You Can’t Make Budraitis Up

All this weekend, down in the Studio Theater at On the Boards, some 70 people will be shifting uncomfortably in their seats. It’s not because (IN)STABILITY is that kind of one-man show, just that the room gets hot under the lights and the chairs are short on padding. But I doubt anyone will complain. All the shows through February 7 are sold out–there’s a wait list every night.

Jung had Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Paul Budraitis has memories, dreams, and hallucinations, and it’s often impossible to tell which is which. That’s by design–the show is highly, highly structured, if also disjunctive–because (IN)STABILITY won’t accept you sitting back and waiting for the entertainment to wash over you. It’s like a wooden bridge across a ravine where every other plank is rotten.

As written and performed by Budraitis, the show is both hectic and hectoring, even as it talks about deep silences and peace. If you’ve ever spent time with someone undergoing a post-traumatic spiritual awakening, this will seem familiar–or, for that matter, if you’re a Dostoevsky fan, or know any god-haunted epileptics personally. To have “the secret” burns, it’s got to be let out. The usual boundaries melt like plastic, with that sickly, unwell smell. “Are you like me?” asks Budraitis.

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“This is not you,” Budraitis says, evenly, emphatically, gesturing at the set behind him. “This is me.” Then he closes himself off from the audience with a black curtain, and, in the dark, recounts a story about dying, leaving his body, feeling so surprised that he thought he was only what he thought he was, and at the same time joyful for the miracle of it.

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The set (by director Sean Ryan, Budraitis, and L.B. Morse, who also did the lighting) is a psychological landscape, full of strange emotional portents: a tree grows in a sidewalk planter, with beauty bark and pennies at its base. Knives stab into the ground. Water glistens, hidden, you only see its reflections on the wall. A walkway boxes it in, and Budraitis meanders or struts or head-down-hustles along it as he recounts his peregrinations around Seattle, his incarnations. Ryan and Budraitis conspire to give the proceedings an off-the-cuff improv flair, though specific movements rhyme and open up for you up to thirty minutes apart.

Twice, Budraitis pulls the black curtains shut and adopts a Ram Dass-meets-Richard Florida-meets-stand-up-comic persona (“It’s crazy out there isn’t it?”). What is about us, why are we so set on boxing ourselves in with houses, cars, jobs? Just think of all the cultural creatives at play in the fields of Mammon. What else could they be doing? We want stability, we want safety, we want…we want. “I respect” and “appreciate” your choices, he tells us, repeatedly. (Why? It’s not a false note, but it’s not a true one.) 

Budraitis tells stories of love. He tells stories that marvel over how it feels when a couple sees themselves together, places themselves in the future–how transient it is, and how hard to forget. He tucks you into your bed at night and watches as the doorknob slowly turns, and an attacker enters the room. He walks past a young girl, crying on a curb–if you’re into Jung, you can smell the anima’s cloying perfume here. Empathy just is, but an insistence on empathy for a blank-screen feminine alter-ego, girls on sidewalks who turn into illuminated avatars, is worthy of investigation.

Only one scene fails to keep up the off-kilter pressure–Budraitis Sings! with Music by Ollie Glatzer. Glatzer’s bass-heavy electronica is actually worth the listen, but, in this instance, Budraitis is only passable as a singer/lyricist. (I don’t mean to rule him out for Idol. Keep the dream alive.)

It’s not just that we’re in danger. It’s not just dispelling the illusion of security. “Should you be here!” rants Budraitis. “SHOULD YOU BE HERE!” He also snags a stool, scoots up close to a woman in the front row, and tells her she’s not who she thinks she is, she’s so much more, a miracle. He’s an unreliable narrator, a suicide who floats instead of falling. He’s come back to tell us something, but it’s the coming back to tell that is the real story, the sense of purpose totalized into a blinding, charismatic light.