Bite Your Lip

Before catching Corrie Van Ausdal in Braces, a lashing and funny one-woman shame-a-thon at Late Night Theatre, the greatest moment of humiliation I’d ever seen went down at a junior high talent show.

Picture a gal we’ll call Wendy, my school’s official pariah, the kid so low that even the home-for-head-lice crew could score points by picking on her. When the bus breezed downwind of a pasture, the boys in the back always screamed, “Close your legs, Wendy!” Yet she schemed for our love, lusting not just for acceptance but for popularity, believing that one great move might win us.

So, for the seventh-grade talent show, Wendy donned a tiger-striped leotard that might have fit before puberty and, in front of 200 jeering kids, chicken-danced.

To “The Heat Is On.”

We laughed our guts out. Just one chorus in, she was crying. But stubborn Wendy kept on keeping on, just like a star would.

Braces is dedicated to this spirit. For an hour and change, Van Ausdal — who can be funnier with just her eyes than most comics — lunges at these moments of humiliation, giving us a series of inspired characters who can’t stop performing, no matter how hard they bomb. Late in the show, Van Ausdal, done up like a teen-goth Cynthia Ozick, plays a young woman delivering a hilariously stiff dramatic monologue to a coffeehouse crowd; when the worst befalls her (a shock I’m not going to ruin), she soldiers on, embarrassment be damned.

Throughout Braces, which Van Ausdal wrote, we meet women who strive mightily — and hilariously — to deny their shame. A truck-stop hooker rationalizes about how she hasn’t had to make the kind of compromises that an executive might, speaking in the detached tone we use to describe the jobs we hate. As she flags down rigs in front of a Flying J, she explains, a little boastfully, “[On] rib nights, we’d be on a 20-minute wait for a blow-job-cornhole combo.”

Later, playing a suburban mom decked out in the kind of ’50s floral dress that costumer Gary Campbell lives for, Van Ausdal delivers a monologue that starts sweetly but winds up like something right out of Medea (by way of Rabbit, Run). Here, she’s as unsettling as she is funny, delivering the entire shocking speech in the same neighborly voice she started with. Van Ausdal understands that Midwesterners perform constantly, onstage and off. These characters prize oblivion, believing — as Wendy did — that to look unashamed is to be unashamed.

Since a daft oblivion is Van Ausdal’s chief comic gift (as seen in Mother Trucker and The Bad Seedling), these scenes delight. She stakes out fresh comic territory: characters of pride and bearing who are also deeply shameless.

Director Ron Megee keeps things skipping along, staging a couple of oddly compelling lip-synch numbers to Tom Waits and Magnetic Fields songs and screening true-life humiliating video of Van Ausdal during the costume changes.

As fine as all this is, most of the show is eclipsed by Van Ausdal’s strongest character: Amanda, the braced-up girl of the title and star of the comic scenes to beat this summer. A seventh-grade outcast herself, Amanda mopes around an empty house, forbidden to watch TV or snack on the frozen burritos that her mother has reserved for dinner. Amanda is shrieky and tremulous, wailing that nobody likes her and moaning, “This is the most boring house in the world.” As we discover the details of her life, we laugh and feel.

Especially when Amanda turns to music. Alone, this band geek rolls on leg warmers and plays along with her favorite record, getting caught up in the kind of bedroom-mirror performance that most people know enough to keep private. If not quite universal, these moments Van Ausdal has chosen to plumb are certainly common.

Unfortunately for Amanda, her second unforgettable scene finds her taking this act to the stage — the health fair at St. Agnes, her Catholic junior high.

I’m loath to ruin this comic nightmare, so I’ll return to Wendy. Like Van Ausdal’s Amanda, she had practiced and dreamed, worked out her moves in front of the mirror, maybe rocked a hairbrush microphone the same way I did squealing along to Prince, the same way most of us have done in showers and cars. Who hasn’t imagined being a star?

Or at least kicking some serious karaoke ass?

But most of us do so idly, knowing that grasping at stardom is for only the gifted and the crazy, groups that are not mutually exclusive.

Let’s just say this. If you’ve ever put on a show in your basement or auditioned for a reality show, if you’ve funky-chickened to a shitty Glenn Frey song in front of your entire junior high, make sure you get down to Late Night.

Just be warned. Van Ausdal — herself gifted and, perhaps, crazy — is digging out deceptive laughs. Not just because of the feelings that they bring gushing back but because they’re so damn big and go on for so long. After a while, they hurt.