I WAS A CHILD OF DEPRESSION PARENTS
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I’ve been bedeviled by such questions ever since I saw David Parris’s lackluster one-man show, I Was a Child of Depression Parents. Wittily subtitled a “Twelve-Step Performance Piece,” it nonetheless lacks both the therapy-born insight and the unifying theme the subtitle implies. Instead Parris–the show’s author and performer–serves up an evening of six half-digested, unevenly performed autobiographical fragments.
Parris starts out on the wrong foot with a trite, not very funny bit. Obeying the third law of stand-up comedy–“Abuse those closest to the stage”–he sits at one of the tables in Sheffield’s cabaret space and pours his heart out to an unwitting patron. Meanwhile behind him an uncredited actress, who appears nowhere else in the show, reveals a series of signs that undercut Parris’s confessions. When he tells us, “I loved college. It was the first time I saw the beauty of diversity,” the sign behind him reads “liberal.” When he says, “I fell in love with this Denzel Washington type,” the sign reads “faggot.” Eventually these signs begin to contradict each other, until by the end Parris has been labeled an idealist and a realist, a liberal and a conservative, gay and homophobic. Parris’s point is all too clear: labels don’t mean much. What he fails to tell us is why we have to sit through a five-minute sketch to learn this.
But sadly, nothing else comes close to the power of this last scene. Parris has a long way to go before he understands how to cross the gulf that separates the artistic from the merely therapeutic.
