Today’s Special: I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It …
The Hideout,
Through May 13
Running time: 1 hr, 10 min
Shana Merlin’s right; one-woman-shows are indeed all too often about abuse, depression, and anorexia, and because of this precedent, it is indeed audacious for the well-adjusted young Merlin, whose parents say things to her like “You make my planet be beautiful,” and whose biggest tragedy in life was not getting into Yale, to put on a show about herself, specifically about her anxiety that she is not interesting enough to warrant our attention. So in the interest of fairness, she puts the box office take up front and tells us we can have our $5 back and leave whenever we decide the show gets too boring.
Today’s Special, as admirably directed by Louis Wells, is, in fact, interesting enough to warrant rapt attention, even though the core theme of the piece is Merlin’s fairly cheesy query, “Am I special?” Evocative of getting-into-college movies circa Ione Skye and freshman orientation seminars, Merlin’s “specialness trial” is far from a philosophical tour de force. At the same time, Merlin is so charming and displays such guts that no one makes a move to leave, except for one guy who goes to the bathroom and thereby incurs Merlin’s scorn (“You’re going to miss the best part!”).
Best parts include Merlin’s tale of her visit to a “Stress Management” class in which the group leader falls to pieces and an imitation of her father, a Santa Claus lookalike. When the young Shana asks her father how he can be Santa if he’s Jewish, he explains patiently that “Chinese people and Jews are the only ones who can work on Christmas Eve.” The hilarious live highlights reel of Merlin’s theatrical career includes a suspiciously high number of masculine roles, a stage résumé Merlin attributes to the fact that she’s not a skinny blonde sorority girl of the type preferred by, among others, one guy she used to date. After she delivered a suitably sexy line to said guy, he complimented her on her “confidence.” As an answer to him and all the others, Merlin delivers a hotbox number called “I am a vamp,” which she makes into an audience participation number. (A critic’s plea: Won’t anyone leave the poor audience alone?).
In all of this, there is about Merlin a youngest-child adorability that’s hard to deny. She pouts when things don’t go her way (for instance, when her sleeve gets caught during a costume change) and she makes it clear that she both expects and deserves our empathy for these sweet little gaffes. Still, Merlin pushes the cute act a little far with her closing song, a chipper “We don’t have to change at all” number. This very “Up With People” ditty epitomizes the naïve, syrupy end of Merlin’s comedic spectrum. Given that this show was created as part of her undergraduate senior thesis for UT, it is to be expected that as she develops as a performer the other end — the wry, well-timed, endearing route she appears fully capable of taking — will dominate her future productions.
This article appears in May 12 • 2000.