David Dean Bottrell on acting, life, family and his one-man show that’s all about love

Do yourself a favor and buy a ticket to David Dean Bottrell Makes Love: A One Man Show while you still can.

It is a riot.

The show will have the final two performances of its current run at Rogue Machine Theatre on Wednesday and Thursday nights.

I was in the audience a few weeks ago – NCIS’s Pauley Perrette was in the next row – and was amazed at the magic David Dean Bottrell creates with just a few props and clever lighting.

Of course, it’s all about the writing and this is a brilliantly written series of monologues about love – all kinds of love – from romantic love to parental love to friendship love and more.

“When I sat down and wrote this thing, my goal was to write it to the best of my ability, to be as honest I could be and tell every truth I could come up with,” Bottrell told me before a recent performance.

Bottrell is best known for his recurring role of Lincoln Meyer on ABC’s great series Boston Legal and recently did a guest spot on NBC’s Harry’s Law. He is also a successful writer whose screenplay became the film Kingdom Come starring Whoopi Goldberg.

“When Boston Legal came along, I had been retired from acting for more than a decade,” he said. “I would occasionally do something but I was in now way actively looking for acting work. It was out of the blue. The phone rang one day and suddenly I was on a TV show. That’s how fast it happened. That particular character was so bizarre and proved to be so popular with audiences that I suddenly got handed back my acting career on a silver platter by David E. Kelley.”

He doesn’t mind that there are some casting directors that will only call him to play psychopaths and nutcases.

“I feel kind of blessed because those parts are kind of fun to do,” he said. “They’re not as plentiful as I would like but when they do come up, I really, really dig doing them.”

But Bottrell isn’t one to sit around waiting for the phone to ring. He teaches acting classes, and also writes and directs. During the run of his one man show, he is also directing an adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt at The Colony Theatre in North Hollywood.

“I’m holding up pretty well but I don’t think I’m every going to try opening two shows five days apart again,” he said. “I’ve learned my lesson.’

David Dean Bottrell Makes Love was first performed at the Comedy Central Stage and a few days later, Bottrell was sent a DVD of it.

He watched and was mortified.

“It occurred to me how much I had revealed about myself in front of a paying audience,” he said. “But the good news was, everybody laughed, nobody walked out of the theater in a huff and everybody was able to look me in the eye afterward. … The whole experience has been phenomenal for me – it really has on every level.”

“What’s been really cool about this show is that when I first started working on the show with director Jim Fall, he wanted to do a show about love. He wanted to be sure and stick to the subject and provide various on-ramps for audience members and as a result, the audiences for the show have become very diverse.”

“We get people of all kinds coming to the show, all sexual preferences, all ethnicities and so many straight guys. It’s been very gratifying.”

One thing that isn’t in the show is any mention of the chatty letters that his mother used to write to him – letters that inspired him to become a writer in the first place.

“There are no letters from my mom in the show – that’s a different show. But I became a writer because of my mother’s letters.

“She would send me these letters, back in the days when people wrote letters, that were amazing because I have a very large, very blue collar, very unlucky family. She would write these letter that would be four pages, front and back, of nothing but bad news. She was so used to that kind of life that she didn’t even notice. It would be about somebody having a miscarriage or something terrible like that then in the next paragraph about how many tomatoes there were in the garden. She was completely color blind to the fact that these letters were unintentionally hilarious. Friends in New York would gather in my apartment to hear me read these letter out loud.”

With a show all about love, is Bottrell is still open to the possibility.

“I’m a single guy, I’m a certain age. Like all single guys in my age group, it’s tricky. It’s not like when you’re a young guy when you go out there and there are a thousand possibilities,” he admits. “As a mature gay, your life is pretty well set. It’s trickier for two men who have very complete, fully formed lives to integrate. I think it’s a little trickier but the good news is, as long as you’re in the game, you have a chance of winning.”

His show has been getting a lot of repeat business and several of those people have brought a single person with them to introduce to Bottrell after the show.

“Who knows? Maybe the whole reason I did this was to get my new partner. Maybe the true love of my life will walk in and see the show.”

David Dean Bottrell Makes Love: A One Man Show is playing on Wednesday and Thursday nights at 8 p.m. at the Rogue Machine Theater – 5041 W. Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90019. (323) 930-0747

The show closes on Dec. 15. Here is a LINK for tickets.