Lauren Weedman is very, very funny.
Chances are, you may have known that already. She performed her show Bust in Boise last year (I didn't get to see it), and she was a correspondent on The Daily Show in 2001 (I didn't have cable). For me, she was wonderfully new and fresh.
Her new show, No ... You Shutup, is incredibly funny. It starts off with extremely awkward banter as Lauren talks to a couple of new parents and makes uncomfortable jokes about how "your boys can swim" and anecdotes about the blood in her boyfriend's stool. In later scenes she switches between playing herself and her boyfriend, her boyfriend's son (still in protracted grief over the death of his mother), her birth mother, her adopted mother, her assistant at work, her gynecologist, an intense lesbian couple, and an adoption agency worker who sounds like a specialty retailer of rare goods when she talks about the Guatemalan babies ("You can't get these any more," she says. Lauren, for her part, continues the babies-as-commodities theme by saying she'd prefer "a gay, sparkly baby"). She throws in a few bodily fluid jokes and some silly dances for good measure.
Weedman manages to find the humor behind the fears and hopes of wanting to become a mother at 40 in a living situation where that seems simply impossible. Her humor is delightfully irreverent, mocking everything from family dinner table conversations to adoption agency marketing videos.
Showing posts with label Boise Contemporary Theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boise Contemporary Theater. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
God's Ear
By now, regular readers will probably note by my overuse of words like "whimsical" and my tendency to be drawn to plays with names like "Psycho Beach Party" that I like offbeat productions. So I thought I was all set with God's Ear at Boise Contemporary Theater.
"Jenny Schwartz has launched her career with a breathtaking new play about loss, love and language," BCT's description reads. "At the center of the story is a couple, struggling to find themselves and each other after a sudden family tragedy.... In contrast to its heavy subject matter, God's Ear features a playful cast of characters, including the Tooth Fairy, G.I. Joe and a transvestite flight attendant."
"The Tooth Fairy, G.I. Joe and a transvestite flight attendant?" I thought. "How can you go wrong?"
Let me assure you, it's very, very possible.
The play was simply weird. I gave up trying to get it and decided there really wasn't that much to get. I was absolutely baffled by the people around me in the audience after the show who were gushing about how great it was. To me, the whole thing smacked of pretension.
Some leeway may be called for because this is a play about grief, and of course different people experience pain and grief differently. And grief isn't always about crying or tragedy. But the play seemed insular somehow -- like it wasn't letting us in, like it wasn't trying to let us understand.
It certainly wasn't the fault of the actors. Tracy Sunderland and Matthew Cameron Clark, who play Mel and Ted, a married couple who have lost a son, are clearly superb, despite the fact that I didn't like the material they had to work with or how they were delivering it (clearly choices of the author and the director). And Andrea Caban brought some much-needed humor to the play with her portrayal of Lenora, the woman Mel refers to as a call girl.
The dialogue relied on the repetition and variation of key phrases. The same question might get asked four or five times, one right after another. The character who answers might give a different answer each time, or might give a synonym of their previous answer. Occasionally this leads to some genuine laugh lines, and there are some witty one-liners. But overall it's a structure that may have been interesting to play with as a writer, but did little for me as an audience member. The dialogue was also delivered in a very stilted, unnatural, often rushed manner. It seems at times like the emphasis is on all the wrong words. Real people don't talk like that.
One of the things I did like were the songs in the play -- a capella little tunes out of the middle of nowhere. One of my favorites was sung by Beau Baxter (who played Guy), a list of things you cannot sell on eBay (a list including "human organs" and "stolen stuff.") They added a little levity to a play that felt, so much of the time, completely numb.
"Jenny Schwartz has launched her career with a breathtaking new play about loss, love and language," BCT's description reads. "At the center of the story is a couple, struggling to find themselves and each other after a sudden family tragedy.... In contrast to its heavy subject matter, God's Ear features a playful cast of characters, including the Tooth Fairy, G.I. Joe and a transvestite flight attendant."
"The Tooth Fairy, G.I. Joe and a transvestite flight attendant?" I thought. "How can you go wrong?"
Let me assure you, it's very, very possible.
The play was simply weird. I gave up trying to get it and decided there really wasn't that much to get. I was absolutely baffled by the people around me in the audience after the show who were gushing about how great it was. To me, the whole thing smacked of pretension.
Some leeway may be called for because this is a play about grief, and of course different people experience pain and grief differently. And grief isn't always about crying or tragedy. But the play seemed insular somehow -- like it wasn't letting us in, like it wasn't trying to let us understand.
It certainly wasn't the fault of the actors. Tracy Sunderland and Matthew Cameron Clark, who play Mel and Ted, a married couple who have lost a son, are clearly superb, despite the fact that I didn't like the material they had to work with or how they were delivering it (clearly choices of the author and the director). And Andrea Caban brought some much-needed humor to the play with her portrayal of Lenora, the woman Mel refers to as a call girl.
The dialogue relied on the repetition and variation of key phrases. The same question might get asked four or five times, one right after another. The character who answers might give a different answer each time, or might give a synonym of their previous answer. Occasionally this leads to some genuine laugh lines, and there are some witty one-liners. But overall it's a structure that may have been interesting to play with as a writer, but did little for me as an audience member. The dialogue was also delivered in a very stilted, unnatural, often rushed manner. It seems at times like the emphasis is on all the wrong words. Real people don't talk like that.
One of the things I did like were the songs in the play -- a capella little tunes out of the middle of nowhere. One of my favorites was sung by Beau Baxter (who played Guy), a list of things you cannot sell on eBay (a list including "human organs" and "stolen stuff.") They added a little levity to a play that felt, so much of the time, completely numb.
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