Death is a Scream

Last night was the closing night of Esther Crow’s one genius show Death is a Scream in the Brick Theater’s Too Soon Festival. Crow (nee Silberstein, of Willy Nilly, Kitsch, and the Electric Mess) knocked my socks off, even as she was frequently changing hers.  This kind of show has a grand old pedigree, stretching back over the years from Leopoldo Fregoli….through Ruth Draper…through Chic Sale…through Jonathan Winters…through Whoopi Goldberg and on and on. It’s the old “Man (or woman) of a Thousand Faces” number, and it sinks or swims by the strength of the different heads on the Medusa.

Crow (actually she’s more of a Mynah bird) dazzles and frankly even freaks me out. In real life she possesses what beatniks used to call “zero cool” — meaning not that she hasn’t got any, but rather that the cool she possesses is below freezing. (If she were on the deck of the Titanic, she might look over at the Captain and say, “Are you gonna get that shit together, man, or what?”) So when she steps into these diverse, nutty characters it’s as though some supernatural force were taking over. And that to me is the essence of the actor’s art. All actors ought to be doing this kind of channeling, every time, no matter what sort of play they’re in. Further, Crow’s ear for music (evident from her various singing projects) proves to extend to the quotidian melodies of human speech and subtleties of dialect. In a bit over an hour, Crow becomes a crazy Spanish guitar player, a working class philosopher, two separate infomercial hostesses (one mid-western, one Brighton beach Russian, both hilarious), a Vietnam vet and coal miner, a British rock star and an elderly Jewish mother (see their pictures here). The bits are joined — very tangentially — by the common theme of death. In between her turns, we get to hear her do some funny songs as she changes costumes (a rap, a blues number, and so forth). Seeing all these characters together really put the others parts I’ve seen her do in perspective, not just her turns in my last two plays, but especially her Chip Fontaine character with the Electric Mess. Her performances are confident, assured, specific, moving and above all, belly-laugh hilarious. Her comedy writing is top notch (though it could use some shaping and editing). I gather it’s a work in progress — the dead space between her monologues needs to be tightened way up. But aside from such nips and tucks I think Esther has a killer act here. She could take this act  to college campuses, cabarets, comedy clubs, television — even, dare I say, vaudeville.