Actor Jason Wells grimaces as he hunches over to get through the doors onto the el. “They don’t build these cars for me or Abraham Lincoln, do they?” he asks of no one in particular. He sits awkwardly. “Hard to find a place for these long legs. Are my feet hitting you?” he asks concernedly of another passenger. All relatively normal, save that Wells is of average height. This is the curious beginning of S.L. Daniels’s theater piece “When William Looks Down,” the standout moment in American Blues Theatre’s entertaining potpourri of short pieces, Monsters III: The El Ride.
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Daniels is Canadian but grew up in LA–she’s a Valley Girl from Encino: “The bad part of Encino.” (That’s an LA joke.) She moved to Chicago ten years ago. “I always say, ‘For the weather.’” She makes her living by designing jewelry. As a writer, not a performer, she’s contributed to all three Monsters shows, and recently had one of her pieces read at an evening of performance hosted by Cheryl Trykv. In that one, “Night of the Coals,” a woman who’s afraid of everything is persuaded to walk on hot coals, the theory being that doing one genuinely terrifying thing might neutralize her fears. In the end the woman decides she’s afraid of certain things for a reason: “Hold on to your fears,” she says. “If you lose your fears, what’s left to protect you?”
