Rambo solo

Alone onstage, a man tells the amazing and ornate story of First Blood, intermixing the details of the novel with those of the film adaptation and incorporating his own imaginings into the narrative. With his body and his voice he feverishly rewrites the tale, which is “as universal as Hamlet” because its characters symbolize solitude and redemption. The magnetic and disarming actor Zachary Oberzan plays the role of himself and embodies all the characters: Sheriff Teasle, the unruly Rambo, the policemen who hunt him down. Projected behind him on screens are three videos of the same performance. Both onstage and on the screen the words and the images slip and slide, never truly coinciding. Here, telling a story means constantly making things up. And those imaginings betray and end up revealing the self, as is so brilliantly demonstrated in this production by the New York company Nature Theater of Oklahoma. From this very amusing theatrical UFO finally emerges a plea for imperfection and for the freedom, even in the face of the overwhelming Hollywood machine, to appropriate the fables of our era so as to better reinvent them.