Oliver Reels in “East 10th Street” Audience
SINCE ITS INCEPTION, but especially over the past several years, Spoleto USA has brought us a series of one-man shows ranging from artsy, hilarious, intriguing, even breathtaking, to downright dreadful.
Performer and writer Edgar Oliver’s “East 10th Street: Self Portrait with Empty House” falls squarely into the first category.
A New York City resident since 1977, Oliver is one of those uncountable thousands of truly talented actors, playwrights, scenic designers, directors—theater people of every stripe—who become well-known in that anthill, and are virtually unknown outside it. I am hoping Oliver’s performance here will launch him into worldwide stardom—if, indeed, that is what he wants.
His elegant turn as a consummate storyteller opened Thursday night at the College of Charleston’s Emmett Robinson Theatre, to about half a house, this paucity of folks willing to hop to a 10 P.M. show a crying shame.
Oliver’s monologue, or monodrama, or dramedy, is indisputably bizarre yet so achingly real that one is not altogether sure how much of it is genuine autobiography and how much clever and unerringly witty hyperbole. One can only hope it is a story that has its basis in truth, embellished and polished to a shining patina.
For if even one-quarter of his account of life in an East Village tenement building is true, God help us, every one. His descriptions of the denizens of a rooming house full of lunatics (who are well beyond the Charleston folks we charitably call ‘eccentric’) may be considered a hallucination, but in the final analysis, none of this matters: the show is riveting.
This is in large part due to Oliver’s inimitable delivery. After the featured actor and playwright takes the stage, bare but for a grid of lights behind him, he begins telling his tale in a soft but perfectly-projected voice, using an unidentifiable accent, sort of British, sort of old-school declamatory. As he possesses the stage—and us—he adds effectively stylized movements that demonstrate the antics of this unique (I trust) population, accompanied only by subtle lighting (designed by David Zeffren).
Every word is carefully chosen as his neighbors come to life, from the old landlord who greets him wearing only “a bath towel below his jutting belly” to the four-foot dwarf Cabalist who haunts the halls, naked. Oliver’s roommate is his sister Helen, a visual artist, no slouch herself, rolling I Ching pennies across the floor all night, driving the dwarf to near madness. Francis, an aged retired wet nurse, occupies the one bathroom for hours every day, endlessly scrubbing her collection of rags with bars of soap she carries in there in a washbasin—which she throws in the face of another reclusive who regularly stages an ambush spraying her with commercial-grade roach killer as she toddles back to her room.
Denied access to this bathroom, one housemate has Maxwell House coffee containers lining his floor-to-ceiling walls, which Oliver and Helen fear is his excrement. Freddie Feldman has “huge, bulging eyes running around in his head like they are trying to escape his skull.” Not so funny on paper; hilarious when Oliver presents it.
Okay, so not all of this can possibly be the gospel truth. Oliver is closely associated with Axis Company, a theater group founded by Randy Sharp, who directed this piece. Among their stated mission goals is “to present aggressive surrealism.” If we must have a niche in which to place this hour-long creation, I suppose that is as good as any.
No matter what you call it, Oliver’s stage presence reels us in until everyone is heartily laughing, cringing, perhaps crying by his deeply touching conclusion, when he describes himself, taking “walks of no returns to desolate places that are beautiful to me… I think I’ll be off wandering somewhere in Brooklyn.”
Photo by Alice O’Malley
