Namaste Man
Intiman Theatre
Through June 22.
Three years ago, in a rehearsal room at Intiman Theater, Andrew
Weems performed the unofficial world premiere of his autobiographical
solo show, Namaste Man. Weems had come to Intiman from New
York to play Andrey in Three Sisters, directed by Bartlett
Sher. Weems told Sher he was working on a solo show and asked if he
could perform it for the Three Sisters team. “We said yes,
mostly just to humor him,” Sher says. “But it really stuck with me.” So
Sher agreed to direct the official world premiere, now playing at
Intiman.
Namaste Man is a series of elliptical stories about Weems’s
childhood in Zambia and Nepal (his father was a state department
official) and adulthood as a broke actor in New York. Weems leaps
through his stories with sprightly, almost impish, energy. His
repeated, high-pitched shouts of “Langtang!” (a Nepalese national park
where he took a field trip) may now be a permanent fixture of my
memory.
He tells tales of hippies and hash bars, yak dung and children
chewing betel nuts, but most of his stories could have happened in a
Cincinnati suburb. They concern his engineer father and his
chain-smoking, inscrutable mother, and kids at his school. To his
credit, Weems doesn’t exploit the exoticism of his settings, but just
lets them give his stories slight inflections. And he avoids being too
saccharine about Nepal by relating a story from his New York years,
when a Nepali scam artist taints whatever romantic generalizations
Weems—or anybody—might have been tempted to make about the
Nepali character. BRENDAN KILEY
Road Movie
Balagan Theatre
Through June 15.
Mark Pinkosh, the only man onstage during the entirety of Road
Movie, is incredibly talented. It may be a cliché to say
that his body is an instrument, but there’s no other way to put it. He
twists his body into some impressively weird shapes while mimicking the
throes of ecstasy or floating in a pool, and each of his characters has
a distinctive body language. Pinkosh could almost do the entire show
without talking.
Thankfully, Pinkosh isn’t silent. He charts the course of Joel, a
bitter New Yorker trying to drive to San Francisco in order to track
down the love of his life, with a genuinely affecting arc. Four out of
five of the accents he assumes (only the Valley girl feels a touch
lazy) are dead-on. His New York accent is perfect—Pinkosh
understands that it’s not so much about geography as it is about
toxically high cynicism levels.
But Road Movie is not flawless, and the problem is in the
script, by Godfrey Hamilton. This is a play about the AIDS crisis, and
while it will no doubt touch the people in the audience who have lived
through the atrocity of the Reagan years, the play’s
structure—Joel learns Very Important Lessons about AIDS and
mortality from four people—is a bit stifling and
unimaginative.
Pinkosh plays a scene between two lovers and musters great chemistry
with himself; to give him a little less plot and a little more room to
showboat—to make this more of a one-man show—would have
been preferable. PAUL CONSTANT
