Theatre--Review

In the opening moments of Lian Cheramie's solo show The OneWoman/Girl/Lady/Beotch Show, we're welcomed by an earnest cleaning woman suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Her job here is simple – offer the audience a brief welcome and introduction to the show we're about to see. But her fixation on getting things clean and an assortment of OCD tics prevent her from fully executing her task.

In many ways, the OCD cleaning woman that opens Cheramie's Show is a fitting symbol for the entire enterprise. Through a series of five brief character sketches and a handful of video shorts, Cheramie aims to introduce the audience to the many voices inside her head. But she never quite packs the punch she's aiming for -- like the cleaning lady, an earnest task is undone by an unnecessary fixation and a few tics of her own.

The show is far from a complete disappointment. Cheramie deserves high marks for tackling solo performance. It's a difficult genre to get right, and its demands on the performer are high. Cheramie takes the whole thing in stride, gliding comfortably from role to role with confidence.

The show also delivers some impressive work by Megan LeBleu, who filmed and edited many of the show's video pieces. There's a sophistication to much of the work she delivers for the show, and rather than slow the show down, the video pieces propel the show forward, landing some of the show's juiciest laughs.

But the whole thing never really gels as theatre. While Cheramie offers us a host of characters (including a snarky poet, an oddball Avon saleslady, a Sarah Palin knockoff and a sex-ed teacher who suffers from "foreign accent syndrome"), the characters never seem to develop past their initial punchline. Part of that could be due to the brevity of the live performance sections of the show, but it can alsobe traced to the show's writing. While she lands some good one-liners in almost all of the character sketches, Cheramie never digs deep enough into her characters to make them believable people. They remain stuck at the level of sketch comedy, and in some cases (namely the Avon lady) that superficiality undercuts what could be a truly affecting character study.

As a performer, Cheramie clearly has affection for each of her characters. But her performances strike a note of sameness that makes it harder for them to leave indelible impressions. Many of the sketches rely heavily on a character's awkwardness or terror of speaking in front of an audience, and this repeated motif throughout the sketches leaves us feeling as though we're treading water. (The same cannot be said for the video segments, though – a video sketch which charts Cheramie's star-crossed affair with a certain food item is both charming and very funny. In my opinion, it was the highlightof the show, and showed Cheramie to be a versatile, interesting performer.)

What it all adds up to is a show that never quite makes it past the surface of things. And that's unfortunate, because inside many of the sketches are glimmers of some really excellent material. Chermaie has the skeleton of five interesting characters that could hold a stage of their own, but right now, they're not fully formed, relying too much on a snappy punch line and not enough on fleshed-out characterizations.

The top practitioners of the solo form – among them John Leguizamo,Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin and Eric Bogosian – did more than make an audience laugh. They revealed something deeply personal about themselves through the characters they created. Yes, the were funny.But they also revealed painful truths about who we are. At present, The One Woman/Girl/Lady/Beotch Show is focused on getting the laughs. By investing some time getting at the truth, the show would add up to a whole lot more.
---Cody Daigle