Retour à revue de presse Janvier 2005


Edmonton Journal
2005.01.15
E5
Liz Nicholls

Beyond the gay confessional: Cuckow launches sneak attack:

Undertow of prejudice and violence emerges

STANDUPHOMO

Directed by: Kevin Sutley

Written by and starring: Nathan Cuckow

Where: The Roost Niteclub, 10345 104th St.

Running: Through Jan. 22

- - -

EDMONTON - We meet the world's most improbable standup in STANDupHOMO, Nathan Cuckow's intricate little solo show-cum- club act.

Heir to the great insurrectionist tradition of Lenny Bruce, our comic is a prim, buttoned-down guy with prissy bangs and pleated pants. In brown, for gawd's sake. A virtual sight-gag of a guy with a cliche lisp and, it seems, a dark "secret" we're sure we already know -- not least because he's in a show called STANDupHOMO and he knows it.

If STANDupHOMO were just another in a long series of gay confessionals, in which a self-denier emerges triumphantly from the closet to declare Here I Am!, it would still have its retro charms. Cuckow is an engaging performer; his ability to create the illusion of semi-improv, that slightly synthetic weave of the prepared and the offhand that makes failed standup so torturous and lame, is uncanny. So we'd laugh -- and then the dramatic irony of knowing more than the protagonist does about himself would wear itself out.

But it's a much odder show than that. Playful in structure, this newly reworked version of a play that premiered as a monologue starts with a denial and a revelation -- "I might as well come right out and tell you the truth: yes, I'm a Mormon, and no, I don't have more than one wife." And it leads to the moment where our rabbity hero (Cuckow), or more precisely the actor (Cuckow) enlisted to perform on behalf of the author (Cuckow) dives back into the closet.

In between, STANDupHOMO unfolds as a series of "secrets," a framework for dissecting the fake-cheeky gay idiom, biblical authority, religious cliches including the smug persecuting piety of claiming to hate the sin while loving the sinner, liberal hypocrisy, conservative viciousness, the cliches of redneck machismo or sex therapy (sorry, thex therapy). Other characters -- relatives apparently, including a Mormon bishop father, a transgender sister, a bully of a brother with a John Wayne obsession -- intrude on our standup's puckish, mildly off-centre ruminations about deviance, or gaydar ("a gay sixth sense; I see gay people all around me"). Why are so many gay people named Bruce, and why do they have moustaches? Is it homophobic to be at a gay pride parade and notice that the best-looking guy is a lesbian? How can same-sex coupling go against nature when every life form on the planet does it? "Mowing your lawn goes against nature."

What emerges cumulatively from the texture of comedy-club throwaways -- "I always thought a metrosexual was someone who had sex on buses" -- that Cuckow delivers so convincingly in his nervous, rather careful persona, is an undertow of continuing prejudice, violence in language and attitude.

It's an elliptical little sneak attack of a show about tolerance that starts with its punchline, gay Mormon standup, and works backwards. The production, directed by Kevin Sutley, is all about the delicate comic negotiation of the trite, the bland, the self-consciously risque, the ineptly quirky, the defiantly chipper, within the narrative framework of a gay man exiting from the closet.

How Cuckow pulls the net of characters, annotations, insights, perspectives, memories and personality fragments into a whole person who is both on- and offstage -- the way all of us perform in our lives -- is the real "secret" here.


Retour à revue de presse Janvier 2005