Usually, when there’s a great show in Pasadena, I say it’s worth the drive. Let’s just say, KATE at the Pasadena Playhouse isn’t worth the drive. In fact, you can skip it. KATE is Kate Berlant’s one-woman show, directed by Bo Burnham. That gives it a certain glitzy-ness and when you hear the show played to sold-out crowds in London and New York, you have expectations. Even entering the theater, you think there might be something to this. There Kate is, sitting in the lobby as the audience arrives with an “ignore me” sign around her neck and a provocative artist's statement on the wall as if you’re walking into some redux and rebuff of a Marina Abramovich performance art piece. Even when you take your seat and are confronted with a slick full-stage video of her in black and white that looks a bit like a vintage Calvin Klein ad, you think how chic and elegant. She’s posing, she’s giving the camera all the different looks and coy emotions. It’s all very polished. Then the show starts... The gag, such as it is, is that this is going to be the story of her life (literally from birth) and her greatest struggle becoming an actress. She’s fine, she says, onstage where a broader more physical style is accepted. It’s the camera that haunts her. She has that greatest of deficiencies as an actress, she tells us. She cannot cry on cue. I’m simplifying the show a bit, but not by that much. There really isn’t that much to the hour and fifteen minutes. It’s tempting to engage the piece as a grand meta-commentary on the world of film and the state of the theater or even comedy. In the same way, you could read her appearance in the lobby before the show as a commentary on performance art but there just isn’t that much there. It’s cheap commentary that has a studied coolness but no real substance. It’s an actress with a sign and a pair of sunglasses. Nothing more than that. Her press gag is that in this show she’s going to reveal a deep dark secret she’s never shared before because, after all, isn’t that what confessional one-person shows do? Spoiler alert: she’s iron deficient. That gives you a sense of the level of complexity. Her other running gag is that her sound guy “Isaac” keeps screwing up the cues. Punching down on the tech crew, always comic genius. As for Bo Burnham’s direction? It’s super clean and tight. I just wish he’d coaxed out of Ms. Berlant some of the painful honesty he captured in his own Netflix special Inside. It’s honesty that’s so painfully absent from Kate. She’s so busy trying to be clever that she never manages to be truly funny or to make you really care. KATE plays at the Pasadena Playhouse through February 11th. This is Anthony Byrnes Opening the Curtain on LA Theater for KCRW.
Nothing to cry about.
