this week in comedy

GABE MOLLICA — SOLO: A SHOW ABOUT FRIENDSHIP / COLIN QUINN: SMALL TALK

Gabe Mollica shares his difficulty in making friends in one-man show (photo by Mindy Tucker)

GABE MOLLICA: SOLO: A SHOW ABOUT FRIENDSHIP
Soho Playhouse
15 Vandam St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Wednesday – Saturday through February 25, $36, 9:00
Extension: Connelly Theater Upstairs
220 East Fourth St. between Aves. A & B
Tuesday – Saturday through November 18, $40
www.sohoplayhouse.com
www.gabemollica.com

Having earned multiple extensions since opening at Soho Playhouse on November 2, comedian Gabe Mollica and his one-man Solo: A Show About Friendship are hard not to love. Yet the night I went, there were fewer than twenty people in the audience, several of whom Mollica knew, referring to them by name as they nodded in agreement with something he said onstage. In his easygoing, not-quite-self-deprecating demeanor, Mollica started the sixty-minute confessional pointing out that he has performed Solo for three people at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival — “the same three people that an hour earlier I had had dinner with” — and for a packed Soho Playhouse on a Saturday night, so he was not bothered by such a sparse turnout on a cold Thursday. In fact, it fit the theme of the evening, which he explains early on: “This is a show about how I don’t have friends.”

Mollica, who recently turned thirty, hails from Garden City, and lives in Astoria, spends an hour detailing his lifetime of seeking male companionship that goes beyond mere camaraderie. He provides a spot-on description of his “six bros,” complete with their going-out and staying-home rituals. One of the bros, Nick, makes ranked lists, from types of music and wood to Adam Sandler flicks. (Yo, Nick, how is Uncut Gems not in the top ten?). Mollica also reveals that his mother, who is named Joy, is sick. (“She’s feeling a lot better now. Thank you for asking.”)

Obsessed in high school with Stephen Sondheim and terrible at sports, Mollica found himself trapped in the middle, “too straight for the gay kids but too gay for the straight kids.” At college he meets Tom, and they hit it off right away, becoming inseparable. Mollica is thrilled beyond belief that he finally has someone he can say anything to, can receive unconditional support from, and is able to be completely honest with.

Gabe Mollica admits to being “too straight for the gay kids but too gay for the straight kids” in Solo (photo by Mindy Tucker)

Mollica relates his and Tom’s adventures and misadventures, but because he’s already told us that today he has no friends, there’s some well-executed narrative tension as we await the inevitable funny/not-funny punchline. Before he gets to that, Mollica discusses his origins as a stand-up comic, his relationships with a few women, and his job working at a summer camp, occasionally supplemented with photos projected on a screen at the back of the stage, which otherwise features only a small stool and a carpet.

Smoothly directed by comedian and monologist Greg Walloch (Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King, F**k the Disabled), Solo is an engaging and heartfelt look at male bonding and the need to have friends, regardless of gender. The show is smartly written, with a finale that circles back to the beginning and results in a poignant conclusion that makes you want to immediately get in touch with your best friend(s). Mollica has a natural charm that, well, will compel you to want to be his friend. After the show, he greeted audience members outside the theater, shaking hands, hugging, and posing for photos. We invited him to an upcoming tribute to Stephen Sondheim; we don’t know whether he’ll be coming solo.

Colin Quinn offers more than just small talk in Small Talk (photo by Monique Carboni)

COLIN QUINN: SMALL TALK
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St.
Monday – Saturday through February 11, $49-$59
Greenwich House
27 Barrow St. at Seventh Ave. South
Tuesday, Saturday, Sunday, March 30 – May 6, $49-$79
www.colinquinnshow.com

There’s a fine line between thematic stand-up comedy and a one-person theatrical show. Recent presentations such as Mike Birbiglia’s The Old Man & the Pool, Alex Edelman’s Just for Us, and Ryan J. Haddad’s Hi, Are You Single? qualify as the latter, as does Gabe Mollica’s aptly titled Solo.

Brooklyn-born actor and comedian Colin Quinn is a master of the one-man show, having explored the history of New York, America, and the world in such highly praised works as Long Story Short, Unconstitutional, The New York Story, and Red State Blue State.

His latest solo foray is Colin Quinn: Small Talk, continuing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through February 11 (and now extended March 30 to May 6 at Greenwich House). The seventy-five-minute show explores how strangers connect, or don’t, by taking part in brief, generally inconsequential face-to-face conversations in elevators, at stores, at work, or on the street, chatting about the weather, sports, what day of the week it is, and other minor tidbits. “Small talk is intimate. It’s an acknowledgment,” he explains. “It’s like two ships that signal each other in the ocean. . . . It’s how we unite by common experience in under a paragraph.”

He worries that the way kids today are being raised, the end of small talk, which began with cavemen and reached new levels with Socrates, is fast approaching, since it depends on one of humankind’s most important inventions, “citizen personality,” which we no longer teach or value. “Personality is who the people that know you think you are. Your reputation is who the people who don’t know you think you are. Your social media profile is who you think you are, and your browser history is who you are,” he says.

Colin Quinn discusses banter, personality, and the history of small talk in latest solo performance (photo by Monique Carboni)

Walking around the stage in a black tee, unbuttoned black shirt, black pants, and white sneakers, Quinn, in his familiar gravelly voice, fills the show with pop-culture references, controversial political issues, and the top five “last words.” Individual jokes can be incisive, immediately relatable, and very funny, but the show, directed by James Fauvell, feels at times like it’s still a work-in-progress. Several tangents and digressions don’t seem to arise naturally from the narrative.

Quinn, who had a heart attack on Valentine’s Day in 2018 when he was fifty-eight, scans the audience for reactions as if he’s testing out new material. After seeing him look up numerous times at a spot in the back of the theater, I turned around and noticed a monitor where the text was scrolling by. He also uses a handheld microphone, which is more associated with stand-up than theatrical productions. Zoë Hurvitz’s set consists of ten blackboards with chalk drawings on them, linking images of hands and faces with Ancient Greek words and modern emojis, but they are never incorporated into the show or identified, which left me scratching my head.

From his days on MTV’s Remote Control and Comedy Central’s Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn through his solo presentations and film and television appearances (Girls, Trainwreck), Quinn has demonstrated his unique personality along with his hilarious and all-too-real take on society at large. “Some people don’t like small talk,” Quinn says in the show. I liked Small Talk, but I wanted to love it. Quinn’s response might be, as he says about one friend’s thoughts on sausage and peppers, “Nobody gives a shit and nobody asked you.” To which I might respond, “Hey, how ’bout this weather?”

UNDER THE RADAR 2023

A Thousand Ways (Part Three): Assembly brings strangers together at the New York Public Library (photo courtesy 600 Highwaymen)

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL
Public Theater and other venues
January 4-22, free – $60
publictheater.org

The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival is back and in person for its eighteenth iteration, running January 4-22 at the Public as well as Chelsea Factory, NYU Skirball, La MaMa, BAM, and the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch. As always, the works come from around the world, a mélange of disciplines that offers unique theatrical experiences. Among this year’s selections are Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Annie Saunders and Becca Wolff’s Our Country, Roger Guenveur Smith’s Otto Frank, Rachel Mars’s Your Sexts Are Shit: Older Better Letters, Kaneza Schaal’s KLII, and Timothy White Eagle and the Violet Triangle’s The Indigo Room.

In addition, “Incoming! — Works-in-Process” features early looks at pieces by Mia Rovegno, Miranda Haymon, Nile Harris, Mariana Valencia, Eric Lockley, Savon Bartley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, and Justin Elizabeth Sayre, while Joe’s Pub will host performances by Eszter Balint, Negin Farsad, Julian Fleisher and his Rather Big Band, Salty Brine, and Migguel Anggelo.

Below is a look at four of the highlights.

600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (PART THREE): AN ASSEMBLY
The New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
455 Fifth Ave. at Fortieth St., seventh floor
January 4-22, free with advance RSVP
publictheater.org

At the January 2021 Under the Radar Festival, the Obie-winning 600 Highwaymen presented A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, a free hourlong telephone conversation between you and another person, randomly put together and facilitated by an electronic voice that asks both general and intimate questions, from where you are sitting to what smells you are missing, structured around a dangerous and lonely fictional situation that is a metaphor for sheltering in place. The company followed that up with the second part, An Encounter, in which you and a stranger — not the same one — meet in person, sitting across a table, separated from one another by a clear glass panel, with no touching and no sharing of objects. In both sections, I bonded quickly with the other person, making for intimate and poignant moments when we were all keeping our distance from each other.

Now comes the grand finale, Assembly, where sixteen strangers at a time will come together to finish the story at the New York Public Library’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation branch in Midtown. Written and created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, A Thousand Ways innovatively tracks how the pandemic lockdown influenced the ways we interact with others as well as how critical connection and entertainment are.

Palindromic show makes US premiere at Under the Radar Festival (photo courtesy Ontroerend Goed)

ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org

What do the following three statements have in common? “Dammit, I’m mad.” “Madam in Eden, I’m Adam.” “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” They are all palindromes, reading the same way backward and forward. They also, in their own way, relate to Ontroerend Goed’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space. Directed by Alexander Devriendt, the Belgian theater collective’s seventy-minute show features a title and a narrative that work both backward and forward as they explore climate change and the destruction wrought by humanity, which has set the Garden of Eden on the path toward armageddon. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time to save the planet if we come up with just the right plan.

PLEXUS POLAIRE: MOBY DICK
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 12-14, $40
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

The world is obsessed with Moby-Dick much the way Captain Ahab is obsessed with the great white itself. Now it’s Norwegian theater company Plexus Polaire and artistic director Yngvild Aspeli’s turn to harpoon the story of one of the most grand quests in all of literature. Aspeli (Signaux, Opéra Opaque, Dracula) incorporates seven actors, fifty puppets, video projections, a drowned orchestra, and a giant whale to transform Herman Melville’s 1851 novel into a haunting ninety-minute multimedia production at NYU Skirball for four performances only, so get on board as soon as you can.

Brian Mendes and Jim Fletcher get ready for NYCP’s Field of Mars (photo courtesy New York City Players)

NEW YORK CITY PLAYERS: FIELD OF MARS
NYU Skirball
566 LaGuardia Pl.
January 19-22, 24-29, $60
publictheater.org
nyuskirball.org

I’ll follow Richard Maxwell and New York City Players anywhere, whether it’s on a boat past the Statue of Liberty (The Vessel), an existential journey inside relationships and theater itself (The Evening, Isolde) and outside time and space (Paradiso, Good Samaritans), or even to the Red Planet and beyond. Actually, his newest piece, Field of Mars, playing at NYU Skirball January 19-29, refers not to the fourth planet from the sun but to the ancient term for a large public space and military parade ground. Maxwell doesn’t like to share too much about upcoming shows, but we do know that this one features Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez, and Gillian Walsh and that the limited audience will be seated on the stage.

Oh, and Maxwell noted in an email blast: “Field of Mars: A chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality. . . . I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell parents regarding the content of Field of Mars: my kids (aged 11 and 15) will not be seeing this show.”

MIKE BIRBIGLIA: THE OLD MAN & THE POOL

Mike Birbiglia discusses mortality with a smile in The Old Man & the Pool (photo by Emilio Madrid)

MIKE BIRBIGLIA: THE OLD MAN AND THE POOL
Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center Theater
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through January 15, $104-$268
212-362-7600
www.lct.org

I remember being home sick one day in fourth grade, when I was ten, grabbing a relatively short book from my parents’ library, and reading it straight through in bed. It was the first real novel I ever picked up, called The Old Man and the Sea, by a man named Ernest Hemingway, about a fisherman facing his own mortality as he desperately tries to reel in a marlin in a life-or-death struggle, for both him and his catch. I can still feel myself turning the pages, the excitement building moment to moment.

The title, and the theme of mortality, is the jumping-off point of Mike Birbiglia’s latest one-man show, the deeply personal and extremely funny The Old Man & the Pool, continuing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater through January 15. In such past solo works as The New One, Thank God for Jokes, and Sleepwalk with Me, the Massachusetts-born, Brooklyn-based comedian and This American Life contributor has documented his REM sleep behavior disorder, his sex life, trying to conceive, and the power of jokes themselves. “There are details in my life that are both setups and punchlines,” he explained in his Broadway debut, The New One, and the same is true once again in The Old Man & the Pool, in which mortality is front and center for seventy-five hysterical, moving minutes.

The show begins with Birbiglia describing his 2017 annual physical, “which I always dread because I have a lot of preexisting conditions, which I call ‘conditions’ because everything is existing if it does and everything is ‘pre’ unless it happened on the way to the appointment. When I see that checklist I circle the whole thing and cross out ‘pregnant.’” When he has trouble blowing into a tube for a pulmonary test, his doctor tells him that based on those results, he might be having a heart attack right then and there. “I call it ‘the birthday cake test,’” Birbiglia tells the audience, “because it sort of tells you how many birthday cakes . . . you have left.” Shortly after that, the doctor tells Birbiglia that he has type two diabetes.

At the time, Birbiglia was forty-four, married to Jenny (who he calls Chlo for no apparent reason), and raising their three-year-old daughter, Oona. Both his father and his paternal grandfather had heart attacks at fifty-six. “I’ve always thought I should just set aside that whole year when I turn fifty-six and get an airbnb by the hospital and keep a flexible schedule,” he says. I understand exactly where he’s coming from; my father died of a heart attack at forty-seven, his father at fifty-seven. Those kinds of facts tend to weigh heavily on your mind.

Mike Birbiglia surfs through a serious diagnosis in latest Broadway solo show (photo by Emilio Madrid)

It’s one of the many reasons why Birbiglia’s shows work so well. He’s a kind of everyman, sharing his foibles with a genuine self-deprecation and easygoing relatability. It pains him that he was raised in a family that would say “Take care” instead of “I love you.” He also tends to come down with extreme medical conditions that are fascinating to hear about. He has to sleep in a special sleeping bag and wear mittens so his sleepwalking doesn’t result in accidentally causing harm to himself, his wife, or his daughter. In The New One, he details undergoing a varicocele repair that makes every male in the audience wince and cringe. He survived bladder cancer. And now, he’s fighting off diabetes and a potential heart attack.

He’s told that he has to start doing cardio five days a week. “I don’t think anybody does cardio five days a week,” he tells his doctor, who replies, “A lot of people do cardio five days a week.” The doctor suggests he swims at the YMCA, which brings up a poignant and profound memory for Birbiglia in which, at the age of seven, he decided he would never again go to a YMCA pool. But the thought of leaving Oona fatherless overwhelms him, and the exercise regime begins as he strives to improve his health, even if it involves changing his diet and swimming laps five days a week. It evokes Santiago, the old man in Hemingway’s story, thinking to himself, “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” Similarly, Birbiglia asks, “Why do we not do the thing we know we should be doing?”

Mike Birbiglia takes it easy while considering death in The Old Man & the Pool (photo by Emilio Madrid)

Birbiglia, who also wrote, directed, and starred in the films Don’t Think Twice and Sleepwalk with Me, is immensely personable and self-effacing, telling his tale in a laid-back, even-tempered manner. He picks up the sole prop, a stool, and walks around the stage with it, occasionally sitting on it. He relaxes on the floor, lays down, and works off the energy of the audience. The night I went, a handful of people came in late, including a woman in the front row. Birbiglia, who was laying on his side at the time, welcomed them and decided to get them up to speed by giving them a quick, unscripted summary of what they missed. It was a brilliant moment, and one that quickly sealed the bond between us and him.

Beowulf Boritt’s set is sparse but effective: a concave board that mimics both a giant wave in its shape and a swimming pool in its gridlike design of blue squares. At times Birbiglia appears to surf under it, while at other times it looks like it is going to envelop him, drowning him. He wears jeans, comfy shoes, and an untucked blue-and-white button-down shirt that echoes the backdrop; the costume is by Toni-Leslie James, with lighting by Aaron Copp, projections by Hana S. Kim, and sound by Kai Harada, all helping develop a warm intimacy. Birbiglia’s longtime director, Seth Barrish, knows just how to keep it all moving forward as Birbiglia heads off on hilarious digressions about wrestling, mold, sugar fries, and signs such as “Slippery When Wet” and “No Breath Holding.”

The show begins and ends with the propulsive song “Red Hearse” by the LA band Red Hearse, in which Jack Antonoff, Sam Dew, and Sounwave promise, “I’ll be better than I was before / A natural, all of the past out the door / I never let you go, was all at our knees before / It’s gettin’ deeper, we’re caught up in the undertow / So come on / And if you can’t hold me / I’ll dive in it headfirst / I’ll die ridin’ in a red hearse.” In The Old Man & the Pool, master storyteller Birbiglia guides the audience through the undertow, emerging safely, and happily, from the abyss.

AN EVENING WITH ERIC BOGOSIAN: MONOLOGUES, DIGRESSIONS, AND AIR GUITAR

Eric Bogosian (between Chain artistic director Kirk Gostkowski and playwright G.D. Kimble) returns to the Chain for a solo benefit (photo courtesy Chain Theatre)

Who: Eric Bogosian
What: One-night-only benefit for Chain Theatre
Where: The Chain Theatre, 312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves., third floor
When: Saturday, January 21, $30-$50+, 8:00
Why: Founded in 2010 and based on West Thirty-Sixth St. since 2018, the Chain Theatre is a nonprofit whose mission is “to create artistic work that is accessible, relatable, and invokes a visceral response in the audience through the mediums of theater and film. . . . A deep respect for the narrative is the driving force behind the cultivation of original texts, the further investigation of recently produced work, and the reclaiming of existing classics for a modern audience. The material chosen focuses on the cyclical nature of history and complexity of the human spirit.” The Chain has presented works by such writers as Arthur Miller, David Rabe, Dale Wasserman, Neil LaBute, Sam Shepard, Martin McDonagh, and Edgar Allan Poe in addition to hosting the annual One Act Festival and Chain Film Festival. In 2014, the Chain staged Obie, Drama Desk, and Silver Bear—winning actor and writer Eric Bogosian’s 1988 Pulitzer finalist, Talk Radio, and this past summer featured the New York City premiere of Black Box PAC’s new production of Bogosian’s 2008 show 1+1 as part of its Play Festival.

On January 21, the Boston-born, New York City–based Bogosian will be at the Chain for the one-night-only benefit “An Evening with Eric Bogosian: Monologues, Digressions, and Air Guitar,” mixing recent work with older favorites. Tickets are $30 for general admission and $50 for priority seating to support the Chain. Bogosian has also written such other solo plays as Drinking in America, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, and Notes from Underground as well as subUrbia and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, which he adapted into films, and the novels Mall, Wasted Beauty, and Perforated Heart and the nonfiction Operation Nemesis: The Secret Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide. His acting career is highlighted by Interview with the Vampire, Billions, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Uncut Gems, and Succession, so basically, you can expect just about anything from him at this ninety-minute charity event. Perhaps he’ll even include “Benefit” from 100 Monologues, in which a rock star discusses why his band is participating in a benefit for — well, you’ll have to discover that for yourself.