Turn Me Loose at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Pictured: Joe Morton as Dick Gregory. Photo credit: Lawrence K. Ho.

“You can’t laugh social problems out of existence” goes a line voiced by Emmy Award and NAACP Image Award-winning film, television and stage veteran Joe Morton as Dick Gregory in Turn Me Loose by playwright Gretchen Law. This West Coast Premier of the Off-Broadway hit is staged to partially transform the Wallis’ Lovelace Studio into a comedy club with half the audience is seated at small tables close to the stage as we become intimately captivated by the words and life of the deeply passionate comedian and social activist.

Turn Me Loose at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Pictured: Joe Morton as Dick Gregory. Photo credit: Lawrence K. Ho.

As much a social political history lesson about race and civil rights as a stand-up act, we are taken back and forth between the 1960’s when Gregory was finding his place in the entertainment world to the clearly spiritually grounded presence later in his life and at the time of his passing in August of this year.

Joe Morton subtly shifts in tone, posture and gait portraying Gregory over these 50 years while consistently delivering skillful soliloquies and verbal punches to the audience’s gut, engaging us and keeping us off guard with jokes that educate and admonish our collective complacency. At one point he cajoles us to stand up in our seats and voice to him the racial epithet he so often hears when performing. Supporting Morton on stage to move through the flow of scenes is actor John Carlin who nimbly voices characters including racist audience members who taunt and heckle Gregory as he stands his ground.

Turn Me Loose at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Pictured: Joe Morton as Dick Gregory. Photo credit: Lawrence K. Ho.