The Unicorn’s Buyer & Cellar digs deeper than you’d think

December 16, 2015

Deborah Hirsch,

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While Christmas productions saturate area theaters this month, the Unicorn is staging a refreshing seasonal alternative — an anti-Christmas festivity, if you will, that’s both funny and heartfelt.

I’m not sure what it is about Barbra Streisand that inspires holiday-season shows, but this is the second consecutive December that the Unicorn has put a play on its Jerome Stage tangentially tied to the diva. Last year, it was the one-woman, one-act I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers, featuring a Hollywood super-agent representing, among other A-listers, the famous singer. This year’s one-man, one-act Buyer & Cellar is the story of an aspiring actor finding a particular job on Streisand’s Malibu estate and, by association, a particular kind of relationship with the idol.

My initial lack of enthusiasm about another Streisand-related show faded from the starting line of Jonathan Tolins’ fast-moving, quip-filled script. The charming and charismatic Seth Golay, as the show’s lone actor, Alex More, revs this vehicle, puts it in drive and never lets up on the gas.

The 95-minute monologue, directed by Darren Sextro with swift precision, is full of action and intrigue. Alex isn’t the only inhabitant of this tale — a fiction, we’re repeatedly reminded in the prologue, pure fantasy — but one in a cast of characters. Golay voices them all: a Streisand assistant; his screenwriter boyfriend, Barry; Streisand’s husband, actor James Brolin; and, of course, Babs, whom he doesn’t really attempt to impersonate (sometimes with a Brooklyn accent and sometimes not). Still, we know when she enters the room.

One-liners and pop-culture references string along like jokes in a stand-up routine, flying with a speed that doesn’t allow them to linger. It’s a synapse-stimulating onslaught, even if a sometimes dated one — Streisand’s movies and the ’70s TV show Marcus Welby, M.D., for instance — but it’s all in keeping with the story, which brings to mind The Santaland Diaries but without the snark. (When we find out why Alex, an out-of-work actor, had to leave a job at Disneyland, an Auschwitz reference — “Mousewitz,” he calls it — feels out of place.)

It’s an intimate show, Golay’s outgoing Alex inviting us into his life and everyday world, one that eventually finds him in Streisand’s employ. The story may be made up, but it’s inspired by fact: Streisand’s 2010 coffee-table tome, My Passion for Design, which showcases her holdings and vast possessions — no “run of the mill” retreat, Alex says of her Malibu compound, which actually includes a mill.

Of primary interest and ridicule here is her estate’s underground, Main Street-like mall, built beneath a barn and housing a gift “shoppe” (shoppee, a mimicking Alex pronounces) and other quaint stores for dolls, clothes and antiques — like “Grandma designed the Apple Store,” he says. Alex’s retail background at Banana Republic gets him a gig manning this basement, just in case Barbra, isolated in her stardom, decides to go shopping — yes, for her own stuff.

“It’s Hoarders on a higher plane,” Alex says, comparing his Target sheets and Home Depot rugs with the luxury items around him. Should we care about such privileged stars? Alex has never been “that big of a Barbra queen,” he confesses, but Streisand worship is his “birthright,” he adds, “the way Jews feel about the Passover seder and … Barbra Streisand.”

He worries how he’ll interact with her, should she appear. (His boyfriend, Barry, has some thoughts.) But actor Alex finds inspiration in improv when she does, in fact, show up. Call it projection, but Alex’s developing relationship — or his illusion of it — with the singer, actor and director is at the center of this energetic and richly detailed show (down to the star’s lengthy, smooth nails).

Golay’s Alex is funny, vulnerable, sarcastic and kind, in a physical, all-consuming performance that never slackens and engages us wholly. He gets us to care not just about his life but also, to an extent, that of the imagined Streisand. This is light stuff, sure, but not just humorous fluff. It reflects, too, on what we deem important, which fits right in with the end of the year.