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.
This is the second time that we have seen Matt Smith perform, the first being “My Boat to Bainbridge” which we loved. “All My Children” was even more exilerating with its outrageous, edgy humor surrounding a poignant message about what it truly means to be a parent – whether one has a child or not!
His line, badly paraphrased, about the amorphous genetic link which connects his character to his “children” is a gem.
More! More! More! And bravo.
I know I really missed out by not making it a priority to see Matt Smith in this show. He is truly a brilliant man with an outrageous sense of humor. I love his approach to storytelling and wish I could have him recount my life in an hour-long monologue when I die just so I could remember the funny parts and reach the other side with a smile on my face.