Serious clowning around in ACT’s Humor Abuse

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Lorenzo Pisoni recalls growing up as the youngest member of the Pickle Family Circus in his one-man show Humor Abuse at American Conservatory Theater. The photo behind him (by Terry Lorant) shows young Pisoni, his father, Larry Pisoni, and his paternal grandfather. Below: Pisoni describes how as a child clown he was stuffed into a trunk before making his big entrance in his father’s act. Photos by Chris Bennion


Now, apparently, it’s time to hear from Bay Area sons.

At Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Jonathan Moscone (with an assist from Tony Taccone) is grappling with the loss and legacy of his father, slain San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, in Ghost Light. Now at American Conservatory Theater, Lorenzo Pisoni is recounting his childhood as the son of a clown, Pickle Family Circus’ Larry Pisoni, in Humor Abuse.

Right at the top of this captivating 80-minue show, the younger Pisoni tells us flat out that he was raised to be his father’s straight man. “I’m not funny,” he says. This is a solo autobiographical show (which premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2009 and played Seattle Repertory Theatre last fall), but in many ways, it’s a two-man show. We only see and hear from Pisoni, now in his mid-30s, but the presence of his father is so strong he’s practically a co-star.

Unlike a lot of solo shows, Pisoni’s comes with some great shtick built in. He made his unofficial debut in the Pickle Family Circus at age 2 during an impromptu act during intermission. From age 6 to 10 he was a contracted clown doing a double act with his dad, and at age 11, when his parents had left the circus, he continued touring with the troupe on his own.

So what we get is sort of a Pisoni Family greatest hits package, which is a delightful way to spend an evening. Clowning is serious business, and Pisoni makes that point strongly has he discusses the ways his dad “trained” him, which is to say made him do things over and over again without really offering to help. It comes across as a sort of tough-love approach to learning the clown ropes.

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Pisoni re-creates some of his dad’s great bits (including an interaction with a lovely lady in the audience and a series of rogue red balloons) and shows off some of what he learned at the feet of a master (who also happened to be his dad, which leads to some tricky emotional territory that Pisoni does not shy away from exploring). The two best bits involve suitcases and a staircase and diving flippers and a ladder. The latter is especially interesting because it’s the first act that the young Pisoni created without his dad, and it includes a fairly high level of (pretend and alarmingly funny) pain.

Working with director Erica Schmidt (his co-creator), Pisoni melds his life story with deft and often delightful clowning. His leading man good looks are almost distracting – are truly funny clowns ever this handsome? But as Pisoni reminds us, he’s not funny. That self-effacement is not really necessary, though, because he’s funny. He even gets a laugh when he says he’s not funny. He’s got charm and is at ease on stage. His clowning skills don’t make you forget the likes of Bill Irwin or David Shiner, but he’s masterful in his own hard-working way.

What’s also interesting about this show is what Pisoni isn’t saying. He is clearly not going to discuss his mother or his sister (a successful circus artist in her own right, Gypsy Snider of the extraordinary Canadian troupe Les Sept Doigts de la Main), who must have had a major impact on his life growing up. But this is primarily the story of a father and a son, their bond and their difficulties. During his teen years, Pisoni and his dad didn’t talk a lot, and it’s hard to get a bead on what their relationship is like now.

Though filled with respect, admiration and even awe, Humor Abuse – perhaps the title is telling – doesn’t brim with filial affection. This isn’t a love letter to Larry Pisoni, but it does turn out to be a tribute to Lorenzo Pickle, the clown character created by Larry Pisoni. Larry, the father, remains an enigma in Humor Abuse, but his creations, Lorenzo Pickle and Lorenzo Pisoni, emerge as genuine stars.

[bonus video]
From last fall’s Seattle Repertory Theatre run of Humor Abuse:

[bonus bonus video]
Lorenzo Pisoni tours his hometown, San Francisco.

HUMOR ABUSE VLOG 7: San Francisco from Lo Pisoni on Vimeo.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Lorenzo Pisoni’s Humor Abuse continues through Feb. 5 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10-$85. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Don Reed checks into The Kipling Hotel

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Don Reed wrote, directed and stars in The Kipling Hotel, his latest autobiographical show at The Marsh Berkeley. Photo by Ric Omphroy


I interviewed Don Reed about his new autobiographical solo show The Kipling Hotel, which opens this weekend at The Marsh Berkeley.

You can read the article here.

This is the second chapter in what will likely be a trilogy of solo shows about the Oakland native’s life. The first was the phenomenally successful East 14th, which ran at The Marsh for 2 1/2 years – no mean feat for a guy who lives in Los Angeles and works as the warmup comedian for “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

One thing that didn’t make the interview was the fact that Reed also has his own media company, Reediculous Media, specializing in voiceover, copywriting, tag lines, marketing and more. His clients include companies like Nickelodeon and Activision. Add to this the fact that Reed is also writing books based on his shows and you have a true Renaissance man.

“It’s like Benjamin Franklin was a sculptor, a writer, a statesman and a scientist,” Reed says. “If you’re not many things, you’re no one when you show up at a party. I love dancing in different areas of media, from theater to books to advertising. For me, it’s all about bringing a comedic spirit to this little ball we roll around on.”

Reed has also been involved in what he calls “a long, slow conversation” with Robert Townsend about the possibility of turning his story into a screenplay. But at 52, Reed is too old to play his younger self.

“But I know who should do it,” he says. “My older son is 15. He looks just like me, and he can cry on cue.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Don Reed’s The Kipling Hotel continues through Feb. 12 at The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. Tickets are $20-$35. Call 415-282-3055 or visit www.themarsh.org.

Marga Gomez: So old, so funny

EXTENDED THROUGH DEC. 17!

Marga Gomez gets a horizontal groove on in her new solo show Not Getting Any Younger at The Marsh in San Francisco. Photos by David Wilson

Though hardly a senior citizen, Marga Gomez needs to talk about her age. That doesn’t mean she’ll tell you her age, but it does mean she’ll regale you with her thoughts on the aging process for 80 minutes in her new solo theatrical venture, Not Getting Any Younger at The Marsh in San Francisco.

Probably best known as a stand-up comic, Gomez says she’s considered a pioneer for being one of the first out lesbian comics. But she hates being called a pioneer because it makes her sound old – like she traveled to gigs in a covered wagon. But Gomez is a theatrical force as well. This is her ninth solo show, and if you’ve seen any of her previous theater work (especially the shows about her show-biz parents), you know how artfully she blends the high entertainment value of stand-up comedy with the more deeply felt levels of autobiographical storytelling.

It is, frankly, news that the ever-youthful Gomez is not getting any younger. She’s as spry as ever (just wait until you see her do the twist and then demonstrate some more contemporary dances moves she likes to call “the anal twist”). For someone who looks so good and is working at the top of her considerable game, it’s somewhat surprising that Gomez is so worked up about landing in mid-middle age.

One of the key components of Younger is that Gomez intends to reveal her actual age. In storytelling terms, this is called suspense. If you look up her Wikipedia page (which she says she composed herself while stoned), the birth date reads: June 19, 1960 [citation needed]. Citation needed indeed. In attempting to shave a few years off her age, Gomez admits, she actually made herself older than she intended. Or so she’d like us to believe.

In her laugh-out-loud show, Gomez discusses visiting the amusement park Freedomland in the Bronx when she was young. Curiously, the Wikipedia page for that park states that opening day was June 19, 1960. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to find out Gomez’s real name. Just a casual breeze through her press clips, you see one reference to the move she made from Long Island to San Francisco when she was 20. Another story places that move in 1979.

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Whatever her age, whether she’s in her early 50s or whether, like her mother, she holds to an ever less believable 21, Gomez is ageless because she’s a dynamic performer and afunny and talented writer. Show business is such a warped world that age can mean life or death to a performer, especially a woman, who is likely to be more harshly judged for having the nerve to age (see Joan Rivers [citation needed]). In a perfect world, Gomez wouldn’t care how old she was because age bears no relation whatsoever to her gifts as a performer. The years have certainly helped shape her into the performer she is today (thank you, years), but they have yet to diminish any of her spark.

Originally directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang in a workshop earlier this year, Younger is really less about age than it is about lying. Referring back to that pesky Wikipedia page, there’s a mention that Gomez is known for her honesty. Of course we know on that very page she’s lying about her age. In setting about the creation of this show, she reveals that her mother lied about her age for much of her life. That’s one of many thoughts she explored in the writing process, which took place primarily in her neighborhood Starbuck’s (“an atmosphere conducive to writing about lies”). Over many soy lattes, she worried about Social Security ceasing to exist exactly on her 65th birthday. She also fretted over schoolchildren who were ever-present in the coffee shop (“What could possibly be so bad in their lives that they need coffee?”) and even more so about the babies, whom she does not like (“They’re stupid adults waiting to happen.”).

She hides from a former lover who has let her hair go naturally gray, while Gomez admits to having had gray hair since childhood (you can’t see it, she says, because now it’s internal).

Like any person talking about the aging process, Gomez has to let out her inner curmudgeon, the one that wants to share that she grew up before the advent of the Internet, that she knows what it’s like to have used a rotary phone, that she studied arithmetic in school (not math) and that she remembers Valencia Street before the trees and hipsters when it was mostly mariachi bands and lesbians. Her funniest curmudgeon story involves a trip to that nightmarish palace of eternal youth, Forever 21. Suffice it to say that if Gomez ever thanks you for anything, don’t answer with “uh huh.” And whatever you do, DO NOT call her ma’am. “That’s a word that can give you arthritis,” she says.

Another show high point involves a childhood friend named Lisa, who liked to recruit her friends for the purpose of teasing and taunting old people. Gomez reacts to that by forming her own short-lived do-gooder club called Old People Helper. When she goes to Lisa’s house for a birthday party, the festivities are presided over by her father, an ex-Marine who was tossed for being too aggressive. If you don’t think Gomez can be an effective ex-Marine, you sadly underestimate her skills as an actor. Judi Dench could only dream of being such a scary Marine.

There are several moments in Younger when Gomez reveals some of what’s really going on with her, as when she mentions that she’s six years away from the age at which her dad died and seven years away from the age her mom died. That, more than anything we hear, makes you understand what all this fussing over age is really about. Marga Gomez may not be getting any younger, but she’s getting funnier. And braver.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Marga Gomez’s Not Getting Any Younger continues an extended run through Dec. 17 at The Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco.Tickets are $15-$35 on a sliding scale. Call 415-282-3055 or visit www.themarsh.org.

Weight and see: Don’t miss 40 Pounds

EXTENDED THROUGH APRIL 30!
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Pidge Meade details her personal transformation in the autobiographical solo show 40 Pounds in 12 Weeks at The Marsh Studio Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by David Allen

 

They say you should never ask a lady about her weight. Well, Pidge Meade is a lady who freely talks about her weight – in fact she’s written an entire solo show about it.

40 Pounds in 12 Weeks: A Love Story, now at The Marsh in San Francisco, is Meade’s intimate, not to mention funny, moving and generally marvelous, account of being a formerly fat lady. One of her recurring characters is a carnival barker who keeps directing our attention to the exhibit of the formerly fat lady trying to navigate her way through difficult life situations such as basking in (too much?) attention at 20-year college reunion or going the metaphysical, from-the-inside-out route toward weight loss.

The carnival barker represents the show’s snarky side because Meade herself is as sweet and likable person as you’ll ever see on stage. Oh, she’ll curse from time to time or show a flash anger, but she’s exactly the kind of amiable person you’d like to spend 70 minutes with. The audience, as audiences do, remains mostly silent throughout her show, yet it somehow feels like a conversation.

Developed with and directed by Charlie Varon, himself a master of the solo show, 40 Pounds tells the story of Meade’s ride on the weight roller coaster. When she went off to college, she immediately gained 40 pounds, much to the dismay of her father, an Olympics-level gymnastic coach. His tough love approach to his daughter’s weight gain was to say that if the weight she gained her freshman year wasn’t gone by the end of summer, she wouldn’t be going back to school at all. Thus began the summer of hell.

More than that, it was the beginning of losing, gaining, losing and gaining more. At her heaviest, about six years ago, Meade was carrying nearly 200 pounds on her slight five-foot frame. She was 198 1/2 pounds, or as she puts it, “almost busting the deuce.”

Meade frames her story with the college reunion, where old friends are astonished to see her so slim and trim. One friend in particular, the still-smiling sorority gal Susie, is insistent about discovering Meade’s secret to weight loss. Was it a juice fast? Well, one was certainly attempted. Was it South Beach? Atkins? Binge and purge? It seems there’s little in the world of weight loss that Meade hadn’t tried.

But the whole point of her show is that there’s no easy answer to weight loss. It’s a deeply personal, highly individual issue that is intimately connected to family issues, relationships and emotional well being.

At the heart of this tale is Meade’s relationship with her father. In those key scenes when she plays her father, the show takes on an utterly compelling dramatic tone. “Break out the tissues, I’ve got daddy issues,” she sings at one point. On the drive back from college, Meade’s dad tells her she’ll never achieve her potential if she’s fat. In the midst of her arduous summer of “weight loss or else,” Meade visits her dad while he’s working with his gymnasts. Chiding her publically, he says, “What do you do with an ass like that?” You feel Meade’s pain so acutely at that moment you want to crawl under you chair.

And what does Meade do with an ass like that? She creates an extraordinary show that has the courage to talk about weight in a way that has the power to change the way you perceive obesity. We’re at a pivotal moment in this country when it comes to childhood obesity. First Lady Michelle Obama has made it the focus of her work in the White House (no matter what Sarah Palin has to say about imposing socialist controls on our kids), and as Meade points out, with 10 million obese children in this country, we risk creating “an entire generation of ginormity.”

Meade gets so honest that she even admits to missing being overweight because it was easier to tell the good people from the bad based on how they react to her. Ouch. That smarts. But Meade isn’t trying to make us feel guilty or make us want to go hug a fat person. She wants to illuminate her own experience – which is ongoing – of personal transformation. When the pain not doing anything became greater than the pain of change, she took action. We can all relate to that, and that’s why 40 Pounds in 12 Weeks is so successful. We’re all part of her story.

BONUS INTERVIEW!

I interviewed Pidge Meade for the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Pidge Meade’s 40 Pounds In 12 Weeks continues an extended run through April 30 at The Marsh Studio Theater, 1074 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$35. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.themarsh.org for information.

 

Astride a sexy beast in Aurora’s Palomino

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David Cale wrote, directed and stars in Palomino at the Aurora Theatre Company. Photos by David Allen.

David Cale is a perfectly attractive human being – he’s got great posture, a receding hairline and a beautifully expressive face. But once you fall under his spell as a storyteller – and you will fall under his spell – he becomes vivid, physically varied characters without doing much more than manipulating his mellifluous voice and holding his lean body differently.

Over the course of 95 minutes in the beguiling Palomino now at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company, Cale becomes, among others, a sexy Irish horse-drawn carriage driver in his early 30s, an Australian widow in late middle age and a super-sexy blonde British babe.

And he’s utterly believable as all of them.

Cale wrote, directed and stars in Palomino, the story of Kieren, one of Central Park’s best looking carriage drivers, and how he inadvertently became a gigolo to some of Manhattan’s upper-crust ladies.

The play started out as a short radio play on NPR’s The Next Big Thing and has evolved into a one-man play populated by seven characters – men, women, straight, gay, uptight and not so uptight.

Cale’s gift as a storyteller is his focus on story over character. He does just enough acting to effectively transform himself into the people populating his story, but he never relinquishes the reigns as our chief storyteller. The stage may seem to fill with personalities, but Cale’s remains chief among them.

Palomino1He’s the gifted writer in charge who can paint a character in just a few deft strokes. Kieren, the Irish rogue who fancies his adventure as a gigolo will make a fine novel one day, reveals complicated depths. His blessing in life, he tells us, is that he doesn’t worry. And Vallie, the widow he begins to fall for, emerges as the kind of woman you want to have drinks with.

Vallie is having a hard time breaking out of her old life. She has “joined the ranks of the sexually invisible” and realizes that her marriage, which was loving but lacking in passion, was something she took too much for granted. Through her interaction with Kieren – including a steamy first encounter on the living room floor – she wakes up to herself and, in her words, drops a bomb on her old life so she can start again with the durable pieces (and friends) that survived the blast.

Vallie’s story is the heart of the show, though Kieren’s erotic adventures are the motor that turns this particular carousel. The plot does indeed turn in interesting directions, taking us full circle into several different love stories, all of which link back to the carriage drawn by a gorgeous Palomino mare.

On a simple, graceful set by Kate Boyd, Heather Basarab’s lights help create a scintillating mood, while Rick Takes’ projections set the scene (a Big Sur beach, Central Park, Malta) and clarify the character roster.

The production elements are minimal because Cale is the ultimate special effect. He trots through Palomino at a mesmeric pace. Watching a love scene unfold between Kieren and Vallie is a marvel as Cale switches genders as effortlessly as he toggles between the Irish and the Australian accents.

By the end of Palomino, we’ve been on an intimate adventure that feels epic in its emotions. This is one of those solo shows that feels as substantial as a fully cast play because Cale as writer, storyteller and actor (in that order) grabs our full attention. He doesn’t take advantage of that control, but neither does he let us go until his wondrous story has been told.

VIDEO EXTRA

Here’s a glimpse of Cale working his magic during the world premiere run last year at Kansas City Repertory Theatre.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

David Cale’s Palomino continues through Dec. 5 at the Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $34-$45. Call 510 843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org.