-year-old Johnny, who explains for us not only what he did but how he reacted personally to each stage of his complex deception.
Actor Leon Cain and director David Berthold brought it off in spades, with the assistance of La Boite’s techno-creatives. They all should share the kudos.
In a nutshell, Johnny, the kid from a poor area of Manchester trawls chat rooms to find friends and incidentally, finds love. When he recognises one contact is his school’s sports jock, (MarkyMark in the chat room) he dare not reveal his true identity, so he creates a female avatar. Where things go from there over the next nine months is the riveting business of the play. Johnny matures sexually, achieves his first love/lust experience, and is amazed by his own creative prowess as he devises his inevitable death. That only the sixteen-year-old MarkyMark has a webcam enables
Johnny to create femmes fatales to entrap him into attempting the murder.
My only reservation: Cass writes in the Manchester accent. Dialects have individual rhythms and verbal idiosyncrasies. I was disappointed Leon Cain didn’t embrace that challenge. Many of his lines sounded strange in plain English.
Jay McKee

Image: Leon Cain. Photo by Al Caeiro