AISLE SAY New York

WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY…

Reviewed by David Spencer

A clutch of highly personal monologue plays by women have opened recently, and here’s a quick rundown:

            This first is a post-mortem: Surprisingly, despite its international acclaim, recent sellout status in NY, being the basis for a hit TV series and launching a now-prominent career, I couldn’t get with Phoebe Walter-Bridge’s Fleabag, despite the audience around me clearly being in love with it and her (she’s a very talented performer, by the way). So mine is not the review you read to tap into the zeitgeist; mine is just the small print on the label. I attended Fleabag cold, without knowing much of the background I’ve just particularized; and then, uncharacteristically for me, checked the reviews after, because I had a nagging suspicion…and sure enough, the precise thing I didn’t like about it is the feature for which it is lauded. Which is the darkly comic presentation of a character chronicling the sadness of her life, triggered by her own self-absorbed independence, and a sexual liberation that seems the opposite of freeing. Not that I have any hard-and-fast bias against self-absorption as a character trait (I have a modicum of it myself), but I need a reason to care about that person, a larger context, if I don’t share the same—I assume—rueful self-recognition that draws people to this particular creation. And since I don’t, the wallow felt unearned. So knowing Fleabag’s universal resonance, I can’t in good conscience say it nay…I’m certainly in the minority. I can only say I was charmed at times by the performer but detached from the material.

*******

            On the other hand, Accidentally Brave provided for me (and I think provides generally) the context that justifies the journey. Written and performed by actress Maddie Corman, it tells of the day her life turned upside down when, while she was driving to work, she got a hysterical call from her daughter that the police were raiding her house, arresting her husband and confiscating his hard drive. She was shortly to be informed that he was being charged with possession and promotion of child porn. Her husband, a former actor and prominent television director, had never directly been involved in the creation or been an active abuser (that was the blessing), but she still have to contend with the secret life of the person closest to her of which she had never had a clue.

             Ms. Corman tells the rest of the story of how she got through all this with a certain amount of discretion. Though she learned of her husband having had a history of childhood abuse, she asserts that that is his story, and not hers to tell. Likewise, she asserts but how her children worked through the crisis is their story, and not hers to tell. What we will witness is how she worked through the crisis—and that’s plenty enough harrowing—and heartbreaking, funny, and bittersweet—material to sustain the evening.

            What’s startling is how exposed Ms. Corman allows herself to be as she relates all, reliving a range of responses from the pragmatic assessment for daily survival to the rawest, ungoverned fury and sense of violation. (Equally bracing is the notion that she can can relive this narrative eight times a week.)

             But at the top of the show, she states that she does it in the hope that the chronicle of what she went through will help others facing their own unimaginable crises.  Given that she has crafted the narrative carefully and that she is never less than engaging,  Accidentally Brave is as good an asset for mental health as any.

*******

I didn’t review Heidi Schreck’s mostly monologue What the Constitution Means to Me upon its downtown debut at the New York Theatre Workshop because, full disclosure, I wasn’t sure what I thought of it. Not in terms of its agenda, which is noble indeed; but as an entertainment. Having seen it again upon its current limited-engagement Broadway transfer…I’m still not. But the friend who accompanied me confidently offered the view that it was “Pulitzer bait.” He may well be right.

On a rotary club auditorium type set, Ms. Schreck takes stage to tell us how she fell in love with the Constitution and how she paid her way through school as an itinerant teenage debater. With the help of Mike Iveson, who has several functions throughout the meeting, but principal of which is portraying the kind of debate moderator who routinely governed those events, she demonstrates how she framed and structured her debate positions, with numerous autobiographical and family history discursions, running the emotional gamut, to make it personal. And of course, the evolving American female perspective is key.

            The audience, both times I saw the show, was with Ms. Schreck every step of the way, laughing, murmuring, applauding & etc where they should. Why do I feel apart from that? At a guess, because the show is a philosophical rumination, and overarching is the idea, rather than a narrative. (Well, there is a narrative of sorts, but it's fragmented, anecdotal and involves era-jumping back and forth.) And while Ms. Schreck is certainly far more substantive in her examination than, say, Colin Quinn was in Red State, Blue State, once I understood the ride I was on, and being already empathetic and sympathetic to its purpose, I disengaged.

            I hasten to add, that’s very personal. I'm virtually the only person I know who had this reaction. A show specifically about the value of the Constitution, not only as a set of governing principles, but as an individual’s moral compass, seems to be needed right now, for reasons I need not articulate. No surprise that it’s doing well, and I don’t begrudge it anything. If you're like my friend (and seemingly the rest of the audience), you'll be far more into it than I was.

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