Matt Smith's Solo Home-Run Show, All My Children

The laughter almost never paused at Hugo House during All My Children (Fridays and Saturday, 8 p.m., through June 12) last night. It's a hilariously poignant new solo show from Matt Smith. (You may remember Matt from such films as Outsourced and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, or just from around town)

He's a quintessentially offbeat Seattle character--even his alter ego Max Poth dines regularly at the Hurricane Café, for instance. Either you get that or you don't, and if you don't the news that it used to be the Dog House won't mean much.

But if you do, you sense right away that Max has a louche streak in him, and it makes sense when he starts recounting how he started stalking the grown-up children of ex-girlfriends, and announcing that he's their real father. Just to, you know, see how it feels.

A counterlife isn't always as daringly funny as this one--it's thanks to the razor's edge that Smith walks between portraying an unassuming, big-hearted, questing, man-of-a-certain-age and a lightly deranged thrill-seeker whose drug of choice is determining the limits of comfort zones.

The show is an 85ish-minute monologue that Smith delivers completely conversationally, just standing there, occasionally acting out with gestures what's going on: salads being smushed into faces, cars being jump-started, people grabbing knives. By keeping it disarmingly low-key, director Bret Fetzer has Smith perpetrate on the audience what Max perpetrates on his "kids," this guy who seems more or less ordinary and credible spinning this wild tale that even if we don't take for the truth, seems to overstep the bounds of propriety in crucial ways.

Max is not oblivious, mind you; he's aware of his transgressions. He just accepts them--past, present, and future--a little too readily for comfort, and shares them with an aplomb that you can't help but laugh at. Without ruining the what-happens-next part of the show for you, I can tell you that it's not a funny set-up stretched to over an hour. It's a trip, in many ways.

It's also a remarkably adult evening in the theater. One of Max's sainted exes, when she hears of what he's been up to, suggests that he's trying to grow up. That's an optimistic view, but not wrong--Max may be incorrigible, and he may keep trying to dive headfirst into maturity, but the show has a lot to say about parenting. Max has learned a little something he'd like to pass on, but what makes his brand of crazy compelling is that he can accept his kids as the people they're trying to be.