Ladee Leroy
Mary Moody Northen Theatre,
through June 13
Running time: 2 hrs
Deep inside, you keep things you never tell anyone: secret desires, insecurities, old grudges, childhood embarrassments you’ve never lived down, idiotic things you regretted the instant you said them, feelings about your job or family or significant other that you’d never share with them or anyone for fear of being misunderstood or looking foolish or hateful or weird, right? Well, Lee Eddy shares them. With the world. For years, she’s been writing about these things on the Web. And now she’s talking about them on the stage, where she spills all this intimate information to friends and strangers while looking them right in the eyes.
How she came to speak so openly about such personal stuff is explained in Ladee Leroy, a new version of the confessional show that she performed at Hyde Park Theatre in 2003. It has to do with those post-college blues, where recent graduate saddled with debt takes dead-end clerical job that stifles her creative energy and sucks the life from her bones. Turns out that a quick, convenient means of revitalizing oneself creatively is to write a Web journal on the company computer during those long, soul-deadening hours on the job. Thus was the online persona of Ladee Leroy born.
But better you should hear Eddy tell it, because it’s much, much, much, much funnier. She has a distinctive comic sensibility that can zero in on the human folly in any given situation – say, an encounter with an officious bank teller or a date with a new boyfriend she wants to impress – then blow it up and blow it up and blow it up to ridiculously outsized proportions, until it explodes hilariously. The teller laying on intimidating attitude becomes a giant with a deep, e-e-e-evil voice. A boyfriend preoccupied with their pet guppies becomes an obsessive, his face pressed to the glass, watching in horror as the parent fish eat their young. Fondness for fast food becomes lustful desire, sung as a thumping, grinding, oh-baby come-on to the Whopper by Barry White. Eddy magnifies all the awkwardness and posturing we seek to minimize so we can see it for the absurdity that it is and laugh at it – and ourselves.
We’d laugh at this material as written, because Eddy writes funny, as fans of her Web site, ladeeleroy.diaryland.com, will attest. But when she performs it, we’re doubly inclined to double over with laughter. Eddy is as gifted a comic actress as we have in Austin today, and she throws herself, flings herself, hurls herself into the performance of these autobiographical episodes with all the comedic verve and skill at her disposal: her long, lean limbs flying all over the stage; her face, so pliable that it would be the envy of Plastic Man, stretching into great, exaggerated expressions of emotion; her voice, like a roller coaster, rising and falling here and there, taking sudden turns this way and that. In the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, Eddy has much more space to work with than at Hyde Park, and it’s a treat watching her fill it, bouncing around the Land of the Giants-sized computer monitor, mouse, and keyboard provided by set designer Brian Scott, letting fly the occasional good yell, and, well, projecting a larger sense of herself in that ineffable way actors can.
Director J. Ed Araiza, a man who knows a thing or two about theatricality, has helped Eddy hone the material into a tighter, more theatrical format. But more than that he’s helped her redefine the material as theatre. There was always a story in the words that Eddy set down about her experiences, but now her gestures, her expressions, her vocal delivery, are all part of that story and as integral to it as any noun or verb. With this production, Eddy has grown into Ladee Leroy in a new and delightful way, and it makes the show even more special than it would have been. You and I may not share those things we keep deep inside, but Ladee Leroy will make you awfully glad that Lee Eddy does.
This article appears in June 11 • 2004.