Eric Edwards lost 210 pounds by walking a few miles in other people's shoes. In "The Weight is Over," a one-man production at Playhouse West in North Hollywood, Edwards takes the audience on his trail to lose weight.

Although he consulted a personal trainer to help him slim down, Edwards' focus in "Weight" is about understanding the emotional factors that led to his triple-digit weight gain by portraying some of the influential people in his life. He plays the roles of his lesbian mother and her girlfriend, his deceased father, boyfriends of women he's had crushes on and James Dean as "the rebel without a male role model."

"I had to deal with the emotional weight to conquer the physical weight" Edwards said in a recent interview.

The 34-year-old actor, who now weighs 155 pounds, draws on his comedic background (he played the funny fat guy in a string of movies, including "Sgt. Bilko," "Blade," "The Little Rascals," "National Lampoon's Senior Trip" and "Problem Child 2") to find the humor in the most poignant and critical moments in his life.

The play, which Edwards co-wrote with Ken Dubner, takes place in Edwards' North Hollywood apartment as he cleans out his closet, discarding remnants of his plumper days. He traces a series of events across the U.S. that led to his trying to eat his way to happiness. In Georgia, there's the day his French immigrant mother "comes out" and introduces him to his "new father, Suzanne," who bears a striking resemblance to Jan-Michael Vincent. Edwards illustrates his fatherless confusion to the audience by donning a red jacket and striking the classic James Dean pinup pose while exclaiming "I was a rebel without a male role model."

His father, a two-term Vietnam vet with a "never-leave-a-man-behind" mentality, attempts to "rescue his boys" by kidnapping Edwards and his brother and moving them to Hawaii, only to die shortly afterward of an Agent Orange-inflicted cancer.

After his father's death and "a Kansas funeral buffet that makes Sizzler look like a health-food bar," Edwards moves in with his aunt and begins to eat away his pain.

Throughout the play's obviously painful stories, Edwards' humorous and timely observations serve as the backbone to his life story onstage and off. He chooses not to dwell on all the choruses of "C'mon, get happy" that he interjects in the play and just moves forward one step at a time. He hopes audience members are inspired to do the same.

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