“We’re living through a comedy-as-theatre boom,” Helen_E_Shaw writes. But Colin Quinn’s pseudo-cantankerous standup special, “Small Talk,” is shaggy-comic territory, a club set barely disguised as a show.
A backdrop, a stool, a beverage, a microphone. A man wanders onstage and grumbles self-deprecatingly; the audience fidgets in anticipation. The world is in flames, and such familiar comforts are an escape. Please, let us laugh.
In this less polished show, directed by James Fauvell, it seems as though Quinn originally planned to talk about something bigger than small talk. The set, designed by Zoë Hurwitz, hints that he intended to chart a history of self-expression: on a series of hanging chalkboards, we see words like “Persona,” reproductions of cave handprints, some emoji rebuses, and, bewilderingly, Modigliani’s “Girl in a Sailor’s Blouse.” He never refers to these.
Brevity is the soul of these exchanges. Quinn has a New Yorker’s impatience with asking too much of your neighbor—c’mon, bud, just acknowledge the weather and move along. He scoffs at what we once called political correctness and at the same time decries the profusion of ugly voices on the Internet. This tempts him into contradiction: he sometimes loves the invigorating wire brush of insult, other times waxes rueful about the end of manners. Regardless, there’s a mushy quality to “Small Talk.
The basic components of this one-man show are the same as those of “Small Talk”: a backdrop, some chairs, beverages, and a microphone . But in nearly every other way, the clean-cut Rapp is Quinn’s opposite. Very little in “Small Talk” touches on the personal—Quinn cringes at anything that smacks of confession or mawkishness. In contrast, Rapp’s manner clings; his face pleads.
Oh, how I wish you’d been able to come with me to “cryptochrome.” Evan Silver, a rara avis of experimental theatre, presented this piece, a gorgeous, trippy eco-cabaret, in a Bushwick warehouse space called We Are Here, as part of the Exponential Festival. In the production, Silver’s alter ego Tiresias—the blind, gender-switching prophet of Greek mythology—directs us to nonhuman kinds of perception.
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