Sunday, September 19, 2010

Curtis Gwinn Exposes Himself

A serendipitous business trip to Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago allowed me to pop by Upright Citizens Brigade LA, where it turned out former New Yorker Curtis Gwinn was giving a one-man show. New York improv junkies know Curtis as a local star, perhaps the biggest in New York before he left last year, most famously working as founding member and deranged ringmaster of Death by Roo Roo.

In person, Curtis can be acerbic, elliptical and generally a pain in the ass. He’s also a lot of fun, in person and onstage, a brilliant post-punk showman torn from the set of Repo Man and allowed to mature twenty years like scotch. But as much fun as he’s having you can always feel the unrelenting, exacting judgment that he lords over himself and everyone around him like a Damoclean sword, emanating off him like an electric field, mowing down anyone too slow in its wake & generating much of the reckless, over-caffeinated dog-pack energy that Roo Roo is still famous for.

Curtis may be a lot of things but he’s not the first candidate you would come up with for one of these one-person shows, which are typically a sort of stand-up comedy equivalent of Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, touchy-feely dinner theater for the grunge set, with seminal moments and life lessons learned and at bottom a naïve, wide-eyed faith in the defining power over our lives of simple, linear narratives that can be boiled down to three beats and twenty-five minutes.

Curtis opened the show addressing this head-on in his usual cantankerous manner, more for himself than the audience – though it was certainly entertaining – as he dragged himself kicking and screaming to the confessional booth.

I hate one-man shows he says, and I resent you for coming tonight. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for supporting this stuff. He then goes on to outline the specific issues he has with the form, especially his disdain for their shared notion of fundamental human change as a result of two or three pivotal events that pluck your heartstrings even while you learn something & laugh.

Curtis is right on here. Number one, people don’t really change, except maybe incrementally and over a very long stretch of time. And if some event in your life is actually so calamitous as to actually make you change in any meaningful way, it’s unlikely to change you for the better and isn’t going to be all that funny no matter how you spin it onstage. The loopy genius of modern improvisational form, which Curtis is especially adept at, is in a way the exact opposite of fundamental change, a ritual re-enactment of repeated behavior driven to further and further extremes in order to reach a surreal & necessary apex, and a celebration of the variations that can be spun from the set-in-stone nature of people, especially when you bump them together like pool balls on the stage to find out what happens.

This same logic marks Curtis’ world view here, and allows his show to tiptoe toward greatness. Having sufficiently chastised both himself and the audience for the unseemly intimacy of the performance to come, he manages to weave together the literal dissolution of his home & his father’s descent into homelessness, a porn mag found in the woods, an aborted attempt at a college education and a botched first romantic encounter into a grumpily touching tone poem of dislocation that holds him up to a microscope for comic inspection without offering any real hope of resolution or redemption.

Only once does the thought that “something might happen” impinge, when a former roommate informs him that his botched sweetheart is a pole dancer at a strip joint in a neighboring town. And that something is slapped down precipitously. Will seeing her so degraded provide irony, insight, closure, catharsis, revenge? No such luck; it’s not even her, it just sort of looks like her.

The sheer pointlessness of the hero’s journey is followed up by the rub-your-nose-in-it degradation of the trip back home. I would call it an anti-climax but he actually does auto-climax in the driver’s seat of his Volkswagen at one point, and is caught & run out of town by the local sheriff only to have his VW break down by the side of the highway, forcing him to abandon it and walk “home” to the apartment where his drifter dad is currently hanging out and climb into bed with him.

This is all a lot funnier than it sounds on the page, which points to the truth that anyone who wants to be adept at improv better be willing to lay themselves out for the audience as naked and squalid and sad as we all happen to be. Curtis’ show was brave by any standard, and very funny. It points to the way in which the underlying philosophy of improv leads to a smarter and stronger comic aesthetic when applied to written forms. And that Curtis is still very much in the process of conquering the world out in LA. He remains one of our best, smartest artists.