The secret looms, promising the pleasure of disclosure and the existence of some solid footing beneath all this melodrama.īerlant’s performance throughout is exquisite, impeccable, and absolutely deadpan. Surely this hidden trauma is the reason she is the way she is. Aren’t we aware of how much we are participating in this rigamarole, this false theatrical experience? At the same time, Berlant teases a dark secret, something lurking underneath all this overly expressive tropey playfulness. Can’t we feel that? Berlant suggests in one of her direct-to-audience interruptions. After all, we’re performing the role of an audience. During some of those interruptions, the house lights come up. Throughout the show, she falls out of “character,” interrupting the flow to speak directly to the audience about how the show is going or to converse with a stage manager in the wings about the timing of particular sound cues or technical effects. Here she is, onstage, performing the hammiest and most absurdly clownish scenes of this tale of woe: being too hammy and clownish to have a screen career. At every step of this evolution, Berlant plays to the joke of the premise. The camera is not for her! She should never try it! Then she moves to New York, where she again toys with appearing in movies and is once again crushed to realize her overblown style does not work. She begins acting in front of a camcorder in her childhood bedroom before being chided by her mother (Berlant, again, doing a deliberately nonsensical Irish accent), who insists that Berlant’s affect is too broad and extravagant to work on-camera. She is herself as a child, dreaming of performing for an audience as she stares out at the stars while sitting on her front porch. ![]() ![]() Berlant plays the history of herself as a young person who wants to become a performer. Kate’s total commitment to the bit is the show’s most glorious achievement. The bench she’s sitting on says “KATE.” The sign on her lap says “IGNORE ME.” Sitting on a bench right next to the box-office desk underneath an enormous close-up photo of her own eyes is Berlant herself, wearing large, dark sunglasses and tapping dispassionately on her phone. (Excuse me, the theatre.) The lobby is covered with Kate iconography: black-and-white decals of Berlant affixed to every surface a mannequin displaying the black tank top, belt, jeans, and boots Berlant wears in the show the word KATE stickered to light switches and outlets a bright wall with images of Berlant in various mugging poses designed for selfies. Kate opens before you actually enter the theater. All that digging down to locate inner truth business? Excavation of trauma as the best way to be vulnerable? Vulnerability as honesty? No, thank you! If that disinterest in interiority has the side effect of making everything feel a little hollow, so be it. She’s uninterested in the self we wonder about quietly in the dark nights of our souls, though - Berlant’s obsession is the external self, the selves we project, the selves we curate and manicure and present to others. Like much of Berlant’s work, Kate is an embodiment and celebration of performance, a towering and gorgeously produced monument to superficiality, playacting, pleasure, excess, and the self. ![]() I had largely forgotten about that show until I walked into the lobby of comedian Kate Berlant’s new one-woman show Kate, and I realized that at every turn, Kate is an elaborate joke on that exact style of show I’d seen a year ago. ![]() The end was designed as a moment of revelation, a bit of stagecraft where props transformed into a portrait and were presented with the satisfying neatness of an algebra solution. The hour was individual to the comedian’s life and experiences, but it was also instantly recognizable as being on-trend, where the best and most “important” humor was really about sadness and trauma. It was a carefully wrought tour through definitive childhood experiences, personality quirks, foundational traumas, and the loneliness of being a person, full of jokes that eventually gave way to scenes of gravity. Ī year or so ago, I saw a comedian’s hour-long autobiographical show. This review contains spoilers about Kate.
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