Solopalooza
at Sheffield’s Beer and Wine Garden, through March 28
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People who hate performance art are probably thinking of the third category, with its beautiful but empty imagery, unfathomable symbolism, and fractured story telling (frequently coupled with a pathological dread of entertaining, or even engaging, the audience). True, a few brilliant performers–among them Goat Island, Michael Kalmes Meyers, the Baubo folks in their more inspired moments–can take these elements and fashion moving, beautiful, transcendent work.
Marx could take a lesson from David Hauptschein and Beau O’Reilly, both on the second week’s bill and both practitioners of a laid-back, thoroughly unpretentious kind of self-revelatory monologue. Like Jeff Garlin, Hauptschein and O’Reilly have “thrown away their acts,” spinning their monologues spontaneously. In both cases the result is totally disarming. Hauptschein tells stories of weird people he’s encountered on the el, including an odd character who shouted at him, “Hey, sit with me!” and then admitted, when Hauptschein joined him, that the best way to keep people from sitting with you is to shout “Hey, sit with me!” All of Hauptschein’s stories are told in the rambling, amused, but essentially unpolished style he uses to host his open-mike readings of letters and diaries.
Masterson doesn’t spend much time telling stories in his hour’s worth of card tricks. In the most involved one he folds a playing card into the shape of a frog who’s searching for a princess to kiss him and turn him back into a face card. Nor is his act as polished or well researched as Ricky Jay’s. And though his tricks are as astounding as Ricky Jay’s, there are far fewer of them. Masterson’s 52 assistants don’t work as hard.
