The rather eccentric Edgar Oliver examines seminal moments from his childhood in latest monologue (photo by Dixie Sheridan)
Axis Company
One Sheridan Sq. between West Fourth & Washington Sts.
Thursday – Saturday through June 7, $30-$40, 8:00
212-352-3101
www.axiscompany.org
Cliché be damned — we really could listen to Edgar Oliver read the phone book, if there was such a thing as a phone book anymore. Oliver’s affected yet elegant and luxurious voice is part Shakespearean thespian, part late-night horror-film host; just the way he pronounces “ar” is an aural wonder, sounding enchantingly otherworldly. He has honed his craft at the Moth, sharing personal stories told with a literary flourish. In his latest monologue, In the Park, running through June 7 at the Axis Theatre in Sheridan Square, Oliver (East 10th Street, Helen and Edgar) takes the audience through his favorite place, Prospect Park, as he revisits seminal childhood moments that helped shape the man he has become. “All throughout my life — when I think of myself and what I have done — what I hope to do — when I look in the mirror — I am measuring myself against that boy,” he says, relating a story about riding the train from his family home in Savannah to Baltimore, where he, his sister, and his mother vacationed in the summers. He had just recalled falling instantly in love with a young man he saw for only a few seconds, evoking Mr. Bernstein’s (Everett Sloane) remembrance in Citizen Kane of seeing a young woman with a white parasol on a ferry. “I would like to go back to that fatal second before love takes place and suffer the transformation over and over,” Oliver says. “What a sweet and terrible wounding it was!”
His poignant, poetic journey through Prospect Park and his past includes such lush phrases as “the green-gold grass,” “the magic of the rain,” “the distant landscape of the sky,” “the silent song of solitude,” and “my own young, murderable beauty.” The sixty-minute show, directed by Axis artistic director Randy Sharp (East 10th Street, Last Man Club), is set on a bare stage, where Oliver generally stands still, inflecting with his arms and head, occasionally walking a few steps to his right and left and then, rather oddly, moving like Frankenstein’s monster. On opening night, Oliver, who hosts the Science Channel’s Odd Folks Home, stumbled a few times and appeared to lose his place at one point, but those slight missteps were forgivable given his otherwise intricate and intimate performance, during which he makes extended eye contact with members of the audience. “My heart was seized with melancholy and with longing,” he says, recalling a car trip to a store when he was six or seven. “It was as though the sky were sorrow — and I longed to go away forever into it. And I realized that I loved sorrow and that I loved melancholy and that I loved life.” Those sentences, delivered with an eerie majesty, encapsulate what In the Park is about as a rather eccentric man with unusual speech habits explores who he was, who he is, and who he might have been — or perhaps still could be.