Kate Berlant's Killer Solo Show is about losing control

Actor and standup Comedian Kate Berlant is always sure to remind people that she didn't get where she is by taking classes. “I got rejected from acting school,” he says Rolling rock. “I have no formal education.” But her one woman show, Kate, which came to Los Angeles last month (well, technically Pasadena) after previous jaunts to New York and London, is deeply concerned with questions of artistic lies and emotional truth. It's also brutally funny.

“It's my favorite place the show has been,” Berlant says of the Pasadena Playhouse, though she had some nerves about the size of the venue — nearly 700 seats, it's her largest audience — and was told to expect a larger crowd. local subscribers who might not immediately go crazy for her self-sabotaging subtextual humor. Instead, the regulars ate it up. Before the show starts, a title card on a screen sternly instructs viewers to introduce themselves to their neighbors, so I met Dina, a beautiful woman who told me she plans to get a tattoo when she turns 80, and I can confirm she enjoyed it incredibly Berland.

But his tragic success Kate in Hollywood's retelling it's less about age shows than the industry that dominates this town: Berlant plays a pretentious, ill-tempered version of the indie phenomenon she actually is, yet her character's instincts for shameless ladder-climbing it's too authentic to write off as schtick. Almost every reviewer has noted how viewers first enter a lobby where Berlant sits silently scrolling through her phone and wearing a sign that says “IGNORE ME,” while nearby, contradictory instructions read “Photography Encouraged”—a quick distillation of the quintessence of the hack artist. Less has been written about the show's slideshow overture, which includes a snapshot of Berlant's IMDb credits, making it clear that this is her audition for future film and television roles. And a running gag à la Waiting for Gaffman (Berland is distracted by the promised presence of an important Disney executive+) hits especially hard in a place where dreams of stardom go off like silly fireworks.

“At some point I started to realize that the series was about to fail,” says Berlant. She explains that she “never wanted to know the joke of 'Oh, a woman's performance in the theater is embarrassing.' We know that. This is already a heavily mined area. So my biggest fear as I was writing it — sometimes I was like, “Oh my God, I'm making a parody of a woman. I will kill myself. Like, this can't be.” That flavor of horror ended up destabilizing the story, which begins to fall apart as Berlant's over-the-top, faux-memoir account of her journey to fame is overwhelmed by technical difficulties and her own intense self-doubt. The former are based on Berlant's experience with her former director, while the latter will be familiar to any creative who begins to wonder if their talents will ever amount to anything.

“Part of the show is the desperation to take it seriously,” says Berlant, who in a climactic moment has to force herself to cry on stage (on a camera that projects her face in a towering 4K close-up , a touch that reflects his influence Katedirector, comedian Bo Burnham). As she tries to show that she's more than an irreverent clown, her stretching and grimacing towards tears results in an act of suspense unlikely to be found anywhere else in comedy because, as Berlant's alter-ego clarifies, the rest of the narrative depends on this feat. “The other night took me a while,” he admits, though it's not about accessing some past trauma. “I like the David Mamet school: acting is athleticism. Like, just do it.”

The catharsis when she does is enough to draw a round of applause, and with it come sobs of apologies from Berlant, who just before verbally abused the audience and declared the theater dead as she melted into the certainty of a career-ending failure. Now he poetically interprets the medium's communal grace, its power to bridge our souls. It's another hilarious twist that reminds us that Berlant is more interested in validation than principle. However, it is far from dishonest. She has been surprised and moved to see how many theatergoers begin to cry with her during this climax.

“A lot of people feel really moved,” he says. “I didn't say, 'I want to do a show that moves people.' I just wanted to do a show that was funny. I think especially people from the theater world see it and understand my real struggle, that sense of the physical world second only to the digital. And that we must persist in the physical world.”

That's what it does Kate an unforgettable lesson in the benefits of losing control, even if it means succumbing to disaster. The taint of social media and its curatorial pressures is evident in the quasi-mythical autobiography that Berlant tries to present: in our interview, she points out that while everyone today feels the need to create an image of themselves “for consumption,” performers they have to deal with an “extra structural humiliation” in trying to be noticed, hired and admired. Instead of criticizing this state of affairs from a distance, Kate it gives us a quirky woman who pursues this conventional gimmick to its limits — and, when she realizes she's been caught in a trap, gnaws off her own leg to escape.

“If you set out to work on something deep and expose yourself, there are no guarantees,” Berlant says. Rolling rock. “But often what can happen is in that effort, if it falls apart, then maybe you get to something that transforms you.”