By Ron Fassler . . .
Liz Kingsman is onto something. She pretends she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but folks, it’s all an act. Her seventy-minute show at the Greenwich House Theater first originated in London’s Soho Theatre. Later, she performed it at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, the same as where Phoebe Waller-Bridge launched her solo show, which led to her signing a $20 million deal with Amazon. Kingsman attempts to blatantly replicate (and openly pray for) a similar worldwide success, acting and writing a piece like Fleabag, though Kingsman’s tongue is firmly planted in her cheek. For one thing, she claims not to have much to say. For another, she is consistently foiled at nearly every turn by her stage crew (and her own memories, which are exceedingly unreliable). It’s smarter than The Play That Goes Wrong, which, though exceedingly well done, is standard farce. Kingsman goes for something else, keeping herself off her game being the main joke. Cleary the point, it effectively works to serve the piece as satire.
Kingsman has a style that makes many of the things she says funnier by her flat and often scatterbrained delivery. It’s like that old line, “A comic is someone who says funny things and a comedian is someone who says things funny.” Kingsman falls into the latter category. Her timing is exquisite, with a very high batting average for almost every joke getting her at least to first base, hitting many doubles, triples and even a home run or two. Relaxed and comfortable in front of an audience, she self-deprecatingly charms the audience into submission within minutes; and, in a gentle, low-key fashion, easily makes her case for why she created this show.
And why did she create it? Its funny advertising ploy calls it “a bold, irreverent, raw, moving and triumphant celebration of adjectives, this blurb will nail down nothing,” which is entirely accurate. For parody’s sake, she builds to the obvious place where she will tell the story we all came to hear, only to have it fall apart and become absolutely meaningless. The term is overused, but it’s a very meta thing. Kingsman has written a one-woman show, using all the familiar tropes, but her spin on it is that nothing comes together. We’re left flailing, our expectations upended . . . which is a good thing. It’s like she says at the beginning: “All I want is for people to see this show, enjoy it, commission it, and connect to it.”
“I’m flawed, but I guess that’s what makes me relatable,” she tells us. In explaining her job in marketing at a bird charity, she describes it as “90% my posting pictures of ducks on Instagram and 10% doing marketing, whatever that is.” Naturally, a good deal of the show is a tell-all of being thwarted in love, filled with delightful observational absurdities. “What I’m really doing is making fun of more successful women. This all comes out of envy and bitterness for what they’ve achieved, and I’ll never get near.”
Mention should be made that directorial credit goes to Adam Brace, also the director of Alex Edelman’s Just For Us, currently packing them in at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Brace was something of an expert in his field, helping creatives like Edelman and Kingsman work to their maximum potential. Tragically, he died at forty-three from complications from a stroke just four months ago.
I managed to see Fleabag when Waller-Bridge brought it to New York after her great success of the vehicle’s television series adaptation. I was one of those adoring fans interested in going back to see her in the role in its barest form. It was great, but truth be told, what Kingsman is doing is more ambitious. She has Waller-Bridge to thank, of course, but this shrewd take on one-woman shows has a lot of satiric heft and, as an actress, Kingsman is up for the challenge. Still quite young, it will be exciting to see where her career heads now, considering her ambitions as an actress didn’t involve this style of performing until recently. “This was never meant to be the ‘thing.’ It’s still not meant to be the ‘thing.’”
One thing’s for sure: it feels likely she will continue in taking self-absorption to daring comic heights in a sly and sneaky manner, as in this exchange in the program of an interview not entirely on the up-and-up:
INTERVIEWER: How long was it from draft to the first review?
LIZ: That’s hard. Because, as you say, we’d always been working on it.
INTERVIEWER: So in a way, thirty years?
LIZ: Yeah it’s somewhere between thirty years and two and a half weeks.
One Woman Show. Through August 11 is at the Greenwich House Theatre, (27 Barrow Street, at Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Village). www.onewomanshownyc.com
Photos: Dylan Woodley
