A Canadian Invasion at SPF 4, Plus Reviews of Waxie Moon, Ben Gonio and More

Solo Performance Festival down at Theatre off Jackson continues, with a Canadian invasion tonight through Saturday. Julia Van Stralen’s Jake’s Gift is supposed to be amazing, a dramedy about a veteran returning to Normandy for the 60th anniversary of D-Day festivities, who confronts his complex feelings about his brother, who died in combat.

Paired with Van Stralen is J. Macdonald’s Gunpowder, billed as “the most destructive solo performance in history.” Macdonald is a yearly import to SPF and is a well-respected solo performer around North America. And then next week, local marimba virtuoso (and a driving force behind the French Project) Erin Jorgensen performs Tues. and Weds., sharing the bill on the latter with Paul Budraitis, whose Not. Stable. At all. has been one of the stand-outs from SPF 4. Tickets and full schedule available here.

This last Tuesday, I caught the final edition of SPF’s “Best in Shorts,” a line-up of eight 10- to 15-minute pieces from seven different performers.

The evening was bookended with performances by Keira McDonald, one of the organizers. The closing performance was a reprise of her comic solo musical Astro-Naughty, a scatological but often sympathetic portrait of astronaut Lisa Nowak that left the audience in stitches. The first piece, a new work called Rapid Slippage Along a Fault, was a bit more difficult. It’s basically McDonald reading a text she wrote that explores loss and suffering, tying the death of a former student, shortly after the Nisqually Quake, to a longer story about a romance with a Naval officer that fell apart in the wake of Sept. 11. The piece was clearly very personal (though I can’t say how autobiographical) to McDonald, who teared up several times during it.

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Personally, I find such raw emotion in a performance discomforting, and not in a good way, no matter how affecting it is at the same time. Art is often a way of processing experience and trying to gain perspective, which is really what you’re offering the audience. But when the artist exposes the rawness of the source material, it often lets you catch a glimpse of the way that real experience gets chewed up, manipulated, and ultimately contrived into the work you’re consuming. The contrast between the well-turned phrases or polished jokes in the monologue, and the moment when the artist starts breaking down, tend to make you question the honesty of the overall project: is this art that’s looking for deeper truths, or is this therapy that’s forcing psychic wounds into a tidy story so they’re manageable?

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One of the stand-outs was Ben Gonio’s De: Colores: Flying with Colors. I’ve seen Gonio in other productions, and he’s always impressed me–his take on Hotspur in Seattle Shakespeare’s Henry IV comes to mind. In De: Colores, Gonio explores the hard road his father took from being a doctor in the Philippines to his struggles as an immigrant bringing his family to his new home in Seattle. A couple weeks ago, I wrote a pretty harsh review of Ki Gottberg’s Frontier: Valley of the Shadow, which covers similar stories, and De: Colores serves as a great example of how to do such a story right. Gonio’s performance isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s honest and moving; his central images (the song “De Colores” and his father’s hat) are far more meaningful than Gottberg’s Hindu theology metaphors, and his restrained performance serves the material better. It’s truly a beautiful piece, and I wish we’d gotten to see more.

And then there’s Waxie Moon. Cabaret and burlesque critics who complain that the rejuvenated art form is already near exhausted need to see Marc Kenison, because performers of his caliber and creativity are few and far between, and with his Waxie Moon persona, he’s pushing the boundaries of boylesque, performance art, and dance. Shall I Compare Waxie to a Summer’s Day?–a riff on Shakespeare–isn’t the best Waxie Moon piece I’ve ever seen (his Andy Kaufman-esque performance of “One” from A Chorus Line takes the cake), but it was still absolutely hilarious. This being a solo performance festival, Waxie was without his usual Harlequin sidekick, but he’s surely not going to perform alone, and the poor (straight) man plucked out of the audience got the striptease of his lifetime–and a pearl necklace plucked from Waxie’s thong to keep as a keepsake.

Of the rest of the performers, several deserve note. Noah Benezra’s No Game, the story of a teenager trying to lose his virginity at a reggae-meets-rave festival, is both hilarious and disturbing in the links it draws, and Benezra is a charismatic young performer with great delivery. Giuseppe Ribaudo’s Little Boy in Flames is similarly a coming-of-age tale, replete with all the painful experiences of being young and gay. It feels like this territory should be cliché by now, and it is a bit, but Ribaudo is strong performer. And then there was Peggy Platt’s Jam, where she performs as a drab, over-caffeinated open-mic poet. Platt’s a well loved local stand-up, and it shows: her comic timing and delivery are top-notch.