The Best of the Fest
Unlike tragedy, comedy cannot exist in a void, as the winning entries from the Factory Theater’s “Shut Up and Laugh” festival demonstrate. The harder these artists work to nail down tiny comic details, the more satisfying the results.
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Professional clown Nathan Carver and lyric soprano Sarah Worthington have clearly sweated bullets over their 20-minute routine, Singer and Saw. Their comedy act–an entity all but extinct in contemporary theater–has been painstakingly crafted from the simplest of materials. Carver enters in a one-piece navy work suit and sets a music stand center stage. When he catches sight of the audience he freezes for a moment, then smiles with all the ease of a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. With the expression cemented in place he slowly backs up, taking forever to reach the rear of the stage, where he pauses for a moment, nods politely, and dashes off in an awkward flurry of knees and elbows.
While these one-liners are clever enough, Stern spends most of her time telling stories, from which her comedy flows naturally. She gets stuck shopping for bras at JCPenney with her father, a six-foot-three, 280-pound man sweetly pawing through bins of delicates for her. She is debilitated by a “sniper attack” of constipation at a fancy charity function while wearing the skin-tight red dress of the show’s title and ends up doubled over in a toilet stall, her arm extended in front of her to keep the stall’s broken door closed, “looking like a really pained member of the Supremes.”
