A plague of one-man shows

DAN ROTTENBERG

Back in the mid-1990s I naively asked the prolific Philadelphia playwright Bruce Graham why he had limited his comedy, Desperate Affection, to just two characters. I assumed Graham would rhapsodize about the intellectual challenges involved in sustaining meaningful dialogue with a limited cast. Instead, he replied, ?With only two characters, every local rep company in the country is sure to produce it.?

Graham is a former schoolteacher who found a way to escape the blackboard jungle for the glitzier world of movies and theater without adversely affecting his living standard. (As his reply suggests, Graham has also mastered the art of deflecting criticism by cheerfully deprecating himself before his critics can get around to it.) The secret of Graham's success, apparently, lies in his pragmatic discovery that what counts for career playwrights nowadays is neither deathless insights nor even dazzling prose, but low overhead. The essence of drama, I observed at that time, is conflict, and conflict requires at least two characters? but ?why exacerbate a theater's financial risk by scripting more??

Was I a hopeless na?f, or what? In recent years a plague of one-man shows has descended upon American theater, next to which Bruce Graham and his two-character scripts look like Florenz Ziegfeld and his Follies. Philadelphia Theatre Co. offers Ben Franklin Unplugged!, a comic memoir whose entire cast consists of the monologuist Josh Kornbluth. Lantern Theater presents Novecento, in which the talented actor Frank X spends 90 minutes spinning a story. Wilma Theater, which nine years ago moved out of its old Sansom Street digs in part because the stage there couldn?t accommodate more than seven actors, currently offers Nine Parts of Desire, with nine characters all portrayed by a single actress, Jacqueline Antaramian, on a single very large stage. Not to be outdone, the Merriam recently presented Golda's Balcony, with Valerie Harper playing not only the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir but 40 other characters as well. Harper's one-woman show hit the Merriam hot on the heels of the fellow who launched this whole phenomenon back in 1954 and returned in December for a reprise: Hal Holbrook, in Mark Twain Tonight!

Certainly there's something to be said for the novelty of watching a single talented actor tackle the challenge of holding an audience's attention all by himself while embodying Abe Lincoln (Holbrook) or Clarence Darrow (Henry Fonda) or Harry Truman (James Whitmore). It's probably well worth the admission price to spend an evening with a venerable great lady of the theater like Elaine Stritch when she's unencumbered by a cast or a script other than her own. One of the funniest plays I ever saw? Becky Mode's Fully Committed, at Philadelphia Theatre Co. in 2002? was a one-man show about the hassles of a reservations clerk at a glitzy New York restaurant.

But the single-actor vehicle works only if it's an exception to the rule. To make that determination, I suggest this simple test: When you enter a theater and discover that the cast consists of just one actor, do you gush, ?Imagine that!?? Or do you groan, ?Oh no, not again??

Let us not kid ourselves. A one-man show is a convenient vehicle for playwrights, actors and directors who yearn for a hedge against the messy unpredictability of human interaction. And it's a godsend for producers who want to hold their costs down. But it's no substitute for genuine drama, which involves people (and therefore actors) relating to each other, not to mention relating to a director and a playwright. It lacks a vital ingredient: the prospect that, on any given evening, the chemistry among actors might take the script in some direction that neither the playwright nor the director anticipated (for better or worse), which is what drama is all about.

If a theater company were to announce, ?We can?t afford to produce four plays this year, so we?re doing three plays and a monologue,? I wouldn?t complain. But some purveyors of these shows have convinced themselves that they?re actually making silk purses out of sow's ears. Consider:

?Josh Kornbluth, interviewed about the genesis of Ben Franklin Unplugged: ?I know that some people who do solo things come from a theatrical background, but I don?t. I hadn?t been in a play and still haven?t. So for me, it's not a matter of doing a monologue as opposed to doing something else. I wanted to tell my story and I couldn?t write it. And through all these twists and turns, I realized I could perform it. The fact that I was performing and it was my own words and only me just happened to be what was at hand for me.?

?Kate Saxon, director of Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire: ?The wonderful thing about Heather's writing is it allows us a glimpse of the [Iraqi] women from within, not through the Westerner's perspective or from the politicians? mouths.?

? Director Dugald MacArthur described Novecento as ?a linguistic tour de force, seeming at times to locate itself on the border between theater and opera? the interior thoughts becoming a greater part of the outward expression, much like an aria.?

If you possess a rich imagination, no doubt you too can persuade yourself that a one-man show provides a window to the inner person, or that it's an opera, or that you?re on an ocean liner with Frank X, or in a Baghdad marketplace with Heather Raffo, or in the Yale Library with Josh Kornbluth. The Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky once attributed his survival in brutal Siberian gulags to his ability to mentally transport himself to more pleasant venues. But if you possess that kind of imagination, who needs theater? Why not dispense with actors altogether and charge the audience $30 a head for the privilege of imagining what's on stage?

My playwright daughter Julie Rottenberg, before joining the writing staff at ?Sex and the City,? wrote a comedy called Love Soup that was produced off-off-Broadway in New York. Love Soup concerned an insecure young woman who tries to impress a man by inviting him to a gourmet dinner party with her eclectic friends at her luxurious apartment. The problem is that she lives in a single cramped room, she can?t cook, and she has no friends; the play concerns her efforts to hire suitable food, quarters and companions for a single evening. The script called for a cast of 19; the play ran for about two weeks and hasn?t been revived. But what fun, for actors and audience alike. As a theatergoer, you only go around once in life. Do you really want to spend that time in solitary confinement?