Good news for completists of live theater events derived from bad movies or people's obsessions with same: Soho Rep has extended the run of Rambo Solo to April 19, in response to the sell-out success of the engagement that began March 19. Conceived and directed by Pavol Liska & Kelly Copper, the show, which originated at the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, stars Zachary Oberzan as an actor named Zachary Oberzan, who saw the 1982 Sylvester Stallone movie First Blood when he was nine years old, and who has apparently spent the past quarter century of his life punishing his parents for not having taken him to see E.T. instead like normal people. In the one-man show, Oberzan lectures the audience about the importance of Rambo's story, then sets about re-enacting it. Oberzan performs his monologue in a homey intimate space strewn with pillows for audience members to sit on, and since he probably doesn't get many chances to bring girls back to his apartment to admire his mastery of the principles of feng shui, while he acts out the story onstage, the makeshift screen behind him shows home movies showing him strenuously acting out the story in his home.

Oberzan is fascinated not just by the movie but by the original novel by David Morrell, which was first published in 1972, ten years before the movie came out; although Morrell created the character of Rambo in that book, he then laid him aside until the movie began to spawn sequels, and he would write the novelizations of both 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II and the mathematically confusing Rambo III. More recently, Morrell wrote the comic book series Captain America: The Chosen; his extensive literary credits also include the 1976 critical study John Barth: An Introduction, which he wrote just to mess with my head. Oberzan, who according to Charles Isherwood's review in The New York Times, performs "with the wandering focus of somebody relating a long story casually", with "lots of 'ums' and dead spots when the thread of the plot is briefly lost, and [Oberzan] often stares dumbly for a moment or two, trying to ferret out from the jumble of memory a particular nugget of dialogue or a turn of the story", says that the show grew out of his fascination with "the various versions of a story and what actually is indeed the original story, and when do you begin to argue about what is the original story?" Unfortunately, whenever I come across First Blood I invariably change the channel before that argument can begin.