Random Postcards: “He Who Laughs: Live!”
Posted July 6, 2011 at 2:23 pm
From Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival
By Jarrett Lyons
Each week we pick at random a postcard for a show happening in New York City this summer and provide a run-down of what you can expect to see when you attend.
This past Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending “He Who Laughs: Live”, at Dixon Place, one of the many varied and explorative shows that make up the annual Hot! Festival, This year will be the 20th year for the festival, which celebrates New York City’s queer culture, making it the oldest continually running LGBTQ festival in the world. This year will also be Dixon Place’s 25th Anniversary, another auspicious milestone for the experimental theater venue.
For those of you who haven’t been to the renovated Dixon Place before (hopefully that’s not too many of you at this point) the theatre is nestled in an unassuming building on the Lower East Side, with an atmosphere that is as much living room and bar, as it is performance venue. It’s one of the most welcoming downtown performance spaces, and it highlights the fact that when you enter the world of Downtown theater you really are becoming a part of a community, even if only for a night.
The performance space is surprisingly large, and the spare aesthetic of the “He Who Laughs” set design highlights this, with nothing more than 5 chairs and 3 microphones, setting us up for a minimalist evening. The primary visuals for the production are provided through projection on the back wall of the stage, which were more than enough to support the stories, which did most of the work establishing the experience.
In theory, “He Who Laughs: Live”, sounds questionable. In this day and age of unfettered and omnipresent social media, the idea of doing a live staged reading of a blog seems a bit meta for my taste. What’s the point? Is it even possible to provide a dramatic structure to a blog?
I shouldn’t have worried.
Playwright Isaac Oliver’s blog “He Who Laughs, or, The Complete Idiots Guide to Intimacy” provides a wealth of material to draw from for a staged reading. Scenes (and posts, evidently) range from the endearing, to the perverse, to the surreal (at one point, Oliver reflects on most of his issues with a manipulative Starbucks coffee cup). The language is intelligent but not overly so. (“Will her teeth be blue from the wine and her eyes dead from Connecticut?”) And he does a great job of blending sincerity and humor to keep the audience on its toes.
Each scene in this episodic narrative attempts, and generally succeeds in capturing the trials and tribulations of dating in a city and a community that is forever shifting it’s mores, and is never quite as predictable as you’d expect. Fortunately, the humor of the author prevents the piece from becoming solipsistic, and keeps it firmly planted in the tradition of humorists like David Sedaris. Throughout the evening, the stories maintain a sharp and light feel, which is a perfect fit for a festival that seeks to expand both awareness and appreciation for the queer experience in all its forms.
The HOT! Festival runs from now until August 6 at Dixon Place.
For more information visit www.HOTFestival.org