Because apparently he doesn’t have enough to do what with warming up Jay Leno’s audience, running a business, and going from Los Angeles to the Bay Area every weekend to do his one-man show, East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player at The Marsh, a theater in San Francisco, Don Reed spent a recent morning out in Pomona-- an hour and a half drive from LA--entertaining 700 middle school students--before heading North to perform.

“These are at-risk black and Latino kids, ” he said in an interview with OL. “I did the show and gave them kind of a motivational speech like ‘Even though you’re from the inner city core, you can shift your gears and go to higher ground.’”

Reed’s abundance of energy is evident in East 14th, his autobiographical play about growing up in Oakland, CA. This one man show was just extended for the 6th time at the Marsh in San Francisco and in January will go to the Marsh in Berkeley. 

Reed plays all the characters, including himself as a boy nicknamed “Blinky” because of his tics; his stepfather who made him go door to door for the Jehovah’s Witnesses (“that religion that rhymes with "Tehovah's Sitnesses"”); his brothers, hard partying Darrell and flamboyant Tony; his dad’s friend, Trout Mouth and his father, a pimp whose only rule was “Be yourself.”

Reed’s mother, Claudette Kranson, who has seen the show four times, says all of these characters were just as Reed portrays them.

“Every time I see him perform it, it blows me away how accurate it is,” she said. “He has everyone down cold.”

A stand-up comedian, actor and producer, Reed, who lives in LA with his wife and two sons, has done or does just about everything you can do in the entertainment industry. Along with appearing on TV shows such as “A Different World” and in the movie, “Hollywood Shuffle,” he was an executive at NBC and went on to start his own entertainment copywriting company, reediculous media.

But when you hear about Reed’s childhood in Oakland, going from being forced to be a Jehovah’s Witness to living with his father who was a pimp, you wonder why, with such an abundance of material, he didn’t do a one-man show sooner.

At the house where his mother and stepfather lived at 34th Ave. and East 14th, Reed says that he was required to knock on doors 100 hours a month and do serious home repair projects such as replacing all the piping with copper, even though he was an inexperienced teen. When he took the bus 50 blocks down East 14th to visit his father on Sundays, it was a whole different existence.

“Usually I could hear his congas from up the street,” Reed said. “They were throwing it down and making the party happen. My father was hilarious and held court telling stories and jokes and there were always people hanging out. It was like a constant party.”

Kranson says everyone always wanted to be around Reed’s father, a talented musician.

“When we were young, we would go to a party and when we walked through the door people would say, ‘The party can start now—the Reeds are here,’” she said. “He brought so much joy to those people.”

Reed thought there would be nothing but good times when he moved in with his dad, but he found that wasn’t quite the case. His dad started questioning Reed’s drinking and smoking marijuana and reminded him of his goal to do something with his life. When his father noticed Reed was skipping classes at Chabot College in the East Bay, he decided to do something about it.

“My father started waking me up to go to college every single morning,” Reed said. “He’d stick his head in the door and say ‘Baby, Donny, time to get up now.’ And I knew I wasn’t going to get out of it any more. Here’s a pimp who never learned to read or write telling me to go to school.”

However, as a kid, Reed didn’t realize what his father did for a living.

“He was never like a pimp standing on a corner,” Reed explains. “It was more like a madam situation, where everybody’s invited and we’re all going to party.”

East 14th has been wildly successful, playing for five months in Los Angeles, a whole summer off Broadway in New York, and at the Marsh for the last seven months. Kranson says she thinks that along with the coming of age story, people like the music in the show, such as the Commodores and Marvin Gaye.

“Everybody I’ve taken to see it can relate to the music,” she said. “They start bobbing their heads and they remember what they were doing when they heard it. It relates so much to 60s and 70s.”

Stephanie Weisman, the director of the Marsh, says Reed is one of the best performers she’s seen since founding the theater 20 years ago. “He’s flat out amazing,” she said. “He has an incredible relationship to the audience, he moves beautifully, and his timing is unbelievable. He’s a wonderful storyteller and it’s a funny and poignant story.”

Part of the appeal of the show is that it takes people out of their own experience, Weisman thinks.

“It’s an expansion of wonder,” she said. “It’s really a delightful show.”

Reed has a theory on why people from totally different backgrounds than his feel connected to the show.

“When I went over to live with my father at 15 years old, I didn’t understand the lingo, how they were dressing, or any of it,” Reed said. “Through the course of the show, the audience members are going through and being inculcated and introduced to that world at the same rate I was, and they fit in about as well as I did, and I didn’t fit in at all. So I guess if I was doing well at it, it wouldn’t resonate as much, but because I was failing, people can make contact with it.”


TAKE ACTION

East 14th will be at the Marsh in San Francisco Friday, Dec. 18 at 9 pm and Saturday, Dec. 19 at 5 pm.

In January it will move to the Marsh in Berkeley.