Carmela Rago and Michael K.Meyers
at Cafe Voltaire, through December 27
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But in her most recent pieces Rago stands stock-still, reading from a binder, shielded from her audience by a black metal music stand. All pretense of playing a persona has been dropped. Gone is the self-conscious dancer who resented Nin’s egotism and the sad, self-deluding shopaholic. Instead Carmela is merely Carmela now, standing onstage reading from a binder. Oddly enough it’s a loss, and not just because Rago had such a gift for playing quirky characters. She seems somehow less present and visible to her audience now, as if Rago the critic had shamed Rago the artist into hiding the most charming and childish parts of her soul.
Rago’s storytelling gifts have gotten stronger. She Cannot Keep a Neat House is perhaps the most succinct, powerful tale she’s ever written. But we hear all three of these poignant stories secondhand, told in the third person by a performer whose warm, witty, quavering voice and evocative gestures seem intentionally confined by the conventions of a staged reading.
Carmela Rago’s question from the early 80s–“Why is Anais Nin so full of herself?”–came back to me the other day while I was watching Michael H. Brownstein fumble his way through his latest one-man show, Let’s Order Grasshopper ‘Cause Everything Else Tastes Like Chicken, a tiresome collection of allegedly autobiographical accounts of his life on the front lines as a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.
