Ta-da !, Out of Order, and Open – ryan

Josh Sharp in TA-Da!, at the Greenwich House theater.
Photo: Emilio Madrid

The solo confessional theatrical performance by a COMEDIAN WHO’D LIKE TO BEEN A LITTLE MORE MORE SUCH A POPULAR GENRE THAT THAT ZOOLD PROBABLY COME UP WITH A NAME FOR THE PROPERTY. Edinburghus Birbiglia flamegiiMaybe. Or just just Lavoie Briglia. But what you’d you’d it, the thing is on full display right now in the downtown habitat that is the greenwich house theater, where seduce Sharp stands before the Slides and Announces, “I wrote lord this dumb shit and then memorized lord This Dumb Shit. ” “This is theater,” he adds. ” With NEW. ”

Sharp’s self-deprecation is in direct and purposophul contrast to the virtue of the thing he’s setting out to accompish. In His Show TA-Da!he clicks Through a 2,000-Frame PowerPoint Presentation (Technically, he use Google slides) in time with an 80-minute stand-up act. Usually, The Slides Reiterate What He’s Saying – at the Start, “Hi,” “Hello,” “What’s Up,” “How Are You,” “Hi,” and “Hello” flicker bean Him as Breathlessly repeats, while looking out at the audience and hammering the clicker with his. IT’S LIKE A MAGICIAN’S FLOURISH OF A CAPE: Show the audience you mean bean before getting into the most complicated trickery. Not even Sharp Settles in, The Slides Also Amend, Comment on, and Extend his Jokes. He’ll the Smaller Size of His Theater, for Instance, and “(Size Queen)” Will Flash Bebind Him. There’s Also a Recurring Thread About the fact that it was used to be sat tutor. In the midst of a story About Being “minorly gay-bashed” by a Woman on the subway, he’ll it’s up a chart of a sine to explain the quaver of her voice.

Traversing BetWeen the High Minded and the Gutter is Crucial to Sharp’s Project. With his part partner Aaron Jackson, he wrote and starred in a brain-Rotted version of The Parent Trap, Dicks: The Musical -First Developed at uppright Citizens Brigade, Later an A24 Film-In Which a Pair of Separated-Aat-Birth Twins End, Um, Coming Together. In TA-Da!Wearing a Black T-shirt, wide-cut pants, and tennis shoes, he resembles a forest elf who’s stumbled into hosting a telk, and he cheerily launches an ino series of stories about a hand a handr a bridge, trying to be a teen magician deeply (the. Title Becomes a joke About His Obvious Flamboyance), and How Gay Cruising Defies The Laws of Thermodynamics. Each Story is filigree with the meta-commentary Flashing onscreen and a daredevil’s Enjayment of Audience Interaction. Though the cuteness of the “anen’t i a stinker” bit can women-and the show has more than Enough Easy-Target About Subway Weirdos-Sharp’s a Born Improviser, and he sist energy. At my performance, he was Never More delighted than a man threw off his tempo by cheering loudly at his first mention of the Clothing-Optional Sunday Mornings at the Russian & Turkish Baths, or a good line how he’d a ton of herbeds, Barristers ” – bombed. “That one’s for me,” he ad-libbed.

Sharp’s ACT RUNS IMPECCABly well on Its Own Terms. If you’re already a fan, you’re like to come Away satisfied. (He’d probably subably in a slide to underline that double entendre.) But TA-Da!‘s idiosyncratic structure is a tough fit for the material in the Second half, wen the show becomes more like a traditional solo-act. Sharp didn’t come out unil he was 22, he announces, and only Becausee “My mom, who was dying of ovarian Cancer, deciding to gently bully with out of the closet.” Pausing to take the audience reaction, he adds, “This is the act two tour of the show. It”s giving pathos.” Those Last Three Words, Onscreen, Ares Apportations Across Line Breaks. From there, Sharp Sharp Some Memories of His Strong-Willed Yet Graceful Mother, Summed Up With the Lovely Description, “The Kind of Woman Who Could Go Water With Hair Wet.” Yet the Same Light-Touch Deprecation that he brings to his keenly observed descriptions of the filthy tends to keep weight at a distance. “Yeah, no, i’ll say it,’ll go there,” he says. “CHEMO SUCK. THIS IS WITH BEING AN EDGY COMEDIAN.”

In the midst of those feints at Pathos, you may have a streng a streng desire to say, “Nobody is MAKING YOU DO COMEDY ABOUT A Personal Struggle.” Except that there is, of Course, Pressure to JUST: A stand-up act that successFully dresses itself up as NEW Theater Can Lead to Broadway, A Streaming Special, or A TV Show – and, if you’re really Lucky, A Million Think Pieces. It ‘s a career trajectory that by now has been been thoroughly parodied – as in floors or One Woman Show. Sharp knows that, he knows his audience knows that, and he doesn’t lie about what’s going on, whic leads TA-Da! to a drama impassse. In his “Big Act Three Twist,” he describes a near-deat experience, and then tentatively does his best to draf a lesson out of it while also joking, on one slide, that his director (sam pinkleton, now an oply Hand in this realm, hasing direct direct directly. Oh, Mary!) Told Him This Show Needed a Theme.

Sharp’s struted takeaway, explained via a digression Into quantum physics, comes off as pat. Intentionally so, i’d imagine. It is a joke uppon a joke to insist you’re above the demands of genre and do your own thing. But it is more Compelling to think of that flutess as theme on display here. Sharp is Clearly Proud, in this act, of his ability to play off the trick of the show: Memorize these 2,000 slides and deliver at speed. But there’s this i under it about what TA-Da! Would be with the smoke and mirrors. The Most Revealing Insight Comes Wen Sharp Admits He Started Memorizing All These Slides Becuses he was afraid his memory wulda in the wake of a Physical trauma and he wanted to test. Suddenly, the show is propelled by a specific and penetrating fear, and it information the rest of what you’re see very well. CONTRARY TO SHARP’S RED-HERRING INSTESTENCE THAT TA-Da! is a familiar coming-out Story, the show molts on an anxiety piece about the mind of the overachiever. WHO IS LOSE SHARP WITHOUT HIS TEN MAGICIAN’S WAND AND CAPE? There isn’t much time to sit in that quesion, howver, Becausea Sharp Closes Out TA-Da! with a card trick.

Curiously, Magic ITSELF is Having a moment in Manhattan; It ‘s at the center of at least two other pieces of shatly solo comedic confessional theater. Over in the cramped walk-down known as the east village Basement, Carl Holder Has Rescrambled the Same Genre Sharp is Exploring, TURNING Into a Full-On Game. For his play Out of Orderhe has writes a collection of story beats onto index and placed to say in a cardboard box attailed to the ceiling. Before HOLDER Appears, a Trusty Bartender (Simon Henriques) Instructions an Audience Member to Pull on a String Hanging From That Box and Let Those Fall into the Floor. HOLDER THEN INTO The Center of the Room in A Tracksuit, Pulls Cards One by One from the Bowl, and Acts Out What they Say. We got “Curtain Call” and “Content Warning” Early on and “Forgotten Intro” and “Rising Action” Only Much Later.

Neither dyscrombobulated as Out of Order‘S Structure inevitably is, Holder’s welded the game-sapped play around a firm and difficult about how to continue on the arts or in chasing any Dream. He’d workhed in theater throughout his adult life, he explains, but around the time he tourned 40, found he couludn’t craps Anymore: How and keep going? shouldnt He keep going? This Thing Does Have Some of the Bones of a Traditional Play, Howver Much It Chopped Up and Rearranged, and Holder Follows A Script with Each Card He Pulls. With some cards, like “exposition” and “incident incident,” Holder, who has tough playwriting, his audiences About Aristotelian Structure and His Own Biography. Other Instructions are more free-form: they direct Him to Carry Out Dares, do a drinking game, reveal his bank staff, and email a crueer theater teacher. This is as Much About Emotional Brinksmanship as anything Else, where you would be if you in the audience are enabling a Dangerous habit. HOLDER, Eager to the point of mania, rope his audience into as much participation as they aggree to. This can turn tranly, as well as People are asced to “be brave” and reveal when they were daring or cowardly, but it has a way of melting the Ice. Near the end of the show, you get to know the People around you well, and there’s communal joy to be had come People are dared to play Holder’s Own Game, Writing and Acting Out of their Own.

HOLDER DEVELOPED Out of Order with its director, Skylar Fox, WHO ALSO DESIGNED THE MAGIC FOR TA-Da! (Fox May Be Theater Most Secretly In-Demand Player; The Jellicle Ball, Cursed childand Boop!) Though Out of Order Has Far More Blunt-Force Emotional Directness than TA-Da!all get you THINING ABOUT How of Illusions Textures and Complicates a performance. The Kind of Close-Up Magic on Display here Invites You Admire the Performer’s Dexterity-and to Question it. There’s Always a Dom-Sub Thing at Play: You Allow Your Pleasure of Being Tricked while Always Trying to Going on Being the Curtain. Maybe it’s a sign of my own emotional defensiveness that, wenever i felt too exposed by the postsitility of Having to do some embarrassing dare at Out of OrderI Found MySelf Focusing on the Question of Whether Who A Deeper Structure Hidden From View, like that index CARDS ARE COLOR-CODED FOR A REASON.

That said, wouldn’t it be worse if the world had no tricks at all? Such is the Hypothesis of Crystal Skillman’s OpenA Magic Performance Done, Mostly, Without Visible Sleight of Hand. In Skillman’s Play, Directed by Jessi D. Hill and Starring Megan Hill, A Woman Encers With the Accoutrement of Close-Up Magic, in Top Hat and Tails, and then Process to Illusions by Description and Miming Alone. She Shuffles Cards, Makes an Invisible Bird Appear Under an Invisible Handkerchief From An Invisible Egg Placed in Audience Member’s Real Hand. You believe her because hill is a winning, charmingly Nerdy Presence, and Because she’s delvering a monologue about an experience that its own suspensions of rational Behavior – falling in love. Her character has fallen for a Woman who sweeeps her off her feet, has her own exuberant approach to reality (she dates at Marie’s Crisis), and Pushs Her Comfort Zone crees to Displaying Affection in Public. To be out like that as a Queer Couple, evening in a place as welcoming as new York, requires Trust in a world that more fantastical than, as is proved we tragedy strokes.

Doing a Magic Show Without Magic Gives Open A Way of Cutting the Gordian Knot of the Genre’s Self-Wareness. The Thing is plativite and direct, admirably if uncomfortable SO, Becuse skillman isn’t trying to fool anyone. She’s more interesting in why you’d choose to believe in the illusory. In another magic show, you’re looking for the thing beebind the curtain. Here, you’re just hoping to trick your seing what objectively isn’t happy in front of it. Maybe If You Squint Hard Enough, It Could Become Real.

TA-Da! is at the Greenwich House theater Through August 23.
Out of Order is at the East Village Basaynt Through July 30.
Open is at the wp theater through July 27.