Never mind Baby Jane! What the audiences who saw Jessica Sherr's solo show at the Athenaeum in 2017 want to know is what happened to Bette Davis following the fatal 1940 Oscar ceremonies, when a premature press announcement of the winners spurred her to depart the festivities rather than feign surprise and congratulations. Sure, the aftermath may be readily available on Wiki, but the framing device for Sherr's 55-minute first-person account of the Hollywood icon's life and career begins with our heroine sulking in her hotel room and ends with her taking the high road and returning to the Coconut Grove to face down her rivals. After expanding the text to feature length for appearances in New York's environs, however, Sherr was forced by the coronavirus shutdown to take her show, not on the road, but online--where the restrictions of laptop cameras, fixed microphones and a stage barely arms-length wide made for severely curtailed running times. The biodrama currently Zooming into your home may be only 80 minutes long, but its narrative takes us all the way into a future where our intrepid champion overcomes the obstacles of that pivotal night to reaffirm her loyalties, reconcile her rivalries, and finish in triumph—and Sherr does it all live, in one unedited take, so you feel like you're really seeing it in a theater (though you might want to avoid looking too closely at the prop cigarettes and whiskey). I missed its debut at the Edinburgh Festival, but I've seen the show in both its one-hour and two-hour versions, and even on a little laptop screen, Bette Davis is, as Sherr proclaims, "bigger than the big screen!"—so don't unfasten your seat belts yet.
