Chick Shtick
From this week’s e-mail, an audition announcement we could almost run as a personal ad: “If you are looking to come and do improv with funny, attractive men, then please come to our female-only auditions.”
Desperate as it is, it’s kinda sweet. Especially that first “come.” Even in comedy, a club that’s as boyish as NAMBLA, guys understand that they need women to complete them. To liven things up a bit. To offer a different perspective. To show — like Tom Cruise — that they know it’s important to have a woman around.
Running off to join a comedy group is right up there with hanging around Best Buy the day new DVDs come out — one of those things boys can’t help and girls can’t fathom. That said, two of Kansas City’s most successful improv companies are run by women. Shelley Stewart, who frequently performs with Full Frontal Comedy, gets my vote for this town’s flat-out funniest performer. And when the local sketch group Monkeys With Hand Grenades (whose very name summons up boys giggling while girls smile politely) takes the Comedy City stage, Pearl MacDonald’s priceless sketches stand out not because they’re better or worse than those of her partners but because she’s interested in different things. Instead of just offering up TV show parodies and wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if premises, she often tries to figure out how people think and feel.
Things that interest women more than they do men.
How we think and feel also spurred Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney when, 15 years back, they birthed Parallel Lives: The Kathy & Mo Show. The wildly successful sketch revue spawned a book, an HBO special and — this past week — a threadbare but winning community-theater revival underneath a Prairie Village hardware store. This Wyandotte Players production (staged in Johnson County because of KCK’s lack of stages) is worth the attention of anyone who wishes comedy more often were about something.
Digging deep into character, Najimy and Gaffney offer scenes richened with sadness and anger. Their women are baffled by the world they find themselves inhabiting … or, in the case of the universe-crafting goddesses they play at the opening, at the world they’ve made. As middle-aged divorcees, they’re surprised to discover that their community college women’s studies course is not about macramé; as lapsed Catholics at their first confession in more than a decade, they’re shaken as they realize how often they tell lies.
Early on, a college girl lands an awkward date with a dimwitted frat boy. He’s not interested in her, and they share no particular connection, but still she swoons a little as he jokes crassly about sex. Any attention electrifies her.
If this all sounds depressing, rest assured that there’s broader stuff, too. They imagine a world where men have periods, and they work up an amusing pastiche of the silliest stuff in Shakespeare. A woman hoping to become the lover of Kenny Rogers promises, “I’ll be strong in a weak sort of way, independent without crossing over the line into unappealing.” Reflecting on a tampon commercial, Najimy — here played by Amy Eisele — announces, “I don’t want my vagina smelling like a daisy any more than a daisy wants to smell like my vagina.”
Strong as it is, chunks of Parallel Lives seem a little stale. There’s little shock left in vagina monologing, and a long scene making fun of vulva-celebrating performance art probably had this same not-so-fresh-feeling way back during Bush I. Fortunately, though, the line-to-line writing is sharp enough that even these old-hat scenes won me over.
The jokes are good; the performances are good enough. This is Eisele’s first time onstage, but she’s ebullient instead of nervous, and her timing is first-rate. Playing Gaffney, Jenn Jenkins wavers a bit, sometimes stiffening up. The further she goes into character, though, the better she is. Her climactic turn as drunk cowboy Hank, a stubbed-out cigarette of a man, is the show’s highlight. Her Hank is slumped on a bar stool, half passed out, shouting to a waitress to “microwave the shit” out of some chili. He leers and paws at Eisele’s melancholy Kathy Sue, frequently proposing marriage despite the fact that he already has a wife.
Then something strange happens. He proposes; she rejects. Then, as he puts his head on the bar, Kathy Sue tells us, wistfully, how her life is plagued by the feeling that she’s “missing out on something.” Hank soon recovers, and the next time he proposes, she glows.
This humanity separates Najimy and Gaffney’s approach from that of lesser sketch artists, whose conception of Hank might stop at what a creepy sumbitch. Yes, we laugh at Hank’s awfulness and Kathy Sue’s delusions, but we also feel something: a sense of true human connection, in all its fragility and importance.
And it’s funny.
If our improv friends are still looking for women, here are two fine candidates.
