Not Quite Myself:
Uh, Yeah, ExactlyThe Off Center,
through May 27
There are some theatre companies that carry a chip of rebellion on their collective shoulders. They’re here to push the envelope, to expand the literal and metaphorical stages of possibility; they don’t want to break a leg unless they’re using that leg to break new ground. Old-school productions tend to give these groups and their followers what my grandfather called the heebie-jeebies — one might almost expect such a company to have “We Hate Theatre” as a slogan, good Christ. It doesn’t necessarily matter to this new breed if a production is good theatre or bad theatre; if the show is theatre-y theatre, it’s probably doomed from the start — in their eyes.
David Gunderson’s new solo show Not Quite Myself is theatre-y theatre. It’s about as theatre-y as theatre can be. In five monologues created by Gunderson and developed in conjunction with Austin Script Works, five different characters delineate the concerns of their worlds. Three are men, two are women; all are performed by the playwright himself. There’s Graeme, who’s knitting a sweater for the antenna of his Aunt Pearl’s Chrysler; Count Basil of Hoohah-‘pon-Brumley, an 18th-century fop who relates a sort of bawdy genealogy in over a dozen regular and extended limericks; Jackie, a middle-aged Jewish American (I believe the term is) Princess who’s mistaken for the late Jackie Onassis almost as frequently as she’d like; Iphigene, a self-proclaimed Dowager Hostess who’s giving a dinner party seminar; and, finally, Dodge, a curmudgeonly geezer whose recent stroke has epiphanized him into a kinder, gentler curmudgeon.
The writing that structures these characters is well-wrought and gives more than just a glimpse of five distinct personalities. Several of what might be attempts at humor fall a bit too quietly upon the audience, but these are compensated for by the intricacy of the characters’ stories, stories that speak of much time spent in honing them toward their points of clarity and insight.
Gunderson’s performance of this diverse group, though, might have benefited from more time spent in the practice of it — in order to invest the characters’ speech patterns, which displayed a variety of dialects, with dissimilar cadences. Each character, though separated by history and region and social strata, spoke (and moved) in the same oft-pausing, down-tempo pattern that too frequently hinted at misplaced or not-quite-remembered lines: something that, in non-traditional theatre, might be used purposefully as an effective tool for something, at least. But here, in such a classic presentation piece, it was a stumbling block that not even the dead-on cross-dressing for the Jackie and Iphigene characters could overcome. And even the show’s best piece — the poignant FronteraFest hit Stroke of Luck, featuring Dodge — lost some of its unique charm in the context of four other similarly-toned offerings.
What did stand out as equal to the best parts of the texts were the set design by Leilah Stewart — O, the postmodern stylishness of it! — and the device of allowing the audience to witness, through a filmy and patterned scrim behind the set’s multi-windowed housefront, Gunderson’s elaborate costume changes. But even if you love theatre and don’t need its edge to bleed for your entertainment, even if you can enjoy good stuff regardless of a somewhat textbook-y feel, you might be left wanting a bit more than is offered by this latest Script Works presentation.
This article appears in May 19 • 2000.