Orange County Register

Midway through a performance of writer-performer Nilaja Sun’s “No Child…” last week at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, I found myself misting up.

That’s right: this crusty old critic, who prides himself on that dubious WASP attribute, stoicism, got a little … well … verklempt. Sun’s solo play about her experiences as a teaching artist in a troubled New York high school was probing, hilarious, wise, insightful and above all very moving.
It got me to thinking about a number of things – why men never carry tissues, for one. But after daubing my eyes surreptitiously with my shirt cuff (it’s easy, guys – pretend to cough, then you’ve got an excuse to bring your hands to your face), I pondered the deeper issues when the lights came up.
Some of the most affecting and powerful theater I’ve seen over the last decade has swept over me during one-person shows. The subjects themselves are as diverse as the solar system: an aging transvestite’s high-wire narrative that counterbalances horror, bravery, denial and outrageous lying (Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife”); harrowing accounts of the plight of Iraqi women (Heather Raffo’s “Nine Parts of Desire”); poet Emily Dickinson’s lonely but rewarding life of the mind (Julie Harris in “The Belle of Amherst”); the late Spalding Gray’s mesmerizing, laser-focused examinations of his private obsessions and demons, which came to assume added poignancy and meaning after his suicide. All of them rewarded me with moments of emotional intensity that will stay with me forever.

There are several reasons, I believe, to explain the dramatic power of the one-person performance.
First and most obvious is our almost instinctive connection with the techniques and traditions of the storyteller. Spinning a tale is the world’s oldest theatrical form. It was the best way to keep boredom at bay around the campfire and pass on the particulars of a people’s history in the eons before the Greeks thought of formalizing the process. Our susceptibility to the storyteller’s powers and tricks – his incantatory skills, his ability to tease and prolong a tale’s climax, to surprise us with twists and reverses, to make us feel we’re sharing the journey with the tale’s characters – is innate, as if imprinted on our DNA.
Another powerful weapon in the solo performer’s arsenal is the direct address. All one-person shows break the fourth wall – the actor addresses the audience – so we’re immediately pulled into their world in a manner that multi-character plays can’t duplicate. This kind of shared knowledge is fundamentally different than soliloquy, which at its heart is a way of revealing inner motivation to advance the plot or provide added insight to character.
Often, we’re more than just observers or visitors to the universe of the solo performer; we’re intimates, even co-conspirators. The character is likely to unburden his most private thoughts, telling us things that not even his closest friends, family or spouse are privy to. After all, the one-person forum implies that something exceptional is taking place, or about to, at the point that we’re visiting. We’re being invited in for a reason, and often it has to do with a seminal moment in the character’s life. In “Full Gallop,” we meet fashion mogul Diana Vreeland in the midst of her career’s biggest crisis, yet her daring and ebullience are undimmed – if anything, she seems emboldened by adversity. In “I Am My Own Wife,” a play that explores and exposes many levels of deception and misdirection, our presence seems to compel the play’s slippery narrator/central character to eventually (after many false leads and narrative tangents) come clean and tell us the truth behind her amazing survival under the most daunting circumstances. In certain extraordinary instances, our presence compels the character to betray himself or herself – the ultimate intimacy.
The feeling of heightened inclusiveness that solo shows can create leads to a corresponding increase in our emotional investment. We’ve been given the privilege of entry into that person’s world, and the price to be paid is a larger stake in the story’s outcome. It’s one thing for an actress playing an Iraqi woman who has lost all her children in an aerial bombardment to tell of her unending grief to another character; quite another when she directs those feelings at us. Such moments act as arrows aimed straight at our hearts. And in a darkened theater, with a gifted actor standing center stage and no ambiguity or distraction to soften the message, it’s impossible to be unmoved.
You may feel manipulated afterwards – that’s a valid point. You might find yourself disagreeing after the fact with the moral message or the tone of a one-person play. But I guarantee you’ll be helpless against its emotional probity at the instant it’s happening. I don’t care what kind of stuff you think you’re made of: bring a hankie! 
 

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