Marcus is Alive review: A balm for anyone who’s ever asked ‘Why me?’ ★★★★ - The Jewish Chronicle

Marcus Freed asked God for a break; six weeks later he got a skull fracture.

In his one-man autobiographical show Marcus is Alive, Freed shares the dramatic true story of the hit-and-run accident that left him with a life-threatening brain bleed and one unshakeable question: If he'd done things differently, could he have changed his fate?

The show opens with the sound of a pre-recorded phone call from Freed’s friend to his mum, breaking the news that her son has been in an accident. We see a stoic-faced Freed, quietly listening, as his friend explains that he’s been taken in for emergency brain surgery. “But the good news is: Marcus is alive.”

Freed relives that day seven years ago when a car ran him down as he crossed an otherwise quiet street in Los Angeles on the way to Friday night dinner, taking his audience along beat-for-beat as he considers whether the choices he made leading up to that fateful moment might have spelled his doom.

Stories with life-or-death stakes typically don’t require frills to captivate an audience, wired as we are to salivate over tales of catastrophe, but Freed doesn’t rest on the mere bones of his near-death experience to tell a propulsive, gut-wrenching story.

He slips frequently from his own narrative voice into the voices of others, lapsing into the cadence of a Hollywood noir detective for a recurrent bit as the smooth-talking LA officer who oversaw his case, or into the hippie-drawl of a psychic healer who opened his third eye for a trippy journey through all his past lives, or into the Shtetl-tinged accent of a kvetchy Jewish surgeon.

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Freed’s fluid writing and committed performance paint a colourful picture of the days and months that followed his accident, a period which was defined, in large part, by the painful absence of the perpetrator.

Perhaps his tale would not be quite as dramatic if it hadn't happened in the US, where being uninsured with a traumatic brain injury actually means death by medical bills. Freed's incentive to find the culprit, whose insurance would pay for the laundry list of expenses, thus becomes all-consuming, and the legal, spiritual, and at times fanatical lengths to which he goes to find this dark silhouette of a man seem to constitute a second storyline altogether.

Here the show starts to drag slightly, its flow disrupted somewhat by the cumbersome details of Freed's amateur investigation into the driver that got away, but for a tale that truly has it all - heartbreak, kabbalistic mysticism, fentanyl drips, a psychic detective, Shabbat dinners, and even a dash of Shakespeare – such digressions can be easily forgiven.

Ultimately, Marcus is Alive is a balm for anyone who’s ever asked, “Why me?”. The show will linger even after the proverbial curtain closes, with one of Freed’s final questions sure to follow you out the door: “What if it didn’t happen to me – it happened for me?”

Marcus is Alive is on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until 24 August at Braw Venues at Hill Street.

Topics:

Edinburgh Fringe

review