The theater, everybody knows, is all about characters in action, usually several, sometimes lots, all colliding in a story about people in conflict.
But then there are Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Mason, John Leguizamo, Rob Becker, Rose Abdoo, Marga Gomez, David Cale, Paula Killen, Kevin Kling, Jim Carrane, Geoff Hoyle, John McGivern, Bill Irwin, Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray and Jeff Garlin.
All have performed noteworthy one-person shows in the last 10 years, part of a movement that has reshaped both the content and commerce of the industry. Many of them, to boot, began in some form of standup comedy and bring elements of standup to their theatrical endeavors.
The whole thing, say the experts, is a matter of necessity and virtue.
“Comedy clubs are closing all over the country,” says Irene Pinn, currently Gomez’s manager and formerly associated with Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard and a host of other solo comic performers. Echoing a sentiment widely held in the comedy industry, she adds, “The clubs got so successful and numerous that television caught on. Now there’s standup shows nightly on cable TV. One alternative for the performers is the theater, where they play to a different audience, with a different kind of material.”
And there’s aesthetic virtue for the performers, too: The theater allows a subtler, more developed and extended kind of comedy than the setup, punchline, setup, punchline uniformly expected in a comedy nightclub. “Lily and Whoopi really paved the way, in that sense,” Pinn says. “They demonstrated you can produce one-person comic shows with characterizations and a depth unseen in a club act.”
The move also can be great for the producer. At a time when a typical Broadway musical costs anywhere from $4 million to more than $10 million to capitalize, one-person shows cost more in the realm of $300,000 to $500,000. There’s only one performer’s salary, for starters, and usually no sets, costumes or prop fees. It’s minimalist theater, highlighting an artistry that can, with the likes of Tomlin, employ the audience’s own imagination and the performer’s versatility to produce an illusion of spectacle.
Still, there remains a level at which these performers have to fight for respect. Jackie Mason just filed a $25 million lawsuit against the five organizations that select Tony Award nominees, charging that he was unfairly barred from Tony consideration. Tomlin’s success in the mid-’80s netted her a Tony for best actress, though her writer, Jane Wagner, was denied even a nomination for the show’s inventive script. Earlier, in the 1970s, Tomlin’s “Appearing Nitely” had earned only a “special” Tony, excluding her from the actress category.
But the successes of Tomlin and Goldberg, which come after earlier inroads made by the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, are part of a modern revolution absorbing sophisticated comedy into the world of legitimate theater. In Chicago as elsewhere, the one-person show, often by a former or current comedian, is now a theatrical mainstay. All the people listed above, except for Bill Irwin, have performed their shows in this city.
Yet another, Sherry Glaser, will be performing her “Family Secrets” as a mainstage offering next season at the downtown Shubert Theatre, where one-person shows are starting to show up on a surprisingly regular basis.
Also coming to the Shubert is perhaps one of the most surprising stories of them all: Rob Becker’s “Defending the Caveman.” Without the name recognition of a Tomlin or Mason, often with so-so reviews from drama critics, Becker has transformed his nightclub routine into a 90-minute theatrical presentation that manages long runs, cult followings and fierce ticket fever wherever he plays.
Launched in 1991 in San Francisco and successful in Dallas, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, Becker’s show opened here in late March and played for four months at the 400-seat Briar Street Theatre. His sellout audiences there (he’s now on vacation) have inspired a follow-up two-week engagement, beginning Sept. 13, at the 2,000-seat Shubert. One of those two weeks is already completely sold out. Lines of would-be ticket buyers waited in front of the theater “like I’ve never seen in my experience,” says Jill Hurwitz, Shubert director of marketing.
Becker, like so many, edged into the theater from the sometimes grubby, sometimes wearisome world of the comedy club. Manager of a West Coast sandwich shop in the early ’80s, he took a class in comedy and found himself doing open-mikes at the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco.
By 1987, he’d tired somewhat of the club treadmill. “I started writing `Defending the Caveman’ in 1987,” he recalls. “A lot of it came about because I saw Tomlin in 1985 and realized what you could do with comedy in the theater. No one is smoking or drinking. They’re paying attention, for starters. And for the first time, with her, I saw a solo act that used the three-act structure of playwriting and the movies.”
Becker says he studied playwriting to come up with his show, which centers primarily on two characters, Becker himself and his wife, in a piece all about modern mating. Offstage, his are not the one-liner thoughts that might be expected from a comic-turned-thespian. He has done quite a lot of academic research, citing Greek precedents for the solo performer as theatrical mainstay and pointing out the tradition is actually older than productions with multiple characters.
“In fact, when the Greeks first put more than one character on stage, there was great controversy,” Becker notes.
In that sense, Becker represents the bulk of these performers, who have moved into the theater as much for aesthetic reasons as for those of comfort or finance. “If you do it for the money,” Becker says, “you’re bound to fail. It has to come out of your guts.”
Since that’s often the case, the one-person show represents a meeting ground of many types of performers and styles. Not all one-person shows in the theater come from stand-up comics, of course. Some come from performance art, while still others, including Tomlin, seem to reside in a kind of half-way world between theater and stand-up by the nature of their unusual approaches to humor.
But another interesting sign of fading barrier between comedy club and theater is a small, upcoming play that uses the phenomenon as its fictional story line. “Bark Like A Comic,” written by and starring Chicagoans Jimmy Rhoades, A.J. Lentini and Bill Gorgo, opens Thursday at Victory Gardens Studio Theater and tells of three standup comics interacting in a backstage “green room” as they take turns going on at a Midwestern club.
Their story, taken from their own lives, reflects both the frustration of the modern comic and the urge to do something more artistically challenging. “When I first came here six years ago from Detroit, there were 10 or so clubs to work in,” says Rhoades. “Now there’s more like 5. The industry is in disarray. They’re papering audiences to fill rooms and just sell drinks now, and when that happens, there’s a natural decline.
“Once you start making money off the bar alone, you’re bound to get drink-friendly jokes,” adds Rhoades, 26, the youngest of the trio.
“It’s like a fork in the road,” agrees Lentini, 40, a former radio deejay who’s been in the comedy business for the last 10 years. “Either you stick to your guns and do more creative stuff, and then don’t work, or you do the same old gags about people who have dog pets vs. people who have cat pets and McNugget jokes. Club audiences have gotten to a point where all you have to say is `How about those Chicken McNuggets?’ and you get a laugh.”
“People in a club don’t necessarily like to soul search,” says Gorgo. “What originally drove this market, the anxiety comedy of Lenny Bruce, say, didn’t populate it during the mid-’80s boom. The new faces drawn in by the boom weren’t necessarily the sons and daughters of Bruce.
“As a result, the pure comic fans have stopped coming. One-third of an audience now, if you ask, will admit they’re in a club for the first time. Why? They didn’t come for 10 years and now they’re coming because someone in the audience won free tickets.
“There’s no layering in comedy as with other art forms,” Gorgo continues. “When I was a kid, pizzerias were big. They became restaurants and now they’re `ristorantes.’ But comedy clubs stay comedy clubs. And now they’re closing. One bar owner recently said to me, `You guys sell beer. When you stop selling it, something else will come along.’ ” Comedians, in other words, sometimes find themselves the human equivalent of the mechanical bulls of the ’70s.
Of course, there’s a danger that the whole thing is being overcooked on the theatrical side, too. The theater is hardly an industry bubbling with cash and high profits. “Now everybody and their uncle wants to leave comedy for theater,” admits Pinn. “I must get 20 to 30 tapes a day from people who suddenly want to mount one-person shows. Yes, I’m very afraid the market will get glutted.
“But,” she adds, with a hint of the undying optimism and ruthlessness that reign in both clubs and the legitimate theater, “the cream will always rise to the top.”
